Gallipoli (85 page)

‘We have to face not only this menace, but the frightful weakening effects of sickness. Already the flies are spreading dysentery to an alarming extent, and the sick rate would astonish you. It cannot be less than 600 a day. We must be evacuating fully 1,000 sick and wounded men every day. When the autumn rains come and unbury our dead, now lying under a light soil in our trenches, sickness must increase. Even now the stench in many of our trenches is sickening …

‘Supposing we lose only 30,000 during winter from sickness. That means that when spring comes we shall have about 60,000 men left. But they will not be an army. They will be a broken force, spent. A winter in Gallipoli will be a winter under severe strain, under shellfire, under the expectation of attack, and in the anguish which is inescapable on this shell-torn spot.
³⁹

‘The troops are trying to support their officers, but it is becoming ever more difficult. ‘Sedition is talked round every tin of bully beef on the peninsula and it is only loyalty that holds the forces together …'
⁴⁰

These are, of course, explosive allegations, and Murdoch works on it again and again. A broad summation is that Prime Minister Fisher, who had promised to fight for Great Britain ‘to the last man and last shilling',
⁴¹
may very well achieve at least the former if the troops are left there for the winter.

After finally completing the letter on the morning of 23 September, Murdoch accompanies Herbert Campbell-Jones to lunch with the venerable editor of
The Times
, Geoffrey Robinson, at the famous Simpson's-in-the-Strand. Over the next three hours – as the white-jacketed chefs carve the meat at the table, the hovering waiters pour the wine and Murdoch in turn pours out everything he has seen – the dismal prospects for all those who remain there once the winter comes are starkly presented.

As Murdoch continues to draw word pictures of what is happening at Gallipoli, as vivid as they are violent, Robinson is clearly moved. ‘The lunch,' Campbell-Jones would later recount, ‘which began with good humour and gaiety, finished with a sense of sombre disaster.'
⁴²

And yet, given the amount that needs to be done, there is little time for dwelling on doom. While Murdoch goes off to Australia's High Commission to cable his letter through to Prime Minister Fisher, Robinson makes arrangements to help Murdoch gain access to the most powerful people in the land.

For it fits exactly with what his proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, has been saying all along, the same Lord Northcliffe who, though momentarily absent on pressing business, has told the editor that he must do everything possible to help the Australian.

By late afternoon, the
Times'
editor has arranged for Murdoch to have breakfast the following morning with one of Lord Northcliffe's key allies on the issue, Sir Edward Carson – the Unionist Chairman of the British Cabinet's Dardanelles Committee – who listens carefully. That afternoon, Murdoch meets the most influential member of the War Cabinet after the Prime Minister, holder of the new portfolio of Minister of Munitions since May, Lloyd George.

This is typical of the Welshman, who has always pursued an open-door policy, seeing anyone and everyone who he thinks may have something worthwhile to say, regardless of their background, where they went to school, and so on … No airs and graces for him, and as a matter of fact very little furniture either … as when Murdoch meets Lloyd George in the newly rented premises at 6 Whitehall Gardens on the afternoon of 24 September, the sparseness of the environment is surprising. Lloyd George has no time for anything not to do with winning the war. And it is at this meeting that the matter takes on a momentum that not even Murdoch could have imagined.

Upon hearing the contents of the letter, Lloyd George is certain of one thing: it needs a wider airing. Merely sending it to the Australian Prime Minister, as Murdoch had done the day before, is likely to achieve little in the short term. Listen, Mr Murdoch, it is your ‘urgent duty … to place it at the disposal of the British Cabinet',
⁴³
including British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith.

Stunned at the speed with which things are moving – Murdoch is a man who has been on Gallipoli for no more than four days, and
he
is now the expert being consulted by the British Cabinet Ministers and perhaps the Prime Minister himself? – the Australian tries to demur, saying, ‘I do not think Mr Fisher would like me to do that at all.'
⁴⁴

But Lloyd George is at his persuasive best, insisting.

Murdoch finally agrees, and, after his departure, Lloyd George writes to Carson, describing the Australian as ‘exceptionally intelligent and sane. That makes the account he gave me of his visit to the Dardanelles … disquieting …'
⁴⁵
He goes on to say, ‘I agree that Murdoch's report does not differ in essentials from that furnished to us by Colonel Hankey …'
⁴⁶

Another parenthesis here. For, to be sure, Murdoch is not the only one making this kind of report about the Dardanelles, nor making such accusations about General Hamilton. In fact, there have been many others, starting with Ashmead-Bartlett on his visit back to London in June. As to Hankey, his report had been submitted to the Committee three weeks before Murdoch's, and, though couched in far more careful language – ‘The Government may well ask themselves whether they are justified in continuing a campaign which takes so tremendous a toll on the country in human life and material resources'
⁴⁷
– the upshot had been much the same.

For Hankey makes no bones about it, and his thrust is clear: ‘It is evident that every alternative must be examined before we are committed to so dangerous and speculative an operation as a winter campaign in the Gallipoli Peninsula.'
⁴⁸

More recently, Prime Minister Asquith's son, Arthur, serving at Cape Helles as a soldier, had written to his father, ‘This Ian Hamilton is the limit, and it is so obvious to all out here what a terrible mess and massacre he has made of the expedition from the start. I don't believe he has ever been in any of the front trenches and I can honestly say I have never once seen any of his staff officers there.'
⁴⁹

As to General Sir Frederick Stopford – who had been dismissed by General Hamilton a fortnight after the debacle of Suvla Bay and sent home – he had no sooner returned to London than he began writing memos and telling all who would listen that the incompetence lay with General Hamilton and his most senior staff, ‘making very serious charges about the general interference of G.H.Q. in the battle'.
⁵⁰

And in just the last week, one of those senior staff, the supremely well-connected Major Guy Dawnay, had also returned to the British capital, and he has been quietly letting the right people know that his superior officer is just not quite up to it. ‘The salient fact,' Dawnay would later be quoted as saying, ‘is that he was
no use.
'
⁵¹

And yet, if such blows against Hamilton's standing have seriously weakened the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, it is now Keith Murdoch who is placed in the position to deliver the knockout blow, if he can manage it. Close parenthesis.

In fact, the Murdoch letter is discussed at the Dardanelles Committee meeting that afternoon of 24 September, with Sir Edward Carson informing his colleagues that he has met an Australian, ‘Mulock', who, among other things, has given him ‘an appalling account of the provisions made for the sick and wounded on the peninsula'.
⁵²
Kitchener is interested enough to take down the Australian's name and address, and promises to see this ‘Mulock' and talk it over with him.

The next day, Keith Murdoch indeed sends two copies of his Fisher letter to Lloyd George, so that the Munitions Minister may keep one and pass one on to the Prime Minister. For the latter, Murdoch attaches a covering note:

On receipt of the explosive letter, Prime Minister Asquith moves quickly. On his orders, copies of it are quickly made and then distributed to every member of the Cabinet's Dardanelles Committee. Read this, and
then
see if you can make an argument that everything is okay. (One wonders, in passing, what the British Cabinet Ministers make of Murdoch's descriptions of the British at Suvla as ‘toy soldiers', and his assertion that, ‘The physique of those at Suvla is not to be compared with that of the Australians. Nor is their intelligence.')
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For Murdoch, meanwhile, a bewildering array of meetings, lunches and dinners follows, as he talks with everyone from Foreign Minister Edward Grey to Conservative Party Leader Andrew Bonar Law; from Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald McKenna to First Lord of the Admiralty Arthur James Balfour in the company of Colonel Maurice Hankey – the last of whom ‘objected to the tone' of the letter, if not its broad thrust.
⁵⁵
Murdoch even meets Winston Churchill, who defends Hamilton, and describes Murdoch's letter as ‘lurid',
⁵⁶
but such has the star of the former First Lord of the Admiralty faded by this time, it really matters little what he thinks. Along with Kitchener, he is regarded as one of the principal architects of the whole debacle. Of course he has to defend the whole campaign.

On one point, Prime Minister Asquith is perfectly clear, at least the way Murdoch would tell it afterwards: ‘Ashmead-Bartlett had a perfect right to communicate with me direct without the intervention of the army censor, and that is why on hearing that the War Office had retained possession of the letter, I immediately sent for it.'
⁵⁷

With so many copies of the explosive Murdoch letter now circulating, it is inevitable that Lord Northcliffe, now returned from his business trip, receives one. For the media baron who has so long run a campaign against Lord Kitchener – and lost no little bark from his shins and circulations from his mastheads in the process – the letter is manna from heaven.

Gallipoli vilification is his vindication! Here is a credible witness, just arrived from the Dardanelles, who is detailing just what a debacle Lord Kitchener – Northcliffe's sworn enemy – has presided over. The media baron immediately has copies of his own made, and passes them on to the editor of
The Times
and his key offsiders.

Hearing of it in turn, Keith Murdoch is suddenly alarmed at how such a sensitive document is now spreading like the plague. On the Monday morning, he dashes off a note to Lord Northcliffe:

Northcliffe replies, pointing out that he has only sent copies to the very tight circle within his paper who see all confidential documents, and, ‘You will never hear of the document from them,' which is the good news. And yet, Lord Northcliffe adds, ‘but I understand that the copy you sent to the Cabinet has apparently been shown to a newspaper editor. That is not my business, but, on the other hand, if I were in possession of the information you have, involving as it does the lives of thousands of your and of my compatriots, I should not be able to rest until the true story of this lamentable adventure was so well known as to force immediate steps to be taken to remedy the state of affairs.'
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In any case, even if Murdoch had wanted to, it is too late to get the genie back in the bottle. For that genie has turned into a cyclone, gathering strength, just as it gathers adherents who have long been saying what Murdoch is saying, and who now have the perfect person carrying the perfect document to create just the kind of storm required to blow down the existing structure.

The fact that this cyclone is blowing at a time when the British Government in general, and the British Generals specifically – and none more so than their chief, the Secretary for War, Lord Kitchener – are under pressure as never before is significant. For in France, the Battle of Loos, the British contribution to the major French offensive in Artois, has just taken place. Following a plan that Lord Kitchener has personally endorsed, using artillery shells that he has organised – which fail to make any impact on the barbed-wire defences – Loos has seen in the first instance 10,000 British soldiers trapped in open fields as withering machine-gun fire mows them down and a devastating barrage of shelling finishes the wounded. All for precious little gain of territory.

The first wave suffered 8000 casualties in less than four hours – and the British Army is on its way to suffering 16,000 dead and 44,000 wounded in the course of the one battle. (Twice the German rate of attrition.) The catastrophe is compounded when, for the first time, the British release canisters of poison gas … only for the wind to change, and another 2000 of their own men go down. All up, not even the censors will be able to keep the humiliating and appalling news from the public of what has happened to the first massed engagement of divisions of Kitchener's New Army.