These were the men upon whom Allanson was preparing to rush at first light in the morning.
At Helles too things had suddenly become very sinister for the Turks. Although the British did not know it, their holding attack had extended the Turkish defence to the edge of its endurance, and the German chief-of-staff there had lost his nerve. He had sent a signal to Liman urging that the whole tip of the peninsula should be abandoned — that the troops there should be evacuated across the Dardanelles to Asia ‘while there is still time to extricate them’.
But Liman’s methods were a good deal more ruthless than those of the British Commander-in-Chief, and in this triple crisis he acted very promptly. He removed the German chief-of-staff from his post at Cape Helles, and instructed the commanding general there that in no circumstances whatever was a single yard of ground to be given up. As for the unfortunate Feizi Bey, who had failed to make his attack at Suvla, he was dismissed out of hand. He was woken out of his sleep at 11 p.m. that night and bundled off to Constantinople. A new command was created embracing the whole battle area from Chunuk Bair to Suvla, and it was given to Mustafa Kemal.
In his account of the campaign Liman gives no explanation of why his choice fell on Kemal. He simply says, ‘That evening I gave command of all the troops in the Anafarta section to Colonel Mustafa Kemal… I had full confidence in his energy.’ Yet it was a surprising appointment to make. One can only conclude that Liman had long since divined Kemal’s abilities, but had been prevented by Enver from promoting him. But now in this extreme crisis he could afford to ignore Enver.
Kemal had been in the heaviest of the fighting on the Anzac front from the beginning. His 19th Division had met the first shock of the New Zealand advance; it had demolished the Australian Light Horse on August 7 and it had been fighting night and day ever since. In Kemal’s view the Turkish position had, by then, become ‘extremely delicate’, and he told Liman’s chief-of-staff so over the telephone on August 8. Unless something was quickly done to straighten out the tangle on Chunuk Bair, he said, they might be forced to evacuate the whole ridge. A unified command on the front was essential. ‘There is no other course,’ he went on, ‘but to put all the available troops under my command.’
Liman’s chief-of-staff at that stage had no notion that Kemal, who was always a troublesome figure at headquarters, was about to be promoted, and he permitted himself to say ironically, ‘Won’t that be too many troops?’
‘It will be too few,’ Kemal replied.
So now, after he had been awake for two nights at Anzac and continually in the front line, Kemal suddenly found himself in charge of the battle. He seems to have been not at all dismayed. Having calmly given orders to his successor in command of the 19th Division on Battleship Hill, he got on his horse and rode across the dark hills to Suvla. One has a vivid picture of him on this solitary midnight ride. Physically he was quite worn out, and his divisional doctor was giving him doses to keep him going. He had grown very thin, his eyes were bloodshot, his voice grating with fatigue, and the battle had brought him to a state of nervous tension which was perhaps not far from fanaticism, except that it was fanaticism of a cold and calculating kind.
With his doctor and an A.D.C. following on behind, he turned up at Willmer’s headquarters in the Suvla hills soon after midnight, and spent the next two hours making himself familiar with the front. No one was able to tell him very much about the movements of the British, but he decided to make a general attack along the whole line from Tekke Tepe to the Sari Bair ridge in the morning. The Bulair force had now arrived, and at 4 a.m. orders were sent out to the commanders telling them to be ready to start in half an hour; they were to advance directly to the heights and then charge down into the Suvla plain on the other side.
As dawn was about to break the Tekke Tepe ridge was still empty. The British 32nd Brigade had not got under way so promptly as Hamilton had hoped on the previous night. Seven hours had gone by while the men groped about in the thick scrub, constantly losing themselves in the winding goat tracks, and it was not until 3.30 a.m. that the brigade was assembled below the summit. At 4 a.m. it advanced at last, and it was just half an hour too late; as the men in the leading company went forward the Turks burst over the rise above them. It was a tumultuous charge, and it annihilated the British. Within a few minutes all their officers were killed, battalion and brigade headquarters were over-run, and men were scattering everywhere in wild disorder. In the intense heat of the machine-gun fire the scrub burst into flames, and the soldiers who had secreted themselves there came bolting into the open like rabbits, with the smoke and flames billowing out behind them. At sunrise Hamilton, watching from the deck of the Triad, was presented with an awful sight. His men were streaming back across the plain in thousands, and at 6 a.m., only an hour and a half after the battle had begun, there seemed to be a general collapse. Not only were the hills lost, but some of the soldiers in their headlong retreat did not stop until they reached the salt lake and the sea. ‘My heart has grown tough amidst the struggles of the peninsula,’ he wrote in his diary that night, ‘but the misery of this scene wellnigh broke it… Words are no use.’
Another two hours went by before the Turkish fire slackened and the British began to rally themselves on a line across the centre of the plain. Hamilton then went ashore to look for Stopford, who had landed overnight at a place called Ghazi Baba, close to the extreme tip of the northern arm of the bay. ‘We found Stopford,’ he says, ‘about four or five hundred yards to the east of Ghazi Baba, busy with part of a Field Company of engineers supervising the building of some splinterproof headquarters huts for himself and his staff. He was absorbed in the work, and he said it would be well to make a thorough good job of the dug-outs as we should probably be here for a very long time… As to this morning’s hold-up, Stopford took it very philosophically.’
And still the polite façade between the two men did not fail. Since headquarters was without news of the left flank on Kiretch Tepe Hamilton suggested that it might be a godd thing if he went off on a reconnaissance in that direction. Stopford agreed, but thought that he himself had better stay at headquarters to deal with the messages coming in. Upon this Hamilton set off with an A.D.C. on a long walk towards the hills and the Corps Commander returned to the building of his huts.
Later that day Stopford sent out a message to one of his divisional generals congratulating him on his stand. ‘Do not try any more today,’ he added, ‘unless the enemy gives you a favourable chance.’
Kemal had watched the battle from a hilltop behind the front line, and by midday he was satisfied that he had nothing more to fear from the British on the Suvla front. But by now alarming messages had reached him from Sari Bair: Allanson had gained the ridge and the centre of crisis had obviously shifted there. At 3 p.m. Kemal went off on horseback through the blazing heat, and having called in on Liman’s headquarters on the way, reached Chunuk Bair just as the evening light was failing. The situation there had grown worse. Allanson and his men had been withdrawn, but other British troops had taken up their positions on the hill; a fresh Turkish regiment which was due to come up from Helles had not arrived, and the troops in the line were to some extent demoralized by the British artillery fire and the continuing strain of the battle. Kemal, who was now spending his fourth night on his feet, at once ordered an attack for four-thirty on the following morning, August 10. His staff protested that the men were incapable of further effort, but Kemal merely repeated his order and went off on a personal reconnaissance along the front.