There is an almost dolphin-like air, a precise abandon, in the way the E-boats frisked about at times. On seeing a convoy, the commanders would deliberately surface and pretend to be in difficulties so as to entice the protective gunboats away. Then, diving deep, they would turn back and demolish the boats of the convoy one by one. They shot up the caravans of camels and bullock carts making their way down the Bulair isthmus with loads of barbed wire and ammunition. When they were short of fresh food they surfaced beside the Turkish trading caiques and provided themselves with fruit and vegetables. Wherever they could they saved their torpedoes and their ammunition by boarding enemy ships and simply opening the sea-cocks or placing a charge on the keel. Sometimes prisoners were carried around for days on end before they could be put ashore, and these were often very strange people — Arabs in their desert robes, sponge-divers and Turkish Imams, and once a German banker, wearing only a short pink vest, who complained that 5,000 marks in gold had just been sent to the bottom.

When more than one submarine was operating the commanders would make a rendezvous, and with their vessels tied up together far out in the Sea of Marmara they would exchange information for an hour or two, while their crews bathed in the sunshine; and then perhaps they would go off on a hunt together. Once there was a disaster. The French Turquoise ran aground and was captured. Enemy intelligence officers found in the captain’s notebook a reference to a meeting which he was to have at sea in a few days’ tine with the British E 20. It was a German U-boat that kept the rendezvous, and she torpedoed E 20 directly she came to the surface. Only the British commander and eight of the crew who were on deck survived.

In August Nasmith sank the battleship Barbarossa Harradin. Expecting that she would come south to take part in a new battle on the peninsula, he lay in wait for her at the top of the Narrows — having, on the way through, scraped heavily against a mine. The battleship appeared in the early dawn escorted by two destroyers, and she was taken utterly by surprise. She capsized and sank within a quarter of an hour.

Nasmith then went on to Constantinople and arrived just at the moment when a collier from the Black Sea had berthed herself beside the Haidar Pasha railway station. Coal at this time had become more precious than gold at Constantinople, since it was so scarce and since everything depended upon it — the railways and the ships, the factories, the city’s supply of light and water. A committee of officials was standing on the wharf discussing how the coal should be apportioned when E 11’s torpedo struck and the ship blew up before their eyes.

Next the submarine turned into the Gulf of Ismid, where the Constantinople-Baghdad railway ran over a viaduct close to the sea, and there d’Oyly-Hughes, the first officer, swam ashore and blew up the line. Like Freyberg at the beginning of the campaign, he was half dead when the E 11 picked him up again.

There were in all 13 submarines engaged in the Sea of Marmara, and although 8 were destroyed the passage was made 27 times. The Turkish losses were 1 battleship (apart from the Messudieh sunk in the previous year), 1 destroyer, 5 gunboats, 11 transports, 44 steamers and 148 sailing boats. Nasmith’s bag alone was 101 vessels, and he was in the Marmara for three months, including a stay of 47 days — a record that was never surpassed in the first world war. By the end of the year all movement of enemy ships by daylight had practically ceased, and with rare exceptions only the most urgent supplies were sent by sea to the peninsula.

It is doubtful if the success of the submarines was ever fully understood by the British while the campaign was going on. At Hamilton’s and de Robeck’s headquarters the sinkings seem to have been regarded more in the nature of a delightful surprise, a bonus on the side, than as the basis for a main offensive. It never seems to have occurred to them that they might have followed up d’Oyly-Hughes’ adventure, that commandos might have been landed north of Bulair to have cut the Turkish land route to the peninsula.

Nor were the Germans any more imaginative. Five small U-boats were eventually assembled at Pola, and managed to get through to Constantinople, but apart from one or two lucky shots at transports coming out of Alexandria they made no further attempt on the Fleet at Gallipoli. By September forty-three German U-boats had been sent to the Mediterranean, but the bulk of the pack remained in the western half of the sea, and they failed to sink any of the ships bringing reinforcements out from England.

And so there was, even as early as May, some reasonable chance of the expedition gathering impetus again. If the Allies were being starved of supplies, so too were the Turks; the lost British battleships were being replaced by monitors, and with the arrival of the Lowland division Hamilton’s forces outnumbered the enemy in the peninsula.

Hamilton in any case was an optimistic man. The sinking of the battleships had been a terrible blow, and on board the Arcadian the General himself was living in the most insecure conditions, so insecure indeed that two transports were lashed to the ship’s side to act as torpedo-buffers. Dismayed but still buoyant, he wrote in his diary: ‘We are left all alone in our glory with our two captive merchantmen. The attitude is heroic but not, I think, so dangerous as it is uncomfortable. The big ocean liners lashed to port and starboard cut us off from light as well as air, and one of them is loaded with Cheddar. When Mr. Jorrocks awoke James Pigg and asked him to open the window to see what sort of a hunting morning it was, it will be remembered that the huntsman opened the cupboard by mistake and made the reply, “Hellish dark and smells of cheese.” Well, that immortal remark hits us off to a T. Never mind. Light will be vouchsafed. Amen.’

Useless now to reflect that the Triumph and the Majestic—and the Goliath too — might have gone to a better end by making a new attempt on the Narrows; or to think of how the great armada of battleships had been scattered and forced to retire into the harbour at Mudros whence it had so confidently set out a month before. The only thing to do now was to wait for news from London, to hope for reinforcements and to hold on.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

DURING the months of June and July neither side made any serious attempt to attack at Anzac, and while an uneasy stalemate continued there five pitched battles were fought at Cape Helles. They were all frontal attacks, all of short duration, a day or two or even less, and none of them succeeded in altering the front line by more than half a mile.[19]

This fighting at Cape Helles was the heaviest of the campaign, and it followed the strict pattern of trench warfare: the preliminary bombardment, the charge of the infantry (sometimes as many as five men to four yards of front), the counter-attack, and then the last confused spasmodic struggles to consolidate the line. Nowhere at any time were any important objectives gained; at the end of it all the Turks were no nearer to driving the Allies into the sea and the Allies were hardly any closer to Achi Baba. Even in the killing of men neither side could claim the advantage, since it is estimated that for the period from the first landings in April to the end of July the total casualties were about the same for each: some 57,000 men.

These battles were so repetitive, so ant-like and inconclusive, that it is almost impossible to discover any meaning in them unless one remembers the tremendous hopes with which each action was begun. The generals really did think that they could get through, and so for a while did the soldiers too. Hunter-Weston, the British Corps Commander, was an extremely confident man. ‘Casualties,’ he said one day, ‘what do I care for casualties?’ The remark might not have been particularly distressing to his soldiers; they too were quite prepared for casualties provided they defeated the Turks, and in any case it was nothing remarkable that the General still believed that victories could be achieved by this kind of fighting; with very few exceptions all the other generals, German, Turkish, French and British, in France as well as Gallipoli, believed the same thing. The artillery bombardment followed by the charge of the infantry was believed to be the surgical act that would bring success in the quickest way, and nobody had yet suggested any alternative to it except, of course, poison gas. The real answer to the problem was simple enough: they needed an armoured mobile gun that would break through the enemy machine-gun fire; in other words a tank. But in 1915 the tank was a year or more and several million lives away, and it seemed to both Turkish and Allied staffs alike that they had only to intensify what they were already doing — to employ more men and more guns on narrower fronts — and the enemy would crack.