Gallipoli (14 page)

There was one other point. De Robeck had very much Hoped that once he was in the Marmara Hamilton would land at Bulair on the neck of the peninsula, and that the Turkish Army, finding itself cut
off, would surrender. Thus there would no longer be any threat to the lifeline of the Fleet through the Dardanelles. But at the meeting Hamilton had announced that it could not be done. He had been
up to Bulair himself aboard the
Phaeton
, and had seen the network of entrenchments there. Hamilton now proposed that he should land instead at the tip of the peninsula and fight his way up
it. This altered the Fleet’s situation entirely. It meant that there would be no sudden collapse of the Turks; they would continue to hold the Narrows and threaten the supply ships coming
through. It was true that from the Marmara the Fleet could attack the Turkish forts from the rear. But how long would it take to destroy them? How long could the Fleet remain isolated in the
Marmara without coal and ammunition; and with the
Goeben
still intact? A fortnight? Three weeks?

There were of course grave dangers in delaying the renewal of
the naval attack until the Army was ready. With every day that went by the Turks were recovering from the
bombardment of the 18th, and one had only to look at the new entrenchments that appeared every morning on the cliffs to know that reinforcements were arriving. Well then, how much delay would there
be? Hamilton thought it would be about three weeks before he was ready. Had Kitchener allowed the 29th Division to sail at the beginning of February as he had originally intended, the troops would
be here now, and it would have been a very different story. But the 29th was still at sea, far down the other end of the Mediterranean,
⁶
and Hamilton did not
believe he could attack without them—and in fact Kitchener had expressly forbidden him to do so.

Birdwood disagreed with Hamilton over this. He said that it might be worth while taking a chance and landing there and then with whatever forces they could scrape together at Lemnos. But on
going into the matter it was found that every sort of equipment from guns to landing craft was missing. Moreover, the transports coming out from England had been stowed in the wildest confusion:
horses in one ship, harness in another: guns had been packed without their limbers and isolated from their ammunition. Nobody in England had been able to make up their minds as to whether or not
there were roads on the Gallipoli peninsula, and so a number of useless lorries had been put on board. To have landed on hostile beaches in these conditions would have been a hazardous thing. Nor
were there any facilities for repacking the ships at Lemnos. So now there was nothing for it but to take everything back to Alexandria in Egypt, and there re-group the whole force and its equipment
in some sort of battle order. Provided his administrative staff arrived in good time, Hamilton judged that the Army might be ready to land on Gallipoli somewhere about the middle of
April—say, April 14. Then the Army and the Navy could attack together.

Upon this the meeting of March 22 broke up.

Keyes was appalled when he got back to the
Queen Elizabeth
and heard the news. He pleaded with de Robeck not to change his plans. The new minesweeping force, he
said, would clear all their difficulties away, and they were bound to get through. To delay for the Army would be fatal.

De Robeck was still uneasy in his mind and he agreed to see Hamilton again. In the afternoon the two sailors went across to the
Franconia
where the General was living and Keyes set out
his arguments again. He was asked when his minesweepers would be ready, and he replied that it would be in about a fortnight’s time: April 3 or April 4. De Robeck then pointed out that since
Hamilton would be ready on April 14 this only meant a delay of ten days. ‘So,’ says Keyes, ‘the matter was finally settled.’ He adds, ‘I must confess I was fearfully
disappointed and unhappy.’

To this theme Keyes returned again and again in later days, and it finally emerges in an unrepentant counter blast in the memoirs he published in 1934: ‘I wish to place on record that I
had no doubt then, and have no doubt now—and nothing will ever shake my opinion—that from the 4th of April onwards the Fleet could have forced the straits and, with losses trifling
compared with those the Army suffered, could have entered the Marmara with sufficient force to destroy the Turco-German Fleet.’

By 1934 Keyes was an Admiral of the Fleet and a great man in the world, with a fighting record that put him almost in the Nelson class. But in 1915 he was no more than an exceptionally promising
young commodore, and he was no match for the steady conservatism of the Navy personified by de Robeck. De Robeck was no weakling—he was a kindly, firm, courageous and fair-minded
man—but he had had his training and he was the one who bore the responsibility. That sudden flash of inspiration that will sometimes transport a commander past all the accepted rules of
warfare into a field of daring that carries everything before it was perhaps lacking in the Admiral’s character, but he can hardly be blamed for that. His ‘no’ was a definite no;
it only remained now to learn how London would view this change of plan.

Churchill says he heard the news with consternation. He told the Dardanelles Commission later: ‘I regarded it (the battle of March 18) as only the first of several
days’ fighting, though the loss in ships sunk or disabled was unpleasant. It never occurred to me for a moment that we should not go on, within the limits of what we had decided to risk, till
we had reached a decision one way or another. I found Lord Fisher and Sir Arthur Wilson in the same mood. Both met me that morning (March 19) with expressions of firm determination to fight it
out.’

But now, on March 23, Churchill has a telegram from de Robeck saying that he will not move without the Army, and not for another three weeks. At once—and one can imagine with what
pugnacity—Churchill sat down and drafted a telegram ordering the Admiral to ‘renew the attack begun on March 18 at the first favourable opportunity’. Then, convening a meeting of
Fisher and the War Group at the Admiralty, he placed the telegram before them for their approval.

Describing this meeting, Churchill says: ‘For the first time since the war began, high words were used around the octagonal table.’ To Fisher and the other admirals it seemed that
with de Robeck’s telegram the situation at the Dardanelles had entirely altered. They had been willing, they said, to support the purely naval attack so long as the admiral on the spot had
recommended it. But now both de Robeck and Hamilton had turned against it. They knew the difficulties; they had the responsibility. To force them to attack against their own judgment would be
entirely wrong.

Churchill could make no headway against these views though he appears to have argued with great energy that morning. When finally the meeting broke up without a decision he still persisted in
his opinion. But it was evident that he was defeated. Asquith said that he agreed with Churchill, but he would not give the order against the advice of the admirals. De Robeck in a further exchange
of telegrams proved immovable. At the Dardanelles the bad weather continued, and Hamilton went off with his staff to Egypt. In London Kitchener informed the War Council that
the Army was now quite willing to take over from the Navy the task of opening the straits. With this there was nothing more to be said, and Churchill gave up at last. With good grace
he sent off a message to de Robeck saying that his new plans had been approved.

A silence now settled on the Gallipoli peninsula: no ship entered the straits, no gun was fired. The Fleet lay at anchor in the islands. The first part of the great adventure was over.

A
LTHOUGH
they knew they had inflicted great damage on the Allied Fleet on March 18 it never occurred to the German and Turkish gunners on the
Dardanelles that the Allied warships would not resume their attack on the following day. The men stood to their guns all through the morning of March 19, and when there was still no sign of the
enemy they presumed that it was the gale that was preventing the ships from coming back. But the rough weather subsided and as day followed day without any sign of the Fleet their sense of dazed
relief began to change into hope. By the end of the month this hope had developed into certainty.

There was one man in Constantinople who could claim that he had never been in the slightest doubt about this astonishing result. As early as February Enver had been saying to his friends in the
capital that it was all nonsense; there was nothing to be afraid of, the enemy would never get through. In March he went down to the Dardanelles to watch the battle, and on his return he announced
that the defences were absolutely solid; the gunners had plenty of ammunition, the minefields were intact. ‘I shall go down
in history,’ Enver said, ‘as the
man who demonstrated the vulnerability of the British Fleet. Unless they bring up a large army with them they will be caught in a trap. It seems to me a foolish enterprise.’
⁷

Since Enver’s military judgments in the past had been spectacularly unsound, few people, either among the diplomats or his colleagues, had been much reassured by this. Yet nothing could
shake him. He confided to Morgenthau one day that when he was in England before the war he had seen many of the leading men—Asquith, Churchill and Haldane—and had pointed out to them
that their ideas were out of date. Churchill had argued that England could defend herself with her Navy alone, and Enver had replied that no great empire could last that did not have an Army as
well. Now here was Churchill sending his Fleet to the Dardanelles so that he could prove to Enver that he was wrong. Well, they would see.

Turning to the Ambassador at the end of this interview, Enver said seriously: ‘You know, there is no one in Germany with whom the Emperor talks as intimately as I have talked with you
today.’

It was not entirely ridiculous. Already Enver was ruling as a dictator in the Ministry of War. No one dared to take a decision in his absence, and the oldest and most distinguished of
politicians and generals were obsequious before him. He thought nothing of keeping the Sultan waiting half an hour or more at a ceremony or a parade, and even Wangenheim was becoming alarmed at the
little colossus he had raised, especially when, after March 18, Enver’s position became more powerful than ever.

In the many histories of the Gallipoli campaign it is argued that the abortive naval attack on the Dardanelles was a cardinal error, not only because it failed but because it warned the Turks of
the approaching invasion and gave them time to fortify the peninsula. This, as we shall see in a moment, was true enough;
yet it seems possible that the political and
psychological effect of March 18 was even more important. It was the Turks’ first victory for many years. Since the beginning of the century the country had never known anything but defeat
and retreat, and they had grown used but not reconciled to the demoralizing spectacle of the refugees streaming back after nearly every battle. To take only one case out of millions, Mustafa
Kemal’s mother had been forced to decamp from Macedonia, and he found her penniless in Constantinople. Salonika, the city in which he had grown up and which he regarded as Turkish by right,
was now Greek.

One particularly appalling winter in Constantinople Aubrey Herbert had been moved to write:

Kemal, no doubt, really did see himself in this light, and there must have been many others like him.

Herbert wrote again: ‘In 1913, when the Balkans gained one smashing victory after another over the unequipped and unorganized Turkish forces every Greek café in Pera shouted its
song of triumph.’

Nor was it only the Greeks, the Armenians and the other foreign minorities who were witnessing the Turks’ humiliation; the great Christian powers had established sovereign prerogatives in
Turkey. They controlled her foreign trade, they administered her armed services and the police, they granted loans to the bankrupt government according to their judgment of its behaviour, and their
own nationals residing in Turkey were above the law: under the system of capitulations Western Europeans could only be tried for offences in their own courts. The obvious implication was that the
Turk was not only incompetent to
manage his own affairs, he was not yet civilized. He was Caliban, a dangerous but now docile monster; and the Christian powers were Prospero,
controlling him for his own good.

For the first five months of the war there had been very little change in these conditions. However much their religion and their instincts taught them to regard foreigners and Christians as
unclean slaves, lower than animals, the Young Turks still desired to be modern, to be Western, and they still affected to despise the methods of Abdul Hamid. Enver, it is true, had talked about
abolishing capitulations and of making foreign residents pay special taxes, but he soon dropped these ideas when he heard Baron von Wangenheim was against him.