After the mid-July battles this attitude towards the campaign became more marked than ever. The number of patients going to the doctors increased in every regiment, and although batches of them were sent off on leave to Imbros so that they would escape the shell fire for a few days the ennui continued, the sense of waste and loss. There were cases of men putting their hands above the parapet so that they would be invalided away with a minor wound, but it was not malingering on a large scale; nearly all were dysentery cases, and without the stimulus of action the soldiers were genuinely unable to find the necessary resistance to fight the disease. Many in fact were so infected that they never returned to the front again.
The situation was not altogether unlike that of the British Army in the Western Desert of Egypt in the summer of 1942 in the second world war. The men were exhausted and dispirited. Nothing ever seemed to go right; they attacked, and always it ended in the same way, the stalemate, the long boring labour of carrying more ammunition up to the front so that they could repeat the same futile proceedings all over again. Many of the soldiers began to say openly that the whole expedition was a blunder; the politicians and brasshats at home had tried to pull off a victory on the cheap, and now that it had failed the expedition was to be abandoned to its fate. This was the real core of their grievances: that they were being neglected and forgotten. The armies in France were to have the favours, and Gallipoli no longer counted for anything at all. It was true that reinforcements were arriving, but they were too late and too few. The casualties had been too heavy.
This was the surface of things, and in a perverse way there was a counter-current working against it. The expedition feeling still persisted, and perhaps it was stronger than ever — the feeling that every man on Gallipoli was a dedicated man, that he was part of an adventure that set him apart from every other soldier. None of the general resentment seems to have been directed upon the commanders on the spot. Hamilton perhaps may have come in for some of the blame, but he was a vague and remote figure whom few of them ever saw, despite the fact that he was constantly going round the trenches, and in any case he too was regarded as a victim of ‘the politicians’. The others, the corps and divisional commanders, were too close to the men to attract their criticism. They shared the same dangers and almost the same hardships with the rank and file, and this was something new in the armies of the first world war, when no officer was without his batman and there was a strict division, a class division, between the gentleman with a commission and the worker-soldier in the ranks. At Anzac Birdwood made a point of being in the front line, and the soldiers saw him every day. He was just as much a target for the sniper and the bursting shrapnel as they were themselves. In June General Gouraud had his arm shattered by a shell-burst, and one of his divisional commanders was killed. Hunter-Weston, made haggard by the strain of too much work and too much unrequited optimism, fell ill of the prevailing dysentery and had to be sent home. And there were of course many more casualties among the brigadiers and the colonels.
All this brought the officer and the soldier very close together, and however much they may have criticized the men in the rear areas, the hospital staffs and the transport companies on the line of supply, it was seldom thought that the commander at the front might be wanting in skill and imagination — he simply took orders and did what he was told to do. He was one of them. It was felt that the solution of their problems lay elsewhere, and it was an intangible tiling, this mystical recipe for the success that always eluded them. Yet somehow, the men thought, there was a way of breaking the stalemate, of justifying themselves, of proving that the expedition was sound after all. And so underneath all their bitterness and tiredness, the men were perfectly willing to attack again provided they could be given the least glimmering of a chance of success. As with the desert soldiers in 1942 they needed a battle of Alamein.
The Turks, meanwhile, were not much better off than the Allies during these hot months. The official casualty figures issued after the campaign reveal that a total of 85,000 were evacuated sick, and of these 21,000 died of disease. By Western standards the Turkish soldiers were very poorly cared for. According to Liman von Sanders their uniforms were so tattered that the hessian sacks which were sent up to the trenches to be filled with sand were constantly disappearing; the men used the material to patch their trousers. No doubt the Turkish peasants were able to withstand the heat and the dirt more easily than the Europeans, and their simpler vegetable diet — rice, bread and oil — was much better for them than bully beef; but they were not inoculated against typhoid and other diseases as the Allied soldiers were, and their trenches and latrines were kept in a much less hygienic state. By July the Turkish generals were finding it necessary to send increasing numbers of men home on leave to their villages, and it often happened that once a soldier left the front he found means of staying away.
Meanwhile the British submarine campaign was causing a shortage of ammunition, which was almost as acute as it was with the Allies. ‘It was fortunate for us,’ Liman wrote, ‘that the British attacks never lasted more than one day, and were punctuated by pauses of several days. Otherwise it would have been impossible to replenish our artillery ammunition.’ He speaks too of ‘the jealousy and lack of co-operation so common among Turkish general officers’, and of several changes in the high command which had to be made at this time as a result of their heavy losses.
None of this was more than guessed at in Hamilton’s headquarters. It was known, however, from prisoners, from aerial reconnaissance and from agents in Constantinople, that Turkish reinforcements in large numbers were arriving on the peninsula, though whether for attack or simply to make good their losses it was impossible to say. As July ran out both sides settled down to an erratic apprehensive calm, enduring the same blistering sun, the same plague of flies and infected dust, the same ant-like existence in the ground. The Allies waited for the Turks to issue forth from the hills; the Turks waited for the Allies to come up to meet them. It was all very old and very new, a twentieth-century revival of the interminable siege. The Turks had a trench and a machine-gun post among Schliemann’s excavations on the site of Troy.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE soldiers at Gallipoli were wrong in thinking that the campaign had been abandoned and forgotten in London. Directly the new government was in office Churchill circulated a paper to cabinet Ministers in which he argued that while the Allies had neither the men nor the ammunition to bring about a decision in France, a comparatively small addition to Hamilton’s forces would make all the difference at Gallipoli.[24] ‘It seems most urgent,’ he wrote, ‘to try to obtain a decision here and wind up the enterprise in a satisfactory manner as soon as possible.’ If the Army advanced just three or four miles up the peninsula the Fleet could steam through to the Sea of Marmara and all the old objects could still be realized: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the support of Russia, the allegiance of the Balkans. Where else in all the other theatres of war could they look during the next three months for such a victory?
Kitchener himself had for some time been approaching this point of view, and in June he came the whole way. The recruiting and training of his new army in England was now well advanced, but it was not yet ready for a resumption of the offensive in France. ‘Such an attack,’ he wrote, ‘before an adequate supply of guns and high-explosive shell can be provided, would only result in heavy casualties and the capture of another turnip field.’
24
There were 24 British divisions in France at this time and only 4 in Gallipoli. The remainder of Hamilton’s force was made up of 2 French and 2 Anzac divisions — a total of 8 divisions.