Gallipoli (64 page)

The killing, on both sides, goes on.

The Third Battle of Krithia on 4 June delivers the same result as the first two, with little ground gained for another 6500 British and French soldiers killed and wounded. The Turkish counter-attack, to recover a few hundred yards of ground on a short front, sees 6000 Turks killed and wounded.

7 JUNE 1915, LONDON, A COMMITTEE OF ITS VERY OWN

A pall of devastation hangs over the entire Peninsula, and for General Hamilton at this time, the only good news is that back in London it appears the ‘Easterners' are winning their own war for control of the levers of power.

For, despite having been stood down from his position as First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill has remained busy and has circulated a treatise to fellow Cabinet Ministers pointing out that while no number of extra divisions added to the 24 already in France will affect the profound stalemate on that front, just three New Army Divisions – raised in large part by adherents to Lord Kitchener's famous poster – added to General Hamilton's forces of eight divisions already on the Gallipoli Peninsula would make all the difference. ‘It seems most urgent,' he insists, ‘to try to obtain a decision here and wind up the enterprise in a satisfactory manner as soon as possible.'
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Quite.

And at the first meeting of the Dardanelles Committee – the name given to the reorganised and enlarged War Council – on 7 June, Churchill so pushes his plan, backed by Kitchener all the way, that the Committee agrees.

So it is that, on this same day that General Hamilton surveys the vast human wreckage of Hunter-Weston's latest disastrous effort, he also receives a cable from Lord Kitchener:

Three
fresh divisions.
Another
50,000 soldiers. And this to go with a division of Kitchener's New Army that has just arrived in Cape Helles. (True, the latest arrivals are less soldiers than badly undertrained civilians wearing the uniforms of soldiers, led by officers who either went to the right school or are of the Old School and have been recalled from retirement, but at least they provide some of the manpower that Hamilton so desperately needs.) All up, Kitchener's cable means Hamilton will have 140,000
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fighting men in the Dardanelles. With that kind of manpower, it really should be possible to crack the Turkish nut, and discussion among Hamilton and his senior officers in their new quarters at Imbros immediately refocuses on how best to do this, how best to break out of their confines at Cape Helles and Anzac Cove, crush the Turks and push to Constantinople.

MID-JUNE 1915, IN CAIRO, A BOB IN, AND THE WINNER SHOUTS!

It's been a month now, and still there is no sign for Lieutenant Hugo Throssell and Colonel Noel Brazier, or for the detachment left behind of the 10th Light Horse, that they will be required to rejoin the regiment in Gallipoli – and they can barely stand it.

Are they really to suffer the humiliation of being stuck in Cairo when all the fighting is going on? When will they get the cable calling for them? Here at the Maadi Camp, it is a very dull, tedious existence waiting for news.

To break that tedium, sometimes Hugo goes into town with fellow soldiers, where, as ever, they make an enormous impression on the locals, who regard the emu plumes on their hats with awe and call them ‘the Kings of the Feathers'
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– though they don't always believe the claim that they are ‘kangaroo feathers'.

In town, the Australians frequently play a betting/drinking game once called ‘Selling a horse for a dish of eggs and herrings', which starts when the cry goes up, ‘A bob in, and the winner shouts!'
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Every man then puts a ‘bob', a shilling, into the middle of the table and whoever wins a simple game of chance – with everyone taking a number and trying to ‘sell a pony'
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– has to buy a round of drinks for everyone at the table, before pocketing anything left over …

It all helps pass the time until they can get to Gallipoli, which is where they all desperately want to be.

MID-JUNE 1915, LONDON, THE JOURNALIST RAISES A STORM

Back in London, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett is nothing if not busy. After arriving on 6 June, he has spent the time writing up the Dardanelles campaign to date, buying the supplies he needs to return to Gallipoli – pads, pens, a typewriter, leather shoes, fine clothes and toiletries – and fending off the many, many people who wish to see him to discuss what on earth is going on out east and how it has all gone so wrong.

There are, in fact, so many people that Ashmead-Bartlett decides to restrict himself to seeing Cabinet members only, and the officials of the War Office and the Admiralty. They include Winston Churchill, with whom he dines on 10 June, in the company of Winston's mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, as well as the Duchess of Marlborough and several others.

And yet this is not the Winston that the journalist had known so well. The old Winston had been glowing, garrulous, brilliant, oratorical and, above all, confident that he had all the answers. This Winston is bruised, battered, hurt, harried, vulnerable, pasty white, much older and sombre. There is only one thing that fires him up, and even then it is only nearing the end of the dinner: the lack of resolution displayed by the navy to see his Dardanelles plan through. The words tumble out, the fury rises, along with the sense of abandonment, of waste.

And to whom is he addressing his remarks?

Why, to Ashmead-Bartlett's amazement, they are directed across the table to his aged mother. Assuming what is clearly a familiar position for her, she sits quietly with an interested expression as her brilliant and adored son lectures her on just where the Dardanelles campaign had all gone wrong and how it was everyone else's fault. For you must understand, Mother, that ‘the battle of March 18 had never been fought to a finish and, had it been, the fleet must have got through the Narrows'.
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Ashmead-Bartlett listens attentively, knowing it to be ‘the most appalling nonsense', as he records in his diary. ‘This is still the great obsession of his mind, one which he will never get rid of. He seemed to feel little or nothing for the brave fellows who had lost their lives in his ill starred enterprise …'
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And yet, such is the way of things that, when the ladies retire – with rather unseemly haste, once Winston pauses for a moment – it is the English journalist himself who becomes the target. ‘You,' he accuses, ‘have come home to run down the expedition and to crab it, and to talk about it before a lot of stupid Society Gossips. You have turned the whole thing to ridicule just for the sake of making a story out of it.'
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While it is possible Ashmead-Bartlett resembles this remark, he also resents it. ‘I was as keen as everybody to see it through,' he insists, ‘if only it was handled in the right manner.'
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With the journalist's tacit confirmation that he had no problem with Churchill's plan
conceptually
, and that the problem lies with those
executing
his plan, the wounded politician at last dismounts from his natural position atop his high horse and tells Ashmead-Bartlett he will facilitate a meeting with the Prime Minister so he can tell him that, personally.

And sure enough, at 1 pm the next day, Ashmead-Bartlett receives a message from Winston to meet him at Downing Street, and shortly thereafter this shining member of the Fourth Estate finds himself sucking deep on the rarefied air of the most ‘sacred Council Chamber' in the land, ‘where, for two hundred years, all great decisions which have made or marred us have been taken',
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the Cabinet Room.

For over an hour, the two of them see Prime Minister Asquith together, with Winston laying out the maps he has brought with him so that he and Ashmead-Bartlett can present the plan they had worked out the previous evening. Their passionate view is that the best way forward is to land a major force north of Bulair. Yes, that's it – cut the Peninsula off at its very neck and you are in a position to emplace guns and block all the supply lines (sea and land) to the 140,000 Turkish soldiers in the south. The key, for Ashmead-Bartlett, is that by doing so you ‘force the Turks to leave their carefully prepared positions in the south, and meet us on ground of our own choosing'.
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Impressed, Asquith reaches out towards the map with his elegant finger and places it over Bulair, blotting out the Peninsula's neck. He nods, saying, ‘It seems to be the only natural thing to do.'
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Clearly, both the Prime Minister and Churchill have learned more from talking truth with Ashmead-Bartlett about what is actually going on over there than they have through reading all of the reports of General Hamilton put together.

‘I wish you would draw me up a short and concise memorandum on the whole situation,' the Prime Minister tells Ashmead-Bartlett as the younger man takes his leave, ‘and let me have it some time this evening. There is a Cabinet Council tomorrow, and I would like to have it by me. I would also like you to be present to answer any questions which may be put to you.'
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How quickly things have moved! From being unable to tell the truth of what is happening at the Dardanelles to being invited to Cabinet. He even dines that evening with Winston's replacement as First Lord of the Admiralty, Arthur Balfour, who questions him closely on the whole campaign, with a particular view to naval operations.

When Ashmead-Bartlett tells Balfour that the military men on the ground often fail to tell the truth to their masters at home, Balfour sighs and says, ‘Yes, I find the greatest difficulty in getting all the information I require. I hope you will tell them out there that they need not be afraid of me. But I do not know about my predecessor.'
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The following day, at the Cabinet meeting at 10 Downing Street, the war correspondent's memo is presented, as he waits outside. After detailing how the rest of the positions are stalemated, with no prospects of breaking out, the memo comes to the key point, which is that, with all of the Turkish defences of the Dardanelles now strengthened, ‘it is a fundamental error to assume any longer that, if we are able to occupy the southern extremity of the Peninsula so as to embrace Kilid Bahr and the European shore of the Narrows, we have opened the gate to Constantinople for the Fleet'. Further, the situation at both Cape Helles and Anzac is a stalemate. Therefore …

Ashmead-Bartlett proposes that a force of five divisions could do the job:

And who could be put at the prow of the attack?

Ashmead-Bartlett is clear:

But all of this is details. What is important is that the thrust be well directed and supported:

After 90 minutes of deliberations, a leading Liberal comes out to ask Ashmead-Bartlett a few questions, followed by none other than … Lord Kitchener.

The war correspondent is a little shocked, expecting someone of stature, of grandeur, of either menacing or magnificent presence. But no, the man in person evinces ‘nothing … to inspire either fear or awe', and the correspondent's primary impression is of a man whose ‘skin is red and rough'.
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The Secretary for War asks a few questions, mostly concerning the route of Turkish supplies onto the Gallipoli Peninsula, which Ashmead-Bartlett is happy to answer. Then the moustachioed one questions the correspondent closely about the position of the troops at Anzac and Cape Helles.

The younger man is insistent in pressing the point that it is ‘out of the question to hope to storm either Krithia or Achi Baba, and would only lead to useless slaughter … I would back my opinion on this point against all the generals on the spot … At Anzac the Dominion troops are in the position of an army holding a closely invested fortress from which they could not even make a successful sortie owing to the nature of the ground, and the fact that everywhere our lines are commanded by the higher hills occupied by the Turks.'
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‘Yes,' the Secretary for War replies, ‘they seem to be absolutely held up at Anzac, and lost very heavily in the last attack, but don't you think they might get on a bit and seize that hill?'
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Too risky, Ashmead-Bartlett replies, as the approaches to the heavily defended hill are so steep and bare, and so lacking in any kind of cover.

Could the Anzacs not then move south of their position and take ‘Achi Baba in reverse?'.
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