Gallipoli (83 page)

‘Get the boys out of that,' Sid Ferrier says to Throssell, remarkably calmly, nodding towards the trench behind where the bomb throwing has started again. ‘It's too hot altogether.'

Then Ferrier walks six yards before sitting down. In the absence of stretcher-bearers, someone gives him the all-purpose tot of rum, and he manages to get to the dressing station 300 yards away. What's left of his arm is amputated at the shoulder, and he is quickly evacuated to a hospital ship.

And what about you, Lieutenant Hugo Throssell? You now have blood all over you from seemingly a dozen wounds on your face, neck, torso and hands. One officer, Lieutenant Tom Kidd, would ever afterwards be struck by how amazing it was that Throssell could still be standing – let alone fighting – with so much blood pouring from his face and hands. ‘You'd have thought by the look of them he had been killing pigs. Then, too, he had got a bullet through the neck on the right side, and his coat collar and shoulder was all blood from that, and his left shoulder had been torn with a bomb, and that was all blood too. In fact, he was just sweat and blood and dirt from head to foot, and, as though that were not enough, he was as lame as a cat from two other hits, one on the leg and the other on the foot.'
⁴⁵

Despite all that, still Throssell wants to get back to the battle, but this time a battalion doctor steps in and insists.

‘With so many dead men lying around, Sir,' one of them says, ‘you risk getting septic poisoning if you don't get your wounds dressed.'
⁴⁶

It is a reasonable point and, knowing the dangers of getting tetanus, which really is a death sentence, Throssell reluctantly accedes to it, retiring briefly to the dressing station. Among his other repairs, one of the
Australia
shoulder badges, ‘twisted and broken, [that was] driven into his shoulder',
⁴⁷
is removed.

Then he quickly returns to his men with more timber and iron that he has found, together with some periscopes. Yet the most senior doctor present takes only one look at him before immediately ordering him to retire and get straight onto a hospital ship, where he is soon placed into a bath in an effort to clean his many wounds, before being put to bed in clean sheets, wearing clean pyjamas. (He is, and make no mistake, not only one of the most courageous ones, but also the luckiest. Of the 24 men whom he had led in the charge at 1 am, he is one of only two left. Of the 160 men of the 10th Light Horse who'd started the action, there are less than a hundred able to continue the fight.)

The New Zealand Mounted Rifles have fared even worse, ‘almost entirely consumed'.
⁴⁸

When Hugo awakes, it is to the vision of a woman with a beautiful face peering down upon him – a Red Cross nurse.

Up on Hill 60, though the Turks are still in control of its summit, its seaward slopes are secured by the Australian occupation of those high trenches, and the link between Suvla Bay and Anzac Cove is established – just.

The final epitaph for the effort is recorded in the diary of one of the troopers of the Auckland Mounted Rifles, James Watson, who had lost many of his own comrades in the battle:

And so with the conclusion of the Battle of Hill 60, the curtain is closed on the August Offensive. Despite the odd triumph here and there, in the final wash-up few are under the impression that it has been anything other than a colossal failure. For the first time, a creeping despair starts to show up among the Anzacs, particularly the veterans. While some of the new arrivals remain bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, still new enough to remain optimistic, for the old fellows – and they really do feel
old
, whatever the date on their birth certificate – there is no escaping the fact that after 18 weeks in this hell on earth they remain further from Constantinople than they had been on the first day, despite suffering 90,000 casualties, 23,500 of whom are beneath the sod, or still lying upon it.

And even those few men unmarked by bullets or shrapnel are mostly debilitated by disease. It is so bad that just under a hundred men a day have to be evacuated to Lemnos to receive treatment, and not all by chance. The problem of self-inflicted wounds is a continuing one.

‘Main thing to do today,' Private Charles Bingham of the 1st Field Ambulance would write some time later, ‘was the clearing out of all patients except for the few self-inflicted ones whom we keep here. You see anyone who wounds himself to get out of this awful place is not allowed to go, he may die here in hospital but he mustn't leave the Peninsula and quite right too I think.'
⁵⁰

For others, the problem is that they are too brave. A case in point is one of Queensland's finest, Private Bob Gray of the 9th Battalion, who is feeling so ‘butcher's' – Digger shorthand for ‘butcher's hook', as in
crook
– that he finally goes to see the doctor.

He had, after all, been wounded on the day of the landing and ignored treatment since. Now, it is ‘again giving a little trouble', so maybe the doc, ‘could advise a little treatment'?

Not really, no.

Upon examining Gray, the horrified doctor finds that, besides the inevitable dysentery, the soldier has ‘a compound fracture of the arm, two bullets through his thigh, another through his diaphragm, liver, and side and there were adhesions to the liver and pleura'.
⁵¹

Private Gray is immediately sent home to Australia.

Not that it stops him. He is no sooner discharged from hospital than, as a matter of urgency, he re-enlists so he can return to the front …

Another aching to return to the front is Captain Carter. From Imbros, he had been transferred to Alexandria and then Cairo, and things gradually got better to the point that on a good night he could actually sleep for several hours without killing any Turks at all. Strangely, the true worry is that he doesn't seem to worry anymore …

‘It is pretty noticeable to me the small amount of feeling or sentiment I have for anything,' he confides to his diary. ‘Nothing astonishes me – and I don't feel sad or sorry about anything. It seems like being a sort of human machine. I heard that Price had died of wounds. I was very sorry indeed but it did not disturb me much mentally – though he practically lived with me in Gallipoli and I got very fond of him. It appears to be a mental deafness – so to speak – my brain seems dull to all sentiment.'
⁵²

All he knows is two things. He wants to see Nurse King – the two have exchanged letters and parcels but have not been able to meet, since she is still on her hospital ship – and he wants to get back to Anzac. But when he tries to check himself out of his hospital in Alexandria, the nurses insist that if he goes back too soon he will just get sick again and have to come back. Better that he gives it just a little bit longer, and he might be right as rain.

‘I trust this hastiness to get back to a fight,' Captain Carter writes, ‘does not last after peace is declared – if I ever get that far …'
⁵³

EARLY HOURS, 2 SEPTEMBER 1915, ON IMBROS, HAMILTON DROWNS

Hands are closing around General Ian Hamilton's throat and pushing him under the waters of the Dardanelles. He can't breathe, can't breathe, can't BREATHE, and though he tries to fight … slowly … slowly … slowly the fight begins to go out of him and … and … and …

And then he wakes up. It has just been a nightmare.

Or has it? Lost in that strange, sleepy netherworld where one is flooded with relief that it has only been a bad dream … but still haunted by the all-too-real emotions that have come with it, Ian Hamilton lies in his bed still shivering with the
horror
of it.

But is he alone? Is there not someone else in his tent too?

Barely able to breathe, he looks closely. There! There is someone in his tent. An assassin? A what?

Terrified, now wide awake, sort of, he carefully looks at the face of the intruder … only to be frustrated. For though he can discern the broad shape, he cannot distinguish any features of the face. In his entire life, he has never been so scared. And even when he fully wakes at dawn, and, of course, there is no one there, and no sign that anyone has been there, still he feels unsettled. Still he feels that someone has come in the night to do him down.

‘For hours afterwards,' he would recount, ‘I was haunted by the thought that the Dardanelles were fatal, that something sinister was a-foot, that all of us were pre-doomed.'
³

Just a day later, there is a visitor …

General Hamilton? Keith Murdoch, the Australian correspondent, is here to see you.

After a long journey from Cairo, Keith Murdoch has arrived on Imbros and wishes to present his credentials to the Commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Forces, by whose sole leave he has been allowed to visit here, and thank him for ‘having stretched a point in my favour by letting me see the Peninsula'.
⁴

Upon meeting Murdoch, General Hamilton is half-impressed – finding him to be ‘a sensible, well-spoken man with dark eyes who said that his mind was a blank about soldiers and soldiering' – but only half. For, as Hamilton also notes, the journalist ‘made me uncomfortable by an elaborate explanation of why his duty to Australia could be better done with a pen than with a rifle'.
⁵

Which brings Murdoch to the point. He needs to get to Gallipoli to see it for himself, and it is quickly arranged …

The journalist soon finds himself aboard a destroyer, gazing resolutely at the wonder before him – Anzac Cove. And oh, the tingling thrill when, just as he knows the soldiers had done on 25 April, he has to climb down the sides of the destroyer and into a boat that takes him to the shore – though in his case he actually lands on a sturdy wooden pier.

Now, just what Keith is expecting, he is not sure. Already, having visited the hospitals in Cairo to talk to dozens of wounded Diggers and officers, lying there among thousands of others with the most grisly wounds imaginable, he had been told something of the true grimness of the place … but nothing could prepare him for this.

The death. The destruction. The sheer
desolation
of the place. The bullets that have bloodied the trail of wounded men coming towards the very boat he has just got off. The shells that continue to fly overhead and burst close. The sense that at any moment they all risk being overwhelmed by just one more Turkish attack.

To get his bearings, Murdoch is more than somewhat dependent on finding the most experienced Australian correspondent on site, Charles Bean, and immediately seeks him out. The Melburnian is shocked to be weakly if warmly greeted by a suddenly much older-looking Bean, sick and lying grimly on his dugout bunk, struggling to get up to shake his hand, having been laid low for several days with the Gallipoli Gallop. By the dim illumination of the sole spirit lamp, the younger man gazes with wonder at his colleague's living circumstances, as Bean labours to get himself dressed.
⁶
One wall of the dugout is made of sandbags alone, while the other is black clay and has dirty clothes hanging from nails pounded into it. Bean does all his work on a desk made from packing cases, and sits on the same and …

And now Bean is ready, and they must go. Be careful to keep your head down, Keith, as this may be dangerous. Though still as weak as a kitten, Bean manages first of all to guide Murdoch – against the constant flow of stretcher-bearers carrying horribly wounded men the other way – to the high frontlines to get an overview of the layout of the whole campaign, as well as introducing him to several key officers, before leaving his intrepid visitor alone, so he can return to his sick bunk.

For the rest of the day, and indeed most of the next four days – with Bean joining for the final half-day on 6 September – Murdoch goes from trench to trench, post to post, keeping his head below the parapet and trying not to reel every time the endless shelling comes close, talking to as many soldiers and officers as he can to get a feel for the whole campaign.

And he is, frankly, appalled.

Here are his countrymen, living in thousands of tiny dugouts that are clinging to little more than a cliff face, as bullets and shells fly, and the supply line behind withers.

Men
live
like this? Fight and
die
like this?

It is not just the horrors of the frontline, the constant shooting and shelling, the dead and disfigured, the stench and flies – though all of that certainly shakes him. What angers Murdoch is the stories he hears of mismanagement, the sacrifice of Anzac lives by ordering rushes straight onto enemy machine-guns, when there had been no hope of success and an all but certain guarantee of death on a mass scale. He
weeps
as he surveys the ground at the Nek, ‘where two of our finest Light Horse regiments were wiped out in ten minutes in an attempt to advance a few yards …'
⁷

Gazing out on the killing fields of Lone Pine – now held by the Australians, at a cost of 2277 soldiers killed or wounded, causing a bump in the Turkish lines – he can scarcely credit the number of dead bodies he is seeing in no-man's-land. As arranged by the good old Bean, Murdoch talks extensively to General ‘Hooky' Walker, as well as six senior Australian officers and one senior British officer. Everywhere – including at Suvla Bay, which he also briefly visits – is death, desolation and devastation, with an exhausted army holding on against a pressing foe, but for how long?

Certainly the journalist is impressed with the resilience and resourcefulness of the Anzacs, together with their courage. ‘It is stirring,' he would record of his countrymen, ‘to see them, magnificent manhood, swinging their fine limbs as they walk about Anzac. They have the noble faces of men who have endured. Oh, if you could picture Anzac as I have seen it, you would find that to be Australian is the greatest privilege that the world has to offer.'
⁸

But admire the men as he does, his overwhelming sense is of the sheer, bloody futility of it all, the waste of human lives, when to his eyes there is little chance that they will ever be able to do anything more than cling to the cliffs, while regularly losing many of their numbers to bullets and sickness. How has it come to this? There, too, he is not long in getting an answer as he talks to soldiers, most of whom point accusatory fingers at GHQ, at General Hamilton and his senior staff.

The Australian officers, while they remain loyal to GHQ, make no bones about the fact that, as bad as it all is now, it is bound to get much worse when the winter comes. ‘The winter campaign,' Murdoch would report the Australian officers telling him, ‘is what we dread above all else, [as] many of our positions will become quite untenable.'
⁹

After visiting Quinn's Post with Bean on the morning of 6 September – men LIVE and DIE like this? – Murdoch leaves Anzac Cove at midday and heads back to Imbros, his head and heart whirling with emotion. On the one hand, there really is a lot to admire in what the men have achieved, and in the calibre of some of the senior officers. Just that morning, at Lone Pine, General Walker had told him of how, ‘I've come to believe in and love my men. I would not change my command for the world.'
¹⁰

But on the other hand … for how long can they hang on? And even if they can, for what purpose? When you are paying a thousand lives to capture one hill, is it remotely realistic to think you could get all the way to Constantinople?

Are his impressions so bad, perhaps, because this is his first experience in the frontline of a war, and he simply doesn't know enough to realise that this is the way all wars are fought? That worry lasts no longer than his first conversation back at Imbros with the vastly experienced war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. The sophisticated Englishman – now situated in a large tent in a specially selected shady spot in a grove surrounded by hedges – is quick to tell the raw Australian that in his view things are every bit as bad as Murdoch thinks. What's more, he has said as much to influential people in London on a quick trip back there in June, after
Majestic
had been sunk. The problem the English journalist has now is that, this far away from London, he cannot reach the same people and, of course, all of the articles he writes and letters he sends must first pass the censor, meaning he can't be critical. And nor can any of the other journalists. But he has criticism a'plenty for General Hamilton and even more for his prig of a Chief of Staff, General Walter Braithwaite. Both men, he has long believed, must be sacked – which would make it easier for the brass to acknowledge the obvious, that the Peninsula must be evacuated.

Murdoch has been thinking along those lines, and to have such a senior correspondent agree with such vehemence turns his views into a passionate conviction. The two talk late into the night, and then the next day as well, and on again into the next night, trying to work out what to do.

Ultimately, Murdoch is insistent that the ‘conspiracy of silence' must be broken.
¹¹
‘Unless someone lets the truth be known at home,' he says, ‘we are likely to suffer a great disaster.'

He is equally sure he is
not
that man. ‘I have only been here for a short time,' Murdoch says, ‘and I have only acquired a local knowledge of Anzac, so I do not feel that my word will carry sufficient weight with the authorities.'
¹²

And as Ashmead-Bartlett has committed himself to his paper to stay here to cover the campaign, and cannot easily return to London to knock on doors once more, the obvious solution then beckons. ‘
You
must write an uncensored letter, telling the plain truth,' Murdoch says, ‘which I will carry to London.'
¹³

Ashmead-Bartlett demurs, preferring to coach Murdoch on all essential points of the disaster that is Gallipoli and the catastrophe it will become if the troops are still here in winter.

But Murdoch pleads that that is not enough: ‘I want something definite under your signature.'

The Englishman continues to resist, but in the end Murdoch is so insistent, and persuasive, that he finally agrees. Some might say this will break the censorship rules – even though neither man has any intent of publishing the letter – but that is rather beside the point.

‘The issue now,' Ashmead-Bartlett notes, ‘is to try and save what is left of the army.'
¹⁴

True, the classic role of a journalist is to chronicle the times, not attempt to be a directly involved player in them, but on this occasion both men have come to the conclusion that, whatever the public is told, they are beholden to bring to the attention of those who do make the ultimate decisions that Gallipoli is already a disaster, now heading to a catastrophe unless drastic action is taken – starting with the dismissal of General Hamilton.

But to whom should Ashmead-Bartlett write the letter?

The Englishman must, Murdoch suggests forcefully, ‘write to Mr Asquith, as the head of the Government and, therefore, the person on whom primary responsibility for coming to a decision must fall'.
¹⁵

And writing to Asquith helps them to get around the censorship rules, which are of course designed to keep the oft bitter truth from the public domain. Could anyone argue that the rules are intended to keep that same bitter truth from the most powerful political figure in the land, whose job it is to know the truth and so decide what must be done? Ashmead-Bartlett knows Asquith. Of course he can write to him, as one Englishman to another. And Murdoch is on a special commission from the Australian Prime Minister, to report on the Australian troops, so of course he can carry it.

And so, in his tent, as the Parisian
cuisinier
of Ashmead-Bartlett prepares the next sumptuous meal, the Englishman gets to work and begins to compose the letter, bashing out the words on his Empire typewriter perched atop the ammunition box he uses for a desk. The full facts, which he has long been aching to write, simply pour out of him, a torrent of truth that has at last burst its banks: