Hamilton began a weary struggle to obtain reinforcements from Egypt, where a garrison of 70,000 men was immobilized, but General Maxwell, the commander there, was very reluctant. He was much concerned, he said, over the movements of the Senoussi tribesmen in the Libyan desert: they might attack at any moment. He could release no troops. Hamilton persisted and got the War Office to agree to the dispatch of two battalions. ‘That was yesterday,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘But the Senoussi must have heard of it at once, for Maxwell forthwith cables, “The attitude of the Senoussi is distinctly dangerous, and his people have been latterly executing night manœuvres round our post at Sollum”… I have renounced the two battalions with apologies, and now I daresay the Senoussi will retire from his night manœuvres round Sollum and resume his old strategic position up Maxwell’s sleeve.’ Hamilton, too, was becoming bitter.
The Turks did not attack. Half their entire army was now in the peninsula, but they too had suffered heavily in August, and were numbed by the same lethargy and weariness. It was the spent atmosphere of convalescence — perhaps hardly as yet convalescence — which had followed the assault on Anzac in May and all the other major battles. For the time being they had had enough of mass killing. Once more gifts of food and cigarettes were thrown back and forth between the trenches, and the war ceased to be a matter of rage, of pitched battle in the open, but of individual professional skill. They sniped. They dug tunnels under each other’s lines and exploded mines in them. They made small raids and feints.
In many ways the men in the opposing trenches must have felt mentally and emotionally closer to one another than to the shadowy figures of the commanding generals and the politicians in the rear. Like poverty, the extreme danger and hardship of the trenches reduced them all, British and Turks alike, to a bare level of existence, and they were set apart from the rest of the world. They may have hated it, but it drew them together, and now more than ever they had for one another the friendly cruelty of the very poor. This was an exact and prescribed arena, and until they were released from it and made safe and comfortable again they were hardly likely to know much about the propaganda animosities and the vicious fears of those who, being behind the lines, endured the war only at second-hand. For the moment the shared misery of dysentery, of flies, of dirt and lice was all.
Herbert records a curious instance of this detached and clinical attitude in the trenches. ‘The fact is,’ a Turkish prisoner said one day, ‘you are just a bit above our trenches. If you could only get your fire rather lower you will be right into them, and here exactly is the dugout of our captain, Risa Kiazim Bey, a poor, good man. You miss him all the time. If you will take a line on that pine tree you will get him.’
Sometimes the Turks would parley with Herbert across the front lines, but they resented as a rule being cajoled by deserters who had gone over to the British. Once for a few minutes they listened in silence and then a voice replied: ‘There are still Turks here and sons of Turks. Who are you? A prisoner? Then go away and don’t talk.’
The end of Ramadan, the Moslem period of fasting, came, and it was expected that the Turks might celebrate it with a new attack. But nothing happened. Instead, the Turkish soldiers made what shift they could to hold a feast in the trenches, and the British at some places sent them gifts.
By September it was already growing cold at night. A strong west wind would drive the sea into the salt lake at Suvla and hold it there until, after a few hours, the water drained out again. Once or twice there were sharp showers of rain accompanied by vivid lightning, and then on October 8 a gale blew up. It was an ominous warning for the British. At Suvla some of the provisioning barges broke loose and carried away ninety feet of the pier; and there was other damage to the improvised wharves at Anzac. ‘Both sides,’ Herbert wrote, ‘sat down grimly to wait for the winter.’
The Allies were waiting for something else as well, and it was even more serious than the winter. What was to become of them? Were they to attack again or stay where they were? Could they stay if Bulgaria came into the war against the Allies? If that happened — and it seemed quite likely now that the Suvla offensive had failed — Germany would have a through railway to Turkey. New guns and ammunition, perhaps even German and Bulgarian troops, could be brought down to the peninsula. Where were the reinforcements to meet them? And whether they were reinforced or not, how was the Navy to keep supplying the peninsula in heavy seas?
The soldiers in the ranks were aware that their fate was being decided in London and Paris, and they discussed the matter interminably in their dugouts. But there was never any definite news. They simply waited.
Hamilton knew what was going on in London, but it was so secret, so sensational and it so often blew hot and cold from week to week that he was not even able to confide in his corps commanders. In August he admitted to Kitchener that he had failed and could do no more unless he was reinforced again: and he needed another 95,000 men. Kitchener in reply said, in effect, that Gallipoli had been given its chance and lost it. The War Cabinet was now turning its mind back to France, and he had agreed to support Joffre in a vast offensive on the western front in September. Seventy French and British divisions were to be employed, and this meant that apart from normal replacements nothing more could be done for Gallipoli at the moment.
Then on September 2 a message arrived at Imbros saying that everything was changed. The French had suddenly and quite unpredictably come forward with an offer to send out a new army to the Dardanelles under the command of General Sarrail. Four French divisions were to be embarked at Marseilles to join the two already at Cape Helles, and they were to be landed on the Asiatic side. The British government would replace the French taken from Cape Helles with two fresh divisions of their own. Hamilton could scarcely believe it when he read the cable. ‘From bankrupt to millionaire in twenty-four hours,’ he wrote. ‘The enormous spin of fortune’s wheel makes me giddy.’ Now they were bound to get through; the Turks had had the go knocked out of them already and this new attack in Asia would be the finish. He himself would offer to serve under Sarrail if that would help to buttress this wonderful piece of news.
The appointment of Sarrail was a devious affair with roots reaching back as far as the Dreyfus case. Sarrail, a Radical-Socialist, an anti-cleric, had been relieved of his command at Verdun by Joffre, but he was politically strong enough to force the French government to find him another appointment. And so he was to have this new independent command in the Near East. Joffre was not in a position to block the appointment, but he could delay and weaken it, and this he was already doing by the time Hamilton got his cable. The four French divisions, he insisted, were not to go to the Dardanelles until after the September offensive had been fought on the western front.
Hamilton got this news on September 14. The earliest date on which the new soldiers could arrive, Kitchener now told him, was mid-November. ‘Postponed!’ the entry runs in Hamilton’s diary. ‘The word is like a knell.’ There was worse to follow.