Bird wood’s plan of deception at Anzac was of a more practical nature and very daring. There were a number of miners in the Australian forces, and these threw out an underground tunnel, over 500 yards in length, in no-man’s-land at Lone Pine.[25] From this the Australians planned to issue forth like disturbed ants at zero hour on the afternoon of August 6. A more elaborate scheme had been worked out to pave the way for the main assault on Chunuk Bair that night. For some weeks almost every night a destroyer had posted herself off Anzac, and with the aid of her searchlights had bombarded a line of Turkish trenches known as Post 3. This action always began precisely at 9 p.m. and continued for half an hour, and it was calculated that the Turks, being human, would fall into a habit of retiring from the trench at 9 p.m. and of returning to it when the bombardment was over. On the night of the attack the Anzac troops planned to creep up to the position in the deep darkness on either side of the searchlight’s beam and then leap into the empty trenches directly the barrage was lifted.

But Birdwood’s main concern was the secret disembarkment at Anzac of his additional 25,000 men with their stores and equipment. In every valley which was not overlooked by the enemy long terraces were dug and new caves were driven into the rocks. Here the incoming troops were to be secreted. Orders were issued that the men, on reaching the shore, were to remain in strict hiding throughout the day, no swimming was allowed until after nightfall, and if German aircraft passed over they were not to turn their faces to the sky. No boat with the reinforcements on board was to approach the shore in the daylight, none was to be in sight of land when dawn broke. In the darkness tens of thousands of gallons of water had to be pumped ashore, new hospitals, ammunition dumps, guns and food stores hidden away. All horses were to be landed with full nosebags, and each man was to carry a full waterbottle and one day’s iron ration.

The movement began on August 4 and continued on three successive nights until August 6. Except that on one occasion a group of lighters was delayed until after dawn and was shelled and driven away the operation was carried out with complete success. There were moments at Birdwood’s headquarters when they felt sure that the Turks must have heard the rattling of anchor chains in the bay, and the shouted orders of the officers on the beach. But the enemy apparently suspected nothing. By August 6 there was scarcely standing room for another man at Anzac.

Meanwhile the last reinforcements from England were arriving in the islands, and it was already something of a victory that all five divisions were brought through the Mediterranean without the loss of a single man. They moved into tented cities on Mytilene, Lemnos and Imbros, and there they waited, in the eyes of the veterans a pale and hesitant lot, for the moment when they were to be re-embarked and taken to the battle.

It was a strange atmosphere. Among the older soldiers on the peninsula the approaching struggle had acted as a stimulus. Fewer and fewer men reported sick, and everything which in idleness had seemed so insupportable — the flies, the heat and the dust — became apparently much easier to bear. But for the new troops this period of suspense was a depressing experience. They were in a half-way house; while they themselves had never been in battle they still did not have the luxury of the ignorance in which the older soldiers had set out to make the first landing on April 25. They knew what the veterans had not known — that a landing could be a terrible thing, that the Turks were a stubborn enemy, and that all might easily end in wounds or death. This was no jaunt to Constantinople and the harems. It so happened that the War Office had published Hamilton’s first dispatch from Gallipoli just at the time that the new drafts were leaving England, and they had all been discussing that tragic story on the voyage out. And so they knew and did not know. Whenever they could they asked tentative questions of the older soldiers. What was it like on the peninsula? Would there be guides to lead them when they got ashore, and if no guides how would they know where to go? What about the shelling? And the sniping? And the Turks? And finally there was the question they could not ask: what was it like to kill a man and to stand up to be killed oneself?

All this was as old as war itself, but these early August days were frightfully hot, the flies and the mosquitoes leapt on to the men’s pink skins and they caught the endemic dysentery very quickly. While they waited they gossiped, and the rumours that went about were not of the hopeful kind. By August 6 the constricting sense of endless waiting had become as bad as if not worse than the prospect of the battle itself. They wanted to get it over.

Upon G.H.Q. at Imbros the strain was of a different kind, for it was perfectly obvious to everybody that this was a gambler’s chance, and probably their last chance. Mentally they might have persuaded themselves that, within reason, every eventuality had been foreseen, that the plan was good, that there was no reason why it should not succeed; but when so many things had gone wrong before it was difficult to feel an emotional enthusiasm. Hamilton was always at his best at these moments. He was courteous, patient, and apparently full of intelligent confidence; he spread an aura of authority round him, he was very much respected. But the crust was thin, and not unnaturally there were occasional disputes at headquarters. The French were not entirely liked, nor were the newcomers who were arriving from England. The staff, too, was on guard against any show of superiority in officers who were serving at the front, and they were often irritated as well by the men in the rear echelons behind them.

Despite the reinforcements, there was still a feeling that the Dardanelles was a poor relation to the French front, and an interminable telegram battle with the War Office went on. In July Churchill had been expected to come to Gallipoli, and he was awaited with much eagerness. At the last moment, however, the visit was blocked by Churchill’s political opponents in cabinet, and Colonel Maurice Hankey, the Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, was sent out instead. Hamilton at first found it difficult to suppress a feeling of antipathy towards this relatively junior officer who was to report directly to the cabinet at home, and it was not until Hankey had been a week or more on Imbros that the staff realized that he was anxious only to use his exceptional talents for their good.

Mackenzie records an odd scene when he was lunching one day with the generals at their mess at G.H.Q. ‘The one next to me,’ he says, ‘was Sir Frederick Stopford, a man of great kindliness and personal charm, whose conversation at lunch left me at the end of the meal completely without hope of victory at Suvla. The reason for this apprehension was his inability to quash the new General opposite, who was one of the Brigadiers in his Army Corps. This Brigadier was holding forth almost truculently about the folly of the plan of operations drawn up by the General Staff, while Sir Frederick Stopford appeared to be trying to reassure him in a fatherly way. I looked along the table to where Aspinall and Dawnay (two of Hamilton’s general staff officers) were sitting near General Braithwaite; but they were out of earshot and the dogmatic Brigadier continued unchallenged to enumerate the various military axioms which were being ignored by the Suvla plan of operations. For one thing, he vowed, most certainly he was not going to advance a single yard until all the Divisional Artillery was ashore. I longed for Sir Frederick to rebuke his disagreeable and discouraging junior; but he was deprecating, courteous, fatherly, anything except the Commander of an Army Corps which had been entrusted with a major operation that might change the whole course of the war in twenty-four hours.’