John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works Page 17

  The main blow was given, none the less, by the troops near Chunuk. Three columns were formed in the pitchy blackness of the very early morning of the 9th, two to seize and clear Chunuk and Hill Q, the third to pass from Hill Q on the wave of the assault to the peak of Koja Chemen. The first two columns were on the lower slopes of Chunuk and in the fields about the Farm, with orders to attack at dawn. The third column, consisting wholly of English troops, was not yet on the ground, but moving during the night up the Chailak Dere. The Dere was jammed with pack-mules, ammunition, and wounded men; it was pitch-dark, and the column made bad going, and those leading it were doubtful of the way. Brigadier-General Baldwin, who commanded, left his brigade in the Dere, went to the headquarters of the first column, and brought back guides to lead his brigade into position. The guides led him on in the darkness, till they realized that they were lost. The Brigadier marched his men back to the Chailak, and then, still in pitch-darkness, up a nullah into the Aghyl Dere, and from there, in growing light, towards the Farm. This wandering in the darkness had tragical results.

  At half-past four the guns from the ships and the army opened on Chunuk, and the columns moved to the assault. Soon the peaks of their objective were burning like the hills of hell to light them on their climb to death, and they went up in the half-darkness to the storm of a volcano spouting fire, driving the Turks before them. Some of the Warwicks and South Lancashires were the first upon the top of Chunuk; Major Allanson, leading the 6th Gurkhas, was the first on the ridge between Chunuk and Hill Q. Up on to the crests came the crowding sections; the Turks were breaking and falling back. Our men passed over the crests, and drove the Turks down on the other side. Victory was flooding up over Chunuk like the Severn tide; our men had scaled the scarp, and there below them lay the ditch, the long grey streak of the Hellespont, the victory and the reward of victory. The battle lay like a field ripe to the harvest: our men had but to put in the sickle. The third column was the sickle of that field, that third column which had lost its way in the blackness of the wilderness. Even now that third column was coming up the hill below; in a few minutes it would have been over the crest, going on to victory with the others. Then, at that moment of time, while our handful on the hilltop waited for the weight of the third column to make its thrust a death-blow, came the most tragical thing in all that tragical campaign.

  It was barely daylight when our men won the hilltop. The story is that our men moving on the crest were mistaken for Turks, or (as some think) that there was some difference in the officers’ watches – some few minutes’ delay in beginning the fire of the guns, and therefore some few minutes’ delay in stopping the bombardment, which had been ordered to continue upon the crest for three-quarters of an hour from 4.30 a.m. Whatever the cause, whether accident, fate, mistake, or the daily waste and confusion of battle, our own guns searched the hilltop for some minutes too long, and thinned out our brave handful with a terrible fire. They were caught in the open and destroyed there; the Turks charged back upon the remnant, and beat them off the greater part of the crest. Only a few minutes after this the third column came into action in support: too late.

  The Turks beat them down the hill to the Farm, but could not drive the men of the first column from the south-western half of the top of the Chunuk. All through the hard and bloody day of the 9th of August the Turks tried to carry this peak, but never quite could, though the day was one long succession of Turk attacks, the Turks fresh and in great strength, our men weary from three terrible days and nights and only a battalion strong, since the peak would not hold more. The New Zealanders and some of the 13th Division held that end of Chunuk. They were in trenches which had been dug under fire, partly by themselves, partly by the Turks. In most places these trenches were only scratchings in the ground, since neither side on that blazing and stricken hill could stand to dig. Here and there, in sheltered patches, the trenches were three feet deep, but whether three feet deep or three inches, all were badly sited, and in some parts had only ten yards’ field of fire. In these pans or scratchings our men fought all day, often hand to hand, usually under a pelt of every kind of fire, often amid a shower of bombs, since the Turks could creep up under cover to within so few yards. Our men lost very heavily during the day, but at nightfall we still held the peak. After dark the 6th Loyal North Lancashires relieved the garrison, took over the trenches, did what they could to strengthen them, and advanced them by some yards here and there. At four o’clock on the morning of the 10th, the 5th Wiltshires came up to support them, and lay down behind the trenches in the ashes, sand, and scattered rubble of the hilltop. Both battalions were exhausted from four days and nights of continual fighting, but in very good heart. At this time these two battalions marked the extreme right of our new line; on their left, stretching down to the Farm, were the 10th Hampshires, and near the Farm the remains of the third column under General Baldwin. There may have been in all some 5,000 men on Chunuk and within a quarter of a mile of it round the Farm.

  In the darkness before dawn, when our men on the hill were busy digging themselves better cover for the day’s battle, the Turks, now strongly reinforced from Bulair and Asia, assaulted Chunuk with not less than 15,000 men. They came on in a monstrous mass, packed shoulder to shoulder, in some places eight deep, in others three or four deep. Practically all their first line were shot by our men, practically all the second line were bayoneted, but the third line got into our trenches and overwhelmed the garrison. Our men fell back to the second line of trenches, and rallied and fired; but the Turks overwhelmed that line too, and then with their packed multitude they paused and gathered like a wave, burst down on the Wiltshire Regiment, and destroyed it almost to a man. Even so, the survivors, outnumbered forty to one, formed and charged with the bayonet, and formed and charged a second time, with a courage which makes the charge of the Light Brigade seem like a dream. But it was a hopeless position. The Turks came on like the sea, beat back all before them, paused for a moment, set rolling down the hill upon our men a number of enormous round bombs, which bounded into our lines and burst, and then following up this artillery they fell on the men round the Farm in the most bloody and desperate fight of the campaign.

  Even as they topped Chunuk and swarmed down to engulf our right, our guns opened upon them in a fire truly awful; but thousands came alive over the crest, and went down to the battle below. Stragglers running from the first rush put a panic in the Aghyl Dere, where bearers, doctors, mules, and a multitude of wounded were jammed up with soldiers trying to get up to the fight. Some of our men held up against this thrust of the Turks, and in that first brave stand General Baldwin was killed. Then our line broke, the Turks got fairly in among our men with a weight which bore all before it, and what followed was a long succession of British rallies to a tussle body to body, with knives and stones and teeth – a fight of wild beasts in the ruined cornfields of the Farm. Nothing can be said of that fight, no words can describe nor any mind imagine it, except as a roaring and blazing hour of killing. Our last reserves came up to it, and the Turks were beaten back; very few of their men reached their lines alive. The Turk dead lay in thousands all down the slopes of the hill; but the crest of the hill, the prize, remained in Turk hands, not in ours.

  That ended the battle of the 6th to 10th of August. We had beaten off the Turks, but our men were too much exhausted to do more. They could not go up the hill again. Our thrust at Sari Bair had failed. It had just failed, by a few minutes, though unsupported from the left. Even then, at the eleventh hour, two fresh battalions and a ton of water would have made Chunuk ours; but we had neither the men nor the water. Sari was not to be our hill. Our men fought for four days and nights in a wilderness of gorse and precipice to make her ours. They fought in a blazing sun, without rest, with little food and with almost no water, on hills on fire and on crags rotting to the tread. They went, like all their brothers in that Peninsula, on a forlorn hope, and by bloody pain they won the image and the taste of victory; and the
n, when their reeling bodies had burst the bars, so that our race might pass through, there were none to pass; the door was open, but there were none to go through it to triumph. And then, slowly, as strength failed, the door was shut again, the bars were forged again, victory was hidden again, all was to do again, and our brave men were but the fewer and the bitterer for all their bloody sacrifice for the land they served. All was to do again after the 10th of August; the great battle of the campaign was over. We had made our fight, we had seen our enemy beaten and the prize displayed, and then (as before at Helles) we had to stop for want of men, till the enemy had remade his army and rebuilt his fort.

  VI

  The day passed, the night came, the King lay down in his vaulted room. St. Gabriel came from God to call him. “Charles, summon the army of your Empire, and go by forced marches into the land of Bire, to the city that the pagans have besieged. The Christians call and cry for you.” The Emperor wished not to go. “God,” he said. “How painful is my life!” He wept from his eyes, he tore his white beard. – The End of the Song of Roland.

  That, in a way, was the end of the campaign, for no other attempt to win through was made. The Turks were shaken to the heart. Another battle following at once might well have broken them. But we had not the men nor the shells for another battle. In the five days’ battle on the front of twelve miles we had lost very little less than a quarter of our entire army, and we had shot away most of our always scanty supply of ammunition. We could not attack again till 50,000 more men were landed and the store of shells replenished. Those men and shells were not near Gallipoli, but in England, where the war as a whole had to be considered. The question to be decided, by those directing the war as a whole, was, “Should those men and shells be sent?” It was decided by the High Direction that they should not be sent; the effort, therefore, could not be made.

  Since the effort could not be made, the campaign declined into a secondary operation – to contain large reserves of Turks, with their guns and munitions, from use elsewhere, in Mesopotamia or in the Caucasus. But before it became this, a well-planned and well-fought effort was made from Suvla to secure our position by seizing the hills to the east of the Bay. This attack took place on the 21st of August, in intense heat, across an open plain without cover of any kind, blazing throughout nearly all its length with scrub fires. The 29th Division (brought up from Cape Helles) carried Scimitar Hill with great dash, and was then held up. The attack on Ismail Oglu failed. Two thrusts, made by the men of Anzac in the latter days of August, secured an important well and the Turk stronghold of Hill 60. This last success made the line from Anzac to Suvla impregnable.

  After this, since no big attempt could be made by the Allied troops, and no big attempt was made by the enemy, the fighting settled down into trench warfare on both sides. There was some shelling every day and night, some machine gun and rifle fire, much sniping, great vigilance, and occasional bombing and mining. The dysentery, which had been present ever since the heats began, increased beyond all measure: very few men in all that army were not attacked and weakened by it. Many thousands went down with it; Mudros, Alexandria, and Malta were filled with cases; many died.

  Those who remained, besides carrying on the war by daily and nightly fire, worked continually with pick and shovel to improve the lines. Long after the war, the goatherd on Gallipoli will lose his way in the miles of trenches which zigzag from Cape Helles to Achi Baba and from Gaba Tepe to Ejelmer Bay. They run to and fro in all that expanse of land, some of them shallow, others deep cuttings in the marl, many of them paved with stone or faced with concrete, most of them sided with little caverns, leading far down (in a few cases) to rooms twenty feet under the ground. Long after we are all dust, the goats of Gallipoli will break their legs in those pits and ditches, and over their coffee round the fire the elders will say that they were dug by devils and the sons of devils, and antiquarians will come from the West to dig there, and will bring away shards of iron and empty tins and bones. Fifty years ago some French staff officers traced out the works round Durazzo, where Pompey the Great fought just such another campaign, two thousand years ago. Two thousand years hence, when this war is forgotten, those lines under the ground will draw the staff officers of whatever country is then the most cried for brains.

  Those lines were the homes of thousands of our soldiers for half a year and more. There they lived and did their cooking and washing, made their jokes and sang their songs. There they sweated under their burdens, and slept, and fell in to die. There they marched up the burning hill, where the sand devils flung by the shells were blackening heaven; there they lay in their dirty rags awaiting death; and there by thousands up and down they lie buried, in little lonely graves where they fell, or in the pits of the great engagements.

  Those lines at Cape Helles, Anzac, and Suvla, were once busy towns, thronged by thousands of citizens, whose going and coming and daily labour were cheerful with singing, as though those places were mining camps during a gold rush, instead of a perilous front where the fire never ceased and the risk of death was constant. But for the noise of war, coming in an irregular rattle, with solitary big explosions, the screams of shells, or the wild whistling crying of ricochets, they seemed busy but very peaceful places. At night, from the sea, the lamps of the dugouts on the cliffs were like the lights of sea-coast towns in summer, and the places seemingly as peaceful, but for the pop and rattle of fire and the streaks of glare from the shells. There was always singing, sometimes very good and always beautiful, coming in the crash of war; and always one heard the noises of the work of men – the beat of pile-drivers, wheels going over stones, and the little solid pobbing noises, from bullets dropping in the sea.

  I have said that those positions were like mining camps during a gold rush. Ballarat, the Sacramento, and the camps of the Transvaal, must have looked strangely like those camps at Suvla and Cape Helles. Anzac at night was like those crags of old building over the Arno at Florence; by day it was a city of cliff dwellers, stirring memories of the race’s past. An immense expanse was visible from all these places: at Cape Helles there was the plain rising gradually to Achi Baba, at Anzac a wilderness of hills, at Suvla the same hills seen from below. Over all these places came a strangeness of light, unlike anything to be seen in the West, a light which made the hills clear and unreal at the same time, softening their savagery into peace, till they seemed not hills but swellings of the land, as though the land there had breathed in and risen a little. All the places were dust-coloured as soon as the flowers had withered, a dark dust-colour where the scrub grew (often almost wine-dark like our own hills where heather grows), a pale sand colour where the scrub gave out, and elsewhere a paleness and a greyness as of moss and lichen and old stone. On this sandy and dusty land, where even the trees were grey and ghostly (olive and Eastern currant), the camps were scattered, a little and a little, never much in one place on account of shelling, till the impression given was one of multitude.

  The signs of the occupation began far out at sea, where the hospital ships lay waiting for their freight. There were always some there, painted white and green, lying outside the range of the big guns. Nearer to the shore were the wrecks of ships, some of them sunk by our men, to make breakwaters, some sunk by the Turk shells, some knocked to pieces or washed ashore by foul weather. Nearly all these wrecks were of small size, trawlers, drifters, and little coastwise vessels such as peddle and bring home fish on the English coasts. Closer in, right on the beaches, were the bones of still smaller boats, pinnaces, cutters, and lighters, whose crews had been the men of the first landings. Men could not see those wrecks without a thrill. There were piers at all the beaches, all built under shellfire, to stand both shellfire and the sea, and at the piers there was always much busy life, men singing at their work, horses and mules disembarking, food and munitions and water discharging, wounded going home and drafts coming ashore. On the beaches were the hieroglyphs of the whole bloody and splendid story; there were the mar
ks and signs, which no one could mistake nor see unmoved.

  Even after months of our occupation the traces were there off the main tracks. A man had but to step from one of the roads into the scrub, and there they lay, relics of barbed wire (blown aside in tangles), round shrapnel-bullets in the sand, empty cartridge-cases, clips of cartridge-cases bent double by a blow yet undischarged, pieces of flattened rifle barrel, rags of leather, broken bayonets, jags and hacks of shell, and, in little hollows, little heaps of cartridge-cases where some man had lain to fire for hour after hour, often until he died at his post, on the 25th of April. Here, too, one came upon the graves of soldiers, sometimes alone, sometimes three or four together, each with an inscribed cross and border of stones from the beach. Privates, sergeants, and officers lay in those graves, and by them, all day long, the work, which they had made possible by that sacrifice on the 25th, went on in a stream, men and munitions going up to the front, and wounded and the dying coming down, while the explosions of the cannon trembled through the earth to them, and the bullets piped and fell over their heads.

  But the cities of those camps were not cities of the dead, they were cities of intense life, cities of comradeship and resolve, unlike the cities of peace. At Mudros, all things seemed little, for there men were dwarfed by their setting; they were there in ships, which made even a full battalion seem only a cluster of heads. On the Peninsula they seemed to have come for the first time to full stature. There they were bigger than their surroundings. There they were naked manhood pitted against death in the desert, and more than holding their own.