Even before the expedition had sailed there had been a misunderstanding about this matter of reinforcements. Kitchener’s attitude — and Hamilton was extremely conscious of it — seems to have been that he could spare so much and no more for Gallipoli, and Hamilton had better make the best of it. And so Hamilton’s modest requests had been rebuffed or had remained unanswered. Yet in the end Kitchener had relented. On April 6 he had sent a cable to Sir John Maxwell, the commander of the Egyptian garrison: ‘You should supply any troops in Egypt that can be spared or even selected officers or men that Sir Ian Hamilton may want for Gallipoli… This telegram should be communicated by you to Sir Ian Hamilton.’
Hamilton knew nothing of this. It is one of the mysteries of the campaign that this telegram was never sent on to him, or if it was the copy was lost. And so now on April 28, when all the plans of the first assault had miscarried, when the exhausted army lay stranded just below the crest of Achi Baba, desperately in need of shells and ammunition of every kind, several divisions of fresh men were standing idly by in Egypt.
It was not from Hamilton but from the Admirals that Kitchener had the first news that the situation was becoming critical. On the day after the landing Admiral Guépratte had sent a message saying that reinforcements were needed immediately, and de Robeck had followed this with another signal which made it clear that the Army was in serious difficulties. Churchill and Fisher seized on de Robeck’s message directly it arrived in the Admiralty in London, and they took it across to Kitchener at the War Office. The Field Marshal professed to be a good deal surprised. As far as he knew, he said, things were going well. Hamilton had not made any request for reinforcements. However, he at once instructed Maxwell in Egypt to embark the 42nd Division for the peninsula, together with an Indian Brigade — that same brigade of Gurkhas that Hamilton had pleaded for so unsuccessfully a month before. The French at the same time promised to embark another division at Marseilles.
On hearing this news Hamilton wrote in his diary, ‘Bis dat qui cito dat. O truest proverb! One fresh man on Gallipoli today was worth five afloat on the Mediterranean or fifty loafing around London in the Central Forces. At home they are carefully totting up figures — I know them — and explaining to the P.M. and the Senior Wranglers with some complacency that the 60,000 effective bayonets left me are enough — seeing they are British — to overthrow the Turkish Empire. So they would be if I had that number, or anything like it, for my line of battle. But what are the facts? Exactly one half of my “bayonets” spend the whole night carrying water, ammunition and supplies between the beach and the firing line. The other half of my “bayonets”, those left in the firing line, are up the whole night armed mostly with spades digging desperately into the earth. Now and then there is a hell of a fight, but that is incidental and a relief.’
While the Allies waited for their reinforcements a three days’ lull settled down on the battlefield. The digging went on. On the front line the spring flowers were blooming wonderfully, cornflowers and scarlet poppies, tulips and wild thyme. A storm blew up and for some hours the Army was cut off from the Fleet, its one lifeline to the outer world. But this was the last of the winter; the snow began to melt on Samothrace, and the sea lightened to its marvellous shade of transparent summer blue. On April 30 Hamilton transferred from the Queen Elizabeth to his command ship the Arcadian, and now for the first time his headquarters staff was gathered together. Some five thousand wounded men were sent off in hospital ships to Egypt, and the dead were buried.
Liman von Sanders was also carrying through a rapid reorganization. One of his Asiatic divisions was brought across the Straits in boats to the peninsula, and on April 30 two more divisions were sent down to him by sea from Constantinople. He could now count upon some seventy-five battalions against Hamilton’s fifty-seven, and Enver in Constantinople ordered a full-scale attack at Cape Helles. This was to be a ruthless affair: the soldiers in the first assault were to charge with unloaded rifles so that they would be forced to advance right up to the Allied trenches with the bayonet, and inflammable material was to be carried by the troops to enable them to bum the British boats on the shore. At ten p.m. on May 1, the three days of comparative silence was broken by a Turkish artillery bombardment along the whole length of the line at Cape Helles, and immediately afterwards the enemy infantry came over the top.
There never was any hope for soldiers attacking in such circumstances in 1915, whether in Gallipoli or France or anywhere else, and it is impossible to follow the confused events of the next week without a feeling of despair at the useless waste. For three days the Turks kept it up, and then when they had gained nothing, when their stretcher-bearers came out with the Red Crescent to gather up their wounded and bury the dead, it was Hamilton’s turn.
By May 5 he had got his reinforcements from Egypt, and in addition he took six thousand men from Birdwood and put them into the British line at Cape Helles: a force of 25,000 men in all. Through most of May 6, 7 and 8 the fight went on and with the same heroic desperation as before. ‘Drums and trumpets will sound the charge,’ General d’Amade announced to the French, and out they went in their bright pale-blue uniforms and their white cork helmets, a painfully clear target against the dun-coloured earth. Each day they hoped to get to Achi Baba. Each night when they had gained perhaps 300 yards in one place and nothing in another a new attack was planned for the following day. Elaborate orders were got out by the staff for each new assault, but it often happened that the front-line commanders did not receive these orders until the very early hours of the morning, and only an hour or two before they had to go over the top. Soon, however, it hardly mattered whether the orders were issued or not, for the men were too exhausted to understand them, too bewildered to do anything but get up dumbly once again into the machine-gun fire. A wild unreality intervened between the wishes of the commanders and the conditions of the actual battle on the shore. The battle made its own rules, and it was useless for the generals to order the soldiers to make for this or that objective; there were no objectives except the enemy himself. This was a simple exercise in killing, and in the end all orders were reduced to just one or two very simple propositions: either to attack or to hold on.
In his extremity Hamilton cabled once more to the War Office for more shells to be sent out. The answer came when the fighting was at its height: he was told that the matter would be considered. ‘It is important,’ the message added, ‘to push on.’
By all means Hamilton wished to push on, and he hardly needed a general in the War Office to tell him so, but by the afternoon of May 8 there was no question of his pushing anywhere. At Cape Helles he had lost 6,500 men, which was about a third of the force engaged, and his over-all casualties of British, French and Anzac troops on the two fronts were now over 20,000. Achi Baba, with a field of scarlet poppies on its crest, still stood before him unshaken on the skyline. All his reserves of men had gone. Most of his shells had been shot away. And his two bridgeheads scarcely covered five square miles between them.
Still sailing about in the Arcadian and unable to get his headquarters on shore, the General sent off a message to Kitchener saying he could do no more. ‘If you could only spare me two fresh divisions organized as a corps,’ he wrote, ‘I could push on with great hopes of success both from Cape Helles and Gaba Tepe; otherwise I am afraid we shall degenerate into trench warfare with its resultant slowness.’