Authors: Alan Moorehead
All the remaining men in the open were now sent back to their lines, and Herbert made a last minute inspection along the front, reminding the Turks that firing was not to begin again for a
further twenty-five minutes. He was answered with salaams, and he too finally dropped out of sight. At 4.45 p.m. a Turkish sniper fired from somewhere in the hills. Immediately the Australians
answered and the roar of high explosive closed over the battlefield again.
There had been some irregularities. On both sides a good deal of surreptitious digging had been done, and both Turkish and British staff officers had strolled about no-man’s-land, covertly
studying the lie of each other’s trenches. It was even said—and the
story has never been denied in Turkey—that Kemal had disguised himself as a sergeant and
had spent the whole nine hours with various burial parties close to the Anzac trenches.
Much the most important result of the battle and the truce, however, was that from this time onwards all real rancour against the Turks died out in the Anzac ranks. They now knew the enemy from
their own experience, and he had ceased to be a propaganda figure. He was no longer a coward, a fanatic or a monster. He was a normal man and they thought him very brave.
This camaraderie with the enemy—the mutual respect of men who are committed to killing one another—was not peculiar to Gallipoli for it existed also in France; but on this isolated
battlefield it had a special intensity. The Australian and New Zealand troops refused to use the gas-masks that were now issued to them. When they were questioned about this they made some such
reply as, ‘The Turks won’t use gas. They’re clean fighters.’
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Had the soldiers known Enver a little better they might not have been so certain of this; yet perhaps they did know Enver, for politicians generally were held in contempt at Gallipoli and by
both sides, and in a way that seldom occurred in the second world war. Soon many of the British began to feel as Herbert felt: that the campaign need never have been fought at all had only the
politicians acted more responsibly in the beginning.
The extreme ferocity with which the battles were fought at Gallipoli gives no inkling of the compassion that the opposing soldiers in the front line felt for one another. In the periods of
comparative calm which followed May 19 at Anzac, the most bizarre incidents occurred. Once a staff officer visiting the front saw with astonishment that a number of Turks were walking about behind
their lines in full view of the Australians. He asked, ‘Why don’t you shoot?’ and was answered, ‘Well, they’re not doing any harm are they? Might as well leave the
poor beggars alone.’ Later in the campaign there was an old Turk who apparently had been given the job of doing the washing for his platoon. Regularly each day he emerged from his trench and
hung
out the wet shirts and socks in a line along the parapet, and no Allied soldier would have dreamed of shooting him. The Turks on their side usually withheld their fire
from the survivors of wrecked ships, and in the front line at least their prisoners were treated with kindness.
There was a constant traffic of gifts in the trenches, the Turks throwing over grapes and sweets, the Allied soldiers responding with tinned food and cigarettes. The Turks had no great love for
British beef. A note came over one day: ‘Bully beef—non. Envoyez milk.’ It became an accepted practice to wave a ‘wash-out’ to a sniper who missed: there would be the
sudden crack of a rifle, the bullet screaming past the Turk’s head, then the laugh from the enemy trench, the waving of a spade or a bayonet and the words in English softly shouted,
‘Better luck next time, Tommy.’
Once or twice private duels were fought. While the rest of the soldiers on both sides held their fire an Australian and a Turk would stand up on the parapets and blaze away at one another until
one or the other was wounded or killed, and something seemed to be proved—their skill, their wish ‘to dare’, perhaps most of all their pride. Then in a moment all would dissolve
into the horror and frenzy of a raid or a setpiece battle, the inhuman berserk killing.
Between the two extremes, between the battles and the truce, between fighting and death, the men had to come to terms with their precarious existence. They soon developed habits that fitted
their mad surroundings, and they did this very rapidly and very well. The rabbit warren of trenches and dugouts at Anzac became more familiar to them than their own villages and homes. By night ten
thousand shaded fires were lit in niches in the cliffs, ten thousand crude meals were cooked; they slept, they waited for their precious mail, their one reminder of the lost sane world, they put
the individual extra touch to their dug-outs—another shelf in the rock, a blanket across the opening, a biscuit tin to hold a tattered book. They knew every twist in the paths where a
sniper’s bullet would come thudding in, they accepted wounding
as they might have accepted an accident on the football field, they argued about the war and the confined
beehive politics of their battalions, they took the risk of bathing in the sea under the bursting shrapnel and nothing would stop them doing it. They cursed and complained and dreamed and this in
fact was home.
No stranger visiting the Anzac bridgehead ever failed to be moved and stimulated by it. It was a thing so wildly out of life, so dangerous, so high-spirited, such a grotesque and theatrical
setting and yet reduced to such a calm and almost matter-of-fact routine. The heart missed a beat when one approached the ramshackle jetty on the beach, for the Turkish shells were constantly
falling there, and it hardly seemed that anyone could survive. Yet once ashore a curious sense of heightened living supervened. No matter how hideous the noise, the men moved about apparently
oblivious of it all, and with a trained and steady air as though they had lived there all their lives; and this in itself was a reassurance to everyone who came ashore. The general aspect was of a
vast mining camp in some savage desert valley. Close to the shore were die dug-outs of the generals, the wireless station, the telephone exchange, the searchlights, a factory for making bombs, a
corral for Turkish prisoners, a smithy. Scores of placid mules sheltered in the gully until at nightfall they began their work of taking ammunition and supplies to the men in the trenches in the
hills above—the water ration was a pannikin a day. There was a smoking incinerator near the jetty, and it erupted loudly whenever an unexploded bullet fell into the flames. An empty shellcase
served as a gong for the headquarters officers’ mess. They ate bully beef, biscuits, plum and apple jam, and just occasionally frozen meat; never vegetables, eggs, milk or fruit.
Above the beach a maze of goat tracks spread upward through the furze and the last surviving patches of prickly oak, and at every step of the way some soldier had made his shelter in the side of
the ravine: a hole dug into the ground, the branches of trees or perhaps a piece of canvas for a roof, a blanket, a few tins and boxes, and that was all. As one progressed upward there were many
crude notices of warning against the enemy snipers:
Keep Well to Your Left. Keep Your Head Down. Double Across One at a Time. Then finally the trenches themselves, where all
day long the men stood to their arms, watching and watching through their periscopes for the slightest movement in the enemy lines. Cigarettes dangled from their mouths. They talked quietly.
Hamilton came over to the bridgehead on May 30 and saw, ‘Men staggering under huge sides of frozen beef: men struggling up cliffs with kerosene tins full of water; men digging; men
cooking; men cardplaying in small dens scooped out from the banks of yellow clay—everyone wore a Bank Holiday air; evidently the ranklings and worries of mankind—miseries and concerns
of the spirit—had fled the precincts of this valley. The Boss—the bill—the girl—envy, malice, hunger, hatred—had scooted away to the Antipodes. All the time, overhead,
the shell and rifle bullets groaned and whined, touching just the same note of violent energy as was in evidence everywhere else. To understand that awful din, raise the eyes twenty-five degrees to
the top of the cliff which closes in the tail end of the valley and you can see the Turkish hand-grenades bursting along the crest, just where an occasional bayonet flashes and figures hardly
distinguishable from Mother Earth crouch in an irregular line. Or else they rise to fire and are silhouetted against the sky and then you recognize the naked athletes from the Antipodes and your
heart goes into your mouth as a whole bunch of them dart forward suddenly, and as suddenly disappear. And the bomb shower stops dead—for the moment; but, all the time, from that fiery crest
line which is Quinn’s, there comes a slow constant trickle of wounded—some dragging themselves painfully along; others being carried along on stretchers. Bomb wounds all; a ceaseless
silent stream of bandages and blood. Yet three out of four of “the boys” have grit left for a gay smile or a cheery little nod to their comrades, waiting for their turn as they pass,
pass, pass, down on their way to the sea.
‘There are poets and writers who see naught in war but carrion, filth, savagery and horror. The heroism of the rank and file makes no appeal. They refuse war the credit of being the only
exercise in devotion on the large scale existing in this world. The superb
moral victory over death leaves them cold. Each one to his taste. To me this is no valley of
death—it is a valley brim full of life at its highest power. Men live through more in five minutes on that crest than they do in five years of Bendigo or Ballarat. Ask the brothers of these
very fighters—Calgoorlie or Coolgardie miners—to do one quarter of the work and to run one hundredth the risk on a wages basis—instanter there would be a riot. But here—not
a murmur, not a question; only a radiant force of camaraderie in action.’
From May onwards many of the men discarded their uniforms, and except for a pair of shorts, boots and perhaps a cap, went naked in the sun. Even in the frontlines they fought stripped to the
waist, a girl, a ship or a dragon tattooed on their arms.
There was a toughness mixed with touchiness in this ant-heap life. Compton Mackenzie relates that on his visit to Anzac he overtook Lieut.-Colonel Pollen, Hamilton’s military secretary,
who was talking to three Australians all well over six feet tall. ‘Pollen, who had a soft, somewhat ecclesiastical voice, was saying, “Have you chaps heard that they’ve given
General Bridges a posthumous K.C.M.G.?”
‘ “Have they?” one of the giants replied. “Well, that won’t do him much good where he is now, will it, mate?”
‘Poor Pollen, who was longing to be sympathetic and not to mind the way these Australians would stare at his red tabs without saluting, walked on a little depressed by his reception at
making conversation, perhaps at the very spot where General Bridges had been mortally wounded. He looked carefully at the ground when he met the next lot, whereupon they all gave him an elaborate
salute, and then because he had looked up too late to acknowledge it one of them turned to the others and said: “I suppose that’s what they call breeding.” They really were rather
difficult.’
But it was the physical appearance of the Dominion soldiers—Colonials as they were then called—that captivated everybody who came to Anzac, and there is hardly an account of the
campaign which does not refer to it with admiration and even a kind of awe. ‘As a child,’ Mackenzie wrote, ‘I used to pore for hours
over those
illustrations of Flaxman for Homer and Virgil which simulated the effect of ancient pottery. There was not one of those glorious young men I saw that day who might not himself have been Ajax or
Diomed, Hector or Achilles. Their almost complete nudity, their tallness and majestic simplicity of line, their rose-brown flesh burnt by the sun and purged of all grossness by the ordeal through
which they were passing, all these united to create something as near to absolute beauty as I shall hope ever to see in this world.’
The soldiers themselves might not have thought of it in this way, but here perhaps, in this unlikely place, was the expression of Rupert Brooke’s dream of war, the Grecian frieze, the man
entirely heroic and entirely beautiful, the best in the presence of death. Just for this moment at the end of May and in the months that followed they were the living embodiment of the legend they
were creating. This was the highest moment of their countries’ short history; they had fought and won their first great battle, they were still in the glow of it, they knew suffering and they
were not afraid. They had made a fortress of this wretched strip of foreign soil on which they had so haphazardly drifted, and they were quite determined to hold on. Never again in the whole course
of the campaign did the Turks attempt an assault in force upon the Anzac bridgehead.
D
URING
the first few weeks of the campaign the wildest rumours went about Constantinople; ten thousand British were said to have been killed at the
landing, and another thirty thousand taken prisoner. At one moment the Allies were reported to be advancing on the city and at the next they had been driven into the sea. Once again there was talk
of special trains that were to evacuate the Government into the interior, of bombardments and of riots. Yet it was not quite the same ferment, the near panic, that had followed the naval attack on
the Narrows in March. The Allied Fleet then had been feared in much the same way as the Air Force bombers were feared at the start of the second world war, but a military campaign on land was
something that everyone could understand, a slower and a more familiar thing; there was no question of the capital being demolished overnight.
Enver took a firm line from the outset; he announced flatly that the Allies were already defeated, and to celebrate the event there was a ceremony at St. Sophia at which the Sultan was invested
with the tide of El Ghazi, the Conqueror, the driver of the Allies into the sea. Flags were hung out in all the principal streets and public squares.