On several occasions Hamilton might have committed a mobile reserve of troops with the most telling consequences, but it never occurred to him to do this without his subordinates’ approval, those same subordinates who were almost as much in ignorance as he was, and in no position to approve or disapprove of anything. And so all day the commander-in-chief cruises up and down the coast in his huge battleship. He hesitates, he communes with himself, he waits; and it is not until late that night that, suddenly and courageously, he intervenes with a resolute decision.

Liman von Sanders’ actions on April 25 were more understandable but hardly more inspired. He was at his headquarters in the town of Gallipoli when, at 5 a.m., he was woken with the news that the Allies had landed. There were, he says, many pale faces around him as the reports came in. The first of these reports arrived from Besika Bay, south of Kum Kale in Asia: a squadron of enemy warships was approaching the coast there with the apparent intention of putting a force ashore. This was quickly followed by news of the actual landing of the French at Kum Kale, and of heavy fighting on the peninsula, both at Cape Helles and near Gaba Tepe. Still another part of the Allied Fleet had steamed up into the Bay of Saros and had opened fire on the Bulair lines. Which of these five advances was the main attack?

Liman judged that it must be at Bulair. This was the point where he could be most seriously hit, and he felt bound to safeguard it until he knew more clearly which way the battle was going to go. Ordering the Seventh Division to march north from Gallipoli (that is to say away from the main battle) he himself with two adjutants galloped on ahead to the neck of the peninsula. While the early sun was still low on the horizon he drew rein on a high patch of ground near the Tomb of Suleiman the Magnificent and looked down on to Saros Bay. There he saw twenty Allied warships firing broadsides on the shore, with the shells of the Turkish batteries erupting in the sea around them. It was not possible to estimate how many soldiers the enemy had brought to this attack, because a high wall made of the branches of trees had been laid along the decks of the ships, but boats filled with men were already being lowered into the sea. They came on towards the beaches until the Turkish machine-gun fire thickened about them. Then they turned and retired out of range, as though they were waiting for reinforcements before renewing the assault.

Liman was studying this scene when Essad Pasha, one of his Turkish corps commanders, brought him the news that the troops in the toe of the peninsula, some forty miles away to the south-west, were being hard pressed and were urgently calling for reinforcements. Essad Pasha was ordered to proceed at once by sea to the Narrows and take command there. But Liman himself lingered on at Bulair. Even when Essad reported later in the day from Maidos that the battle in the south was growing critical, Liman still could not bring himself to believe that the landings near Gaba Tepe and Cape Helles were anything more than a diversion. However, he dispatched five battalions by sea from Gallipoli to the Narrows, while he himself remained behind in the north with his staff.

That night the fire from the enemy warships off Bulair died away, and when no further action followed in the morning Liman was persuaded at last that the real battle lay in the peninsula itself. He then took a major decision: the remainder of the two divisions at Bulair were ordered south, and he himself proceeded to Mal Tepe, near the Narrows, to take command.

Thus on both sides the opening phases of the battle were fought in the absence of the commanders-in-chief; each having made his plan stood back and left the issue to the soldiers in their awful collision on the shore.

The behaviour of the Turks is another part of the mystery. It is true that they were defending their own soil against a new Christian invasion from the west. They had their faith, and their priests were with them in the trenches inciting them to fight in the name of Allah and Mahomet. For many weeks they had been preparing for this day; they were rested and ready. But when all this is said, one still finds it difficult to understand their esprit de corps. For the most part they were illiterate conscripts from the country, and they fought simply because they were ordered to fight. Many of them had been without pay for months, they were poorly fed and badly looked after in every way; and the discipline was harsh.

One would have thought that these things would have been enough to have broken their spirit when the first dreadful barrage fell upon them from the sea. Yet, with one or two exceptions, the Turks fought with fantastic bravery on this day, and although they were always out-gunned and out-numbered their steadiness never forsook them. They were not in the least undisciplined in the way they fought; they were very cool and very skilful.

Nor is the conduct of the Allied soldiers very easily explained. Certainly they had the expedition feeling; they were young and consequently they believed that they could do anything. Yet very few of Hamilton’s troops had ever come under fire before or had ever killed a man or seen death around them. The midshipmen who took the boats to the shore were hardly more than children, and even the professional French and British soldiers had little conception of the nature of a modern battle, let alone so strange and perilous an operation as this. In the case of the Australians and New Zealanders there was not even a tradition to guide them, for there had been no wars at all in their country’s past. They had no immediate ancestors to live up to — it was simply a matter of proving themselves to themselves, of starting a tradition here and now.

The unknown, which is the real destroyer of courage, pressed more heavily on the Allies than the Turks, for these young men were a long way from their homes, most of them had lived much more protected lives than the Anatolian peasant, and now, at this first experience of war, they were the ones who had to get up into the open and expose themselves while the Turks remained in their safe and familiar trenches. Everything before the Allied soldiers was unknown: the dark sea, the waiting enemy, the very coast itself and all that lay beyond. And it was perhaps not very helpful that General Hunter-Weston should have made a proclamation to the 29th Division before the battle saying, ‘heavy losses by bullets, by shells, by mines and by drowning are to be expected.’ But none of this made any difference.

A wild exuberance seems to have seized upon everybody’s mind. The Australians rush ashore shouting ‘Imshi Yallah’, a phrase they had picked up in more careless days in Cairo. The sixteen-year-old British midshipman, standing up very straight at the tiller, grounds his boat on the sand, cries out some phrase from the football field, and such of his men who are still alive follow him ashore. The French doctor, operating in a ghastly welter of blood, makes a note in his diary, ‘I have sublime stretcher-bearers.’

They probably were sublime, for nearly everyone seems to have been possessed with an inhuman recklessness and selflessness on this day. On one beach alone no fewer than five Victoria Crosses were won within a few hours of the landing.

Still another decoration[11] was awarded to Lieut.-Commander Bernard Freyberg in circumstances which, though hardly typical of the fighting, do manage to convey perhaps as well as anything the curiously dedicated courage of the men. Freyberg, who was one of the party who had buried Rupert Brooke on Skyros two days before, came north with the Royal Naval Division, and as part of the pretended landing which was so successful in delaying Liman von Sanders at Bulair he was chosen to lead a boatload of soldiers ashore in the darkness. At the last moment, however, he pointed out that it was unwise to risk the lives of a whole platoon when one man would suffice. Accordingly he had himself taken towards the land in a naval cutter, and when the boat was still two miles from the coast he slipped naked into the icy midnight sea and swam ashore carrying on his back a waterproof canvas bag containing three oil flares and five calcium lights, a knife, a signalling light and a revolver. Reaching the beach after an hour and a half’s hard swimming, he lit his first flare, and then entering the water again swam on for another 300 yards to the east. Landing again he lit another flare and crept into some bushes to await developments. Nothing happened. He then crawled into the Turkish entrenchments, and finding no one about went back to the shore and ignited the third flare.