All this brought the officer and the soldier very close together, and however much they may have criticized the men in the rear areas, the hospital staffs and the transport companies on the line of supply, it was seldom thought that the commander at the front might be wanting in skill and imagination — he simply took orders and did what he was told to do. He was one of them. It was felt that the solution of their problems lay elsewhere, and it was an intangible tiling, this mystical recipe for the success that always eluded them. Yet somehow, the men thought, there was a way of breaking the stalemate, of justifying themselves, of proving that the expedition was sound after all. And so underneath all their bitterness and tiredness, the men were perfectly willing to attack again provided they could be given the least glimmering of a chance of success. As with the desert soldiers in 1942 they needed a battle of Alamein.

The Turks, meanwhile, were not much better off than the Allies during these hot months. The official casualty figures issued after the campaign reveal that a total of 85,000 were evacuated sick, and of these 21,000 died of disease. By Western standards the Turkish soldiers were very poorly cared for. According to Liman von Sanders their uniforms were so tattered that the hessian sacks which were sent up to the trenches to be filled with sand were constantly disappearing; the men used the material to patch their trousers. No doubt the Turkish peasants were able to withstand the heat and the dirt more easily than the Europeans, and their simpler vegetable diet — rice, bread and oil — was much better for them than bully beef; but they were not inoculated against typhoid and other diseases as the Allied soldiers were, and their trenches and latrines were kept in a much less hygienic state. By July the Turkish generals were finding it necessary to send increasing numbers of men home on leave to their villages, and it often happened that once a soldier left the front he found means of staying away.

Meanwhile the British submarine campaign was causing a shortage of ammunition, which was almost as acute as it was with the Allies. ‘It was fortunate for us,’ Liman wrote, ‘that the British attacks never lasted more than one day, and were punctuated by pauses of several days. Otherwise it would have been impossible to replenish our artillery ammunition.’ He speaks too of ‘the jealousy and lack of co-operation so common among Turkish general officers’, and of several changes in the high command which had to be made at this time as a result of their heavy losses.

None of this was more than guessed at in Hamilton’s headquarters. It was known, however, from prisoners, from aerial reconnaissance and from agents in Constantinople, that Turkish reinforcements in large numbers were arriving on the peninsula, though whether for attack or simply to make good their losses it was impossible to say. As July ran out both sides settled down to an erratic apprehensive calm, enduring the same blistering sun, the same plague of flies and infected dust, the same ant-like existence in the ground. The Allies waited for the Turks to issue forth from the hills; the Turks waited for the Allies to come up to meet them. It was all very old and very new, a twentieth-century revival of the interminable siege. The Turks had a trench and a machine-gun post among Schliemann’s excavations on the site of Troy.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE soldiers at Gallipoli were wrong in thinking that the campaign had been abandoned and forgotten in London. Directly the new government was in office Churchill circulated a paper to cabinet Ministers in which he argued that while the Allies had neither the men nor the ammunition to bring about a decision in France, a comparatively small addition to Hamilton’s forces would make all the difference at Gallipoli.[24] ‘It seems most urgent,’ he wrote, ‘to try to obtain a decision here and wind up the enterprise in a satisfactory manner as soon as possible.’ If the Army advanced just three or four miles up the peninsula the Fleet could steam through to the Sea of Marmara and all the old objects could still be realized: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the support of Russia, the allegiance of the Balkans. Where else in all the other theatres of war could they look during the next three months for such a victory?

Kitchener himself had for some time been approaching this point of view, and in June he came the whole way. The recruiting and training of his new army in England was now well advanced, but it was not yet ready for a resumption of the offensive in France. ‘Such an attack,’ he wrote, ‘before an adequate supply of guns and high-explosive shell can be provided, would only result in heavy casualties and the capture of another turnip field.’

It was an indication of this new approach that as soon as the new cabinet was formed the War Council had been reconstructed under the name of the Dardanelles Committee. It met on June 7, and Kitchener and Churchill between them had no difficulty in getting the members to agree to the dispatch of another three divisions to Gallipoli. By the end of the month two more divisions had been added, and three of the largest ocean liners, the Olympic, the Mauretania and the Aquitania, had been chartered to take them to the Mediterranean. By the beginning of July Hamilton was informed that he was to have the ammunition for which he had been so persistently pleading, and a few weeks later the War Office was writing: ‘We should like to hear from you after considering your plans whether there is anything further in the way of personnel, guns or ammunition we can send you, as we are most anxious to give you everything you can possibly require and use.’

It was almost an embarrassment of favours. By now Hamilton had either in Gallipoli or in transit an army of thirteen divisions or approximately some 120,000 effective men. This was no longer a distracting novel enterprise: it was the front on which the main British hopes were fixed, and men and shells were being withheld from France to supply it.

The Admiralty, too, was making a large contribution. The monitors arrived to replace the battleships, strange, flat-bottomed boats of 6,000 tons, mounting 14-inch guns of American manufacture. Their most original feature was the blisters or bulges on their sides, designed to ward off the explosions of torpedoes (which the sailors soon discovered made excellent bathing platforms). Almost as important were the Beetles, the landing barges which had been designed by Fisher and which were to be the precursors of the small craft used at Normandy and other landings in the second world war. They were capable of carrying five hundred men or forty horses, and were fitted with armoured plates sufficiently strong to resist shrapnel and machine-gun fire. The name derived from the fact that they were painted black, and the long landing ramps which projected from their bows had the appearance of antennae.

Two more balloon ships, the Hector and the Canning, were sent out to assist in the artillery spotting, and there were additions to the number of trawlers, auxiliary hospital ships, and other craft. It was a less imposing fleet than the one which had originally sailed to the Dardanelles in the spring, but it was larger and much better suited to an amphibious operation in a narrow sea.

A similar change overtook the Air Force with the arrival of new seaplane carriers and pilots, the French setting themselves up on Tenedos and the British on Imbros. As many as fifteen aircraft were now able to take off together for concentrated raids on the peninsula and the Narrows.

Towards the end of July, when a lull had again settled over the front, most of these new forces were concentrated in the Ægean islands, where they were to be kept in secret until the moment came to commit them to the battle. A new landing on the enemy coast was obviously essential, and all the old arguments came up once again: Bulair was too strongly fortified, the Asiatic coast too distant from their objectives, and at neither place could the Navy give its full support to the Army on the shore. So once again it had to be the peninsula itself. The plan that finally emerged was very largely a repetition of April 25, but it had one vital difference: the emphasis was now removed from Cape Helles and Achi Baba and placed upon the Sari Bair ridge in the centre of the peninsula. Birdwood had been urging this course for some weeks past, and in many ways it appeared to be a promising design. He proposed to break out of the north of the Anzac bridgehead by night and assault Chunuk Bair and the crests of the hills, having first made a major feint at a place called Lone Pine to the south. Simultaneously there was to be a new landing at Suvla Bay, immediately to the north of Anzac, and it was hoped that as soon as the hills there were taken the combined force would push through to the Narrows about four miles away. With the bulk of the Turkish Army then bottled up in the tip of the peninsula, and under heavy pressure from the French and the British at Cape Helles, it was hoped that there would be a quick ending to the campaign, at any rate as far as the Dardanelles was concerned.