CHAPTER ELEVEN
DURING the months of June and July neither side made any serious attempt to attack at Anzac, and while an uneasy stalemate continued there five pitched battles were fought at Cape Helles. They were all frontal attacks, all of short duration, a day or two or even less, and none of them succeeded in altering the front line by more than half a mile.[19]
This fighting at Cape Helles was the heaviest of the campaign, and it followed the strict pattern of trench warfare: the preliminary bombardment, the charge of the infantry (sometimes as many as five men to four yards of front), the counter-attack, and then the last confused spasmodic struggles to consolidate the line. Nowhere at any time were any important objectives gained; at the end of it all the Turks were no nearer to driving the Allies into the sea and the Allies were hardly any closer to Achi Baba. Even in the killing of men neither side could claim the advantage, since it is estimated that for the period from the first landings in April to the end of July the total casualties were about the same for each: some 57,000 men.
These battles were so repetitive, so ant-like and inconclusive, that it is almost impossible to discover any meaning in them unless one remembers the tremendous hopes with which each action was begun. The generals really did think that they could get through, and so for a while did the soldiers too. Hunter-Weston, the British Corps Commander, was an extremely confident man. ‘Casualties,’ he said one day, ‘what do I care for casualties?’ The remark might not have been particularly distressing to his soldiers; they too were quite prepared for casualties provided they defeated the Turks, and in any case it was nothing remarkable that the General still believed that victories could be achieved by this kind of fighting; with very few exceptions all the other generals, German, Turkish, French and British, in France as well as Gallipoli, believed the same thing. The artillery bombardment followed by the charge of the infantry was believed to be the surgical act that would bring success in the quickest way, and nobody had yet suggested any alternative to it except, of course, poison gas. The real answer to the problem was simple enough: they needed an armoured mobile gun that would break through the enemy machine-gun fire; in other words a tank. But in 1915 the tank was a year or more and several million lives away, and it seemed to both Turkish and Allied staffs alike that they had only to intensify what they were already doing — to employ more men and more guns on narrower fronts — and the enemy would crack.
Since the rules of the game, the actual methods of the fighting, were not in question, the generals had to find other reasons to explain their failure, and on the side of the Allies it usually boiled down to a matter of ammunition. If only they had had more shells to fire all would have been well. Just a few more rounds, another few guns, and the miracle would have happened. It had already been demonstrated at Gallipoli — and it was to be demonstrated over and over again on a much larger scale in France — that artillery bombardment was not the real way out of this suicidal impasse, but the British were strictly rationed in shells at Gallipoli, and this very shortage seemed to indicate that this was where their fatal weakness lay. Through June and July, there were times when Hamilton could think of nothing else, and he sent off message after message to Kitchener pointing out how badly served he was in the matter of ammunition compared with the armies in France.
‘A purely passive defence is not possible for us,’ he wrote; ‘it implies losing ground by degrees — and we have not a yard to lose… But, to expect us to attack without giving us our fair share — on Western standards — of high explosive and howitzers shows lack of military imagination.’ He went on: ‘If only K. would come and see for himself! Failing that — if only it were possible for me to run home and put my own case.’ But he did not go. Sometimes his staff found him looking aged and tired.
Through these months a gradual change overtook the commanders at Cape Helles in the planning of their battles. They did not lose hope, they simply lowered their sights. In the beginning the Allies had envisaged an advance upon Constantinople itself and cavalry was held in reserve for that purpose. By June they were concentrating upon Achi Baba, and the more the hill remained unconquered the more important it seemed: the more it appeared to swell up physically before them on the horizon. By July they were thinking in still more restricted terms: of advances of 700 or 800 yards, of the capture of two or three lines of the enemy trenches. In the same way the Turks gradually began to give up their notions of ‘pushing the enemy into the sea’. After July they tried no more headlong assaults; they were content to contain the Allies and harass them, in their narrow foothold on the sea.
In the many books that were written about the campaign soon after the first world war, there is a constantly repeated belief that posterity would never forget what happened there. Such and such a regiment’s bayonet charge will ‘go down in history’; the deed is ‘immortal’ or ‘imperishable’, is enshrined forever in the records of the past. But who in this generation has heard of Lancashire Landing or Gully Ravine or the Third Battle of Krithia? Even as names they have almost vanished out of memory, and whether this hill was taken or that trench was lost seems hardly to matter any more. All becomes lost in a confused impression of waste and fruitless heroism, of out-of-dateness and littleness in another age. And yet if one forgets the actual battles — the statistics, the plans, the place-names, the technical moves — and studies instead the battlefield itself in its quieter moments, the feelings of the soldiers, what they ate and wore and thought and talked about, the small circumstances of their daily lives, the scene does become alive again and in a peculiarly vivid way. There can scarcely have been a battlefield quite like it in this or any other way.
Usually one approached Cape Helles from either Imbros or Lemnos in one of the trawlers or flat-bottomed boats that provided a kind of ferry service to the beaches after the battleships had sailed away. By day it was a pleasant trip through a sea of cool peacock blue, and it was only when one was within about five miles of the shore that one saw that it was overhung by a vast yellowish cloud of dust. This dust increased during heavy fighting and diminished at night, and with sudden changes of the wind, but it was usually there through these months of early summer. And with the dust a sickly carrion smell came out across the sea, as far as three miles at times. A fringe of debris with the same implications of rottenness and decay washed along the shore. Yet on a quiet day there was a certain toy-like quality in the scene around Sedd-el-Bahr — toylike in the sense that it was very busy, very crowded with ingenious imitations of ordinary life in other, safer places. The long green keel of the Majestic was still clearly visible beneath the sea, and the castle by the beach had a battered appearance as though someone had stamped on it with his foot. The River Clyde was still there, firmly moored to the shore with lighters and other small boats all about her, and she was joined now by another vessel, the old French battleship Magenta, which had been sunk about a quarter of a mile to the west to form a miniature harbour in the bay. Piers had sprung up, and around them thousands of men were bathing, unloading boats, stacking great piles of tins and boxes on the shore. A new road had been cut around the base of the cliff by Turkish prisoners, and lines of horses and mules stood waiting there.
‘The comparison with a seaside resort on a fine bank holiday,’ Compton Mackenzie wrote, ‘arrived so inevitably as really to seem rather trite. Yet all the time the comparison was justifying itself. Even the aeroplanes on the top of the low cliff eastward had the look of an ‘amusement’ to provide a sixpenny or threepenny thrill; the tents might so easily conceal phrenologists or fortune tellers; the signal station might well be a camera obscura; the very carts of the Indian Transport, seen through the driven sand, had an air of waiting goat-carriages.’
19
These engagements may be summarized:
June 4: Allied attack in the centre. Gain 250–500 yards on a one-mile front. Allies’ casualties 6,500, Turkish 9,000.
June 21 and following days: French attack on the right. Gain of about 200 yards. French casualties 2,500, Turkish 6,000.
June 28: British attack on the left. Gain of half a mile. British casualties 3,800, Turkish unknown.
July 5: Turkish attack along the whole line. Nothing gained. Casualties, Turks 16,000, Allies negligible.
July 12/13: Allied attack on a one-mile front. Gain of 400 yards. Casualties, Allies 4,000, Turks 10,000.