Gallipoli (30 page)

In the space of three days, from 3 April onwards, nearly all of Mena Camp empties out.

With high spirits still abounding, most of the Anzac soldiers begin singing as they march out – and they don't stop until they get all the way to Cairo Central Railway Station.

Sadly, the Australian Light Horse in Maadi Camp are not required to join them, though they live in hope that they may be required. Colonel John Monash would record that when the time came for his own 4th Brigade to leave, ‘Thousands of Territorials, and Australians and New Zealand Light Horsemen, many weeping with regret at not being allowed to come, gathered around to give us a royal send-off …'
³⁴

The lucky ones who are going, however, pile into the packed carriages at Cairo Central and begin their journey to Alexandria, where troopships await to take them to a destination still unknown.

‘I'll bet this much,' Sergeant Archie Barwick of 1st Battalion would record in his diary, ‘that a finer body of troops never left Cairo than the old 1st Div. Every man was as hard as nails & trained to the hour. I was one of the smallest men in our Battalion – that will give you an idea of what they were like, & every man was cocksure of himself, of being able to beat any man, be he Turk or German, & frightened of nothing with legs on it …'
³⁵

Ah, but there are scenes of poignancy, too, as when brothers part. On this evening, Captain Jack Bean is hurriedly leaving for the Dardanelles with the 3rd Battalion when Charles Bean finds him and helps him pack. Before the two take their leave of each other, Jack gives his younger brother a couple of tablets of morphia, against the possibility that Charles might get badly hurt.

‘Hope you won't need them,' Jack says softly. ‘But you never know.'

‘Thanks,' Charles replies as he slips them into his pocket. ‘I'll be careful … You never know.'

And now, as the 3rd Battalion marches out, it is time for the brothers to take their leave of each other. As Jack climbs upon his horse and slowly takes up his position behind the last of his marching comrades, Charles walks alongside him for a way.

Finally, however, it is time.

Jack reaches down to shake his brother's hand.

‘Well, so long, Chas,' Jack says quietly. ‘I'll be watching out for you when you come.'

‘Yes. I hope I won't be far behind you,' Charles Bean replies. ‘So long, Jack … Take care of yourself.'

Jack rides on. Charles stands there, staring, as his brother recedes in the darkened distance.

And now, another quiet voice beside him.

‘That brother of yours,' says a fellow officer of the 3rd Battalion, who has watched the whole scene, ‘is the kindest man I have ever known.'
³⁶

And so they continue to leave, including Captain Gordon Carter of the 1st Battalion, with one close observer of the whole parade being Nurse King.

‘The whole of the 1st Brigade left us starting about 4 p.m.,' she records in her diary. ‘It was a dreadfully sad day to think we may never see some of our pals again. Went to bed very sad indeed.'
³⁷

In Alexandria, cabs await to take the arriving Anzacs from the station through the teeming streets – hey, look at those girls walking around without veils, quite unlike Cairo – to the harbour. And what a spectacle!

‘There are,' Colonel John Monash of the 4th Brigade would record when his own time for leaving came, ‘literally hundreds of large steamers, warships, transports, troopships, colliers, store ships, hospital ships, water ships, supply ships, repair ships, depot ships, Egyptian, French, British, Australian, and even two of the USA squadrons which visited Australia.'
³⁸

Where are they going? No one is
officially
sure, and certainly
not
the captains of the ships, who have sealed orders, only to be opened once they leave Alexandria Harbour. (In fact, in some quarters the whole thing is such an open secret that a number of captains don't even bother opening those orders.)

5 APRIL 1915, MUDROS, 3RD BRIGADE TO HAVE THEIR MATES' BACKS

You bloody beauty. It is all very top secret and must not be discussed, but on this Easter Monday, the 3rd Brigade, who have been training at Lemnos for the last four weeks, receive ‘official intimation' that they will be the first troops to secure a beachhead on the Gallipoli Peninsula and provide cover for those who are to follow. As recorded at the time, this wonderful bit of information is received by the troops like ‘a bit of roast meat to a starving man'.
³⁹
They jump upon it and now begin to practise – full kit on their backs – disembarking, discarding the kit and charging forward to get to whatever defenders there might be, and from the beginning they are expecting plenty.

10–12 APRIL 1915, INTO LEMNOS, A GATHERING OF THE FAITHFUL FLEET

What a pleasure it is! After two days steaming in cramped conditions across 570 nautical miles of the Mediterranean, on this day dozens of troopships from Alexandria carefully make their way through the pale blue waters of ‘the Aegean Sea, amid the islands famed in Grecian [history]'.
⁴⁰
The sun is shining benignly, the air is fragrant, and off to the east on the second day they can see the peaks of the Island of Rhodes, whose historical glory they can contemplate for a couple of hours before they finally come to the minefields that guard the entrance to the glorious and protected Mudros Harbour on Lemnos.

One man sitting on deck notes in his diary as they approach, ‘The haystacks and medieval looking windmills all looked so peaceful and remote from the world that it gave one's eye a shock to look upon the line of huge battleships stretched across the harbour mouth.'
⁴¹

On the wider arms of the harbour, the soldiers can see beautiful farms dotting the foreshores, boasting cows and sheep on lush pastures, ‘thick with little red flowers and yellow flowers and some sort of blue lupin',
⁴²
rising up to distant, towering green hills that come complete with snowy peaks. It is all such a visual relief after so many long months in the desert. And yes, there by the shore are a few fetching peasant girls too, with the most wondrous olive skin imaginable – the first European women many of the soldiers have seen for months. (At least outside the Wazza …)

And yet, as the soldiers' ships continue steaming up the harbour, soon enough the men see them:
hundreds
of transports, warships, torpedo craft, trawlers and white hospital ships with green bands around them, with lighter craft buzzing around on the translucent waters. Most ships flutter the flags of France, Russia and Britain. The scene is colourful, a regatta with soldiers on passing ships cheering each other, ships' horns going off and people on shore waving.

Higher up, they can see the picturesque villages of Lemnos winking down upon them from the surrounding hills.

This then is apparently to be the staging point – everyone is saying their destination seems likely to be the Dardanelles, some 60 miles away, and hopefully they'll launch in just a few days. Apparently, there will be as many as 80,000 gathered here within a day or two. In the meantime, it is for the lucky ones to get ashore and stretch their legs, do some training exercises, as tents around the foreshore rapidly turn the harbour into a small town of hospitals, administrative centres and recreational facilities.

And here now, on 12 April, the Atlantic liner SS
Minnewaska
, bearing the commanders and senior officers of the Anzacs, led by Generals William Birdwood and Harold Walker. Wonderfully for Charles Bean, he is accompanying them – by the skin of his teeth only – due to the loyal support of General Bridges, who had intervened at the last minute to secure permission for the Australian correspondent to cover the Australian landing. Yes, he will still have to wait for permission to file like the (
sniff
) already accredited British journalists, but it is victory enough just to be here.

And Bean has had an amazing trip, appreciating like few others the glory of the waters they have traversed, made famous by Homer's epic poems the
Iliad
, on the Trojan War, and the
Odyssey
, about Ulysses' voyage home following the fall of Troy. Gazing westward, Bean can even see the island of Patmos, where the Book of Revelations is said to have been written, the white town capping the hill like snow, and the great 1000-year-old monastery crowning all.
⁴³

Within an hour of
Minnewaska
anchoring at Mudros, a boat is sent for the Generals and they are being welcomed onto the one-time passenger liner HMT
Arcadian
, where they meet General Sir Ian Hamilton and his rather prickly Chief of Staff, General Walter Braithwaite. Braithwaite has nearly finished his ‘operation order' for the landing and now gives Birdwood and his senior officers their first look at this detailed plan.

Hamilton's vision is for a multi-pronged attack, aiming his sharpest prong, the 29th Division, which has arrived in Port Mudros just the day before, at the southern tip of the Peninsula at Cape Helles. This will give the Brits the best chance of retaining naval gunfire support, as it can fire on that tip from three sides. On the first day, 12 battalions, comprising 14,000 soldiers, will land across five beaches, codenamed S, V, W, X and Y Beaches, with the first and last beaches protecting the flanks of V, W and X, where the main thrust would come at 5.30 am, following a half-hour bombardment from the fleet.

The key attack point will be V Beach, and it is here that approximately 2800 troops of the 29th Division will be unleashed.

How to get so many soldiers ashore quickly? This too has been worked out: when in Rome, do as the Romans do. When just across the waters from the plains of Troy, do as the Trojans had done, not with a massive hollow horse filled with soldiers, but with SS
River Clyde
, an old steam collier that can beach itself and have 2000 British soldiers pour out specially cut sally ports in its side. Meanwhile, a small steam hopper,
Argyll
, would position itself parallel to the shore between the collier and the beach, to make a bridge for those soldiers to pour across and be into the battle in a matter of minutes! The job of all soldiers so landed – in full daylight, to avoid confusion with the admittedly difficult exercise, and allow time for naval gunfire, which would be impossible in the dark – will be to quickly work their way up the Peninsula. Their first day objective will be to take the hill of Achi Baba, which overlooks the Peninsula tip and is six miles from V Beach.

The French, meanwhile, are to make a diversionary landing at Kum Kale on the Asian shore before re-embarking to hold the eastern area of the Helles sector.

‘Hints have been thrown out that we are asking the French cat to pull the hottest chestnut out of the fire,' Hamilton would note. ‘Not at all. At Kum Kale, with their own ships at their back, and the deep Mendere River to their front, d'Amade's men should easily be able to hold their own for a day or two – all that we ask of them.'
⁴⁴

Meanwhile, transports containing the Naval Division will make a demonstration off Bulair, high in the Gulf of Saros, where their aim will be ‘to make as much splash as they can with their small boats and try to provide matter for alarm wires to Constantinople and the enemy's Chief'.
⁴⁵

As to the Anzac landing, that in the thinking of General Hamilton ‘will be of the nature of a strong feint'
⁴⁶
– an attack secondary to the main one, designed to confuse the enemy as to where to place his precious defensive resources – though, if all goes well, it might even ‘develop into the real thing'.
⁴⁷
Where precisely?

Having examined the coast from the bridge of
Phaeton
, Hamilton's views have already been confided to his diary and are substantially unchanged now.

From Bulair down to Suvla Bay, ‘the coastline is precipitous; high cliffs and no sort of creeks or beaches', meaning that a landing there would be ‘impracticable'.
⁴⁸
As to Suvla Bay, it does boast ‘a fine harbour but too far North were the aim to combine a landing there together with an attack on the Southern end of the Peninsula. Were we, on the other hand, to try to work the whole force ashore from Suvla Bay, the country is too big; it is the broadest part of the Peninsula; also, we should be too far from its waist and from the Narrows we wish to dominate.'
⁴⁹

All things considered, it is a spot on the western coast of the European arm of the Gallipoli Peninsula, Gaba Tepe, just south of Suvla Bay, that seems best.

‘I mean we could get ashore on a calm day if there was no enemy. Gaba Tepe itself would be ideal, but, alas, the Turks are not blind; it is a mass of trenches and wire.'
⁵⁰

Between Gaba Tepe and Cape Helles, the coast consists of cliffs from 100 to 300 feet high, though here and there Hamilton could see sandy strips at their base. There is much discussion about whether it would even be possible to land men, but his view is clear.

‘I believe myself,' he would confide to his diary, ‘the cliffs are not unclimbable. I thoroughly believe also in going for at least one spot that seems impracticable.'
⁵¹

Gaba Tepe is that.

In the darkness just before dawn, it will be the job of the first troops of the 3rd Brigade ashore to push forward and capture all ground between the shore and the Third Ridge, about a mile inland, so securing a large beachhead on which the other Brigades can securely land.