There was a fantastic difference between the life of the soldiers on shore and that of the sailors in the warships that steamed by, perhaps only a couple of hundred yards out at sea. A ship’s wardroom was a kind of wonderland for any Army officer who was invited on board. After weeks of enduring the flies, and the lice in his clothes, and with his eye still filled with the sight and smell of the decaying dead, he would stand and gaze with astonishment at the clean linen on the table, the glasses, the plates, the meat, the fruit and the wine.

These differences were multiplied still more in the case of the ocean liners which were taken over as transports complete with their peacetime crews and furnishings. Henry Nevinson, the war correspondent, has related that he was aboard the liner Minneapolis just before a major battle was to be fought. He was to go ashore with the attacking troops in the early dawn, and at 4 a.m. he rang for a cup of tea. ‘On this ship,’ the steward informed him, ‘breakfast is always at 8.30.’ A little later when the soldiers were taking to the assault boats the stewards got out their vacuum-cleaners and went to work along the carpets in the corridors in the usual way. Breakfast no doubt was served at eight-thirty, though there were few to eat it, and indeed by that time many of the soldiers were no longer alive.

There was no resentment at all about these things in the Army, for the sailors were known to be eager to get into the fight, and it was a kind of reassurance, a pleasant reminder of the ultimate sanity of life, to have the Navy there with its clean, comfortable ships. ‘It has been computed,’ Wemyss wrote, ‘that in shore fighting it takes several tons of lead to kill one man: at sea one torpedo can cause the death of many hundreds. On shore the soldier is in almost perpetual discomfort, if not misery — at sea the sailor lives in comparative comfort until the moment comes when his life is required of him.’

Yet it seems possible that one can make too much of the hardships of the soldiers at Gallipoli, or rather there is a danger of seeing these hardships out of their right context. With the mere cataloguing of the Army’s miseries a sense of dreariness is transmitted, and this is a false impression; at this stage life on the peninsula was anything but dreary. It was ghastly but it was not yet petty or monotonous. There can be no fair comparison with the relatively comfortable lives of the soldiers in the second world war, or even with the lives of these men themselves before they enlisted. Gallipoli swallowed them up and made conditions of its own. With marvellous rapidity the men removed themselves to another plane of existence, the past receded, the future barely existed, and they lived as never before upon the moment, released from the normal weight of human ambitions and regrets. ‘It was in some ways,’ Herbert says, ‘a curiously happy time.’ It is a strange remark, but one feels one understands it very well. The men had no cinemas, no music, no radios, no ‘entertainment’ of any kind, and they never met women or children as the soldiers did behind the lines in France. Yet the very absence of these pleasures created another scale of values. They had a sharp and enormous appetite for the smallest things. Bathing in the sea became an inexpressible joy. To get away from the flies, to wash the dust from one’s eyes and mouth, to feel cool again: this was a heightening of sensation which, for the moment, went beyond their dreams of home. The brewing of tea in the evening, the sharing out of a parcel, a cake or a bar of chocolate, the long talks in the starlight talking of what they would do ‘when it was all over’—all these things took on an almost mystical emphasis of a kind that became familiar enough in the western desert of Egypt in the second world war, or indeed on any distant front in any war. There were no pin-up girls; no erotic magazines reached them — they were lucky if they even saw a newspaper from home that was under a month old — and there were no nurses or Ensa troupes. Perhaps because of this the sexual instinct seems to have been held in abeyance for the time, or rather it was absorbed in the minutiae of their intensely friendly life, the generous feelings created by the danger all around them. There was very little vice; ordinary crimes became lost in the innocence of the crime of war itself. Certainly there was no possibility of drunkenness,[22] and gambling was not much more than an anaemic pastime in a world where money was the least of things. They craved not soft beds and hot baths but mosquito nets and salt water soap. Promotion counted for a good deal, and so did the word of praise and the medal. General Gouraud, the French commander who had replaced d’Amade, would form his men up in a hollow square in the moonlight and solemnly bestow the Croix de Guerre and the accolade upon some young poilu who, they all knew, had earned these honours only a few days or even a few hours before; and this was much more impressive than any ceremonial in a barracks could have been. They were all keen judges of bravery on that narrow front.

Yet probably it was the small network of habits that grew up in the trenches that made life bearable to the men. There was a deliberate playing down of the dramatic and the dangerous quality of things. The biggest of the Turkish guns that fired from Kum Kale was known as ‘Asiatic Annie’; another was called ‘Quick Dick’, and the most commonplace names were found for the places where the bloodiest actions were fought: ‘Clapham Junction’, ‘The Vineyard’, ‘Le Haricot’. A kind, of defensive mechanism was made out of swearing and a simple, ironical, hard-boiled sense of humour: ‘Please God give us victory. But not in our sector.’ ‘Having a good clean-up?’ a commanding general said one day to a soldier who was washing himself in a mug of water. ‘Yes, sir,’ the man answered, ‘and I only wish I were a bloody canary.’

Hours were spent in improving their dug-outs, in picking lice out of their clothing, in cooking their food (pancakes made of flour and water soon became a universal thing), in writing their diaries and letters.[23]

Some managed to develop hobbies of a kind. There was, for example, a mild fever for the excavation of antiquities among the French. At Lemnos before the landing they had unearthed, a mutilated statue of Eros at the site of the ancient Hephaestia, and on arriving at Cape Helles they were delighted to find that Asiatic Annie was disinterring other relics. Two huge jars with skeletons in them were uncovered in a shell crater, and when the soldiers started to dig their trenches at Hissarlik they came on a series of large stone sarcophagi which resounded dully when struck with a pick. Through the centuries (and at once it was asserted that these finds were as old as Troy), soil had penetrated, grain by grain, into the interior of the tombs, but the soldiers managed to excavate many bones, as well as vases, lamps and statues in pottery of men and women. The French doctor wrote again to his wife about one especially beautiful cup: Its long handles, almost ethereal in their delicacy, give to this little thing the palpitation of wings.’

Living as they did beneath the ground, many of the men became absorbed in the insect life around them. They set on centipedes and scorpions to fight one another, and hours would go by while they watched the ant-lion digging his small craters in the, sand. Round and round he would go, clockwise and then anticlockwise, scooping up the soil with his great flippers, tossing it on to his head, and then with an upward jerk flipping it over the rim of the crater. When finally the crater was finished, and the ant-lion was lying in hiding at the bottom, the soldiers would drive beetles and other insects up to the rim, and there would be the quick scuiBe in the sand, the pounce and then the slow death as the ant-lion sucked his victim dry. In this troglodyte war in the trenches there was perhaps something symbolic about the ant-lion.