The island of Lemnos, which had been loaned to the Allies by the Venizelist government in Greece, is reputed to be the abode of Vulcan, and the Argonauts are said to have rested there for a time. By the standards of the Ægean Sea it is not, however, a beautiful place. Few trees can be made to grow, and the local inhabitants have never been able to scratch much more than a bare living from the harsh volcanic rock and the surrounding sea. An uneventful timeless life goes by.
This island now became, in April 1915, the scene of one of the great maritime spectacles of the war. Ship after ship steamed into Mudros Harbour until there were some two hundred of them anchored there, and they made a city on the water. In addition to the warships, every possible variety of vessel had been pressed into service to transport the troops: brightly-painted Greek caiques and pleasure steamers, trawlers and ferryboats, colliers and transatlantic liners. Among the long lines of great battleships and cruisers some vessels, like the Russian cruiser Askold, became great objects of wonder. The Askold carried five extremely tall perpendicular funnels, and the soldiers at once renamed her the Packet of Woodbines. Then there was the ancient French battleship Henri IV, which had scarcely a foot of freeboard and a superstructure so towered and turreted that she looked like a medieval castle, a Braque drawing in heavy grey. These antiquities found themselves lying side by side with the latest submarines and destroyers.
A detached observer might have found the scene almost gay and regatta-like. From shore to ship and from ship to ship swarms of motor-boats and cutters ran about. Every vessel flew its flag, the smoke from hundreds of funnels rose up into the sky, and from one direction or another the sound of bugles and military bands was constantly floating across the water. There was movement everywhere. On the crowded ships the men who were to make the first assault were exercised in getting down rope ladders into boats. Others drilled on deck. Others again exercised the animals on shore. By night thousands of lights and signal lamps sparkled across the bay.
In the midst of this scene, dominating it and imparting an air of great strength and resolution, rode the flagship, the Queen Elizabeth, in which Hamilton had decided to make his headquarters with de Robeck until he was able to set up on shore on the Gallipoli peninsula.
An immense enthusiasm pulsated through the Fleet. With the sight of so many ships around them it seemed to all but a few sceptics more certain than ever that they could not fail. Everyone was delighted when the men scrawled slogans across the sides of their transports: ‘Turkish Delight’; ‘To Constantinople and the Harems’. They lined the decks shouting and cat-calling to one another, cheering each ship that arrived or departed from the harbour. Finally the excitement of the adventure had seized upon everybody’s mind, and the inward choking feeling of dread was overlaid by an outward gaiety, by the exaltation and otherworldness that chloroforms the soldier in the last moments of waiting.
The morning of April 23 broke fine and dear, and de Robeck gave orders for the operations to begin. All that day and on the day following the slower transports amid cheers moved out of Mudros and steamed towards their rendezvous off the beaches. By the evening of Saturday, April 24, the 200 ships were in motion, those carrying the Royal Naval Division headed for the Gulf of Saros, the Anzac contingent making for Imbros, the British and the French for Tenedos. The sea was again unsettled, and a sharp wind blew. As dusk fell a wet three-quarter moon with a halo round it was seen in the sky, but presently this halo cleared away, bright moonlight flooded the night, and the waves began to subside to perfect calm.
Hamilton, going aboard the Queen Elizabeth, found a signal waiting for him. Rupert Brooke was dead. His sunstroke had developed into blood poisoning, and he had died on a French hospital ship at the island of Skyros, just a few hours before he was due to set off for Gallipoli. Freyberg, Browne, Lister and others of his friends had carried him up to an olive grove on the heights of the island, and had buried him there with a rough pile of marble on the grave.
Towards midnight the warships with the assault troops on board were beginning to reach their battle stations. When they were still out of sight of land the ships came to a dead stop, all hands were roused, and a meal of hot coffee and rolls was given to the soldiers. In silence then, with their rifles in their hands and their packs on their backs, the men fell in on numbered squares on deck. There seems to have been no confusion as each platoon went down the ladders hand over hand, and directly the boats were filled they were towed by pinnaces in groups to the stern. The moon had now set, and there remained only a faint starlight in the sky. The battleships, each with four lines of boats behind it, steamed slowly forward again towards the shore. Soon after 4 a.m. the outline of the coast became visible through the early morning mist. An utter stillness enveloped the cliffs; there was no sign of life or movement anywhere.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A STRANGE light plays over the Gallipoli landing on April 25, and no matter how often the story is retold there is still an actuality about it, a feeling of suspense and incompleteness. Although nearly half a century has gone by, nothing yet seems fated about the day’s events, a hundred questions remain unanswered, and in a curious way one feels that the battle might still lie before us in the future; that there is still time to make other plans and bring it to a different ending.
Hardly anyone behaves on this day as you might have expected him to do. One can think of half a dozen moves that the commanders might have made at any given moment, and very often the thing they did do seems the most improbable of all. There is a certain clarity about the actions of Mustafa Kemal on the Turkish side, and of Roger Keyes with the British, but for the others — and perhaps at times for these two as well — the great crises of the day appear to have gone cascading by as though they were some natural phenomenon, having a monstrous life of its own, and for the time being entirely out of control.
For the soldiers in the front line the issues were, of course, brutally simple, but even here the most implausible situations develop; having captured some vital position a kind of inertia seizes both officers and men. Fatigue overwhelms them and they can think of nothing but retreat. Confronted by some quite impossible objective their lives suddenly appear to them to be of no consequence at all; they get up and charge and die. Thus vacuums occur all along the line; while all is peace and quiet in one valley a frightful carnage rages in the next; and this for no apparent reason, unless it be that men are always a little mad in battle and fear and courage combine at last to paralyse the mind.
Even the natural elements — the unexpected currents in the sea, the unmapped countryside, the sudden changes in the weather — have a certain eccentricity at Gallipoli. When for an instant the battle composes itself into a coherent pattern all is upset by some chance shifting of the wind, some stray cloud passing over the moon.
And so no programme goes according to plan, never at any moment through the long day can you predict what will happen next. Often it is perfectly clear to the observer that victory is but a hairsbreadth away — just one more move, just this or that — but the move is never made, and instead, like a spectator at a Shakespearean drama, one is hurried off to some other crisis in another part of the forest.
The movements of both the commanders-in-chief were very strange. Instead of putting himself aboard some fast detached command vessel like the Phaeton, with adequate signalling equipment, Hamilton chose to immure himself in the conning tower of the Queen Elizabeth, and thereby he cut himself off both from his staff and from direct command of what was happening on shore. The Queen Elizabeth was a fighting ship with her own duties to perform quite independently of the commander-in-chief, and although she was able to cruise up and down the coast at the General’s will, she could never get near enough to the beaches for him to understand what was going on; and the firing of her huge guns can scarcely have been conducive to clear thinking. Hamilton, in any case, had resolved before ever the battle began not to interfere unless he was asked — all tactical authority was handed over to his two corps commanders, Hunter-Weston with the British on the Cape Helles front, and Birdwood with the Anzac forces at Gaba Tepe. Since these two officers also remained at sea through the vital hours of the day they too were without accurate information. Signalling arrangements on the shore began to fail as soon as the first contact with the enemy was made, and very soon each separate unit was left to its own devices. Thus no senior commander had any clear picture of the battle, and battalions divided by only a mile or two from the main front might just as well have been fighting on the moon for all the control the commanders exercised upon them.