It was an excess of caution and it was not wise. Liman von Sanders says that in any case he was warned. Early in July he began to hear rumours from the islands that another landing was imminent: some 50,000 men and 140 ships were said to have been assembled at Lemnos. On July 22—the same day that Hamilton was breaking the secret to Stopford — Liman received a telegram from Supreme Headquarters in Germany. ‘From reports received here,’ it ran, ‘it seems probable that at the beginning of August a strong attack will be made on the Dardanelles, perhaps in connection with a landing on the Gulf of Saros (the Bulair area), or on the coast of Asia Minor. It will be well to economize ammunition.’
Liman himself was inclined to agree with this forecast, and he deployed his army accordingly. He now had a force of sixteen small divisions (which was roughly equivalent to Hamilton’s thirteen), and three of these he posted at Bulair, three opposite the Anzac bridgehead, five at Cape Helles, and the remaining three at Kum Kale on the Asiatic side of the straits. As for the Suvla area, the British were very nearly right in their estimate of the Turkish garrison there. Liman did not consider it a danger point, and he stationed only three weak battalions — about 1,800 men — around the bay. They had no barbed wire and no machine-guns.
There were then three main Turkish battle groups on the peninsula: the Bulair force in the north commanded by Feizi Bey, the force opposite Anzac in the centre commanded by Essad Pasha, and the southern force at Cape Helles commanded by Wehib Pasha (a younger brother of Essad Pasha). Mustafa Kemal was in a somewhat dubious position at this time. Liman respected him very much as a soldier, and would have promoted him, but he found him quarrelsome and difficult to control. A major row had developed in June when Enver, arriving on one of his periodical visits from Constantinople, cancelled an attack which Kemal had planned to launch on Anzac. Kemal, he said, was too much given to the squandering of troops, and Kemal at once resigned. Liman managed to restore peace between them, but when the attack turned out to be a complete disaster recriminations broke out afresh. Kemal declared that Enver’s interference had spoiled his plans, and Enver retaliated by making an address to the soldiers in which he praised them for the way they had fought under such poor leadership. It was another and violent example of the ‘jealousy and lack of co-operation so common among Turkish general officers’. Kemal once more resigned in a sour rage, and it was only when Enver left the peninsula that he calmed down and agreed to continue with his division — the old 19th. He was still with it on the north of the Anzac front in August, a senior divisional commander but no more.
It seems possible that Liman was to some extent taken in by the British feint on the island of Mytilene, the ancient Lesbos, for it was very thoroughly done. In July British officers made ostentatious inquiries among the local population of Turks and Greeks about the water supply and sites for encampments; and a little later a brigade of troops actually arrived. Maps of the Asiatic coast were freely distributed through the Army, and on August 3 Hamilton himself came over to the island to inspect the troops: an indication they were on the eve of going into battle, as indeed they were, but not in Asia. These moves can hardly have failed to have been reported to the Turks, for there were many people on the island who were hostile to the Allies, and a fantasy of espionage and counter-espionage was going on. In particular there was one family named Vassilaki of two brothers and three alleged beautiful sisters, which was the talk of the islands. The brothers kept eluding the British intelligence officers, and it was all very enjoyable in an opéra bouffe kind of way.
Bird wood’s plan of deception at Anzac was of a more practical nature and very daring. There were a number of miners in the Australian forces, and these threw out an underground tunnel, over 500 yards in length, in no-man’s-land at Lone Pine.[25] From this the Australians planned to issue forth like disturbed ants at zero hour on the afternoon of August 6. A more elaborate scheme had been worked out to pave the way for the main assault on Chunuk Bair that night. For some weeks almost every night a destroyer had posted herself off Anzac, and with the aid of her searchlights had bombarded a line of Turkish trenches known as Post 3. This action always began precisely at 9 p.m. and continued for half an hour, and it was calculated that the Turks, being human, would fall into a habit of retiring from the trench at 9 p.m. and of returning to it when the bombardment was over. On the night of the attack the Anzac troops planned to creep up to the position in the deep darkness on either side of the searchlight’s beam and then leap into the empty trenches directly the barrage was lifted.
But Birdwood’s main concern was the secret disembarkment at Anzac of his additional 25,000 men with their stores and equipment. In every valley which was not overlooked by the enemy long terraces were dug and new caves were driven into the rocks. Here the incoming troops were to be secreted. Orders were issued that the men, on reaching the shore, were to remain in strict hiding throughout the day, no swimming was allowed until after nightfall, and if German aircraft passed over they were not to turn their faces to the sky. No boat with the reinforcements on board was to approach the shore in the daylight, none was to be in sight of land when dawn broke. In the darkness tens of thousands of gallons of water had to be pumped ashore, new hospitals, ammunition dumps, guns and food stores hidden away. All horses were to be landed with full nosebags, and each man was to carry a full waterbottle and one day’s iron ration.
The movement began on August 4 and continued on three successive nights until August 6. Except that on one occasion a group of lighters was delayed until after dawn and was shelled and driven away the operation was carried out with complete success. There were moments at Birdwood’s headquarters when they felt sure that the Turks must have heard the rattling of anchor chains in the bay, and the shouted orders of the officers on the beach. But the enemy apparently suspected nothing. By August 6 there was scarcely standing room for another man at Anzac.
Meanwhile the last reinforcements from England were arriving in the islands, and it was already something of a victory that all five divisions were brought through the Mediterranean without the loss of a single man. They moved into tented cities on Mytilene, Lemnos and Imbros, and there they waited, in the eyes of the veterans a pale and hesitant lot, for the moment when they were to be re-embarked and taken to the battle.
It was a strange atmosphere. Among the older soldiers on the peninsula the approaching struggle had acted as a stimulus. Fewer and fewer men reported sick, and everything which in idleness had seemed so insupportable — the flies, the heat and the dust — became apparently much easier to bear. But for the new troops this period of suspense was a depressing experience. They were in a half-way house; while they themselves had never been in battle they still did not have the luxury of the ignorance in which the older soldiers had set out to make the first landing on April 25. They knew what the veterans had not known — that a landing could be a terrible thing, that the Turks were a stubborn enemy, and that all might easily end in wounds or death. This was no jaunt to Constantinople and the harems. It so happened that the War Office had published Hamilton’s first dispatch from Gallipoli just at the time that the new drafts were leaving England, and they had all been discussing that tragic story on the voyage out. And so they knew and did not know. Whenever they could they asked tentative questions of the older soldiers. What was it like on the peninsula? Would there be guides to lead them when they got ashore, and if no guides how would they know where to go? What about the shelling? And the sniping? And the Turks? And finally there was the question they could not ask: what was it like to kill a man and to stand up to be killed oneself?
25
Lone Pine had its name from the fact that the Turks, though supplied with charcoal for their cooking, had cut down for firewood all but a single tree on the ridge. It so happened that on the very morning of the attack this last tree was also felled.