Gallipoli (42 page)

And now, just before 10.30 in the morning, here is the intrepid, tall and red-headed figure of Charles Bean, staggering ashore in his squelching boots, holding a camera and earnestly taking shots of the scenes on the beach and surrounding hills, before turning to take shots of the men landing behind, as shrapnel sprays all around them. Forget that. The important thing is to capture the moment, to record scenes for posterity that he will be able to expand on with words. Words such as these:

Soon enough, he makes his way to the spot where General Bridges' HQ is now constructed – a rough dugout covered with canvas, scraped into the side of the slope in a gully up from the beach. This will be the only sure place to get information on the whole of the battle, and, after throwing his heavy backpack down, Bean sticks close to the HQ from the moment General Bridges gets to work and starts receiving messages from the ridge beyond by telegraph over wires that the signallers had so courageously laid down under heavy fire.

The mood is tense as Bridges continues issuing orders, occasionally being forced to shout over the sound of rifle and machine-gun fire, not to mention the booming sound of artillery from the ships rolling across the waters and bouncing around their gully. From the first, it is clear that the whole battle is in the balance. From everywhere on the frontlines, it seems, as recorded by Bridges' Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-Colonel Brudenell White, ‘urgent requests were coming in all day for reinforcements – urgent demands from every unit that went up. We even had requests from company commanders who had lost their battalions: We cannot hold on unless immediately reinforced.'
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Sometimes, Bridges obliges, sending whatever he can; other times, he sends back a terse message: ‘Tell them they've got to stick it.'
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For he cannot send forces he does not have. All he can do is remain calm, weigh the situation and give what support is possible.

Around and about the HQ, a steady stream of wounded men limps past. Not far away, Bean can see ‘about half-a-dozen poor chaps … lying there dead'.
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Things are grim all right. When General Bridges sends his General Staff Officer, Major Thomas Blamey, up to the top of the soon-to-be-named Shrapnel Gully to give him a report on the situation, Blamey is not long in returning, to describe it as ‘Very ticklish …'
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What would make a big difference, and is desperately needed, is for howitzers to come into play, but the landing force have none with them, and the 18-pound field guns, with their flat-trajectory shells, are not suited to the mountainous terrain. All that can be landed in the short term, in the late morning, is the first of two Indian Mountain Batteries, boasting light guns, designed to be dismantled and moved up to high terrain. Manned by Sikhs and Punjabi Muslims – the only Allied Muslims on the Peninsula – the six dismantled guns are soon being hauled by a string of mules ‘up through the steep Scrub'
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to a point on the 400 Plateau, where they are reassembled and soon firing.

Captain H. A. Kirby trains his guns on the Third Ridge in the direction of Scrubby Knoll shortly before noon and starts firing the ten-pound shells on the Turks. Their guns are small compared with the Turks' – the heaviest of which can hurl shells of 80 pounds – but they are a start, their first land-based artillery.

As the sun pushes high in the sky, Colonel Mustafa Kemal has a rough idea of just what he and his men are facing. The invaders have landed what appears to be more than eight battalions, on a front about a mile wide, and have penetrated as far as Battleship Hill in the north, and along the ridges in front of the point on the Third Ridge to be known as Scrubby Knoll, a little over a mile from the shore. And yet, so rough is the country between the shore and Scrubby Knoll, so determined the defenders, that the invaders are incapable for the moment of breaking through. Worse for them, they are even struggling to hold onto the land they have won and are beginning to pull back. And they are not the only ones. For, under continual Turkish fire, the Allied transports and battleships have been forced to pull back offshore and out of range. As a result, ‘not an infantryman has landed on the beach' since 12 pm
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– the by now exhausted Anzacs have no reinforcements. The small number of artillery pieces that were coming ashore has also ceased.
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As Private Herbert Reynolds of the 1st Field Ambulance, who is seeing the scale of destruction firsthand, scribbles in his diary, ‘only two Indian mountain batteries are ashore and we are badly in need of artillery support, everywhere the enquiry is being made along the front “Where is our artillery?” … there appears to be no sign of us pushing through to our objectives without them.'
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In the extremity of the battle going on all around, not only are men lost from their companies and battalions but inevitably there is now little concern as to whether one is an Australian or a New Zealander. When high up on the Second Ridge, a New Zealander suddenly has his entire foot blown away by a bullet or piece of shrapnel and is seen hopping forward, calling out, ‘For God's sake, don't leave me!' On the instant, a young Australian jumps up and says, ‘Come on mate, get on my back,' and the two are soon heading back down the hill,
Anzacs
truly together at last.
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Captain Gordon Carter? To his amazement, high on the Second Ridge, he has not yet been shot dead. He had landed as part of the Third Wave that morning, and they had immediately received orders to reinforce the firing line, at which point the chaos and carnage had begun. Pinned down by ‘terrific enfiladed fire from shrapnel, rifle and machine gun',
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they had lost their Commanding Officer, Captain McGuire, early with a bullet to the abdomen, leaving Captain Carter nominally in charge, but it is rather beside the point. For his soldiers, like most Anzac soldiers, are now scattered everywhere, and for as long as three hours all they can do is hope to survive by hugging the earth as hard as they can, as men get shot all around. Captain Carter is ‘thoroughly scared'.
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But now what? As the fire upon them eases a little, dozens of men around him make to retire in disorder.

Oh no, they
don't
.

Standing up and shouting at them, Carter imposes some rough order and manages to rally them, as they press forward.

‘I give you full credit for this, my Father and Mother,' he later writes to his parents, ‘for the action came quite spontaneously and was not the result of any thought. It gave me a great deal of confidence and I felt fairly right from then … I kept getting hold of all the scared chaps about and sending them up.'
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A little later, he finds another ‘150 men under a wounded Captain retiring. I could not stand this so made the men rally and found the firing line on the right flank.'
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Extraordinarily, even in the madness of it all, he still wonders about Nurse King, hoping she is out of harm's way. (She is, almost. Aboard the
Sicilia
, about to take in their first lot of wounded, she and her fellow medical staff are close enough to the action that ‘[we] can hear the
Queen Elizabeth
firing and each time our boat trembles like anything'.)
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In a curious combination of calm and great energy, Colonel Mustafa Kemal moves among his troops, just back from the firing line, encouraging, directing, pushing his men forward in what seems like a lull in the fire upon them. Clearly it can't last, however, as the enemy continues to land its forces, and Mustafa knows that there will likely never be a better time to hurl the enemy back into the sea than right now. And so, from Chunuk Bair, he prepares for a mass attack in earnest, ordering more than 30 artillery guns to prepare to commence an intense, unified bombardment of the enemy lines, particularly concentrated on the two areas he aims to hit hardest – Baby 700 and 400 Plateau – while bringing forward all reserve infantry and getting them into position.

NOON, 25 APRIL 1915, HE LIKES TO BE, UNDER THE SEA, WALKING ON EGGSHELLS

Still alive. Even if it feels like only just. After dodging seemingly every torpedo and picket boat in the Narrows, and having several narrow escapes, Captain Stoker had decided at 8.30 that morning that discretion was the better part of valour, and the best thing for the submarine to do would be simply to lie on the bottom of the Dardanelles until the madness overhead had dissipated, and night-time could return to again give them the cover they needed. And so they had nestled on the banks of a small bay on the Asian shore, at a depth of 70 feet.

How to breathe at that depth, with no intake of fresh air?

Exactly.

The only answer is: the best you can. With 35 men in such a confined space, it is no easy matter, for the air is stultifying, having already passed through the lungs – and worse – of all of them, and all of it thickened by the choking diesel fumes that have not yet had a chance to escape, even though
AE2
is now running solely on battery power. And yet, that is still not the worst of it. Overwhelming even those fumes is the stench from the toilet in the forward torpedo room, otherwise recognised as two covered buckets: one for liquids, the other for … solids. Both those buckets had tipped over when
AE2
had slid down the first sandbank, and their contents now sluice around with the bilge under the deck planking.

Gawd help us all.

After observing the Sabbath by having a gathering near the periscope for Sunday prayers …
Oh Heavenly Father, bless us for …
the men sleep as best they can, but it is little enough. What they mostly do is wait, occasionally tense as the roar of engines above signals that they are still being searched for, with boats passing overhead every 15 minutes or so. Just after noon, something hits hard against the starboard side, for'ard – a grappling hook, perhaps – and the whole sub crew is instantly awake and ferociously focused. Again, however, it goes quiet, and all they can do is lie there, gasping for heavy breath, wondering if they will ever see the sun again.

As tough as their situation is, however, they inevitably wonder how those storming the beaches on the Peninsula are faring …

For the Anzacs, the best they will be able to do now is to hold onto the Second Ridge.

And it appears they are doing a good job of it. For Lieutenant Ahmet Mucip is still commanding his company on Mortar Ridge, but his line is disintegrating and many of his soldiers are now martyrs. However, a battalion of the 57th Regiment has arrived in the gully behind to provide reinforcement. Allah be praised!

Whether the Anzacs can keep holding on is touch and go, especially if the men, taken over by herd mentality and furphies, simply start retreating of their own accord. Major Beevor, still holding the firing line at Wire Gully, has already dealt with this situation once today … and now, it seems, it's happening again. He is convinced it is the clever enemy, who are ‘using all sorts of subterfuges to undermine the morale' of the Anzacs.
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