Hamilton came over to the bridgehead on May 30 and saw, ‘Men staggering under huge sides of frozen beef: men struggling up cliffs with kerosene tins full of water; men digging; men cooking; men cardplaying in small dens scooped out from the banks of yellow clay — everyone wore a Bank Holiday air; evidently the ranklings and worries of mankind — miseries and concerns of the spirit — had fled the precincts of this valley. The Boss — the bill — the girl — envy, malice, hunger, hatred — had scooted away to the Antipodes. All the time, overhead, the shell and rifle bullets groaned and whined, touching just the same note of violent energy as was in evidence everywhere else. To understand that awful din, raise the eyes twenty-five degrees to the top of the cliff which closes in the tail end of the valley and you can see the Turkish hand-grenades bursting along the crest, just where an occasional bayonet flashes and figures hardly distinguishable from Mother Earth crouch in an irregular line. Or else they rise to fire and are silhouetted against the sky and then you recognize the naked athletes from the Antipodes and your heart goes into your mouth as a whole bunch of them dart forward suddenly, and as suddenly disappear. And the bomb shower stops dead — for the moment; but, all the time, from that fiery crest line which is Quinn’s, there comes a slow constant trickle of wounded — some dragging themselves painfully along; others being carried along on stretchers. Bomb wounds all; a ceaseless silent stream of bandages and blood. Yet three out of four of “the boys” have grit left for a gay smile or a cheery little nod to their comrades, waiting for their turn as they pass, pass, pass, down on their way to the sea.
‘There are poets and writers who see naught in war but carrion, filth, savagery and horror. The heroism of the rank and file makes no appeal. They refuse war the credit of being the only exercise in devotion on the large scale existing in this world. The superb moral victory over death leaves them cold. Each one to his taste. To me this is no valley of death — it is a valley brim full of life at its highest power. Men live through more in five minutes on that crest than they do in five years of Bendigo or Ballarat. Ask the brothers of these very fighters — Calgoorlie or Coolgardie miners — to do one quarter of the work and to run one hundredth the risk on a wages basis — instanter there would be a riot. But here — not a murmur, not a question; only a radiant force of camaraderie in action.’
From May onwards many of the men discarded their uniforms, and except for a pair of shorts, boots and perhaps a cap, went naked in the sun. Even in the frontlines they fought stripped to the waist, a girl, a ship or a dragon tattooed on their arms.
There was a toughness mixed with touchiness in this ant-heap life. Compton Mackenzie relates that on his visit to Anzac he overtook Lieut.-Colonel Pollen, Hamilton’s military secretary, who was talking to three Australians all well over six feet tall. ‘Pollen, who had a soft, somewhat ecclesiastical voice, was saying, “Have you chaps heard that they’ve given General Bridges a posthumous K.C.M.G.?”
‘ “Have they?” one of the giants replied. “Well, that won’t do him much good where he is now, will it, mate?”
‘Poor Pollen, who was longing to be sympathetic and not to mind the way these Australians would stare at his red tabs without saluting, walked on a little depressed by his reception at making conversation, perhaps at the very spot where General Bridges had been mortally wounded. He looked carefully at the ground when he met the next lot, whereupon they all gave him an elaborate salute, and then because he had looked up too late to acknowledge it one of them turned to the others and said: “I suppose that’s what they call breeding.” They really were rather difficult.’
But it was the physical appearance of the Dominion soldiers — Colonials as they were then called — that captivated everybody who came to Anzac, and there is hardly an account of the campaign which does not refer to it with admiration and even a kind of awe. ‘As a child,’ Mackenzie wrote, ‘I used to pore for hours over those illustrations of Flaxman for Homer and Virgil which simulated the effect of ancient pottery. There was not one of those glorious young men I saw that day who might not himself have been Ajax or Diomed, Hector or Achilles. Their almost complete nudity, their tallness and majestic simplicity of line, their rose-brown flesh burnt by the sun and purged of all grossness by the ordeal through which they were passing, all these united to create something as near to absolute beauty as I shall hope ever to see in this world.’
The soldiers themselves might not have thought of it in this way, but here perhaps, in this unlikely place, was the expression of Rupert Brooke’s dream of war, the Grecian frieze, the man entirely heroic and entirely beautiful, the best in the presence of death. Just for this moment at the end of May and in the months that followed they were the living embodiment of the legend they were creating. This was the highest moment of their countries’ short history; they had fought and won their first great battle, they were still in the glow of it, they knew suffering and they were not afraid. They had made a fortress of this wretched strip of foreign soil on which they had so haphazardly drifted, and they were quite determined to hold on. Never again in the whole course of the campaign did the Turks attempt an assault in force upon the Anzac bridgehead.
CHAPTER TEN
DURING the first few weeks of the campaign the wildest rumours went about Constantinople; ten thousand British were said to have been killed at the landing, and another thirty thousand taken prisoner. At one moment the Allies were reported to be advancing on the city and at the next they had been driven into the sea. Once again there was talk of special trains that were to evacuate the Government into the interior, of bombardments and of riots. Yet it was not quite the same ferment, the near panic, that had followed the naval attack on the Narrows in March. The Allied Fleet then had been feared in much the same way as the Air Force bombers were feared at the start of the second world war, but a military campaign on land was something that everyone could understand, a slower and a more familiar thing; there was no question of the capital being demolished overnight.
Enver took a firm line from the outset; he announced flatly that the Allies were already defeated, and to celebrate the event there was a ceremony at St. Sophia at which the Sultan was invested with the tide of El Ghazi, the Conqueror, the driver of the Allies into the sea. Flags were hung out in all the principal streets and public squares.
It is doubtful if anyone was much impressed by this, but by the end of the first week in May it was clear at least that the invading army was not making much headway. An apathetic quiet settled on the streets, and the city began to accustom itself to the suspense, the misery and the occasional shocks of a long campaign. Presently the old familiar signs of war began to appear: the conscripts marching through the streets in their shabby field grey uniforms and pyramidal hats, the Army communiqués that announced yesterday’s victory all over again, the ferocious newspaper articles, the flags and the parades, the spy hunt and the renewed outburst of official xenophobia.
Once again the foreign minorities, the Armenians and the Greeks, went underground with their thoughts and, where they could, their belongings. Bedri, the Chief of Police, pursued them as persistently as he could, issuing worthless receipts for the goods he seized from their shops and houses, and extracting money by the simple process of keeping people in gaol until they bought themselves out. One day his men swooped on the Bon Marché and carried off all the boxes of toy soldiers in the shop on the ground that they had been manufactured in France.