Yet probably it was the small network of habits that grew up in the trenches that made life bearable to the men. There was a deliberate playing down of the dramatic and the dangerous quality of things. The biggest of the Turkish guns that fired from Kum Kale was known as ‘Asiatic Annie’; another was called ‘Quick Dick’, and the most commonplace names were found for the places where the bloodiest actions were fought: ‘Clapham Junction’, ‘The Vineyard’, ‘Le Haricot’. A kind, of defensive mechanism was made out of swearing and a simple, ironical, hard-boiled sense of humour: ‘Please God give us victory. But not in our sector.’ ‘Having a good clean-up?’ a commanding general said one day to a soldier who was washing himself in a mug of water. ‘Yes, sir,’ the man answered, ‘and I only wish I were a bloody canary.’
Hours were spent in improving their dug-outs, in picking lice out of their clothing, in cooking their food (pancakes made of flour and water soon became a universal thing), in writing their diaries and letters.[23]
Some managed to develop hobbies of a kind. There was, for example, a mild fever for the excavation of antiquities among the French. At Lemnos before the landing they had unearthed, a mutilated statue of Eros at the site of the ancient Hephaestia, and on arriving at Cape Helles they were delighted to find that Asiatic Annie was disinterring other relics. Two huge jars with skeletons in them were uncovered in a shell crater, and when the soldiers started to dig their trenches at Hissarlik they came on a series of large stone sarcophagi which resounded dully when struck with a pick. Through the centuries (and at once it was asserted that these finds were as old as Troy), soil had penetrated, grain by grain, into the interior of the tombs, but the soldiers managed to excavate many bones, as well as vases, lamps and statues in pottery of men and women. The French doctor wrote again to his wife about one especially beautiful cup: Its long handles, almost ethereal in their delicacy, give to this little thing the palpitation of wings.’
Living as they did beneath the ground, many of the men became absorbed in the insect life around them. They set on centipedes and scorpions to fight one another, and hours would go by while they watched the ant-lion digging his small craters in the, sand. Round and round he would go, clockwise and then anticlockwise, scooping up the soil with his great flippers, tossing it on to his head, and then with an upward jerk flipping it over the rim of the crater. When finally the crater was finished, and the ant-lion was lying in hiding at the bottom, the soldiers would drive beetles and other insects up to the rim, and there would be the quick scuiBe in the sand, the pounce and then the slow death as the ant-lion sucked his victim dry. In this troglodyte war in the trenches there was perhaps something symbolic about the ant-lion.
A stream of rumours (known on the Anzac bridgehead as ‘furphies’), flowed through the trenches, and they were usually based upon something which was heard ‘down on the beach’, or from someone’s batman or cook or signaller at brigade or battalion headquarters. The most lurid stories were passed along: the Turks in one sector had all been dressed as women, Hamilton had been sacked, the Russians had landed on the Bosphorus and had sunk the Goeben, Enver had ordered a general offensive to celebrate the first day of Ramadan on July 12, a notorious female spy had been captured in a ship at Mudros.
Unless a battle was in progress one day was very like another; the stand-to in the trenches at 3 a.m., the first shots at dawn rising to a crescendo and dying away again; the morning shelling, the evening bathe, the ritual of brewing tea and the long conversations in the starlight; finally the muffled sound of the mule teams coming up to the front with stores from the beach as soon as darkness fell.
Occasionally the unexpected happened, as when a German and a British aeroplane, flying low like wasps, fought a rifle duel with one another over the trenches, and both armies held their fire to watch it; and again when the Turks sprinkled the Allies’ lines with pamphlets in Urdu appealing to the Indian soldiers not to fight their brother Moslems — a device that had very little success with the Gurkhas, who were unable to read Urdu and who, being Buddhists, loathed Mahomet.
The Air Force had a particular fascination for the soldiers. Being chained to their trenches, the men could only dream of what it might be like to roam far behind the enemy lines. To see the other side of Achi Baba was to them almost as wonderful as to see the other side of the moon. As for Constantinople, it was lurid fantasy, a vision of minarets and spice bazaars, of caliphs and harems of jewels and odalisques and whirling dervishes. Constantinople, of course, was not like this at all; but just to have the possibility of winging your way there through the air — this in 1915 had a touch of the magic carpet about it. And there was, in fact, an immense exhilaration in the adventures of these box kites in the sky. Within a day or two Samson had established what would now be called an airstrip at Cape Helles, and although he was shelled every time he took off and landed he continued there, to the admiration of the soldiers, for a week or two. When finally he decided that it was more sensible to make his base on the island of Imbros he left a dummy plane behind, and the Army had the enjoyment of watching the Turks bombarding it for a week on end. Some 500 shells exploded on the field before the machine was demolished.
Samson liked to go up in the first light of the morning, and having waved to the British soldiers in the trenches he flew on up the peninsula to catch the Turks around their cooking fires. Then he would return in the last light of the evening to shoot up the enemy camel teams and bullock carts as they set out on their nightly journey to the front.
Both British and French airmen helped the Allied submarines as they made their passage of the Narrows by flying overhead and distracting the attention of the Turkish gunners; and often they joined Nasmith, Boyle and the others in the attack on the supply lines at the neck of the peninsula. Once a British pilot succeeded in torpedoing a Turkish vessel from the air. There were frequent disasters; a seaplane with a faulty engine would alight perhaps in the straits and then, with enemy bullets churning up the water all around, the machine would limp away across the sea like some maimed bird until it reached the safety of the cliffs.
These were absorbing spectacles for the soldiers in the trenches; in a world where everything was earthbound and without movement the airmen brought a sense of freedom into life.
As at Anzac, the men at Cape Helles had no personal hatred of the Turks, and there was a good deal of sympathy for them when, after one of their disastrous assaults, they asked for an armistice to bury their dead. Hamilton, on the advice of Hunter-Weston’s headquarters, refused the request, as it was believed that the Turkish commanders wanted to renew the attack and were having difficulty in inducing their men to charge over ground that was strewn with corpses.
‘A bit of hate is just what our men want here,’ one of the British colonels wrote. ‘They are inclined to look on the Turk as a very bad old comic… one feels very sorry for the individual and absolutely bloodthirsty against the mass.’ It was a common thing for the soldiers to offer prisoners their waterbottles and packages of cigarettes as soon as they were captured.
After June it was noticed that a psychological change was overtaking the Army. Whenever there was the project of another battle sickness fell off, and if the men were not actually as eager for the fight as their commanders pretended them to be, they were at least unwilling to see others take their place. It was the dogged attitude of the man who, having been obliged to undertake a disagreeable job, is determined to finish it. Always too they hoped that this battle was to be the last. Then, when the attack was over and all their hopes had come to nothing, the reaction set in. More and more men reported sick. Discipline flagged, and a despondent and irritable atmosphere spread through the trenches. To accept risk in idleness, to wait under the constant shelling without plans and hopes — that was the intolerable thing.
23
The men were issued, with a green active service envelope on which was printed, ‘I certify on my honour that the contents of this envelope refer to nothing but family matters.’ This meant that the letter was censored at the base and. not in the regiment.
For the laconic there was also a card with the printed words:
‘I am quite well.’
‘I have been admitted, to hospital, sick, wounded.’
One simply struck out the words that did not apply.