The Gallipoli Letter (8 page)

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 shell-fire, under the expectation of attack, and in the anguish which is inescapable on this shell-torn spot. The troops will in reality be on guard throughout the winter. They will stand to arms throughout long and bitter nights. Nothing can be expected from them when at last the normal fighting days come again. The new offensive must then be made with a huge army of new troops. Can we get them? Already the complaint in France is that we cannot fill the gaps, that after an advance our thinned ranks cannot be replenished.

But I am not a pessimist, and if there is really military necessity for this awful ordeal, then I am sure the Australian troops will face it. Indeed, anxious though they are to leave the dreary and sombre scene of their wreckage, the Australian divisions would strongly resent the confession of failure that a withdrawal would entail. They are dispirited, they have been through such warfare as no army has seen in any part of the world, but they are game to the end.

On the high political question of whether good is to be served by keeping the armies in Gallipoli, I can say little, for I am uninformed. Cabinet Ministers here impress me with the fact that a failure in the Dardanelles would have most serious results in India. Persia is giving endless trouble, and there seems to be little doubt that India is ripe for trouble. Nor do I know whether the appalling outlay in money on the Dardanelles expedition, with its huge and costly line of communications, can be allowed to continue without endangering those financial resources on which we rely to so great an extent in the wearing down of Germany's strength. Nor do I know whether any offensive next year against Constantinople can succeed. On that point I can only say that the best military advice is that we can get through, that we would be through now if we had thrown in sufficient forces. Whyte, whom we both admire as an able soldier and an inspiring Australian leader, assures me that another 150,000 men would do the job. I presume that would mean a landing on a large scale somewhere in Thrace, or north of Bulair. Certainly, any advance against the extraordinary strong trenches—narrow and deep, like all the Turks' wonderful trench work, and covered with heavy timber overhead protection against shell fire and bombs, from our present positions seems impracticable. You would have wept with Hughes and myself if you have gone with us over the ground where two of our finest Light Horses regiments were wiped out in ten minutes in a brave effort to advance a few yards to Dead Man's Ridge. We lost five hundred men, squatter's sons and farmer's sons, on that terrible spot. Such is the cost of so much as looking out over the top of our trenches.

And now one word about the troops. No one who sees them at work in trenches and on beaches and in saps can doubt that their morale is very severely shaken indeed. It is far worse at Suvla, although the men there are only two months from home, than anywhere else. The spirit at Suvla is simply deplorable. The men have no confidence in the staff, and to tell the truth they have little confidence in London. I shall always remember the stricken face of a young English lieutenant when I told him he must make up his mind for a winter campaign. We had had a month of physical and mental torture, and the prospect of a winter seemed more than he could bear. But his greatest dread was that the London authorities would not begin until too late to send winter provisions. All the new army is still clothed in tropical uniforms, and when I left, London was still sending out drafts in thin “shorts”. Everywhere one encountered the same fear that the armies would be left to their fate, and that the many shipments of materials, food and clothing required for winter would not be despatched until the weather made their landing impossible. This lack of confidence in the authorities arises principally from the fact that every man knows that the last operations were grossly bungled by the general staff, and that Hamilton has led a series of armies into a series of culde-sacs. You would hardly believe the evidence of your own eyes at Suvla. You would refuse to believe that these men were really British soldiers. So badly shaken are they by their miserable defeats and by their surroundings, so physically affected are they by the lack of water and the monotony of a salt beef and rice diet, that they show an atrophy of mind and body that is appalling. I must confess that in our own trenches, where our men have been kept on guard for abnormally long periods, I saw the same terrible atrophy. You can understand how it arises. It is like the look of a tortured dumb animal. Men living in trenches with no movement except when they are digging, and with nothing to look at except a narrow strip of sky and the blank walls of their prisons, cannot remain cheerful or even thoughtful. Perhaps some efforts could have been made by the War Office to provide them with cinemas, or entertainments, but of course Gallipoli is at the end of a long and costly, not to say dangerous, line of communications. This fact is the only excuse for the excess of bully-beef feeding.

The physique of those at Suvla is not to be compared with that of the Australians. Nor is their intelligence. I fear also that the British physique is very much below that of the Turks. Indeed, it is quite obviously so. Our men have found it impossible to form a high opinion of the British K. men and territorials. They are merely a lot of childlike youths without strength to endure or brains to improve their conditions. I do not like to dictate this sentence, even for your eyes, but the fact is that after the first days at Suvla an order had to be issued to officers to shoot without mercy any soldiers who lagged behind or loitered in an advance. The Kitchener army showed perfection in manoeuvre training—they kept a good line on the Suvla plain—but that is not the kind of training required at the Dardanelles, and it is a question really of whether the training has been of the right kind. All this is very dismal, and they are of course only my impressions. But every Australian officer and man agrees with what I say.

At Anzac the morale is good. The men are thoroughly dispirited, except the new arrivals. They are weakened sadly by dysentery and illness. They have been overworked, through lack of reinforcements. And as an army of offence they are done. Not one step can be made with the first Australian division until it has been completely rested and refitted. But it is having only one month's rest at Mudros. The New Zealand and Australian Division (Godley's) also is reduced to only a few thousand men and has shot its bolt. But the men of Anzac would never retreat. And the one way to cheer them up is to pass the word that the Turks are going to attack, or that an assault by our forces is being planned. The great fighting spirit of the race is still burning in these men; but it does not burn amongst the toy soldiers of Suvla. You could imagine nothing finer that the spirit of some Australian boys—all of good parentage—who were stowed away on a troopship I was on in the Aegean, having deserted their posts in Alexandria out of mere shame of the thought of returning to Australia without having taken part in the fighting on Anzac's sacred soil. These fine country lads, magnificent men, knew that the desertion would cost them their stripes, but that and the loss of pay did not worry them. How wonderfully generous is the Australian soldier's view of life! These lads discussed quite fearlessly the prospects of their deaths, and their view was, “It is no disgrace for an Australian to die beside good pals in Anzac, where his best pals are under the dust.”

But I could pour into your ears so much truth about the grandeur of our Australian army, and the wonderful affection of those fine young soldiers for each other and their homeland, that your Australianism would become a more powerful sentiment than before. It is stirring 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 an Australian is the greatest privilege the world has to offer.

It is only these fighting qualities, and the special capacity of the Australian physique to endure hardship, that keep the morale at Anzac good. The men have great faith in Birdwood, Walker and Legge - not much in Godley. Birdwood struck me as a good army corps commander, but nothing more. He has not the fighting quality, not the big brain, of a great general. Walker is a plain hard-hitting soldier. We are lucky in these men. But for the general staff, and I fear for Hamilton, officers and men have nothing but contempt. They express it fearlessly. That however is not peculiar to Anzac. Sedition is talked round every tin of bully beef on the peninsula, and it is only loyalty that holds the forces together. Every returning troopship, every section of the line of communications, is full of the same talk. I like General Hamilton, and found him exceedingly kindly. I admire him as a journalist. But as a strategist he has completely failed. Undoubtedly, the essential and first step to restore the morale of the shaken forces is to recall him and his Chief of Staff, a man more cordially detested in our forces than Enver Pasha. What the army there wants is a young leader, a man who has had no past, and around whom the officers can rally. I am hoping strongly that Smith Dorrien will not be sent out, because whether he failed or not in France, he will be said to have failed; and the troops on the peninsula must not be allowed to harbour the suspicion that second rate goods are any longer considered good enough for them.

I cannot see any solution which does not begin with the recall of Hamilton. Perhaps before this reaches you this recall will have occurred. Do not believe anything you may see about a large reinforcement and a new offensive before the winter. That I fear is impossible. If after the Suvla Bay disaster we had had another hundred thousand men to pour into the peninsula, we might well have got through. But as it is, we hold positions that are nothing more than costly embarrassments. It is not for me to judge Hamilton, but it is plain that when an army has completely lost faith in its general, and he has on numerous occasions proved his weaknesses, only one thing can be done. He has very seldom been at Anzax [sic]. He lives at Imbros. The French call him the General who lives on an Island. The story may not be true, but the army believes that Hamilton left Suvla on August 21 remarking “Everything hangs in the balance, the Yeomanry are about to charge.” Of course the army laughs at a general who leaves the battlefield when everything hangs in the balance.

I could make this letter interminable, and I fear that I have only touched very incompletely on a few phases. What I want to say to you now very seriously is that the continuous and ghastly bungling over the Dardanelles enterprise was to be expected from such a General Staff as the British Army possesses, so far as I have seen it. The conceit and self-complacency of the red feather men are

PLATE 8 Three Anzac soldiers shelter from bursting shells in a shallow trench, June 1915. It took a couple of days for men to accept the random danger of life at Anzac—to stop ducking when they heard the whizz of a shell overhead, or not flinch when a bullet thudded into a sand-bagged parapet wall protecting them all.
Photographer
J.P. Campbell, by permission of the National Library of Australia, an23297150-v

equalled only by their incapacity. Along the line of communications, and especially at Mudros, are countless high officers and conceited young cubs who are plainly only playing at war. What can you expect of men who have never worked seriously, who have lived for their appearance and for social distinction and selfsatisfaction [sic], and who are now called on to conduct a gigantic war? Kitchener has a terrible task in getting pure work out of these men, whose motives can never be pure, for they are unchangeably selfish. I want to say frankly that it is my opinion, and that without exception of Australian officers, that appointments to the General Staff are made from motives of friendship and social influence. Australians now loathe and detest any Englishmen wearing red. Without such a purification of motive as will bring youth and ability to the top, we cannot win. I could tell you of many scandals, but the instance that will best appeal to you is that of the staff ship Aragon. She is a magnificent and luxurious South American liner, anchored in the Mudros harbour as a base for the Staff of the Inspector-General of Communications. I can give you no idea of how the Australians—and the new British officers too—loathe the Aragon. Heaven knows what she is costing, but certainly the staff lives in luxury. And nothing can exceed the rudeness of these chocolate general staff soldiers to those returning from the front. The ship's adjutant is the worst instance of rude and disgusting snobbishness and incapacity I have come across. With others, plain downright incapacity is the main characteristic. I must say this of them also, that whereas at our 3rd Australian General Hospital on shore we had 134 fever cases, including typhus, with only a few mosquito nets, and no ice, and few medical comforts, the Aragon staff was wallowing in ice. Colonel Stawell—you know him as Melbourne's leading consultant—and Sir Alex. M'Cormick are not sentimentalists. But they really wept over the terrible hardships of the wounded, due to the incapacity of the Aragon. One concrete case is that of 150 wounded men landed in dead of night, with no provision and no instructions, at the hospital beach, to make their way as best they could to the hospital, which had no notice of their arrival. Fiaschi, de Crespigny, Stawell and Kent Hughes will be able to tell you of the absolutely shocking difficulties of this hospital in face of perpetual snubbing and bungling of the Aragon staff. While I was at the hospital a beautiful general and his staff rode in to make an inspection. Despite their appearance as perfect specimens of the general staff, I thought, we shall now get the ice from the Aragon on to the brows of our unfortunate men. But no ice appeared next day. The navy is very good, and sent some comforts and ice across, but for the three days before my visit this ice had gone astray before it reached the hospital.