Part 11

In the harbour at Imbros on that night there was a heavy sea, and in a small, dancing boat we quested through the darkness for any ship sailing to Anzac. One was found at last that was on the point of sailing, and off we went.

The instructions of my friend Ian Smith were to get to Suvla, and luck favoured him, for at dawn we lay off Suvla, and a trawler took him ashore.

Along the heights and down to the sea-shore the battle growled and raged, and it was difficult to know what was the mist of the morning or battle smoke. I got off at Anzac, which was calm, realizing that I had missed the first attack.

_Diary._ _Saturday, August 7, 1915._ _Kaba Tebé._ I went out to Headquarters, which are now beyond Colonel Bauchop’s old Headquarters. He, poor fellow, had just been hit and was said to be dying. Dix[20] again wounded in the leg and Cator killed when he had just been promoted. I saw the General; on the way out I met 300 Turkish prisoners and was ordered to return and embark them. We came to the pier on the beach, then three shells fell on and beside it; both S. B. and I thought we were going to have a very bad time, packed like sardines, with panicky prisoners. Embarking them took time; we were all very snappy, but we got them off. I was glad to find S. B. and Woods. All the dugouts here are desolate. I saw General Birdwood, who was very sad about Onslow.[21] He talked of the water difficulties. He was cheerful, as usual, and said he thought we should know which way things were going by 5 o’clock. S. was less cheerful.

I went back to Headquarters, a weary trudge of two hot, steaming miles, past masses of wounded. The saps were constantly blocked. Then back to Anzac for a few hours’ sleep, till I can get my kit.

_Sunday, August 8, 1915._ _Near Anafarta._ Slept badly last night at Anzac. The place was very desolate with every one away. I got up before a clear dawn and went out to the observation post, where I found General Godley and General Shaw. Our assault began. We saw our men in the growing light attack the Turks. It was a cruel and beautiful sight, for it was like a fight in fairyland; they went forward in parties through the beautiful light, with the clouds crimsoning over them. Sometimes a tiny, gallant figure would be in front, then a puff would come and they would be lying still. We got to within about forty yards of the Turks; later we lost ground. Meanwhile, men were streaming up, through awful heat. There were Irish troops cursing the Kaiser. At the observation post we were being badly shelled. The beauty of the place was extraordinary, and made it better than the baldness of Anzac, but we were on an unpropitious hillside, and beyond there were mules and men, clustered thickly.

Then I was sent back to Kaba Tepé, where I found a lot of wounded prisoners, who had not been attended to. I woke a doctor who had not slept for ages. He talked almost deliriously, but came along and worked like a real good man. I saw General House, V.C., and suggested attaching one doctor to the prisoners, so that we should not get contagious diseases.

Returned to Bauchop’s Post and examined a couple of Germans from the _Goeben_. Got a good deal of information. Then I was telephoned for to interrogate a wounded Greek, who had, however, got lost. I went back outside the hospital, where there were many wounded lying. I stumbled upon poor A. C. (a schoolfellow), who had been wounded about 3 a.m. the day before, and had lain in the sun on the sand all the previous day. He recognized me, and asked me to help him, but was light-headed. There were fifty-six others with him; M. and I counted. It was awful having to pass them. A lot of the men called out: “We are being murdered.” The smells were fearful.... I went down a sap to the north to find the Greek. Fierce shelling began. The sap was knocked down in front and behind.

I came to a field hospital, situated where the troops were going through. There no one knew where Taylor’s Hollow, the place where the Greek was supposed to be, was. While I was there shelling was bad. Several of the wounded hit again. One man was knocked in on the top of me, bleeding all over. I returned to meet Thoms, who said he knew the way. We ran the gauntlet....

I had a curious, beautiful walk, looking for the wounded Greek, going to nineteen hospitals. Many wounded everywhere. First I saw one of our fellows who had met ten Turks and had ten bayonet wounds. He was extremely cheerful. Then a couple of Turks in the shadow of some pines, one dying and groaning, really unconscious. I offered the other water from my bottle, but he refused because of his companion, using Philip Sidney’s words in Turkish.

Men were being hit everywhere. After going by fields and groves and lanes I came back to where the wounded were lying in hundreds, in the sap going to the sea, near Bauchop’s Fountain. There a man called to me in French. He was the Greek I was looking for, badly wounded. He talked a great deal. Said 200,000 reinforcements were expected from Gallipoli. No gas would be used here....

_Monday, August 9, 1915._ _No. 3 Outpost._ Slept uncomfortably on the ground. Went before the dawn to observation post; returned to examine prisoners. Had an unsuccessful expedition with Hastings to find some guns which he said had been lost between the lines.

Bullets came streaming down our valley, and we put up a small wall, of sacks, 3 feet high, behind which we slept. I was sitting at breakfast this morning listening to Colonel Manders[22] talking, when suddenly I saw Charlie B. put his hand to his own head and say: “By G----, he’s killed!” Manders fell back dead, with a bullet through his temple. He was a very good fellow.

Sir Ian Hamilton came ashore. I saw him for a moment. Then to Kaba Tepé; going and coming one passes a line of bodies, some dreadful, being carried for burial. Many still lying out. The last wounded have been more pitiful than anything I have seen. Cazalet is badly wounded; I hope he will recover; he is a good boy. Colonel Malone was killed last night and Jacky Hughes wounded. Lots of shelling.

Coming back I had to go outside the crowded sap, and got sniped. Thoms and I had a very lively time of it.

Came back for Manders’ funeral. I was very fond of him. General Godley read a few sentences with the help of my electric torch, which failed. Four others were buried with him. Later I saw a great shell strike the grave. A cemetery, or rather lots, growing up round us. There are dead buried or half buried in every gully.

_Tuesday, August 10, 1915._ _No. 3 Outpost._ Christo arrived with my kit and some grapes last night. While we were eating these, two men, one of whom was our cook, were hit, and he being the second cook, it was decided to change our quarters, as a lot of bullets streamed down the gully and we had been losing heavily. I was called up in the night to see about some wounded. The General had said they had better go by boat, because of the difficulty of the saps, but there were no boats, and Manders’ death had caused confusion at the hospital. The doctor on the beach said he could not keep the wounded there any longer, because of the rifle fire. I woke Charlie B. We got 200 men from the Canterbury reinforcements. They had been fighting without sleep since Sunday morning, but evacuated about 300 wounded to below Walker’s Ridge. There were no complaints. The Turks still had to be left. They called to me at night and at dawn. I gave them drinks, and later, after sunrise, shifted them into the shade, which made them cheerful. The General had not slept for three nights. The day went badly for us. We lost Chunuk Bair, and without it we cannot win the battle. The Turks have fought very finely, and all praise their courage. It was wonderful to see them charging down the hill, through the storm of shrapnel, under the white ghost wreaths of smoke. Our own men were splendid. The N.Z. Infantry Brigade must have ceased to exist. Meanwhile the condition of the wounded is indescribable. They lie in the sand in rows upon rows, their faces caked with sand and blood; one murmur for water; no shelter from the sun; many of them in saps, with men passing all the time scattering more dust on them. There is hardly any possibility of transporting them. The fire zones are desperate, and the saps are blocked with ammunition transport and mules, also whinnying for water, carrying food, etc. Some unwounded men almost mad from thirst, cursing.

We all did what we could, but amongst so many it was almost impossible.... The wounded Turks still here. I kept them alive with water. More prisoners in, report another 15,000 men at Bulair and a new Division, the 7th, coming against us here. I saw General Cooper,[23] wounded, in the afternoon, and got him water. His Staff had all been killed or wounded....

If the Turks continue to hold Chunuk Bair and get up their big guns there, we are, as a force, far worse off than at Anzac. What has happened is roughly this: we have emerged from a position which was unsatisfactory but certain, into one that is uncertain but partly satisfactory. If the Turks have the time to dig themselves in, then we are worse off than before, because we shall again be held up, with the winter to face, and time running hard against us, with an extended front. The Turks will still have land communications, while we shall only have sea communications, and though we ourselves shall be possibly better off, because we shall now have a harbour, the Turks some time will almost certainly be able to break through, though possibly not able to keep what they take. But the men at Helles will not be freed as our move proposed to free them.

I thought one of the wounded Turks had cholera to-day. There is very little water, and we have to give them water out of our own bottles. We have a terrible view here: lines of wounded creeping up from the hospital to the cemetery like a tide, and the cemetery is going like a live thing to meet the wounded. Between us and the sea is about 150 yards; this space is now empty of men because of the sniping. There are a number of dead mules on it, which smell horribly but cannot be moved. A curious exhibition of sniping took place just below us this evening, about 50 yards away. Two men were on the open space when a sniper started to shoot at them. They popped into a dry well that practically hid them, but he got his bullets all round them--in front and behind and on the sides. They weren’t hit. The camp watched, laughing.

_Thursday, August 12, 1915._ _No. 3 Outpost._ At 4.30 in the morning I got up and walked with the General. We went up to Rhododendron Ridge to have a look at the Turks. It is a steep, beautiful walk, and a glorious view--trees everywhere and cliffs. We are fastening the cliffs up, and camouflaging the trenches.

I took Nikolas the miller round the observation post in the morning. A new Division is supposed to be against us, the 8th. In the afternoon walked into Anzac to get a drink of water as have had fever and a cruel thirst. The dugouts smell, and washing’s difficult. Anglesey gave me excellent water.

_Friday, August 13, 1915._ _No. 3 Outpost._ Nothing doing. Bullets singing about, but nobody getting hit. The heat’s ferocious, and everybody’s feeling ill. Macaulay’s wounded.

Worked yesterday morning, also started on new dugout. In the afternoon went with Turkish papers to Anzac. I saw C. He said that this beach for cruelty had beaten the Crimea.... Savage feeling with the R.A.M.C....

Streams of mules took water out in the evening as the sun set. I met several men with sunstroke coming in. I saw George Hutton, Royal Welsh Fusiliers, who has become a Colonel. He had a hand-to-hand bayonet tussle with a Turk, in the last fight. Another man came up, and killed the Turk with his bayonet. Then, he said, the man, instead of pulling his bayonet out, dashed to another man and asked him for his bayonet, saying: “I have left mine in the Turk.”

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The battle-cries, by the way, were for the Turks the sonorous, deep-voiced “Allah, Allah,” and “Voor” (“God, God,” “Strike”); while the New Zealanders used often to shout: “Eggs is cooked.” This apparently irrelevant, unwarlike slogan had its origin in Egypt. There, on field days in the desert, when the men halted to rest, Egyptians would appear magically with primitive kitchens and the cry of “Eggs is cooked!”

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_Diary._ _Monday, August 16, 1915._ _No. 3 Outpost._ Christo will spit on my razor-strop; otherwise he is a good servant.... Bathed with Charlie B. yesterday afternoon.... I don’t think we want Roumania in. If she has no ammunition and takes a very bad knock from Germany, it would give Germany a very strong strategic position. The Turks who have come in do not really seem very disheartened.

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At about this time the Expeditionary Force entered upon a new phase. The agony of the struggle had passed its crisis. Both sides sat down grimly, to wait for the winter. In many ways our position had distinctly improved. There was more room, and space banished the sense of imprisonment that had afflicted us. The country was not as battle-scarred as Anzac, and walking over the heights at sunset was a feast of loveliness.

We moved our Headquarters again, and I went up to a large dugout in what had been a Turkish fort. The troops quartered in this fort were an Indian Field Battery and sixty-three New Zealanders, all that was left of their battalion. These men had been in the first landing. They had, every one of them, had dysentery or fever, and the great majority were still sick and over-ripe for hospital.

As time went on, and illness increased, one often heard men and officers say: “If we can’t hold the trenches with sound men, we have got to hold them with sick men.” When all was quiet, the sick-list grew daily. But when the men knew that there was to be an attack, they fought their sickness, to fight the Turk, and the stream to the hospitals shrank.

I admired nothing in the war more than the spirit of these sixty-three New Zealanders, who were soon to go to their last fight. When the day’s work was over, and the sunset swept the sea, we used to lean upon the parapet and look up to where Chunuk Bair flamed, and talk. The great distance from their own country created an atmosphere of loneliness. This loneliness was emphasized by the fact that the New Zealanders rarely received the same recognition as the Australians in the Press, and many of their gallant deeds went unrecorded or were attributed to their greater neighbours. But they had a silent pride that put these things into proper perspective. The spirit of these men was unconquered and unconquerable. At night, when the great moon of the Dardanelles soared and all was quiet except the occasional whine of a bullet overhead, the voices of the tired men continually argued the merits of the Expedition, and there was always one end to these discussions: “Well, it may all be a ---- mistake, but in a war of this size you will have mistakes of this size, and it doesn’t matter a ---- to us whether we are for it here or in France, for we came out to do one job, and it’s nothing to us whether we finish in one place or another.” The Turks were not the only fatalists in those days.

We were now well supplied with water, but food of the right kind was a difficulty. It was very hard to obtain supplies for sick men, and here, as always, we met with the greatest kindness from the Navy.

Horlick’s Malted Milk and fruit from the Islands did us more good than anything else. Relations of mine in Egypt sent me an enormous quantity of the first, which I was able to distribute to the garrison of the fort. Later, when I was invalided, I bequeathed the massive remnants to a friend who had just landed. Greedily he opened my stores, hoping for the good things of the world--tongues, potted ham and whisky--only to find a wilderness of Horlick’s Malted Milk.

Our position had at last been appreciated at home, and we were no longer irritated, as in the early days, by the frivolity and fatuousness of London. Upon one occasion, shortly after the first landing, one of the illustrated papers had a magnificent picture entitled, if I remember right, “The Charge that Won Constantinople.” The picture was of a cavalry charge, led quite obviously by General Godley--and those were the days when we were living on the edge of a cliff, where only centipedes could, and did, charge, and when we were provided with some mules and my six donkeys for all our transport.

There was a remarkable contrast between our war against the Germans and the Turks. In France the British soldier started fighting good-naturedly, and it took considerable time to work him up to a pitch of hatred; at Anzac the troops from the Dominions began their campaign with feelings of contempt and hatred, which gradually turned to respect for the Moslems. At the beginning the great majority of our men had naturally no knowledge of the enemy they were fighting. Once, looking down from a gun emplacement, I saw a number of Turks walking about, and asked why they had not been shot at. “Well,” said one man, “it seems hard on them, poor chaps. They aren’t doing any harm.” Then up came another: “Those Turks,” he said, “they walk about as if this place belongs to them.” I suggested that it was their native land. “Well,” he said, “I never thought of that.”

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_Diary._ _Monday, August 16, 1915._ _No. 2 Outpost._ It’s curious the way the men speak of the Turks here. They still can’t be made to wear gas helmets, because they say the Turks are clean fighters and won’t use gas....

It’s good to be high up in this observation post, above the smells, with a magnificent view of hill and valley. We shoot from here pretty often at the Turkish guns. Last night the Dardanelles droned on for hours. This morning the machine-guns on both sides were going like dentists’ drills. To-day it’s absolutely still, with only the whirr of aeroplanes overhead.

Bartlett turned up to-night. He had not much hope.... Poor Bauchop is dead. News came to-night.... A gallant man.

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On Wednesday, August 18th, I was sent to G.H.Q. at Imbros, and heard a full account of the tragic battle down at Helles, and the condition of the wounded at Mudros.

When men have gone to the limits of human endurance, when blood has been spilled like water, and the result is still unachieved, bitter and indiscriminate recrimination and criticism inevitably follow. But Anzac had one great advantage. Our leaders had the confidence of their men. The troops were able to see General Birdwood and General Godley every day in the front trenches with themselves, walking about under fire as if they had been on a lawn in England, and the men knew that their own lives were never uselessly sacrificed.

The work of many of the doctors on the Peninsula was beyond all praise, but there was black rage against the chiefs of the R.A.M.C. at Imbros and in Egypt. The anger would have been still greater if their attitude of complacent self-sufficiency had been known.

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_Diary._ _Thursday, August 19, 1915._ _No. 3 Outpost._ Returned to the Peninsula with Bettinson and Commander Patch and Phillips, the navigator. When we had come up to the fort I told them not to show their heads at the observation post, as the fort did not belong to me, and I did not want to become unpopular. I got Perry, Captain of the fort, and he sat them down on the parapet, showing them the lines of our trenches. While we talked, a sniper shot at Patch, just missing him, and hitting the parapet beside him. They were very pleased, though the others said I had paid a man to shoot in order to give them fun. Perry said in a friendly way: “That’s a good sniper; he’s thirteen hundred yards off, so it was a pretty decent shot.” Then he talked to them, and they felt what any one must feel talking to these men. They gave us a lot of things, and are sending all sorts of things to-morrow for the men here.

_Friday, August 20, 1915._ _No. 2 Outpost._ Last night was the first cold night. This morning I went out with the General, who was like a bull-dog and a cyclone. We met Birdwood, who was there to see the last Australians arrive, 17th and 18th Brigades, in Reserve Gully. They looked a splendid lot, and it did one’s heart good to see them. Some more officers from the _Bacchante_ turned up with stores, and special cocoa for me. I was just going off to find Perry when I met him. He is off out; there is a fight to-morrow. I gave him the cocoa. He was glad to have it.... The men are all tired out with heat and dysentery and digging and fighting. The General and I went up to Sazli Beit Deri. I didn’t think it over-safe for him.

_Saturday, August 21, 1915._ _No. 2 Outpost._ Work in the morning. Was to have gone with the General in the afternoon, but prisoners came in to be examined. They said: “Curse the Germans! We can’t go on. There are no more men left.” One of them was killed by their own fire after I left. G. L. came to luncheon. Charlie B., he and I started off together, I feeling pretty bad. It was very hot. We went at a great pace over two or three ridges and across valleys, our guns thundering about us. Finally, I felt so bad I let them go on, and came back.... The battle developed and the shooting was fierce and general. While I hunted for General Monash’s Headquarters I met Colonel A. J., who was rather worried. We had a close shave.... I left him, and had an odd adventure.... Went home alone through deafening noise, all the valleys under fire.... Got at last into a shallow nullah that led into a regular gully, and so home.

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That day I saw an unforgettable sight. The dismounted Yeomanry attacked the Turks across the salt lakes of Suvla. Shrapnel burst over them continuously; above their heads there was a sea of smoke. Away to the north by Chocolate Hill fires broke out on the plain. The Yeomanry never faltered. On they came through the haze of smoke in two formations, columns and extended. Sometimes they broke into a run, but they always came on. It is difficult to describe the feelings of pride and sorrow with which we watched this advance, in which so many of our friends and relations were playing their part.

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_Diary._ _August 21st._ Charlie B. and G. L. came back all right.... The Turks had come over in three waves down Chunuk Bair. The first two were destroyed by naval fire; the third got home into our trenches. Charlie B. was full of admiration for one old fellow whom he had seen holding up his finger and lecturing to the men when they hung back.

Hutton is wounded again.

_Sunday, August 22, 1915._ _No. 2 Outpost._ Last night, or this morning at 1 o’clock, I was called up. They said there were 150 Turks in one place and others elsewhere, anxious to surrender. I took the miller, Zachariades and Kyriakidis out to Headquarters. Sent back Kyriakidis and the miller, as there was nothing doing and I wanted to keep Kyriakidis. Went on with Zachariades and guides sent by Poles to Colonel Agnew to his H.Q. There we lay on the ground, very cold. They said the Turks had wished to surrender, but there had been no interpreter, and they had been fired on. The Turks were then attacking heavily. Eastwood telephoned that they had fourteen prisoners. I went back to see if they could give any news about our immediate front.

Every one worried. The ---- Battalion of Australians had gone wrong. Nobody knew where they were. I sent my escort to try and find them. The Hampshires, who ought to have arrived, had not come.... They came along gradually.