Gallipoli (79 page)

Behind them, in succession, come more and more waves of just as many men, fighting for their homeland.

So fast are they, so surprising is the attack, that many of the soldiers of the 6th Loyal North Lancashires, who have not quite heeded the warning to dig in and stay alert, go from a deep sleep to an eternal sleep in the time it takes to slip a Turkish 12-inch bayonet between their ribs. ‘The enemy,' Mustafa Kemal would recount, ‘could not even find time to use their weapons. It was an epic, throat to throat struggle …'
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Within minutes, the first line of the North Lancashires' defence is annihilated.

And after four hours of fighting, all the survivors of the British forces have retreated at full pelt from the southern end of the Anafarta Group's front. The Turks are once again in control of Chunuk Bair. It is then that the British start to rain continuous fire on the position, coming ‘from ships and shore mortars and field guns'.
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Mustafa Kemal, in the thick of it with his men, looks out at the sea and traces an arc upwards with his eyes as ‘shrapnel and pieces of steel poured down like rain from the sky'.
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Within seconds, his surrounds are filled with the bodies of martyrs and the groans of the wounded.

In the middle of it all, Colonel Kemal is suddenly –
crack!
– hit by a piece of shrapnel in his chest. When he throws his hand to it, that hand comes away bloody.

‘Sir,' the officer next to him says, ‘you are shot.'

Kemal covers the officer's mouth with his hand. ‘
Sus
,' he hisses. ‘Shut up.'
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With the officer now silent, Colonel Mustafa Kemal looks back down at his chest as his fingers fumble around the wound. But there's not a single piece of shrapnel embedded in his skin. His pocket watch, however, is smashed into pieces.
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It is extraordinary good fortune.

Despite the hail of fire that continues to rain down from the defiant British forces, Chunuk Bair is lost. The simple plan and inspirational leadership of Colonel Mustafa Kemal has worked. As his Chief of Staff, Major Izzetin, would write in his diary that day, ‘The crisis has been overcome. Kemal's energy and effectiveness have borne fruit.'
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The next morning, at 8.45 am, Colonel Kemal, with the strange sense of having an ache in his chest but a song in his heart, sits down in his headquarters and writes to General von Sanders:

11 AUGUST 1915, UPON THE AEGEAN SEA, THE BATTLE'S ROAR EBBS

Captain Gordon Carter is one of the lucky ones. Despite having been in almost continuous action over the last five days, and having seen so many bullets and bayonets take his comrades around him, somehow he is still – physically at least – unscathed. ‘I am really very weak,' he writes in his diary, ‘and seem to have hardly any flesh on me. No wonder the bullets miss me.'
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Mentally, like many of the other survivors, he is not so well, and every time he closes his eyes he comes to with a start, as he sees enormous Turks with bayonets coming straight for him, wanting to shoot him and stab him and choke him and kill his comrades and …

Oh. Just a nightmare.

And then he tries to sleep again, and the same thing happens. At least he is lucky now to be on a hospital ship heading back to Lemnos with many of the badly wounded men from his battalion. At last, it looks like he is going to be able to get some desperately needed rest.

Back at Anzac, finally, it is over. After five days of battle, Lone Pine is in Australian hands, its trenches occupied by Anzac boots – all at the cost of some 2000 Anzac lives, and more than three times that for the Turks. As one Australian soldier who has ‘for four days … been dragging Turkish dead out of the captured trenches and burying them in large holes' writes of the Australian victory in a letter home, ‘although not decisive, it finished very much to our advantage and “Jacko” the Turk is now in a very desperate position. He is like a dying donkey, his last kick is always his hardest.'
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And yet, the net result of the Anzacs now having Lone Pine is … not much.

Yes, it is an advantage to have it, which is to the good, but the maxim established by Sir John French a year earlier in France, regarding trench warfare, again holds true: with two forces of relatively equal strength, through massive effort and the loss of many lives, you can bend the enemy's trench, but not break it. At Lone Pine, the Pimple has simply become bigger and more bulbous.

Few are more appalled by the sheer waste of Australian lives than Charles Bean, particularly when it comes to what happened at the Nek. While admiring of the courage displayed – ‘For sheer bravery, devoted loyalty, and that self-discipline which seldom failed in Australian soldiers, they stand alone in the annals of their country'
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– their deaths had been pointless.

‘Although at such crises in a great battle firm action must be taken, sometimes regardless of cost,' he would write many years later, ‘there could be no valid reason for flinging away the later lines after the first had utterly failed. It is doubtful if there exists in the records of the A.I.F. one instance in which, after one attacking party had been signally defeated, a second, sent after it, succeeded without some radical change having been effected in the plan or the conditions.'
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He also reserves some criticism for ‘the gallant [Lieutenant-Colonel] White': ‘Acting as a sportsman rather than a soldier, by leading forward the first line deprived his regiment of the control which should have been exercised over its operations. Its morale did not require the stimulus of personal leadership; and had his protest been added to Brazier's, Antill might have discontinued the attack. The most grievous result was the needless loss of lives precious to their nation.'
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For his part, rarely, if ever, has Ashmead-Bartlett been so angry, depressed and disillusioned all at once. A veteran of seven wars, including one he fought in, he has seen bad times before. But not like this. Not so many wasted lives for such little gain. Returning to Imbros, he hears for the first time what has happened at Cape Helles, where the attacks on Achi Baba have failed once more.

‘Deathly depression reigns at Imbros,' he would record. ‘The truth is now generally known that we have failed everywhere. The empty tents of the IXth Corps, glistening in the sun, have become tombstones of the dead; at night they appear ghostlike and deserted under the moonlight. Where is that mighty host which occupied them but five days ago?'
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Dead. Nearly all dead.

So, too, many of those who had gone into the attacks at Achi Baba and Anzac, with Ashmead-Bartlett recording, ‘The 29th Division also suffered heavily, and our total casualties at Helles alone have not been under six thousand.'
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Anzac? Birdwood will soon tell him the truth: ‘He said his total losses were 375 officers and 10,138 rank and file in the operations on the left and over 2,000 in the taking and holding of Lone Pine Plateau.'
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And so it goes on. Stark statistics, one after the other, confirm catastrophic losses on an unimaginable scale. The total casualties therefore cannot be much under 28,000 – an appalling total for the gains, which, as General Godley expressed it, amounted to some 500 acres of bad grazing ground.

Making matters worse for Ashmead-Bartlett is that, somehow, he has to write an account of the battle at Suvla Bay that will contain something of the truth, while still passing the censor: ‘an almost impossible task. It is easy enough to write up a success, but it would defy the genius of Ananias to make a victory out of this affair, either at Helles, Anzac, or Suvla. We have landed again and dug another graveyard. That is all.'
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As to Charles Bean, he too does the best he can to give an honest account of what has happened at the ‘Battle of Lonesome Pine', but the only way to get it through is to leave out the horror of what has occurred. In the final result, he manages to almost make it sound like this battle has bordered on victory: ‘The position at the moment of writing is that we have given the Turks a heavy blow opposite part of the Australian line. The battle is still raging.'
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Of the Battle of the Nek, Bean does, however, manage to get it into print that ‘extraordinarily Gallant Attempts of the Light Horse on the trenches opposite them were futile. The fighting has been tremendously intense, charge after charge being made.'
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Only General Hamilton has no such problems, as he puts out his own releases, subsequently run in the British press, trumpeting ‘a successful attack' by the ANZAC troops who had made ‘additional gains and further progress'.
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Of Suvla Bay, Special Correspondent General Hamilton reports that ‘the new British artillery beat down row after row of Turkish trenches … and the Turks beat a hasty retreat'.
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Never fear, the readers of the British Empire are told, ‘the Turkish troops are getting very demoralised, and the whole population of Constantinople is pessimistic'.
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General Hamilton's press releases are used as the basis for euphoric reports carried around the world:

 

ON GALLIPOLI SUVLA BAY LANDING ‘MOST BRILLIANT FEAT' GREAT FORCE DISEMBARKED

17 AUGUST 1915, CAIRO, KEITH MURDOCH CONFRONTS AND IS CONFRONTED

Keith Murdoch is shocked. To this point, he has devoured all the correspondents' accounts of the glories of Gallipoli, and yet, now he is here in Cairo, actually talking to the wounded soldiers who have been there, everything sounds so different.

After visiting the Australian training camp at Mena to try to get to the bottom of the mail problem, he has visited the hospitals too, where convalescing soldiers and officers tell of the shattering charges against chattering machine-guns that have cut Australians down like wheat, of the terrible mismanagement from first to last, of the lack of water, sanitation and supplies.

It all heightens his desire to see the situation for himself, and on this day he writes a letter:

General Hamilton reads the letter shortly before sending off a cable of his own to Lord Kitchener, advising that although, admittedly and unfortunately, his coup has so far failed,
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he has worked out what
is
needed to finally triumph at the Dardanelles:

Hamilton estimates that another 105,000 soldiers, or so, should do it.

19 AUGUST 1915, GALLIPOLI, FAIR DINKS

And now, here at last at Gallipoli are the first arrivals of the 17,000 men of the AIF's 2nd Australian Division, composed mostly of those who had joined up in the latter months of 1914 and first months of 1915. They are lauded by the press as men of a rather more substantial cut, incapable of just dropping everything and signing up like those gadabouts in the first lot, and, Charles Bean notes, ‘a high proportion volunteered not so much from impetuosity of spirit as because of a reasoned patriotism. The newspapers, in the effort to encourage enlistment, pointed out that these men were perhaps more truly representative of Australia.'
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Oh,
really?

When the men of the 1st Divvy are sent articles from home glorying in this very theme, they are thrilled to hear it and delighted that the 2nd Divvy have at last graced them with their presence. Of course, as detailed by Bean, they at once christen them ‘the “Dinkum” that is, “the genuine” Australians'.
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