In the last week of September Bulgaria mobilized, and it was apparent that within a matter of days she would be marching with the Germans and Austrians against Serbia. There was only one way of bringing help to the Serbians, and that was by attacking Bulgaria through Greece. But the Greek government was now insisting that if she was to enter the war she must be supported by an Allied force at Salonika. There was not much time. Kitchener and Joffre agreed that two divisions, one French and the other British, must be sent from Gallipoli to Salonika at once. If necessary Hamilton would have to abandon Suvla and again confine himself to the bridgeheads at Anzac and Cape Helles.
This blow fell on Imbros on September 26, and Hamilton forced himself to take it philosophically. He wrote in his diary early in October, ‘At whose door will history leave the blame for the helpless, hopeless fix we are left in — rotting with disease and told to take it easy.’ But he loyally sent off the two divisions to Salonika and fitted them out as well as he could before they left.
By now, however, events had come to a crisis where two divisions could make little difference one way or another. Joffre’s offensive in the west failed with the loss of a quarter of a million men. Then on October 9 the Germans and Austrians fell on Belgrade, while on the following day the Bulgarians attacked Serbia from the east. The Allies’ force at Salonika was too small, too disorganized and too far away to do anything but to look on helplessly. And it was one more galling twist that the removal of the two divisions from Gallipoli had precisely the reverse effect on Greece to the one anticipated. Seeing Hamilton’s army reduced like this, King Constantine at once made up his mind that the Allies were about to abandon Gallipoli. He dismissed his anti-German Prime Minister, Venizelos, and decided upon a neutrality which, if not actively hostile to the Allies, was at least not helpful.
There was but one ray of hope for Gallipoli in all this. Keyes wanted the Fleet to assault the Narrows again. He had argued for it after the August battles had failed, he argued all through September, and with a new ally — Admiral Wemyss, the Commander-in-Chief at Lemnos — he was still arguing in October. De Robeck was still opposed but he allowed Keyes to draw up a new plan and propound it to a group of senior admirals at the Dardanelles. They were caught again in the old half-emotional dilemma. They felt deeply about the losses of the Army, they wanted to attack, and they again half believed that in the end the Admiralty would order them to do so. But still they could not clearly see how it was to be done. Eventually a compromise was decided upon: Keyes was to go to London and put the matter personally to the Admiralty and the War Cabinet.
But this for the moment was a side-issue, a single current moving against a turning tide. After the September offensive Joffre still withheld the four divisions earmarked for the Dardanelles, and the longer he delayed the more French opinion began to swing against the Asiatic landing altogether. With Serbia falling, Salonika appeared to be the more crucial strategic point for a new offensive. In London, too, Lloyd George and Carson,[28] the Attorney-General, were openly pushing their campaign against Kitchener, and the issue was rapidly narrowing down to a simple alternative: Salonika or Gallipoli, which was it to be? Hamilton’s army was now down to half its strength and the campaign was at a stalemate. Was it really worth while throwing good money after bad?
On October 11 Kitchener felt bound to acknowledge the pressure of these questions. He cabled Hamilton, ‘What is your estimate of the probable losses which would be entailed to your force if the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula was decided upon and carried out in the most careful manner? No decision has been arrived at yet on this question of evacuation, but I feel I ought to have your views.’
When he read this Hamilton burst out, ‘If they do this they make the Dardanelles into the bloodiest tragedy of the world. I won’t touch it.’ Could they not understand that the Turks were worn out, that the Allied soldiers were reviving now in the cooler weather, that they had only to be supported at Gallipoli and they would get through? And what if a gale came up half way through the evacuation? It might cause a disaster only equalled in history by that of the Athenians at Syracuse.
The headquarters at Imbros was not the best of places in which to take calm decisions. Hamilton was suffering miserably from dysentery, and German aircraft had begun to raid the island. On this very day a quiverful of iron spikes had come rattling down about the General’s head.
In the morning, however, he sent off a sober reply. They must reckon on the loss of half the men, and all their guns and stores, he said. ‘One quarter would probably get off quite easily, then the trouble would begin. We might be very lucky and lose considerably less than I have estimated. On the other hand, with all these raw troops at Suvla and all these Senegalese at Cape Helles, we might have a veritable catastrophe.’
Privately Hamilton believed that the losses would be less than half — between 35 and 45 per cent. was his estimate — but his staff were in favour of the higher figure, and he adopted it to make his opposition to the evacuation absolutely clear. But there was more in Kitchener’s query than a balancing of estimates about evacuation: the whole question of Hamilton’s command was involved. Already there had been rumblings. On October 4 Kitchener had sent a private cable to Hamilton warning him that there had been a ‘flow of unofficial reports from Gallipoli’ adversely criticizing G.H.Q. at Imbros. Should they not make some changes, Kitchener suggested. Perhaps Braithwaite should come home.
Hamilton had indignantly refused. But it was clear now that he himself and everyone on Imbros were under fire.
Then on October 11, the same day that Kitchener had sent his cable about evacuation, the Dardanelles Committee approached the matter in an oblique but very definite way. They decided that reinforcements should be dispatched to the Near East, but they were not to go directly to Gallipoli; they were to be held in Egypt while a senior general, Haig or Kitchener himself — someone at any rate who was senior to Hamilton — went out and decided between Gallipoli and Salonika.
The truth was that Hamilton was diminishing fast in everybody’s estimation. He was the general who always nearly succeeded. He had badly mismanaged Suvla, and General Stopford, who had recently come home, was making some very serious charges about the interference of G.H.Q. in the battle. The headquarters staff, Stopford wrote in a report to the War Office, ‘lived on an island at some distance from the peninsula’ and had been greatly misinformed about the Turkish strength at Suvla. There was another factor. Hamilton was Kitchener’s man, and it was beginning to seem that Kitchener might be covering him up. The Committee waited now with some impatience to see whether anything hopeful or useful would come in reply to Kitchener’s cable. It chanced, too, that just at this time the German zeppelins were having a particular success in their raids on London: 176 people had been killed in two successive nights. Between the falling bombs on London and the falling spikes on Imbros everybody’s nerves were on edge.
But it was not the bombs, nor Stopford’s criticisms, not even the growing opposition to Kitchener and all his plans and protégés which was the immediate factor in the undoing of Hamilton’s reputation at this moment. It was an Australian journalist named Keith Murdoch. His entry into the explosive scene is one of the oddest incidents in the Gallipoli campaign.
The trouble had begun far back in April with Ashmead-Bartlett, the war correspondent who represented the London press at the Dardanelles. According to Compton Mackenzie, who was in a position to know, Ashmead-Bartlett was not liked at headquarters. He was the stranger in the camp, a solitary civilian among professional and amateur soldiers. He was never captivated by Hamilton as the others were, but remained instead the detached hostile critic. He resented the censorship at G.H.Q., he disagreed with all their plans, and, worst of all, he was for ever predicting failure. Things grew to such a pitch that on one occasion, according to Mackenzie, the officers at Corps Headquarters at Cape Helles went into hiding in the rocks when Ashmead-Bartlett approached to avoid having to ask him to lunch.
28
Carson resigned soon afterwards over the failure of the Government to send adequate help to Serbia. ‘The Dardanelles operations,’ he told the House of Commons, ‘hang like a millstone round our necks, and have brought upon us the most vast disaster that has happened in the course of the war.’