Liman’s chief-of-staff at that stage had no notion that Kemal, who was always a troublesome figure at headquarters, was about to be promoted, and he permitted himself to say ironically, ‘Won’t that be too many troops?’

‘It will be too few,’ Kemal replied.

So now, after he had been awake for two nights at Anzac and continually in the front line, Kemal suddenly found himself in charge of the battle. He seems to have been not at all dismayed. Having calmly given orders to his successor in command of the 19th Division on Battleship Hill, he got on his horse and rode across the dark hills to Suvla. One has a vivid picture of him on this solitary midnight ride. Physically he was quite worn out, and his divisional doctor was giving him doses to keep him going. He had grown very thin, his eyes were bloodshot, his voice grating with fatigue, and the battle had brought him to a state of nervous tension which was perhaps not far from fanaticism, except that it was fanaticism of a cold and calculating kind.

With his doctor and an A.D.C. following on behind, he turned up at Willmer’s headquarters in the Suvla hills soon after midnight, and spent the next two hours making himself familiar with the front. No one was able to tell him very much about the movements of the British, but he decided to make a general attack along the whole line from Tekke Tepe to the Sari Bair ridge in the morning. The Bulair force had now arrived, and at 4 a.m. orders were sent out to the commanders telling them to be ready to start in half an hour; they were to advance directly to the heights and then charge down into the Suvla plain on the other side.

As dawn was about to break the Tekke Tepe ridge was still empty. The British 32nd Brigade had not got under way so promptly as Hamilton had hoped on the previous night. Seven hours had gone by while the men groped about in the thick scrub, constantly losing themselves in the winding goat tracks, and it was not until 3.30 a.m. that the brigade was assembled below the summit. At 4 a.m. it advanced at last, and it was just half an hour too late; as the men in the leading company went forward the Turks burst over the rise above them. It was a tumultuous charge, and it annihilated the British. Within a few minutes all their officers were killed, battalion and brigade headquarters were over-run, and men were scattering everywhere in wild disorder. In the intense heat of the machine-gun fire the scrub burst into flames, and the soldiers who had secreted themselves there came bolting into the open like rabbits, with the smoke and flames billowing out behind them. At sunrise Hamilton, watching from the deck of the Triad, was presented with an awful sight. His men were streaming back across the plain in thousands, and at 6 a.m., only an hour and a half after the battle had begun, there seemed to be a general collapse. Not only were the hills lost, but some of the soldiers in their headlong retreat did not stop until they reached the salt lake and the sea. ‘My heart has grown tough amidst the struggles of the peninsula,’ he wrote in his diary that night, ‘but the misery of this scene wellnigh broke it… Words are no use.’

Another two hours went by before the Turkish fire slackened and the British began to rally themselves on a line across the centre of the plain. Hamilton then went ashore to look for Stopford, who had landed overnight at a place called Ghazi Baba, close to the extreme tip of the northern arm of the bay. ‘We found Stopford,’ he says, ‘about four or five hundred yards to the east of Ghazi Baba, busy with part of a Field Company of engineers supervising the building of some splinterproof headquarters huts for himself and his staff. He was absorbed in the work, and he said it would be well to make a thorough good job of the dug-outs as we should probably be here for a very long time… As to this morning’s hold-up, Stopford took it very philosophically.’

And still the polite façade between the two men did not fail. Since headquarters was without news of the left flank on Kiretch Tepe Hamilton suggested that it might be a godd thing if he went off on a reconnaissance in that direction. Stopford agreed, but thought that he himself had better stay at headquarters to deal with the messages coming in. Upon this Hamilton set off with an A.D.C. on a long walk towards the hills and the Corps Commander returned to the building of his huts.

Later that day Stopford sent out a message to one of his divisional generals congratulating him on his stand. ‘Do not try any more today,’ he added, ‘unless the enemy gives you a favourable chance.’

Kemal had watched the battle from a hilltop behind the front line, and by midday he was satisfied that he had nothing more to fear from the British on the Suvla front. But by now alarming messages had reached him from Sari Bair: Allanson had gained the ridge and the centre of crisis had obviously shifted there. At 3 p.m. Kemal went off on horseback through the blazing heat, and having called in on Liman’s headquarters on the way, reached Chunuk Bair just as the evening light was failing. The situation there had grown worse. Allanson and his men had been withdrawn, but other British troops had taken up their positions on the hill; a fresh Turkish regiment which was due to come up from Helles had not arrived, and the troops in the line were to some extent demoralized by the British artillery fire and the continuing strain of the battle. Kemal, who was now spending his fourth night on his feet, at once ordered an attack for four-thirty on the following morning, August 10. His staff protested that the men were incapable of further effort, but Kemal merely repeated his order and went off on a personal reconnaissance along the front.

It was the last gasp of the battle, the final spasm that was to decide the issue one way or another. On both sides the men had been fighting for three days and nights without sleep, and with very little water or food. The trenches behind them were choked with dead and wounded, and most of those who were still living looked out on their hideous surroundings through a fog of exhaustion. They lay on the ground, they waited, and they responded to their orders like robots with dull mechanical movements. They were ready enough to go on fighting, but some of them hardly knew what they were doing, and the end of the nightmare in which they were living was now becoming more important to them than the idea of victory. It had been so hot through the day that water had begun to seem like the one last luxury in the world, more urgent even than sleep, and when water mules went by men ran forward to lick the moisture off the canvas buckets.

On Chunuk Bair the trenches were barely thirty yards apart, and Kemal got two regiments into his front line very quietly through the night. All depended on whether or not the British guns fired on this mass of closely-packed men before they could charge with the light of the morning sun behind them.

When there were still a few minutes to go before daybreak Kemal crept out into no-man’s-land and softly called out a few last words of encouragement to his men as he crawled along. ‘Don’t hurry. Let me go first. Wait until you see me raise my whip and then all rush forward together.’

At four-thirty he stood up between the opposing trenches. A bullet smashed his wrist watch but he raised his whip and walked towards the British line. Four hours later not an Allied soldier remained on Sari Bair.

It had been a fiercer charge than the one at Suvla, more compact and much more desperate, and most of the Turks who took part in it were obliterated by the British artillery on the open slopes. But they managed to win back their lost trenches, and by midday on August 10 not a single height of any importance at Suvla or Anzac was in British hands. At Cape Helles the battle subsided to a fitful end.