Trained dentists were unknown at Gallipoli; if a man got toothache, or broke his teeth on the ration biscuits — a thing that happened quite often — he had to put up with it as best he could, unless he was lucky enough to find some hospital orderly who was able to make rough repairs.
These things began to cause a growing resentment in the Army. ‘The men are getting pretty tired,’ Aubrey Herbert wrote. ‘They are not as resigned as their ten thousand brother monks over the way at Mount Athos.’
On June 1 Hamilton had abandoned his cheese-ridden berth aboard the Arcadian and had set up his headquarters on the island of Imbros. But the staff there were hardly better off than anybody else, except that they were not under fire. They had put up their tents on a particularly dreary stretch of coast where there was no shade, and the fine biscuit-coloured sand blew into their faces all day. There existed close by a perfectly good site on level ground among figs and olive trees, but this was deliberately ignored partly because they did not wish to give the camp an air of permanence — the next attack might gain enough ground to allow them to land on the peninsula — and partly because it was felt that the staff should know something of the hardships and miseries of the men at the front. Almost uneatable food was provided to strengthen this illusion. It does not seem to have occurred to the General or any of his senior officers that efficiency mattered more than appearances, and that a man suffering from dysentery — from the flies, the bad food and the heat — was not likely to give his best attention to his work.
And in fact an exasperating muddle began to overtake affairs in the rear areas and along the lines of supply. Most of it was centred on Lemnos and its harbour of Mudros where many of the base installations had been dumped down. Ships arrived without manifests and had to be unloaded before the transport officers could discover what was in them. Often cargoes were sent in the wrong vessels to the wrong places, or became lost or mixed up with other cargoes. New shells arrived without the new keys which were essential to them. Mail disappeared. A polyglot crowd of men in transit hung about the shore waiting for orders. ‘Mingling among them all,’ Admiral Wemyss, the Governor, wrote in his diary,[21] ‘is the wily Greek, avaricious and plausible, making much money out of both of the others (the French and the British) hawking every sort of commodity from onions to Turkish Delight and Beecham’s Pills.’ At the the front someone invented a phrase which expressed the soldiers’ view of the islands. It was ‘Imbros, Mudros and Chaos’.
There was a fantastic difference between the life of the soldiers on shore and that of the sailors in the warships that steamed by, perhaps only a couple of hundred yards out at sea. A ship’s wardroom was a kind of wonderland for any Army officer who was invited on board. After weeks of enduring the flies, and the lice in his clothes, and with his eye still filled with the sight and smell of the decaying dead, he would stand and gaze with astonishment at the clean linen on the table, the glasses, the plates, the meat, the fruit and the wine.
These differences were multiplied still more in the case of the ocean liners which were taken over as transports complete with their peacetime crews and furnishings. Henry Nevinson, the war correspondent, has related that he was aboard the liner Minneapolis just before a major battle was to be fought. He was to go ashore with the attacking troops in the early dawn, and at 4 a.m. he rang for a cup of tea. ‘On this ship,’ the steward informed him, ‘breakfast is always at 8.30.’ A little later when the soldiers were taking to the assault boats the stewards got out their vacuum-cleaners and went to work along the carpets in the corridors in the usual way. Breakfast no doubt was served at eight-thirty, though there were few to eat it, and indeed by that time many of the soldiers were no longer alive.
There was no resentment at all about these things in the Army, for the sailors were known to be eager to get into the fight, and it was a kind of reassurance, a pleasant reminder of the ultimate sanity of life, to have the Navy there with its clean, comfortable ships. ‘It has been computed,’ Wemyss wrote, ‘that in shore fighting it takes several tons of lead to kill one man: at sea one torpedo can cause the death of many hundreds. On shore the soldier is in almost perpetual discomfort, if not misery — at sea the sailor lives in comparative comfort until the moment comes when his life is required of him.’
Yet it seems possible that one can make too much of the hardships of the soldiers at Gallipoli, or rather there is a danger of seeing these hardships out of their right context. With the mere cataloguing of the Army’s miseries a sense of dreariness is transmitted, and this is a false impression; at this stage life on the peninsula was anything but dreary. It was ghastly but it was not yet petty or monotonous. There can be no fair comparison with the relatively comfortable lives of the soldiers in the second world war, or even with the lives of these men themselves before they enlisted. Gallipoli swallowed them up and made conditions of its own. With marvellous rapidity the men removed themselves to another plane of existence, the past receded, the future barely existed, and they lived as never before upon the moment, released from the normal weight of human ambitions and regrets. ‘It was in some ways,’ Herbert says, ‘a curiously happy time.’ It is a strange remark, but one feels one understands it very well. The men had no cinemas, no music, no radios, no ‘entertainment’ of any kind, and they never met women or children as the soldiers did behind the lines in France. Yet the very absence of these pleasures created another scale of values. They had a sharp and enormous appetite for the smallest things. Bathing in the sea became an inexpressible joy. To get away from the flies, to wash the dust from one’s eyes and mouth, to feel cool again: this was a heightening of sensation which, for the moment, went beyond their dreams of home. The brewing of tea in the evening, the sharing out of a parcel, a cake or a bar of chocolate, the long talks in the starlight talking of what they would do ‘when it was all over’—all these things took on an almost mystical emphasis of a kind that became familiar enough in the western desert of Egypt in the second world war, or indeed on any distant front in any war. There were no pin-up girls; no erotic magazines reached them — they were lucky if they even saw a newspaper from home that was under a month old — and there were no nurses or Ensa troupes. Perhaps because of this the sexual instinct seems to have been held in abeyance for the time, or rather it was absorbed in the minutiae of their intensely friendly life, the generous feelings created by the danger all around them. There was very little vice; ordinary crimes became lost in the innocence of the crime of war itself. Certainly there was no possibility of drunkenness,[22] and gambling was not much more than an anaemic pastime in a world where money was the least of things. They craved not soft beds and hot baths but mosquito nets and salt water soap. Promotion counted for a good deal, and so did the word of praise and the medal. General Gouraud, the French commander who had replaced d’Amade, would form his men up in a hollow square in the moonlight and solemnly bestow the Croix de Guerre and the accolade upon some young poilu who, they all knew, had earned these honours only a few days or even a few hours before; and this was much more impressive than any ceremonial in a barracks could have been. They were all keen judges of bravery on that narrow front.
21
Perhaps because of its isolation and its strangeness, perhaps because of the lack of other entertainment, the Gallipoli campaign produced an extraordinary number of diaries. Every other man seems to have kept one, and no doubt the notebooks still exist in tens of thousands of homes. It was customary to illustrate them with sketches and photographs, and perhaps some wild flower, a bird’s feather, a souvenir like a captured Turkish badge, pressed between the leaves.
22
Except once at Anzac when some barrels of wine were washed ashore from the wreck of the