All this was as old as war itself, but these early August days were frightfully hot, the flies and the mosquitoes leapt on to the men’s pink skins and they caught the endemic dysentery very quickly. While they waited they gossiped, and the rumours that went about were not of the hopeful kind. By August 6 the constricting sense of endless waiting had become as bad as if not worse than the prospect of the battle itself. They wanted to get it over.
Upon G.H.Q. at Imbros the strain was of a different kind, for it was perfectly obvious to everybody that this was a gambler’s chance, and probably their last chance. Mentally they might have persuaded themselves that, within reason, every eventuality had been foreseen, that the plan was good, that there was no reason why it should not succeed; but when so many things had gone wrong before it was difficult to feel an emotional enthusiasm. Hamilton was always at his best at these moments. He was courteous, patient, and apparently full of intelligent confidence; he spread an aura of authority round him, he was very much respected. But the crust was thin, and not unnaturally there were occasional disputes at headquarters. The French were not entirely liked, nor were the newcomers who were arriving from England. The staff, too, was on guard against any show of superiority in officers who were serving at the front, and they were often irritated as well by the men in the rear echelons behind them.
Despite the reinforcements, there was still a feeling that the Dardanelles was a poor relation to the French front, and an interminable telegram battle with the War Office went on. In July Churchill had been expected to come to Gallipoli, and he was awaited with much eagerness. At the last moment, however, the visit was blocked by Churchill’s political opponents in cabinet, and Colonel Maurice Hankey, the Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, was sent out instead. Hamilton at first found it difficult to suppress a feeling of antipathy towards this relatively junior officer who was to report directly to the cabinet at home, and it was not until Hankey had been a week or more on Imbros that the staff realized that he was anxious only to use his exceptional talents for their good.
Mackenzie records an odd scene when he was lunching one day with the generals at their mess at G.H.Q. ‘The one next to me,’ he says, ‘was Sir Frederick Stopford, a man of great kindliness and personal charm, whose conversation at lunch left me at the end of the meal completely without hope of victory at Suvla. The reason for this apprehension was his inability to quash the new General opposite, who was one of the Brigadiers in his Army Corps. This Brigadier was holding forth almost truculently about the folly of the plan of operations drawn up by the General Staff, while Sir Frederick Stopford appeared to be trying to reassure him in a fatherly way. I looked along the table to where Aspinall and Dawnay (two of Hamilton’s general staff officers) were sitting near General Braithwaite; but they were out of earshot and the dogmatic Brigadier continued unchallenged to enumerate the various military axioms which were being ignored by the Suvla plan of operations. For one thing, he vowed, most certainly he was not going to advance a single yard until all the Divisional Artillery was ashore. I longed for Sir Frederick to rebuke his disagreeable and discouraging junior; but he was deprecating, courteous, fatherly, anything except the Commander of an Army Corps which had been entrusted with a major operation that might change the whole course of the war in twenty-four hours.’
Hamilton’s position at this time is difficult to understand, for by now he had broken nearly all the rules which were subsequently evolved by Field-Marshal Montgomery in the second world war for operations of this kind. He had allowed his junior commanders to criticize and change his plan, and he had never conveyed to them by word of mouth exactly what he wanted them to do. Instead of keeping the control of the battle under his own hand, his generals and brigadiers were to act on their own discretion; they were to get forward ‘if possible’. In the same way Hamilton had failed to impress his will on Kitchener and the War Office; he had not wanted these new commanders, they were charming men of his own world, but they were old and they had a fatal lack of experience. Nevertheless, he had accepted them. What was wanted was young commanders with seasoned troops, but at Suvla it was the other way about.
Had Hamilton but known it there existed in his Army a man of quite exceptional ability who would have been the ideal commander for the Suvla operation. This was a brigadier-general named John Monash. Monash is something of an enigma in the first world war, for although Hamilton had noticed that he was an able officer, no one, either at Imbros or at Anzac or anywhere else, seems to have divined his peculiar talents as a leader. He was an Australian Jew, already fifty years of age, and his attainments were extraordinary: he was a Doctor of Engineering, and had also graduated in Arts and Law, in addition to being deeply read in music, in medicine and in German literature. Soldiering had been merely a hobby for Monash but for years he had been enthusiastic about it, and when he had volunteered for service at the outbreak of the war he had been made a colonel. He took a brigade ashore at Anzac in the April landing, and had since done well within the limits of that narrow front, but he had not advanced beyond the rank of brigadier.
This was the man who was soon to rise to the command of an army corps in France, and who towards the end of the war was to be considered as a possible successor to Haig as Commander-in-Chief of all the British Armies in France.
‘Unfortunately,’ Lloyd George wrote in his memoirs, ‘the British did not bring into prominence any commander who, taking all round, was more conspicuously fitted for this post (than Haig). No doubt Monash would, if the opportunity had been given him, have risen to the height of it, but the greatness of his abilities was not brought to the attention of the cabinet in any of the Despatches. Professional soldiers could hardly be expected to advertise the fact that the greatest strategist in the Army was a civilian when the war began, and that they were being surpassed by a man who had not received any of their advantages in training and teaching… Monash was… the most resourceful general in the whole British Army.’
But in August 1915 no one had thought of Monash in such terms as these, and indeed he had never been heard of outside his own narrow circle. In the coming battle he was confined to the role of taking one of the Anzac columns on a roundabout route up Sari Bair.
The plan itself was open to serious criticism; except for the Suvla landing it did not force the Turks to react to the British, it was the British who were reacting to the Turks. They were proposing to direct their main attack upon Chunuk Bair, the enemy’s strongest point, and it was not to be one concentrated blow on a broad manageable front, but the most congested of battles in which only a few men could take part at one time, and in the most difficult country where anything and everything could go wrong. The Anzac bridgehead was perfectly safe, and the Turks never had a hope of dislodging the Allies from it. It was an ideal training ground, and the new troops coming out from the United Kingdom might very well have been put in there to hold the line while the main attack was delivered not at Chunuk Bair but at Suvla.
The Australians and New Zealanders were by now the most aggressive fighters in the whole peninsula. They had not been heavily engaged through June and July like the British and the French at Cape Helles. They were eager for action, they wanted space and movement after all these claustrophobic months under the ground, and the Suvla landing, with a broad flanking movement round Sari Bair, was precisely the sort of adventure to which they would have responded. They knew the ground — from their perches in the bridgehead they looked down on it every day — they knew the Turks, and their commanders had all the experience of the April landing behind them.