Gallipoli (60 page)

24 MAY 1915, AT ANZAC COVE, SMILING MAY YOU GO AND SMILING COME AGAIN

It has taken some time to organise – with negotiations begun after the 1st Brigade's Colonel Owen had waved the flag of the Red Cross – but on this day it happens. A truce has been negotiated. From 7.30 am onwards, soldiers on both sides are instructed to stand down – no guns fired, no bombs thrown, no grenades, no artillery. An amazing silence falls upon the trenches.

Colonel Fahrettin, the Chief of Staff of 3rd Corps and the Turkish officer who led the negotiations for the ceasefire, would recall, ‘There was a deep silence and the enemy ships were all of a sudden out of sight.'
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For the first time in weeks, men can hear the lapping of the Aegean Sea, even after the dawn. After some heavy rain overnight, a soft mist slowly rises from the gullies and settles over the trenches …

On the beach at Gaba Tepe, right by the tangle of barbed wire that marks the beginning of the path of no-man's-land that winds its way for two miles all the way around Anzac Cove – up valleys, through gullies, across plateaus and back down through bluffs before coming out on the beach again – two groups of Turkish and Anzac officers, each accompanied by 50 soldiers carrying sticks bearing white flags, assemble.
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All of the Anzac soldiers are given two packets of cigarettes, of which one is designated to be given to their Turkish counterpart.

The officers shake hands while the bristling soldiers survey each other warily … though at least the gift of cigarettes helps warm things a little. And then they start off, before, as described by journalist Compton Mackenzie, ‘the smell of death floated over the ridge above and settled down upon us, tangible, it seemed, and clammy as the membrane of a bat's wing'.
⁶¹

At least a light, almost cleansing rain begins to fall. Heading up the Second Ridge, the group keeps going till it comes to the first lot of corpses. A pairing of white-flag men are left there to mark the ‘middle line' of no-man's-land, while the rest of the group moves on.

According to the terms of the truce, the soldiers from each side are to come out of the trenches and bury their men on their side of the line, while taking enemy corpses to the middle line for the other side to bury. Enemy rifles are also to be returned, albeit with their bolts removed.

And so it begins, progressively, through all of no-man's-land. Tentatively at first, and then with growing confidence, the Anzacs and Turks rise from their trenches and slowly walk towards each other, scarcely believing that this is possible, that they could really be upright in no-man's-land without being shot to pieces.

These men from countries on opposite sides of the planet continue to walk towards each other – over the corpses of their fallen friends, their brothers, the enemies who they have shot – until they are face to face.

This
is Johnny Turk up close? He looks … he looks … well, frankly, a bit like we do. Darker, certainly, and smaller, sure, but instead of the sneering half-humans the Allies had been expecting, the image they have conjured up over the weeks, they are
men …
just like them.

And the Turks clearly feel much the same. They had been led to believe that the Anzacs are cannibals and have started to call them ‘White Gurkhas'.
⁶²
But they don't look so much like cannibals as … well … young, fair-faced, wide-eyed boys. As for the newly arrived Light Horsemen, though, the Turks are quite surprised by their get-up and have already started to make them the butt of a few jokes. It seems they are quickly coming to the consensus that ‘the men with the fur round their hats are not as good as fighters as the Australians'.
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The first thing is to quickly look for any signs of life among the thousands of bodies, and occasionally there actually are some, with those survivors rushed away by the stretcher-bearers. But before long, both sides are heavily engaged in the real task at hand: burying their dead. (Not all join in, to be sure, with one Australian soldier exclaiming, ‘I don't mind killing, but I bar burying the cows!')
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While the smell of the dead in the trenches has been awful, here it is overpowering, gut-wrenching, nauseating, and more than a few men on both sides sink to their knees and throw up. There are only two basic ways of coping with the stench. One is to take some of the wool soaked in antiseptic proffered by the Turkish Red Crescent men – the equivalent of the Red Cross, with the symbol changed for religious reasons – and stuff it up your nostrils, though this method needs to be constantly renewed.

The other way is to smoke, and on this day even non-smokers are seen puffing away while burying soldier after soldier beneath the sod. One Australian Digger looks down to see ‘squelching up from the ground on either side of my boot like a rotten mangold the deliquescent green and black flesh of a Turk's head'.
⁶⁵

He sees an entire parapet made out of dead bodies.

Despite the gravity of the situation, however, there is still some levity when at one point some Turkish soldiers burst into laughter as their Australian counterparts hold up cigarettes and call out ‘
Baksheesh!
'.
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Before long, they are all exchanging cigarettes with their ‘enemies', and even exchanging pleasantries. One Turkish soldier offers his considered and clearly heartfelt view to his Australian counterpart: ‘English good – German no good.'
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But back to work.

The bodies that have been lying there for four weeks are the worst; they are black and bloated, and mostly only identifiable by the identification discs around their necks. The major problem with these bodies is that they tend to break up as you move them. You can be left holding an arm or a leg, as the tissues burst apart and the gases escape, emitting a stench that can bring even a strong man low. But at least the lack of identification helps hide the horror of what you are doing.

When it comes to the more recent corpses, there is no hiding it: these are clearly men –
mates
– whom you'd often known for months, whom you'd joined up with, trained with, travelled with and fought alongside. And many a man is seen to weep as he finds a beloved friend, a brother, a brother-in-arms, whom he had last seen charging forward, only to finish here as this decomposing mess, with an agonised expression on what remains of his face – his death grimace.

On their side, the Turks are doing it even tougher. To begin with, there are so many more of their dead – as many as 10,000 by one, likely exaggerated, count. In the words of a Turkish captain talking with British intelligence officer Captain Aubrey Herbert, a speaker of the Turkish language who had been instrumental in arranging the truce, ‘At this spectacle even the most gentle must feel savage, and the most savage must weep.'
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Inevitably, the middle line soon proves to be very blurred, as neither army particularly cares where it is. They just concentrate on getting the bodies buried, usually under about only half a foot of soil. Yes, there might be a problem should the rain become heavy and wash that soil away, but for now they have no choice. There are simply too many bodies to worry about burying them deeper.

Soon enough, there is even more fraternising. ‘After lunch,' Fahrettin would recall, ‘it started to get more crowded and the men of the Australian–New Zealand Corps started to teach our soldiers English words.

‘One of the first words they taught us was “ANZAC”, which was the name given to their group of soldiers. And it was at that time that we first really met these charming and good-humoured people.

‘“Are you English?” one Turkish soldier asked.

‘“No, we aren't English. We are Australian and New Zealanders …”

‘When we asked, “Why are you in this war?” they answered, “The English are our brothers. Our religion and our culture are one and the same.”

‘At every opportunity, the ANZACs showed that they liked our soldiers' attitudes and actions. Within a short amount of time, sympathy grew up between the two sides. The Anzacs would rip buttons and badges off their uniforms and give it to our soldiers as a memento, and would ask for something in return. Because the buttons on our uniforms were hidden, our soldiers looked for something else to give them, one soldier finding a small coin which he handed to the man across from him. They gave each other chocolate and sweets and began to talk with each other using sign language …'
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One Australian soldier, amazed at the sheer contours of a particularly gigantic Turkish soldier, pulls out a tape measure and asks if he can measure him. The Turk laughs and graciously concedes to the request.

He was a bloody GIANT, I tell you!

In many areas where the Turkish dead are thick and the Australian dead more scattered and quickly buried, the Australians take advantage of the lull and go down to the ocean. By 2 pm, one soldier would record in his diary, ‘the sandy stretch of beach reminded one of Cronulla or Maroubra, so numerous were the bathers & as the day advanced it became so thick I had grave fears of the trenches in case of treachery'.
⁷⁰

Charles Bean takes the opportunity to visit the most dangerous place at Anzac, the most forward, exposed position – Quinn's Post – and is shocked, not just by the obvious precariousness of the position, and that his tall figure has to bend particularly low to stay safe …

‘In one trench there is an archway such as you often find, left to avoid enfilading fire, I suppose. It is not four foot – scarcely three foot – thick; but in it is a dead Turk. His boot and his fingers of one hand stick out from the roof as you squeeze your way under.'
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And Bean is not the only one taking advantage of the truce to have a stickybeak at things he would not otherwise get close to. A number of the Turkish ‘soldiers' edging close to Anzac lines are in fact Turkish officers in the uniforms of their men … and one of the Australian ‘privates' is none other than General Birdwood!
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By 4 pm, most of the men are back to their posts, as the time is drawing close for the truce to be over. By 4.17 pm, the white-flag men are retired, after first shaking hands with their counterparts.

Captain Aubrey Herbert chaffs the Turks he is with, saying, ‘You will shoot me, tomorrow.'
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‘God forbid!' they cry back in chorus, laughing and cheering. ‘We will never shoot you.' And now a group of Australians go to shake hands with the Turks: ‘Goodbye, old chap. Good luck!'

‘
Oghur Ola gule gule gedejekseniz, gule gule gelejekseniz
,' the Turks reply.
⁷⁴
‘Smiling may you go and smiling come again.'
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It is with some regret, then, that the two sides take their leave of each other, shaking hands and waving goodbye as, one by one, they climb back into their trenches, all on the strict understanding that it will be 25 minutes before the battle resumes.

A strange kind of hush now falls over Anzac Cove. There is wonder at what has happened on this day, and even exuberance at this breakthrough of humanity that they have all been privileged to be a part of. There is desperate sadness at the things they have seen, the once-cherished friends they have buried. And there is real melancholy: now that the armistice is over, they must once again take up arms and kill or be killed by the very men with whom they had been sharing cigarettes just a few minutes earlier.

At 4.45 pm, a single shot rings out, followed shortly afterwards by another, and then a burst of a machine-gun, and then another, and then a bomb explodes.

It is on again.

25 MAY 1915, OFF CAPE HELLES. FOR ELLIS ASHMEAD-BARTLETT, DIFFERENT DAY, SAME OLD STORY

25 MAY 1915, A POLITICAL CRISIS IN LONDON

With the extent of the debacle in the Dardanelles now becoming ever more apparent to both the public and the political class, it is inevitable that someone will have to pay the piper, and who better than the man who has championed the campaign all along: Winston Churchill? That certainly is the view taken by the shaken Prime Minister Asquith. On this day, he does a deal with the Conservative Opposition whereby they will form part of a Coalition government that retains him as PM but sees the end of Churchill – a one-time Conservative himself before defecting to the Liberals in 1904, so he has it coming – as the First Lord of the Admiralty.

‘I am finished,' Churchill tells the Prime Minister when advised that he will have to leave the Admiralty, ‘finished in respect of all I care for; the waging of war.'
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Asquith would have liked to rid himself of the troublesome Kitchener, too, but while it is one thing for Lord Northcliffe to have shed three-quarters of his readership by attacking the Secretary of State for War, the newly formed Coalition cannot yet afford to lose the same number of votes by doing the same.

So for the moment, it is Churchill who suffers alone.

‘I'm finished,'he repeats to his great friend, Herbert Asquith's daughter, Violet Bonham Carter.
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Standing alone by the edge of a manicured lawn by a river, he appears to her ‘like Napoleon on St Helena'.
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There can surely be no way back from here. And yet he will prove to be not the only one with a sinking feeling on the day …