Through the heat of the day Hamilton remained there, a prisoner on his island, until at last at 4.30 in the afternoon the Triad arrived and took him on board. An hour and a half later the yacht ran up alongside the Chatham in Suvla Bay, and Hamilton found de Robeck, Keyes and Aspinall waiting for him there. A few new moves had taken place during the latter part of the afternoon, but they were very largely a repetition of the morning’s events, a further shuffling round in the bemused coil in which they had all been caught from the first moment of the landing. It took Hamilton only a few minutes to hear the outlines of the dismal story, and he then jumped into a fast motor-boat with Roger Keyes and Aspinall and headed across the bay for the Jonquil.
Stopford meanwhile had been ashore for the first time. He had intended to visit Hammersley on the beach at 5 p.m. but he had been a little worried by Aspinall’s visit, and the distinct breeze of impatience that appeared to be blowing from G.H.Q., and so he had put the time forward by an hour. When he arrived on the beach he found that Hammersley was out, but the divisional staff assured him that plans were well advanced for an attack on the following day. Content with this, the General returned to the Jonquil. Yet another message from G.H.Q. was waiting for him there. Reconnaissance planes had been ranging over the peninsula again, and they reported there were still no signs of the enemy on Tekke Tepe. On the other hand, reinforcements of an ominous size had been seen marching down from Bulair, and they were clearly headed for Suvla Bay. Stopford sent another signal to the shore ordering a general advance on the hills, but leaving it to Hammersley to fix the time for the start. He had barely completed these arrangements when Hamilton arrived.
The interview was balanced on a thin edge of courtesy and was very brief. Where were the troops, Hamilton asked, and why weren’t they in the hills? The men were exhausted, Stopford said. They must have artillery to support them. After a night’s rest they would attack in the morning. Why not tonight? Well, for one thing Hammersley was all against a night attack.
‘We must occupy the heights at once,’ Hamilton insisted. ‘It is imperative we get to Ismail Oglu Tepe and Tekke Tepe now.’ But it was insistence in a void, an argument that no longer had any point, in this strange headquarters in the sea. It might have had a point if it had taken place before the landing, had Hamilton driven it home quite ruthlessly and clearly to the generals and the brigadiers and the colonels that there was only one object before them, and that was to get inland. But he had not pressed the argument then, he had left things to Stopford’s discretion, and in the intervening two days his plan had become nothing more than a vague hope hanging in the air. The colonels had told the brigadiers they could not get forward, the brigadiers had passed this on to the divisions, and now he was talking to a tired general who had foreseen it all from the beginning. Stopford had known all along that the plan would not work: you had to have guns.
Hamilton said shortly that he himself would go ashore and talk to Hammersley and the brigadiers.
‘Stopford agreed,’ Hamilton wrote that night in his diary. ‘Nothing, he said, would please him more than if I could succeed where he had failed, and would I excuse him from accompanying me; he had not been very fit; he had just returned from a visit to the shore and he wanted to give his leg a chance. He pointed out Hammersley’s headquarters about 400 yards off and said he, Hammersley, would be able to direct me to the Brigades.
‘So I nipped down the Jonquil’s ladder, tumbled into Roger Keyes’ racing motor-boat and with him and Aspinall we simply shot across the water to Lala Baba. Every moment was priceless. I had not been five minutes on the Jonquil and in another two I was with Hammersley.
‘Under the low cliffs by the sea was a small half-moon of a beach about 100 by 40 yards. At the north end of the half-moon was Hammersley. Asked to give me an idea of the situation he gave me much the same story as Stopford.’
So now they had the same argument all over again. They simply could not do it, Hammersley said, not until eight the following morning. Tomorrow was too late, Hamilton said, were there no troops whatever ready to march? They were asked only to cover two and a half miles, and there were no Turks in front of them. No, Hammersley said, there were no troops ready — unless just possibly the 32nd Brigade. ‘Then tell them,’ Hamilton said, ‘to advance at once and dig themselves in on the crestline.’
It was now 6.30 p.m. on August 8, and the time allowed for the arrival of the enemy reinforcements had long since gone by. And yet, astonishingly, there was still no sign of any new formations gathering on the heights. Nine hours of darkness still lay before them; it was going to be a race, but surely there was time for the 32nd Brigade to gather itself together and march the two and a half miles to the top of Tekke Tepe. If they got just one battalion dug in before dawn it would be enough: the rest of the division could follow later.
Hamilton went back to the Triad. He did not communicate again with Stopford, and no one else bothered to inform Corps Headquarters in the Jonquil that by the commander-in-chief’s orders the plans had been changed and the troops were on the march.
Towards midnight Hamilton walked out on to the deck. The night — this third night on the Suvla beaches — was absolutely still. Somewhere in the hills now the soldiers were creeping upward through the scrub.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
AT Anzac on August 6 there was no confusion over the plans; the commanders knew exactly what they had to do. During the afternoon the Australians were to attack at Lone Pine in the south of the bridgehead, so as to give the Turks the impression that the main assault was coming from that direction, and then, after nightfall, the bulk of Birdwood’s forces were to march up the ravines towards Sari Bair. They hoped to take the crest of the ridge by morning.
The charge at Lone Pine was a particularly desperate adventure, since it was to take place in broad daylight and on a narrow front of only 220 yards where the Turks could concentrate their fire. Yet the soldiers believed in the plan. They believed in it so well and were so eager to fight that guards had to be posted in the rear trenches to prevent unauthorized men from attempting to take part. This was a wise precaution, because when the fighting did begin it created a frenzy that was not far from madness, and men were to be seen offering sums of five pounds or more for the privilege of getting a place in the front line.
Through the midday hours the soldiers committed to the first assault filed quietly into the secret underground tunnel which had been dug about fifty yards in advance of the front line and parallel to it through no-man’s-land. The sandbags plugging the holes from which they were to emerge were loosened, and they lay waiting there in darkness and in fearful heat, while the artillery barrage thundered over their heads. At 5.30 p.m. whistles sounded the attack along the line. It was the strangest of battles; soldiers erupting from the ground into the bright sunlight, others leaping up from the trenches behind them, and all of them with shouts and yells running forward into the scrub. They had about a hundred yards to go, and when they arrived at the Turkish line they found that the trenches had been roofed over with heavy pine logs. Some of the men dropped their rifles and started to claw these logs aside with their hands, others simply fired down through the chinks into the Turks below, others again went running on to the open communication trenches and there they sprang down to take the enemy in the rear. In the semi-darkness under the pine logs there was very little space to shoot; on both sides they fought with bayonets and sometimes without any weapons at all, kicking and struggling on the ground, trying to throttle one another with their hands.