Gallipoli (19 page)

Enthusiasm for the plan continues to grow. True, Great Britain had tried this before, when, back in 1807, Admiral Sir John Duckworth, in his flagship,
Royal George
, had led seven ships of the line and some smaller vessels through the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmara – firing hard and being fired upon from the forts and batteries – before reaching Constantinople. Failing to incite the Turkish Fleet to come out and fight like men, after ten days he ran the gauntlet back down through the strengthened defences of the Straits, being fired upon and firing hard, before returning to Tenedos to count his heavy losses.
⁵¹

But in these modern times, surely things will go much better. The Royal Navy has dominated the seas since Napoleon's challenge was met at Trafalgar in 1805, and the possibility of defeat is no more contemplated than the idea that any country in the Muslim world could seriously throw out a challenge to the British Empire, their sea-mines notwithstanding.

Churchill is not strong on exactly how those minefields can be cleared – lying as they do right under heavily armed forts – but hopefully those details can be worked out later. Nor is it precisely clear how the fall of Constantinople will cause those in Berlin to hold up their hands in surrender, but there is something so confident in Churchill's presentation, so compelling about it, that he is able to carry all before him.

For his part, Sir John French is appalled. His men are fighting for their lives on the Western Front and now the War Council wants to put resources into this eastern sideshow? Doesn't Churchill realise that attacking Turkey in this manner would be ‘to play the German game'?
⁵²
Far better, in his view, to keep what soldiers there are in Europe proper to, preferably, attack the Germans now occupying the Belgian coast.

Tension is developing between the ‘Westerners' and the ‘Easterners'. How are the British Empire's precious resources to be shared across the obviously crucial theatres of operation on the Western Front and those existing and emerging in the east? Might achieving victory in the east create a series of circumstances that contributes to breaking the deadlock in the west?

Recorded in the minutes, ‘Lord Kitchener, “thought [Churchill's] plan worth trying. We could leave off the bombardment if it did not prove effective.”'
⁵³

As to Prime Minister Asquith, he is generally supportive, though, as he writes in a letter to Venetia in the middle of proceedings, while ‘now (4 pm) in the middle of our War Council, which began at 12', he is ‘keen to tell you all about it, & see if it meets with your approval'.
⁵⁴

In the end, even French gives up and concurs with the now unanimous motion: ‘That the Admiralty should prepare for a naval expedition in February to bombard and take the Gallipoli Peninsula with Constantinople as its objective.'
⁵⁵

At least one person at the meeting, however – even though he does not have a vote – remains strongly against the proposal. Only a few days afterwards, First Sea Lord Sir John Fisher writes to his one-time protégé, the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, informing him that the only way Fisher would support the Dardanelles operation would be if it became a joint military/naval operation, and even then it would need ‘200,000 men in conjunction with the Fleet'.
⁵⁶
For without soldiers hitting the shores, how could the navy alone take out the mines and the forts? Sir John just can't see it. Every ounce of his six decades' experience in the navy – which he used to love with filial duty but now adores with a paternal passion – tells him that this is wrong, that disaster awaits. The young, ambitious Churchill may be prepared to wantonly sacrifice ships in the hope of advancing his career, but he, Sir John Fisher, is NOT. (His fondness for writing in capital letters is indicative of the fact that he also tends to speak, and think, in them.)

For now, however, Fisher's caution really does place him in the minority, while Churchill, for one, is simply intoxicated at the wonder of the whole thing. ‘My God!' he says shortly afterwards to the Prime Minister's wife, Margot Asquith, at a small gathering at Walmer Castle, ‘This,
this
is living History. Everything we are doing and saying is thrilling – it will be read by a thousand generations, think of
that
! Why, I would not be out of this glorious, delicious war for anything the world could give me …'
⁵⁷

Suddenly, the sound of clinking glasses and light chatter ceases. Taken aback at his obvious enthusiasm for war at a time when so many thousands are dying every week, his audience pauses so awkwardly in conversation that Churchill feels obliged to quickly follow up, not least because Mrs Asquith is an infamous gossip.

‘I say, don't repeat that I said the word “delicious” – you know what I mean …'
⁵⁸

No … Winston … not … quite.

Some time before, Winston's wife, ‘Clemmy', had even told Mrs Asquith that ‘inventing uniforms is one of Winston's chief pleasures and temptations'.
⁵⁹

Yes, he is clearly a brilliant man, but what is also clear is that he is enjoying this war hugely.

MID-JANUARY 1915, AN UNFORTUNATE OUTBREAK

In the past four weeks, no fewer than a thousand men have been hospitalised with venereal disease (VD) – mostly syphilis, gonorrhoea, genital warts and herpes, and God knows what else, though most of them know something is up from the first moment they start pissing razor blades. The sheer number of those afflicted brings ‘serious and far reaching consequences and introduced the medical service to its most difficult problem in the war'.
⁶⁰

Some men come forward of their own volition; others are found out when they are formed up in companies and submitted to what is known as a ‘short-arm inspection', where they must present their penis to an inspecting doctor, and ‘skin it back and milk it down'
⁶¹
so he can look for pus at the end of the urethra.

Notices are put up in every Mess:

How to deal with it? Beyond quarantining the affected and administering injections that would kill a brown dog, while putting them on a course of mercury pills, the next thing is to dock the pay of all those hospitalised, including that part the soldier had allotted to his family, as they are no longer earning their keep. When out of hospital, those with VD have to suffer the humiliation of wearing white armbands. Lectures are also instituted about the physical and moral dangers of consorting with prostitutes. Some condoms are even issued – so thick are they it is debatable whether a nail could get through one, let alone a disease, and as to a screw … it gets to be rather beside the point.

Despite this widespread outbreak among the troops, it is so taboo – so shameful! – that few dare to talk about it, even to each other. They certainly leave it out of their letters home, and even their private diaries.

13–15 JANUARY 1915, PORT SAID, FORTUNE FAVOURS THE BRAVE

Nurse Lydia King doesn't believe a word of it, not one
word
, do you hear? Having just arrived in Egypt after the long ocean trip from Australia, the fetching 29-year-old with the full lips and lustrous hair – originally from Orange, via Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney – is on her way with a contingent of her fellow newly recruited army nurses to look after the men of the AIF, when she decides to have her fortune told by an Egyptian fortune-teller, just for a laugh. And that fortune, this exotic-looking chappie tells her, as he gravely turns over the cards that show her future, is clear: ‘You will live to be a bent old woman, walking with a stick. You will be rather deaf but have very good eyesight. Next year you will marry a very nice good man, and have two children.'
⁶³

Marry next year?
Her? Not likely. She is too busy. And the times are too turbulent. She has no idea even where she will
be
next year, let alone who she might be in love with enough to marry, so how could the fortune-teller? ‘All this I reckon, bunkum,' she writes in her diary that night,
⁶⁴
before resuming her journey the next day to Cairo, and thence to Mena Camp, where she and the three other nurses she has been travelling with are to be based.

As ever, she sticks close to her fellow nurse from Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Ursula Carter, and they have no sooner arrived in this extraordinarily dusty camp than they receive a visit from Ursula's brother, Lieutenant Herbert Gordon Carter of the 1st Brigade's 1st Battalion. He seems … a very nice chap. Tall, handsome, with piercing eyes, the strapping 29-year-old has a caring manner about him and is so obviously pleased to see his sister that it is clear he has a very strong family instinct. That afternoon, they all hire donkeys to go all around the pyramids and the Sphinx, and laugh the afternoon away as the sun beats down. When Lydia momentarily falls off her donkey, Gordon leaps off his own in an instant to help her back up. And he speaks French!

Lieutenant Carter? He is himself quite a little taken with ‘Nurse King', as he strictly refers to her in his diary. For believing in, and feeling comfortable with, strong women is simply in his blood. Something of a Sydney Grammar blue-blood from a wealthy Sydney family – his father had purchased the girls' school Ascham at Darling Point from its founder, Miss Marie Wallace, and had gone on to become its principal, instituting fewer tea-party-related subjects and more mathematics and natural-history classes – with a First Class Honours degree in Engineering from Sydney University, he is a refined man, but Nurse King's adventurous ways please him. It is no small thing for her and his younger sister to have come on such an adventure to the other side of the world, to potentially put themselves in harm's way to look after Australian soldiers, and just as he has vowed to his parents to do everything to look after Ursula, he instinctively feels protective towards Nurse King too. Apart from everything else, he likes the way the no-nonsense nurse refuses to sit primly on the donkey's side-saddle, the way a lady is meant to, but actually sits firmly astride a proper saddle, as that is the most sensible way … even if she does fall off. It feels good to help her up. That evening, he takes the girls to Shepheard's Hotel, where they dine at the table right next to General Birdwood.

LATE JANUARY 1915, COLONEL MUSTAFA KEMAL RETURNS TO ACTIVE SERVICE

The rather distinguished-looking military man, astride his fine horse, now arriving in Constantinople's dusty and bustling Beyazit Square attracts his fair share of attention and more. There is just something about him – his poise, his polish, his
bearing
, his piercing blue eyes and regal cheekbones – that makes the clutch of old men chatting and talking of the day's news turn their heads, as do the young women in their headscarves sweeping the streets, as does the man with the flock of peacocks, yelling his incomprehensible language that every herder must establish between themselves and their flock, and even his young son. Perhaps, too, at a generally lugubrious time, this man is beaming.

For although Lieutenant-Colonel Mustafa Kemal has enjoyed his time in Sofia – not least for the acquaintance of several delightful, educated women in a social life of fancy-dress balls and more European surroundings – he had been honoured and relieved to finally receive a telegram from General Enver's deputy, Ismail Hakki, ordering him to leave Sofia immediately and assume command of the 19th Division.

Colonel Mustafa's constant agitations to be sent back to active duty, to be back among soldiers in the struggle for his country, have finally been answered, and he now approaches the War Ministry through the soaring keyhole archway at its entrance – the very symbol of military power in the Empire – with delight.

Leaving his mount in the courtyard of the grand three-storey Ministry building, he walks up the stairs and through the marble columns to the office of the War Minister himself, the thin and pale General Enver, who has just returned from personally leading an offensive against the Russians in the Caucasus. Only Enver's moustache remains as upturned, waxed and magnificent as ever, while all the rest of him droops.

‘You're a little tired?' Colonel Mustafa says.

‘No,' Enver replies, naturally defensive around his ambitious colleague, ‘not that much.'

‘What's happened?'

‘We fought – that's about it …'

‘What's the position now?' Mustafa presses.

‘Very good,' replies Enver.
⁶⁵

Not wishing to press General Enver any further, Colonel Mustafa turns the conversation to the subject of his appointment: ‘You have kindly appointed me commander of the 19th Division. Where is it? And which corps and army is it part of?'

‘That's right,' Enver replies. ‘If you enquire with the general staff you'll get precise information.'
⁶⁶

Sensing that General Enver is deeply preoccupied and exhausted, and even a tad uncomfortable in his presence, Mustafa Kemal takes his leave and soon presents himself to the offices of the General Staff. Entering the bustling room, he announces himself: ‘I am Lieutenant-Colonel Mustafa Kemal, Commander of the 19th Division.'