Nasmith set off on his August cruise which a few days later was to bring its first result in the sinking of the battleship Barbarossa Harradin. And in the islands the invasion fleet assembled: the black beetles, the Isle of Man paddle-steamers, the North Sea trawlers, the yachts, the Thames tugs, the drifters, the monitors, the cruisers and destroyers.
Only bad weather or a Turkish attack could now delay or change the plans. At zero hour de Robeck was to go to Suvla in his new flagship, the light cruiser Chatham, but Hamilton this time elected to remain on shore at Imbros, where he was connected by submarine telephone to Cape Helles, ten miles, and Anzac, fifteen miles, away.
August 6 was a day of calm, hard, glaring sunshine, and in the afternoon when the soldiers were embarking at Imbros they could clearly hear the roar of the guns at Anzac and Cape Helles where the battle had already begun. Bright little stabbing flashes sparkled in the sky. As night fell a few minutes after seven a brilliant crimson sunset expanded along the horizon. Then it was black darkness, with no light showing in the Fleet. The island with its thousands of empty tents and its silence took on an air of terrible desolation. ‘The day before the start is the worst day for a commander,’ Hamilton wrote. ‘The operation overhangs him as the thought of another sort of operation troubles the mind of a sick man in hospital.’ He was restless, and walked down to the beach to see the 11th Division go off. The men, packed like herrings in the beetles and on the decks of the destroyers, were silent and listless: ‘These new men seem subdued when I recall the blaze of enthusiasm in which the old lot started out of Mudros harbour on that April afternoon.’ For a moment he debated whether or not he should have cruised round the invasion fleet in a motor launch, saying a few encouraging words to each unit as he went along, but he dismissed the idea when he remembered that the men did not know him by sight; and in any case several hours were to go by before they arrived on the beaches, and that was too long an interval for his words to survive.
He looked for Stopford and Reed, hoping that they might have done something to enthuse their soldiers, but they were nowhere to be seen; and he returned to his hut. Nothing to do but to wait.
Stopford had been lying on his valise spread out on the floor of his tent, and Colonel Aspinall found him there. The General had slipped and sprained his knee that morning and was not feeling very well. ‘I want you to tell Sir Ian Hamilton,’ he said, ‘that I am going to do my best, and that I hope to be successful. But he must realize that if the enemy proves to be holding a strong line of continuous entrenchments I shall be unable to dislodge him till more guns are landed.’ Glumly he went on to quote his chief-of-staff: ‘All the teaching of the campaign in France,’ he said, ‘proves that continuous trenches cannot be attacked without the assistance of large numbers of howitzers.’
He rose soon afterwards, and getting aboard the Jonquil with Rear-Admiral Christian, steamed away.
In the darkness Hamilton strolled down to the beach again and saw the ships moving, ghostlike and silent, to the boom across the mouth of the harbour. ‘This empty harbour frightens me,’ he wrote later. ‘Nothing in legend is stranger or more terrible than the silent departure of this silent Army.’
Then he went back to his tent to keep a vigil with his telephones through the night.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MUSTAFA KEMAL kept a record of his own activities during the campaign, and it is quite unlike anything else that has been written about Gallipoli. It is a kind of day book, half pamphlet and half military history, a mixture of the intensely egoistical and the very practical. Long arid passages about the movements of regiments are followed by outbursts of almost childish jingoism (the equivalent of the Allies’ ‘One of our men is worth half a dozen Turks’). At times he breaks off to moralize: ‘What a fine mirror history is… In great events which pass to the bosom of history how clearly do the conduct and acts of those who take an active part in these events show their moral character.’ There is a strong suggestion throughout that the other commanders are wrong while he is right, and his approach to all but a few of his superior officers is at once obsequious and contemptuous. Yet he argues very closely, he always sees the battle from a fresh point of view, and he is very precise about such things as dates and place-names and the movements of troops.
There is no reason to think that this document has been edited or changed by others with an eye to the General’s later career as the dictator of Turkey; the original notebook is preserved by the Historical Branch of the Turkish General Staff at Ankara, and most of it is filled with Kemal’s own handwriting in the fine arabic script which he later abolished in Turkey in favour of the more practical and much less beautiful Latin alphabet. The rest of the notebook has been dictated to an assistant either on the battlefield itself or shortly afterwards.
There is one very interesting passage dealing with the period immediately before the Suvla landing. As so often happened, Kemal was involved in a dispute with his commanding officer — in this case Essad Pasha, the Corps Commander opposite Anzac. It had been decided to extend Kemal’s divisional front in the north of the Anzac bridgehead so as to take in part of a ravine known as Sazlidere. Kemal at once protested that this was too much responsibility for him to undertake. He went on and on about it, writing letter after letter (which he quotes) to Corps Headquarters. Essad took the line that this was all very unimportant, but, since Kemal wished it, he would remove the area from the 19th divisional front and take it under his own command. This did not suit Kemal at all. He replied that the Sazlidere area was so important that it must be put under a strong independent command; did they not realize that it was quite possible for the enemy to advance by day up to the very foot of Sari Bair under the cover of this deep ravine? Essad answered that he was in feet establishing an independent command from Suvla to the north of Anzac, and a German officer was coming out to take charge of it. The dividing line between his and Kemal’s command would be the Sazlidere ravine — or at any rate the upper part of it, since the mouth was already occupied by the enemy.
Once again Kemal protested; a dividing line between two commands, he said, was always the weakest point. The responsibility for Sazlidere must be made perfectly clear, and strong forces posted there. Essad was growing weary of the argument. ‘Little valleys like this,’ he wrote, ‘cannot be inclusive or exclusive of either side.’ However, he agreed to come down one day with his chief-of-staff to survey the position. Kemal led them to his advance headquarters on a plateau known to the British as Battleship Hill, and from there they looked down, as from an aircraft, at the coastline to the north of Anzac, the salt lake glistening in the distance by the sea, the empty bay at Suvla, the hills to the east, and in between, the flat plain reaching up to the tangle of foothills around Sazlidere at their feet. The three crests of Sari Bair — Chunuk Bair, Hill Q and Koja Chemen Tepe — with their apparently unclimbable slopes, rose up above them immediately to their right.
Kemal reports the discussion that followed in these words: ‘Seeing this view, the Chief-of-Staff of the Corps said, “Only raiding parties could cross this ground.”
‘The Corps Commander turned to me and said, “Where will the enemy come from?” Pointing with my hand in the direction of Ari Burnu, and along the whole shore as far as Suvla, I said, “From here”.
‘ “Very well, supposing he does come from there, how will he advance?” Again pointing towards Ari Burnu, I moved my hand in a semi-circle towards Koja Chemen Tepe. “He will advance from here,” I said. The Corps Commander smiled and patted my shoulder. “Don’t you worry, he can’t do it,” he said. Seeing that it was impossible to convince him I felt it unnecessary to prolong the argument any further. I confined myself to saying, “God willing, sir, things will turn out as you expect”.’