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Dedication My father owned a horse in Egypt. It carried him
from the shadow of the Pyramids, across the deserts to Palestine and
to the fringes of one of the last great cavalry feats in the history
of warfare. This book is dedicated to that horse – and to the 50,000
horses shipped from the Australian bush to Egypt, Palestine and
Syria in the First World War, under the care of Banjo Paterson,
never to return. Monuments, after all, can be in words as well as in
stone.
For the bushmen love hard riding where the wild bush horses are,
And the stock-horse snuffs that battle with delight...
THE MAN FROM SNOWY RIVER – BANJO PATERSON
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Prologue
First light confirmed a scene of horror. During the night, horses
and men had gone down together in hundreds and died in one tangled,
bleeding mass. The ground was thick with the dead and the dying.
Most of the fugitives in the Barada Gorge, the main escape route to
Beirut, were Turkish and German soldiers who had refused to
surrender and had been machinegunned under orders from High Command.
Sealing all the exits of Damascus was urgent. The British wanted
the Turkish and German military commanders, troops and officials to
surrender, not to escape, but many, including Mustafa Kemal, had
already raced ahead.
At great speed, leading the remnants of his army, he had galloped
out of range. Narrowly, he had escaped becoming one of the 40,000
prisoners taken in less than a fortnight. When the Allies had opened
fire, the Turks in the front of the column had tried to turn back to
the city, but the push of the people behind them was so strong that
they were shoved forward into the zone of endless bullets pouring
down from the cliff above.
After four centuries, the crescent moon and star flag of the
sprawling Ottoman Empire, which had fluttered over Damascus since
1516, was soon to be hauled down. World War I had just entered its
fifth year. The British were about to have a significant victory in
the Middle East, a conquest that would give them a dominant role in
the area.
Night and day since 19 September 1918, the Allies had
relentlessly gone on in pursuit of the Turkish soldiers, whose
stirring war cry of ‘Allah! Allah! Allah!’ was all too familiar. Now
thousands were trying to flee before the British army finally seized
the fabled city. Hundreds of dead men, horses and even a flock of
dead sheep, lay in between broken-down vehicles, abandoned guns,
machinery and disabled transport, blocking the path of the advancing
horsemen. Some unlucky human survivors were heard, feebly calling
for water. Those who were still conscious gazed with eyes that
begged for a little mercy; mercy that they knew would not come from
the Arabs. The air was heavy with the nauseating smell of unburied
corpses of men and beasts. At dusk, the prowling jackals would close
in to perform their funeral rites.
As the riders made their way through the dead and wounded, they
took care that the horses’ iron hooves would not trample and mangle
the faces of the fallen. Corpses were strewn everywhere. Groans and
screams echoed pitifully in the silent dawn. The animals waited
either for rescue, the relief of a quick pistol shot or a bayonet
stab.
In the half-light of early morning, a troop of scouts raced back.
For nearly a mile ahead the road was almost impassable. Progress
through the debris was slow – both the riders and their horses were
showing signs of exhaustion.
Most of the soldiers – from the Kimberleys, Geraldton, Perth,
Kalgoorlie and the back of Broome – felt like old campaigners now.
Thirteen days earlier, they had started at Jaffa (from where the
famous orange had taken its name), then swept up the coast of
Palestine on what they already referred to as the ‘Great Ride’. Few
mounted troops and horses could have endured such a journey. Feeding
and watering 12,000 horses and their riders as they invaded new
territory, let alone the 57,000 troops in the rear, together with
the tens of thousands of camels, mules and donkeys, was such a
formidable task that both man and beast often went without forage
and water.
This was the largest group of cavalry ever used in an advance by
the British army, and the largest deployed in modern times. It was
on a par with the cavalry at Waterloo or at Omdurman with the
Hussars against the Mahdi’s Black Flags when Winston Churchill
charged against the Dervishes.
Although the Australian mounted troops’ mastery of horses set
tham apart and they received the admiration and adulation now
reserved for pop bands, film stars and footballers, few people are
aware of their major role in the fall of Damascus. It was to be the
culmination of a campaign that had started four years earlier in
Gallipoli.
Usually, the disastrous nine months of the Gallipoli campaign are
seen in isolation, not as part of the ongoing campaign between the
British and the Turks in the western Mediterranean, but between 1915
and 1918, battles had endlessly dragged on between two empires: the
shrinking Ottoman Empire and the expanding British Empire that
encircled the globe. By chance, on the roads to Damascus, two of the
main players on the Turkish side were the same commanders as had
been at Gallipoli: Mustafa Kemal and Otto Liman von Sanders. For
twelve days, the British Desert Mounted Corps had been pursuing
them, from Nablus and Nazareth. But now on the steep and terrible
hills above Damascus the wheel of fortune was turning full circle.
Kemal, despite fighting desperately, was losing.
God, the Koran and the Germans were failing the Turks. The
Germans, too, had overrated the effect of the Sultan announcing a
jihad – a holy war.
Strong though the Muslim faith was, it had not proved a unifying
force. The Sherif (Governor of Mecca) and the British – with much
help from Lawrence – defused the jihad so effectively that
few people now associate the word with World War I.
Britain’s Egyptian Expeditionary Forces, with headquarters in
Cairo, had led the offensive around the Mediterranean coast and,
right from the beginning, had defiantly used Muslim soldiers,
pitting co-religionists against each other. (This was a separate
operation from the British campaign run by the India office in
Mesopotamia, which does not fall within the scope of this book.) The
four-year operation can be divided into four distinct phases, each
one with a different British commander.
The first, in February 1915, the initial Turkish–German offensive
against the Suez Canal, was successfully repulsed by General Sir
John Maxwell; second, Gallipoli, was where the Turks, under the
German general, Otto Liman von Sanders, aided by Mustafa Kemal,
later known as Ataturk, had defeated General Sir Ian Hamilton’s
forces; the third was the slow British advance across the Sinai
Peninsula, led by Sir Archibald Murray between 1916 and 1917, which
ended in disaster for the British when General Kress von
Kressenstein had twice beaten them at Gaza. General Sir Edmund
Allenby led the fourth and final phase. After breaking through Gaza
at the end of 1917, he had captured Jerusalem. Merged into the last
two phases of the Turkish–British conflict was the guerrilla warfare
of the Arab Revolt, immortalised in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
by T. E. Lawrence.
Capturing Damascus had seemed a wild dream when Lawrence, soon to
be known as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, had first proposed it to the Arabs
in 1916.
It was then one of the great cities of the Middle East, more
central to the region than Cairo or Baghdad and, as Lawrence later
wrote, ‘the climax of our two years’ uncertainty’. He again stressed
its importance in his book’s epilogue: ‘Damascus had not seemed a
sheath for my sword when I landed in Arabia; but its capture
disclosed the exhaustion of my main springs of action’.
The Australians pummelled the road through the deep Barada Gorge,
down the barren, steep hills. Lawrence, who had been part of the
group that had bivouacked in their rough camp on the ridge above the
gorge the previous night, was not, as planned, behind them. With his
small stature arrayed in extravagant, flowing robes similar to those
of a desert sheikh, complete with Bedouin headdress and dagger,
standing beside his huge armoured Rolls Royce, the ‘Blue Mist’, he
was more than noticeable. Below the minimum height for soldiers,
Lawrence had not qualified for active service like his two brothers,
who had both been killed in France. He had gone into the army
through the intelligence department, and for two years had acted as
British liaison officer to Prince Feisal and the Arab irregulars. He
was already renowned for his daring guerrilla tactics, especially
blowing up trains. With Prince Feisal, the small Arab regular army
and the colourful rag-tag band of Arab irregulars, he had
rendezvoused with the Australians at the town of Deraa. Both groups
had been progressing in a northerly direction for over a year, but
the last few days had been the first time that the two forces had
been in the same area. Now, having slept briefly beside his car,
Lawrence was now nowhere to be seen.
In the distance, the Australian horsemen could see the indistinct
outlines of the slender white minarets and the glittering domes of
Damascus’s mosques. They horsemen were still too far away to hear
the holy chants of the Muslims in the mosques; still oblivious to
the destruction, calls to prayer still rang out. Under the threat of
sniping from the odd survivor in the dense undergrowth on either
side of the Barada Gorge, the men of the 10th Light Horse Regiment
flung themselves from their horses, and proceeded to clear a path
through this shambles. When they pushed the dead to the side of the
road, a quick count revealed 370 Turkish corpses. Wounded Turks –
and they were in their hundreds – were carried to the grassy bank of
the river.
Arrangements were made for them to be picked up by ambulances
later.
Once the men were past the bodies, the command to ‘Push on!’ was
given.
Short of water, short of food and short of sleep, their faces
smeared with sweat and dirt, their lips dry and cracked, the
Australians rode on. Engulfed in a thick cloud of dust, they
galloped as fast as the steep descent and the stamina of their
horses would allow. The weather was hotter than usual for early
autumn. Spirits rose. The river in front was not a mirage. It was
forbidden to drink straight from rivers but, as always, some men
filled the crown of their felt hats with water and let their horses
drink. Others also managed to splash their eyes. But the unofficial
halt was short.
Damascus, reputedly the oldest city in the world to be
continuously inhabited, had for centuries been a vital nerve centre
of the sprawling Ottoman Empire and the key to Syria. Soon, though,
this fabled city was to be taken over by the Allies. And soon the
question would arise – who entered first? Was it the Australians?
Was it the Arabs? Had Lawrence descended the hill by another route,
met up with some Arabs and got there first? Was there really a sham
entry staged by the British to deceive the French? Did the
Australians unwittingly undermine the Arabs’ quest for
self-government in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire? What was the
significance of the order to the Australians not to go into
Damascus? As political consequences would follow from the claim of
who was first into Damascus, each side, each faction, was passionate
about the honour of being the first who entered. Even war diaries
differ in their answers.
Historians have made the debate about who was first in to
Damascus a bone of contention. The chaos and confusion at Damascus
of different forces reaching the city at similar and/or overlapping
times created a scenario where claims could be staked – and pushed
aside by counter-claims. While some books present the 10th Light
Horse as the first past the post, in others Lawrence and the Arabs
are not only the winners, but are often depicted as the real victors
of the campaign. The issue of who was first to Damascus went far
beyond personal pride.
Professor Eliezer Tauber, of the Bar-Illan University in Israel,
goes so far as to say, in his book The Arab Movements in World
War I: ‘One of the most controversial questions in the history
of the First World War in the Middle East is the question of who
conquered [Damascus], or to be more exact, who reached Damascus
first.’ Because of the Declaration to the Seven – a statement made
by British officials in the Arab Bureau in Cairo in mid-1918 – the
question of who arrived first in Damascus was critical. The
Declaration stated that the British would recognise Arab
independence in Arab areas that had been independent before the war,
or that had been liberated by the Arabs themselves. Therefore the
question of who got to Damascus first was significant enough for
people to distort the truth. More importantly, the fate of this
fabled city could affect the sharing of the lands in territories
around it.
Could there really have been an error in the official reporting
of the date and hour? The 1951 edition of Encyclopaedia
Britannica says that Lawrence, ‘…after breaking up the enemy’s
trans-Jordan army, entered Damascus some hours ahead of the British.
Lawrence took charge of the city till Allenby could reach it, and
suppressed attempts at reaction’. The historian B. H. Liddell Hart
wrote that Damascus was taken with the help of ‘two comparatively
novel tools – aircraft and Arabs’. Leon Uris’s epic novel The Haj
says that Feisal ‘entered Damascus and had himself proclaimed
King of Syria…’.
Respected historian Elie Kedourie was one of the earliest and
strongest advocates of the theory that the Australians were first
into Damascus. Tauber, too, thought they were first there. But then
Professor Stephen Tabachnick, at Memphis University, joined in the
debate to resolve the question (as far as it can be resolved) of
whether or not Lawrence was truthful about who actually entered
first. Qualifying his remarks with ‘it may well be a matter of
interpretation’, he cautioned me to remember that city limits were
not always clearly delineated.
David Lean’s 1962 prize-winning film, Lawrence of Arabia,
starring Peter O’Toole, gives the impression that Lawrence was first
into the city. No Australian horsemen appear in it at all. Robert
Bolt adapted the screenplay from Lawrence’s classic history of the
campaign, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In this, Lawrence is the
central figure and narrator, unfolding the campaign’s grandeur, its
epic proportions, its brutality, cruelty and gore. Both book and
film omit to mention the Australian Light Horse galloping towards
Damascus, let alone ever entering it, or the twelve-day cavalry
offensive by the Australian horsemen and the pitched ‘head-on’
battles fought by British troops.
The jostling, politics and jealousies at the gates of Damascus
were not reported at the time. My interest stems from my father,
Robbie Robertson, who was a trooper with the 10th Light Horse in the
last year of World War I.
While writing a book on Napoleon and his horses, I became curious
about my father and his warhorse.
I decided to write about the story of the Light Horse in the
Middle East during the war; not a ‘drums and trumpets’ history with
details of a long string of battles, but a story giving an overall
view of its achievement. It lays no claim to historical
completeness. At the same time as following the Light Horse from
Gallipoli in 1915 to Syria in 1918, I decided to try to unravel the
controversial and touchy question of ‘Who was first to Damascus?’ In
searching for the answer to this question, I also found the reasons
why details of the campaign have remained mostly in obscurity.
The fact that Field Marshall Earl Wavell, who had been Allenby’s
Chief-of- Staff in the Middle East, praised the advance as the
largest body of cavalry employed in modern times under one commander
is usually forgotten. He went so far as to say that it was ‘the
greatest exploit in history of horsed cavalry, and possibly their
last success on a large scale…’. The cavalry historian, the Marquess
of Anglesey, called it ‘the last [campaign] in the history of the
world in which the mobility conferred by men on horseback was
successfully employed on a large scale. Never before in the annals
of the British army had so numerous a mounted force been employed’.
No matter how he is described, Lawrence is usually mentioned in
histories of the Middle East campaign, whereas the Australians are
usually omitted. In the battle-filled fortnight that preceded the
fall of Damascus, Lawrence and the Arabs usually overshadow all
other participants, such as the Australian Light Horse, who formed
the bulk of the cavalry, together with regiments from New Zealand,
India, Britain and France. Another point usually omitted in
descriptions of the campaign is the support given to the horses by
the aircraft. This combination of cavalry and air power was unique
in military history. In Europe, aircraft were restricted by bad
weather and limited landing places, but in Palestine and Syria,
pilots could take advantage of the clear skies and some of the
immense treeless plains for landings and take-offs, although
flamingoes, once they were inured to the noise, could be slow to
move and got in the way.
To disentangle the mystery, I realised I would have to entwine
the stories of the Australians in the Great Ride with the role of
Lawrence in the Arab Revolt and as an intelligence officer. Did some
of the ambiguity lie in the fact that ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ was a
forerunner of cloak-and-dagger intelligence officers? Professor Tabachnick raised the possibility when he asked, ‘Does he [Lawrence]
see himself as a heroic knight or a cynical agent? Is he a dreamy
arts graduate forced to participate in a brutal war that destroys
him, or a willing sadomasochist who loves war too much?’ Wanting to
extract the truth from the blurred falsehoods and extravagant claims
that so often, and so casually, accompany war, I set off to
Damascus, Deraa, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Amman and many other places
touched on during the advance into Syria. No Hashemite royal
archives opened their hitherto sealed doors, but the fascinating
chain of events that led the Allied and the Arab forces to meet in
Damascus still needed to be resolved. The campaign, plotted in
London, Syria, Cairo, Paris, Berlin, Constantinople (Istanbul) and
Damascus, was shaped by many players, including the Arab irregulars
with Lawrence, the German generals with the Turkish troops, the
Egyptian Expeditionary Forces General Headquarters and, of course,
the individual corps, divisions and regiments.
Despite writing the 1,188 pages of Lawrence’s official biography,
Jeremy Wilson, former chairman of the Lawrence Society, ignores the
Australian entrance into Damascus. When answering my request for
information on who was first into Damascus he said: In the
end, the problem for most researchers is simply logistical: the
documents are split between London and Australia, and no-one has had
the resources to study both sides… Wilson overlooks the hundreds
of overseas researchers welcomed into the library of the Australian
War Memorial in Canberra, some of whom have been given fellowships.
Among them were Dr Yigal Sheffy of Tel Aviv University and Dr
Matthew Hughes from Northampton University in England. Their
theories, together with those of Tauber, and the papers delivered
during the Israeli–Turkish International Colloquy held in Tel Aviv
and Istanbul in 2000, have thrown new light on the Middle East
during World War I – and the role of the Australians in it.
Wilson stressed, in his reply, that: The capture of Damascus
is a fuzzy area in Lawrence’s life and could do with clarification.
I don’t see this as a question of Lawrence’s version against the
Australian version, because in their more moderate forms both
versions are probably correct. But there are unanswered questions,
and the documents must exist to establish exactly what happened. I
am intrigued, for example, by [General Sir Harry] Chauvel’s
differing accounts, and by insinuations in the 1922 text of
Seven Pillars that are toned down in the subscriber’s
abridgement.
Wilson’s allusion to ‘differing accounts’ by the corps commander
was challenging. Were the Australian reports really contradictory?
As with everything to do with special or undercover agents and
espionage, it seemed shrouded in mystery. In 2001, when the British
Foreign Office began lifting the embargo on certain old intelligence
files, more contradictions emerged, but at the same time,
paradoxically, more clarity. Research led me not just to files, but
to one of the most exclusive clubs in the world, the Special Forces
Club in Knightsbridge, in the heart of London. Although details of
the intelligence organisation in Cairo that employed Lawrence were
still not easy to come by (like much to do with the Secret Service),
something filtered through, as will be seen at the end of this book,
which made the story clearer.
The great-grandson of an Irish horse-breaker, my father was the
proudest of riders. Through persistence and a little lying – he was
only sixteen – he had been accepted into Western Australia’s mounted
infantry. With neither a bridle nor the crucial bit, he could turn a
horse by tapping on its neck. Skilled though he was, the tough
school of the Outback, where he had learnt to tame wild bush horses,
did not produce riders who cared for the niceties of dressage,
accoutrements, class distinctions – or rules.
Riding had given him a nonchalant sense of daring, and like his
father, he was also a gambler. Risking arrest, he had briefly run a
‘two-up’ school both in the back streets of Cairo and twenty miles
away in Heliopolis. Two shiny copper Australian coins, with the
profile of George V on the front and the word ‘penny’ on the
reverse, usually jingled in his pocket in expectation of a game.
Whenever the cry ‘Come in spinner!’ was heard, he would flick and
toss the lucky coins with dexterity from the tips of two
outstretched fingers.
Also always ready for a quick round of poker, he kept a
well-thumbed pack of cards inside his khaki jacket with his
cigarette papers, or if he was in luck, some Woodbines or Navy Cut.
There is a photograph of my father taken in the Middle East. He
is astride his faithful steed, sitting deep in the saddle, wearing
the uniform of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). I have looked at
this equestrian picture nearly every day of my life, yet I do not
really know my father, or even his horse’s name. Overcome with
emotion at any mention of his horse, he rarely spoke of him. When a
child, I mentally fused my father with his battlescarred animal
until they became a single entity, as they seemed to be in the
photograph. If I gaze long enough at the picture, tears well up in
my eyes. I see him on his horse galloping across those sandy and
stony deserts, heading towards uncertainty and heartbreak.
Over two decades after the Great Ride, when I was born, my father
was still proud of having once been in the Light Horse. But despite
always wearing his Returned Soldiers’ League badge on the lapel of
his fine wool suits, he was one of a minority who did not attend
ceremonies. We never went to Anzac Day services. He told his sister,
Dorothy, that anything to do with the slaughter was too much for
him. The one parade in which he did take part was traumatising.
Years later, he said to our mother, ‘I hate bringing back those
times’. Like many young men, he had enlisted with enthusiasm, only
to find himself dehumanised, disillusioned and exploited – appalled
at the thought of what he was obliged to do with his sword and rifle
in either self-defence or the heat of combat. The poet, Siegfried
Sassoon, who tried ‘to touch the hearts of men with poetry’,
described similar sentiments: I stood with the Dead, so forsaken
and still: When dawn was grey I stood with the Dead.
And my slow heart said, ‘You must kill, you must kill: ‘Soldier,
soldier, morning is red’.
My father’s sister explained how my father was also forced to
kill the one thing he loved. He never, she believed, recovered
emotionally from having to shoot his beloved horse. Shooting his
constant companion was the only way to save him from being sold as a
beast of burden to join the overworked wretches in the streets of
Cairo or in quarries or mines. (Many horses were so cruelly treated
that in the 1930s, a charity, the Brooke Hospital for Horses, was
set up to care for the survivors.) Australian men in those days had
no outlet for their grief other than rage or drink. My father shut
part of himself down and bore the emotional scars for the rest of
his living days. Remembering what his sister had told me, it is
possible that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder,
but there was little help then available for the war-damaged
soldier, except advice such as ‘Go home; get on with a job; be a
man!’ I lived with Robbie Robertson for fourteen years but can
recall no closeness. We shared over 5000 days and nights in a
respectable but dreary liver-coloured brick house on pale stone
foundations near a golf course, three miles from Manly beach,
Sydney. At the age of fifty-three, mumbling something about feeling
unwell, he collapsed on the floor and died from a massive heart
attack. He had not seemed the same since returning from a short
business trip overseas four months earlier – even though he was, at
last, able to talk in an easy manner about some of his experiences.
The Italian ship sailing to Naples had gone via the Suez Canal,
taking him briefly back to his old haunts from the war around Cairo.
Heavier and not so agile, he again rode out to the Pyramids at Giza
this time, not riding his own horse by moonlight but riding a
tourist camel in daylight. Nor could he fulfil his youthful wish of
striding through the heavy, double wooden doors of Shepheard’s
Hotel, which during the war had been off-limits to all but officers.
He never saw its lotus-topped pillars or bought a gin and tonic at
the Long Bar. All he found was a hole in the ground. The building,
along with all its old snobbery and exclusivity, had gone up in
flames two years earlier in the riots that had deposed King Farouk.
While I was writing this book, my sister said that our father
comes to life for her ‘only when I either turn the stiff cardboard
pages of the old family photograph album or when I meet a pet
cockatoo’. He was unusually animated when pointing out talking birds
– a yellow-crested white cockatoo that screeched out his name had
been a close companion of his youth. For me, though, my father
exists solely in that photograph of him mounted on his beloved
horse. With his brown eyes alert, his lean bronzed face stern, he is
unsmiling beneath the distinctive Australian hat with its upturned
brim and plume of emu feathers in the band. The weather was hot, yet
he was wearing his serge khaki soldier’s uniform with its coarse
jacket with voluminous exterior pockets. Not so tall as powerful –
he was still growing – he had fine features, a fresh, clear skin,
profuse brown hair, bushy eyebrows and prominent cheekbones. In the
photograph, the head of the horse is as important as that of the
rider. Take away the horse and the picture is nothing. The animal
gives potency to the rider.
Little remains besides the photograph to tell of my father and
his time in the war. Records simply list Private Noel Robertson,
number 57192, who served with the AIF from 24 April 1918 until 10
July 1919 in the Great War and in the Egyptian Rebellion, religion
Church of England. His campaign medals, the British War Medal and
the Victory Medal, have gone, and his horse’s bones lie in Syria.
Remembering the 12,000 horsemen, together with the 12,000 horses
– the geldings from the Kimberleys, the bays from the Albany grass
country and the bright chestnuts bred on the tawny plains behind
Wagga – I set off to find out what was real, what was imaginary, and
what had just been invented so that I could answer the much-repeated
query – who was first to Damascus?
Chapter One
‘We are the ANZAC army!’
Men and horses started to develop a permanent squint. The fine
flying sand, the white glare of the dusty roads and the ice-cold
winter nights were a shock after the seventy-seven day voyage from
Albany, Western Australia. Apart from a brief stop at Colombo to
take on coal, the men had seen only blue seas and skies – and ships.
It had taken thirty-six transports and three cruisers to convey the
first contingent – 21,529 volunteers and 14,000 horses. While most
of the men stepped onto Egyptian soil with eagerness, others were
disappointed and furious. This land of deserts, mud huts, palm
trees, minarets and mosques had not been their destination when they
had boarded the ships in Australia, but years of patient work by
Germany in Constantinople had been rewarded a few weeks earlier when
the Turks had become allied to the Central Powers. By 11 November,
while the Australian contingent was still at sea, Turkey entered the
war against Russia, France and Britain. Most of the Australians had
enlisted so they could go and fight the Germans in France. It was
the Kaiser whom they intended to fight, not the Sultan Caliph.
Originally the Australian Imperial Force was to go to France via
England, to be trained on a site reserved for colonial forces in
transit at Salisbury Plain, near Stonehenge in Wiltshire. But
soldiers already there were suffering from overcrowding and
incomplete facilities made worse by snow. Since the Canadians, with
thousands of horses, had arrived, the place had become a shambles.
When alternative camps had to be found, the sands of Egypt seemed an
ideal place – the Australians could train, protect the canal and act
as a deterrent to Turkey.
The decision to disembark the Australians in Egypt was so sudden
that the British army had not made adequate arrangements or sent
enough equipment. Men were forced to spend ice-cold nights sleeping
on groundsheets in the open until tents were issued. In England,
recruits were also suffering because of deficiencies in guns,
uniforms, leather boots, horses, metal horseshoes and blacksmiths,
and volunteers often had to wear civilian clothes or old uniforms.
Other improvisations included using broomsticks instead of rifles
and latrines that were nothing but poles over communal pits.
The Australian battalions were sent to three sites around Cairo.
Each Australian Light Horse regiment was commanded by a lieutenant
colonel and each regiment was composed of three squadrons, each
commanded by a major. The largest camp was near Mena; the second
further out, at Moascar, with a fine view of lines of sand dunes;
and the third was at Maadi, a pleasant English suburb on the banks
of the Nile in an area busy with feluccas.
Excellent water supplies and large areas easily fenced off into
paddocks made these places ideal for the Light Horse – and the tens
of thousands of horses soon to arrive. Danger and war seemed far
away. Apart from the odd fox, jackal, unusual spider and scorpion,
the men were disturbed only occasionally by the flocks of pink
flamingoes soaring over the marshes at the mouth of the Nile. Route
marches across the sands with packs on their backs weighing eighty
pounds, trench digging (shovelling earth and rubble) and rifle
practice were strenuous, so men sought fun during time off. Many
spent their spare time playing two-up and all manner of card games.
Horses thrive in dry climates, and they adapted well to Egypt,
despite the irritation of a particularly unpleasant horsefly, which
collected underneath their tails. But after the long cramped voyage,
packed so tightly into the holds of the boats, standing for over
seven weeks, with no fresh food and limited water, the animals were
not fit enough to be ridden. At first no mounted work was done,
owing to the risk of serious leg breakdowns among the horses. In an
article in the Egyptian Gazette of December 1914, one of the
camps was described thus: Large wood fires burn beneath and
around oval iron pots of tea; toast, too, seems a great favourite,
baked and sadly burned in the wood ashes…the many lines of beautiful
and much-loved horses had practically constant attention day and
night...There are wild and almost-wild horses amongst them, many of
which were presented to the regiment before they left.
It took a month for each horse to be acclimatised, and for their
weakened and stiffened legs to be brought up to condition. Gentle
exercise was increased until they were enjoying ten miles a day at a
fast pace. Later they swam over the Nile at the Barrage on a rope.
These healthy horses from Australia were the pride and the joy of
the newly arrived soldiers. Men rode them to the Pyramids on starry
nights, and also organised horse races and amateur horse carnivals.
More ships brought more horses and more men. During February 1915
two more brigades of Australians arrived. One was under the command
of Colonel John Monash, a successful engineer from Melbourne, a
former member of the part-time militia, who rose to become one of
the great generals of World War I. The other brigade was under
Colonel G Ryrie, a tough pastoralist, politician and one-time
pugilist. Together with the New Zealand Brigade, the Australians
were formed into the Australia–New Zealand Army Corps, commanded by
the dapper fifty-year-old General Sir William Birdwood, often
referred to as ‘good old Birdie’. Although not himself an Australian
or a New Zealander, the popularity of this former cavalry officer in
the Indian army was higher than for the average World War I
commander. Like the commanders of the Canadian, New Zealand and
South African forces, he had a dual responsibility: to safeguard the
Australian troops while, at the same time, serving the ‘Mother
Country’.
The stories about the origin of the acronym ANZAC during those
early months in Egypt are many. One story says that Birdwood saw the
initials on a packing case addressed to ‘the A(ustralia) N(ew)
Z(ealand) A(rmy) C(orps)’.
An alternative account says that he saw the letters used by a New
Zealand signaller, Sergeant Keith Little. Yet another version says
that the initials were used in a telegram. The name became well
known and the basis of a song, sung vigorously to the tune of ‘The
Church’s One Foundation’: We are the Anzac Army, The ANZAC, We
cannot shoot, we don’t salute, What bloody good are we? And when we
get to Ber-lin The Kaiser he will say, ‘Hoch, hoch! Mein Gott, what
a bloody odd lot To get six bob a day!’ At times, life was
tougher for the men than the horses. Days were filled with endless
drills, shooting dummy targets and enduring fatigue duties – a
similar routine for almost all soldiers from the time of Caesar’s
legions. With shoulders heavily laden with backpacks and bandoliers
of bullets, with feet burning hot after hours of monotonous
marching, men were habituated to going ‘left, right, left, right,
left’ – 110 paces to the minute. The odd man collapsed into a ditch,
unable to walk another step. Obedience and authority dominated
everything. To bring troops up to their maximum stamina and to
instil automatic unthinking obedience so that they would obey any
order in battle, however strange it might seem, they were
conditioned to mindless routine tasks. There were also, of course,
familiar comforts such as concerts or sightseeing, but men,
regardless of the exotic location and the unknown pleasures they had
never tasted before, were homesick. In one letter, the censor was
surprised to read the words: ‘They call this the Promised Land.
I don’t know who they promised it to, but whoever it is, I wish
they’d give it to him and let us get back home.’ The more timid
soldiers sought solace in things familiar from home – steaming mugs
of hot chocolate, tea and toast, writing or reading letters.
The tradition of communal singing on Outback stations and on
drovers’ camps was so strong that even without a mouth organ, piano,
piano accordion or guitar, groups sang Christmas carols or bush
ballads around their campfires with loud and hearty choruses.
Instruments were improvised – a stick and beer bottle tops, a comb
with paper, clapping spoons or a gum leaf, plucked from one of the
groves of stately eucalyptus trees, the fastest growing hardwood
trees in the world, which had spread around the Mediterranean a
century earlier.
Most of the horses were ‘Walers’ – tough Arab crosses, with
strong necks, short backs and the small hooves of desert-bred
horses. A little bigger than Arab horses, they stood about fifteen
to sixteen hands. Originally they were sired by an English
thoroughbred from breeding mares, and were said to be part
draughthorse. They had a well-deserved reputation for having similar
endurance to the legendary Cossack ponies, and tens of thousands had
been exported to India since the 1830s. Favoured as stock horses and
cavalry remounts, they were named after the state in which they were
originally sired and raised, New South Wales.
Colonel John Monash summed up the cleverness of this unique
Australian breed. In a letter home, he said:
My horse Tom is a
real beauty. He is my favourite. He is a gentle and well-mannered
horse, very strong, and very willing, and answers to the slightest
hint, both as to pace and direction, stands perfectly still when
told, still enough for me to write orders in the saddle, and trots
or canters or gallops at a touch of the knee without spur or whip.
In fact, I now carry neither. He never tires, and is as strong and
sure-footed after a heavy day, without feed or water, as he is on
starting out. He is still a little nervous of camels, but his
particular aversion is a donkey, and he can spot them long before I
do.
Cosmopolitan though Cairo was, the Australians often stood out,
and not just because of their size. Some were big spenders; others
were high-spirited, with an inclination to boisterous behaviour,
even the odd bit of brawling.
When possible, most men jumped on the old trams, which plied
backwards and forwards to the centre of the city. The famous museum,
with its embalmed bodies, was a great attraction, as were the Blue
Mosque, the Citadel, the Kersaal Theatre (especially backstage) and
other fleshpots. Music and dance halls added to the feverish
atmosphere. According to the British administrator, Ronald Storrs,
the Australians spent between three and four thousand pounds a day
in the city. The coins and notes were confusing, and men often felt
they were ‘being had’, saying that ‘…once or twice bitten and you’re
ready for the next time…’. But money quickly slipped out of their
large khaki pockets. Diversions in the so-called ‘undesirable
quarters’ were exciting and bewildering – the noise, the smells of
incense, cigarette smoke and opium, the beggars, the fortune
tellers, the mixture of Jews, Greeks, Arabs, Lebanese, Sudanese,
Turks and Europeans. There was also an open display of sexuality in
this cosmopolitan city. Soldiers haggled in the labyrinths of tiny
streets crammed with veiled women, men with turbans or a fez who sat
cross-legged beside piles of carpets, sandalwood, brass pots, scent,
a snake in a cage or the latest copy of The Times from
London.
Some dives were half café, half brothel. Most cafés had a
tinkling piano or pianola. Whether drinking or eating in lively
cafés or nightspots, shopping for wire pipe cleaners at a penny
each, buying sesame cakes or exploring bazaars with balconies
overhung with laundry, there were always hints of hidden
temptations. The sight of women resting their breasts on balcony
railings, belly dancing or what was nicknamed the ‘can-can’
suggested many activities. Stage shows set out to shock. They were a
far cry from Mata Hari’s sophisticated nude dancing at the Folies Bergères in Paris.
Prostitution, mainly operated by Europeans, was openly practised
in the red-light areas such as the Wasser district. An estimated
30,000 prostitutes plied their trade in Cairo, including scantily
clad women soliciting custom in doorways, on balconies and in
alleyways. Nothing seemed to stop the men: neither warnings about
the dangers of venereal diseases (mostly syphilis and gonorrhoea),
nor lectures on its dangers, nor lurid pictures of victims, nor even
the discontinuation of pay during harsh treatment at strict
hospitals.
One in ten of the AIF reported sick with what was referred to as
‘a selfinflicted wound’ but the rate, for some unexplained reason,
was lower among the Light Horsemen.
The treatment of Egyptian women and animals shocked the
Australians.
Especially distressing were the overburdened donkeys, mules and
horses.
Some had ribs protruding through shrunken scabby coats, covered
in flyinfested sores, being urged on with the brutal goad of the
whip. Seeing a man riding a donkey with his wife walking behind in a
shapeless black tunic, her bright kohl-rimmed eyes peeping over the
yashmak and an infant with a flyridden face in a sling over her
back, did seem a bit strange. Comments such as ‘the people are
filthy and do nothing but lounge about and smoke…’ were mild
compared to Colonel John Monash’s remarks about ‘a yelling,
screaming crowd of dirty, smelly Arabs and donkey boys…’.
A. B. Facey’s reaction, in A Fortunate Life, was typical:
Cairo was a dirty city after what I was used to. The Egyptian
people were ragged and poorly clothed…the living conditions of the
poor were terrible. I saw a married couple with several children,
eating and sleeping with the house goat, in one room…we had to keep
a close watch on our clothes and equipment or it would be stolen. I
had one of my tunics stolen…The Egyptian religion permitted a man to
have as many wives as he could afford to keep…the sheiks had harems…
Visiting archaeologists had recently unearthed hordes of
treasures and sites.
The army recruited many of these experts, as they had a thorough
knowledge of the country, were used to working with Arabs and spoke
Arabic. Among the most prominent were Leonard Woolley and T. E.
Lawrence, who had worked in Palestine and Syria, and Howard Carter,
who was in 1915, with the help of Lord Carnarvon, on the verge of
discovering the tomb of Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings.
Carnarvon’s half-brother, who was to play such an active role at
Gallipoli, was Aubrey Herbert, who, like Lawrence, was recruited
into intelligence in Cairo. He became the model for John Buchan’s
hero in his spy story, Greenmantle. But Flinders Petrie (the
grandson of the Australian explorer Matthew Flinders), who had
surveyed the pyramids at Giza and is regarded as the founder of
scientific archaeological methods, was considered too old, at
sixty-one, for military service of any kind.
Earlier pioneers in archaeology had opened up the wonders of
Egypt, the Holy Land and the ancient world to an ever-increasing
stream of sightseers and tourists. After ships had begun plying the
Suez Canal, Thomas Cook, a Baptist lay preacher, had launched his
Eastern Tours. In the 19th century, close to a million European
tourists visited Jerusalem alone. Due to the extreme heat and the
mosquitoes, most tourism took place during the cooler months. Now,
as six million men in uniform marched and fought in Europe, and
British bases were formed in Egypt, the war was starting to fill
Cairo all year round, including the sweltering summer months.
When the second convoy had departed from Port Phillip Bay, near
Melbourne, with 10,500 troops and thousands of horses, in Egypt the
Australians were preparing for Christmas in a Muslim country. But 25
December was a disappointment to many. According to Henry Bostock,
one soldier later wrote complaining of newspapers reporting
incorrectly that they had been served roast turkey. ‘The officers
might have been, but we had sardines and bread, and any amount of
nuts, figs and oranges. I was on guard one day about the middle of
January when they brought us pudding that came from England – Xmas
pudding.’ Every month ships from Australia brought letters, comfort
parcels, troops and horses. The men and horses of the 10th Light
Horse arrived at Alexandria on 8 March. Within hours they were
entrained to Cairo, arriving at midnight at Abu-el-Ela, where
despite the blackness of night, the men were marched to Mena,
leading the horses on foot. A halt was called at about two o’clock
in the morning, just as the pyramids of Mena loomed up through the
mist. The weary men set up a camp there and then on the edge of the
already established area of tents of the First Infantry Division. No
time was lost.
From the very next day, 10 March, to 27 April, the regiment went
into intensive training in the desert – troop, squadron and
regimental tactical exercises proceeded without hindrance. The men
of the 10th Light Horse were living up to their reputation. General
Sir Ian Hamilton, when he had visited Australia before the war, had
described them as ‘the pick of the bunch…real thrusters who would be
held up by no obstacle of ground, timber or water…’.
Although hundreds of thousands of Australians were willing to put
their lives at risk, they often found it difficult to grasp the
precise reasons for the war.
Nor were many really sure of the causes for which they might die
– or kill.
But everyone knew that one assassin’s revolver shot, killing the
Archduke Ferdinand, heir-apparent to the Austrian throne, had sent
the world spinning into war. The previous heir to the Austrian
throne, Crown Prince Rudolf, the son of Emperor Franz Joseph, had
shot himself in 1889, after killing his mistress at Mayerling. When
the assassination on 28 June 1914 had first been announced, not much
attention was given to what was seen as yet another incident in the
dramas of Central Europe. There had recently been two Balkan wars,
the latter of which had ended only a year earlier. Another
unexpected death in the Imperial Austrian succession, in Sarajevo,
the capital of the wild and remote mountain province of
Bosnia-Herzegovina, was not immediately seen as the final straw in a
bitter struggle between Austria and Serbia, a struggle in which
Austria was determined to wipe Serbia off the map. The assassin was
a member of the Black Hand, an underground nationalist movement
aided and funded by the secret service of neighbouring Serbia, set
to liberate Bosnia from Austria. For decades the Balkan states had
seethed in conspiracies, jostling for power. Bosnia, like its
neighbours, had for centuries been a possession of the Ottoman
Empire. The former Turkish provinces comprising Albania, Bulgaria,
Rumania, Greece, Serbia and Montenegro had nearly fallen to Russia
in 1878, but had gained or maintained their independence thanks to
British intervention. However, the lands of the Ottoman Empire still
stretched in a vast arc from Turkey around the eastern Mediterranean
to Syria, Palestine, Sinai and Egypt. Large numbers of Turks were
garrisoned in Palestine and Syria, which was provisioned with guns,
food and ammunition by the newly constructed German-built railway
running from Constantinople.
British policy had always been to contain Russia and to hold her
firmly back from gaining more land or provinces in southern Europe.
In fifty years Turkey had lost almost all of her territories in
Europe and also in North Africa – Tunisia, Morocco and Libya.
Because Turkey had relied upon the support of Britain to retain its
remaining Empire, Egypt was still officially part of the Ottoman
Empire – but, only officially. In actual fact, it had become a
showpiece of British imperialism. Now the old antagonists of the
Crimean War, Russia and Britain, were uniting to drive the Turks out
of Europe and the Middle East.
Nearly fifty years earlier, in 1869, the high-flying Khedive, the
Viceroy of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Ismail Pasha, had
officially opened the prestigious Suez Canal with much ostentation.
One extravagance included a lavish Opera House in which to stage the
world première of Aida, by Giuseppe Verdi. Such was Ismail
Pasha’s flamboyance that he was forced to sell half his Suez Canal
shares to British investors. European shareholders, or
‘bondholders’, of the canal soon controlled Egypt by collecting half
of the country’s revenue to service the liabilities. The unofficial
British occupation of Egypt increased as Egypt’s debt increased, as
did anti-British feeling. Saad Zaghloul, the leader of the popular
Egyptian Nationalist Party, made moves towards independence, but
activity was mostly underground.
When Turkey entered the war, Britain annexed Cyprus; proclaimed a
protectorate over Egypt to a border just east of the canal itself,
in the Sinai Peninsula; invaded Mesopotamia; started negotiating
with Paris and St Petersburg as to the disposal of the Sultan’s
dominions; and, in a bloodless coup, deposed the pro-Turkish Khedive
of Egypt, Hussain Kemal, and replaced him with the pliable son of
Ismail, Ahmed Fuadi (the grandfather of King Farouk).
In his palace at the Golden Horn on the Bosphorus, the Sultan’s
fury knew no bounds. He launched a jihad, a holy war, against
the infidel, and in the name of the ‘Servant of the two holy cities,
the caliph of the Muslims and Commander of the Faithful’, he
prohibited all Muslims from joining any Allied armies. This was the
trump card that Turkey held, which she then considered almost
greater than her military strength. For Mehmet V, the old and weak
Sultan of Turkey, was also the caliph of Islam, the spiritual leader
of the tens of millions of Muslims in Egypt, India, Russia, Africa
and the Arab countries. As commander of the faithful, he was well
aware that Britain had over 100 million Muslims within her Empire.
Since the late 18th century, the sultans in Constantinople had
placed a lot of importance on their role as the titular heads of the
Sunni Muslims and keepers of the insignia of the caliphate – the
Prophet’s mantle – in the royal palace, to which pious pilgrims
continued to pay homage. The key to their holy position was as
official guardians of the two Holy Places, Medina and Mecca in the
Sinai Peninsula. Distant though these were from Constantinople,
control was exercised through the Sultan’s representative, the
sherif of Hejaz.
In Constantinople, no effort was spared to give substance or
publicity to the jihad. It was quickly reinforced by a
similar declaration by the highest Muslim authority in the capital,
Sheikh al-Islam. No less than five ‘fatwas’ (religious rulings)
followed. These calls to holy war were read out in every mosque,
printed in every newspaper throughout the Ottoman Empire and soon
distributed throughout the Muslim world. Emphasis was placed on the
wrongdoing of Muslims prepared to join in any attack on another
Islam state, in alliance with the non-believer. Civil uprisings were
also demanded.
The declaration of the jihad put Muslims outside the
Ottoman Empire in a dilemma. Did they stay loyal to the King, also
Emperor of India, the Tsar of all the Russias, the President of the
French Republic and the French Empire, or to the injunction of the
Sultan–Caliph? While many subjects, especially in India, became
anxious about their now conflicting allegiances, governments,
especially in London and Paris, feared civil strife in their
colonies.
Proclaimed with much pomp and publicity, the jihad urged
followers of Mohammed ‘to struggle in the path of God’. According to
the 1951 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, it threatened
all Muslims ‘with the punishment of hell if they supported his [the
Sultan’s] enemies’. The first jihad had been issued in
Baghdad in about 825, when Muslim territory was attacked – a
defensive measure, not an act of aggression. Over the centuries,
whenever Islamic territory was under attack from infidels, a call
for jihad had been issued.
Unlike jihads issued in previous centuries, the Sultan’s
call to holy war was supported by a Christian country, and Kaiser
Wilhelm was presented as a champion of Islam. German-inspired
rumours went so far as to suggest that he had been secretly
converted and assumed the name Gulliam Haji. As soon as the jihad
was announced in November, copies of it were rushed to Berlin
from Constantinople. Once translated into languages such as Russian,
Hindu and Arabic, it became the basis of thousands of leaflets
secretly distributed to enemy armies.
So Germany, exploiting the propaganda angle of the jihad,
used it as an extra weapon in their policy to spread unrest and
rebellion through Allied countries. David Fromkin, in A Peace to
End All Peace, said: ‘The staff of the German Foreign Ministry
predicted that the Sultan’s actions would "awaken the fanaticism of
Islam" and might lead to a large-scale revolution in India’.
Turkey attempted to ensure that she had the strategic initiative
in the Middle East by launching a multi-front war, with offensives
in the Caucasus and in the Sinai. Strategy was based on the belief
that the Egyptians, seeing their fellow Muslims up in arms against
the infidel, would immediately rush in and assist in the invasion.
At the beginning of 1915, 20,000 conscripted Anatolian Turks,
Armenians, Kurds, Syrians and Arabs, accompanied by 11,000 camels,
marched in an ill-conceived offensive from Beersheba across the
merciless sands of the Sinai Desert to cut off the Suez Canal from
Egypt.
Despite dragging steel punts, boats and field guns, the march
took only ten days. But the British, just by changing the Khedive,
had made a strong show of force. Neither the jihad, nor the
propaganda leaflets, had much effect.
There was no sign of the Muslims of Egypt joining their
brothers-in-arms or aiding them against the British.
Ignoring the aeroplanes overhead, which began strafing them en
route, on 3 February the Turks attacked the Suez Canal, the
crossroads of the British Empire. Despite being quickly repulsed by
Indians and the 6th Ghurkha Rifles from Nepal, the Turks launched a
flotilla of pontoons. At this stage the Turks had expected that
their arrival would be met with a huge local uprising – the purpose
of the boats was to carry men with arms across the canal to link up
with the anticipated Egyptian insurgents. But there were no takers.
Even the rebellious Egyptians failed to rebel openly. Despite
propaganda leaflets, Egypt’s Muslims failed to rise up against
either the new Khedive or the British. Without any local response
from residents, the Turks stood no chance. Only about twenty-five
Turks made it to the western bank of the canal, disappearing into
the Egyptian crowds to harness the support of the locals. Once the
officers realised that they had no backing, they limited themselves
to damaging installations in the canal, trying to sink vessels and
disrupt traffic. Reluctantly, by evening, having suffered 2,000
casualties, the Turks fled back to their line in the Sinai, leaving
700 prisoners.
Turkish forces had more success further south. From the Yemen,
they entered the Aden protectorate and installed themselves both in
the highlands and near Aden, the vital coaling station for British
ships en route from the Suez Canal to India and Australia. Here,
protected by inhospitable terrain, Turkey’s threat was very real. If
they got to the coast, they would threaten Britain’s Red Sea route,
and the Germans could deploy their submarine U-boats. But the
British responded effectively, with a blockade of the Red Sea. This
left two routes for the Turks to send goods to their bases at Mecca
and Medina: overland from the Yemen or via the legendary Hejaz or
Pilgrim railway. After running from Medina through the Maan desert
to the big junction at Deraa, the trains went on to Damascus, to be
loaded with military supplies and reinforcements for the Turkish
garrison controlling the area.
Ironically, just as the Turks had planned to incite the
population in Egypt to revolt, certain British strategists in Cairo
dreamt of an Arab uprising against the Turks. Turning this area into
a base friendly towards the British would diminish the threats to
the Red Sea and bring the Muslim Holy Cities, Mecca and Medina, back
into the realm of 100 million Muslim subjects in the British Empire.
Since the outbreak of war, they had been in the grip of the enemy.
Medina, the birthplace of the Prophet, was 300 miles from Mecca, so
strategically it was not a formidable task. British authorities
wanted to be able to reassure Muslims throughout the world that the
Holy Cities were inviolate and that pilgrimages were secure.
Ideally, the caliphate would be separated from the Ottoman dynasty;
the Sacred Places would be put under an independent ruler, and the
title of ‘Keeper of the Holy Places’ would be transferred from the
distant Sultan to the local sherif of the Hejaz, Hussein Ibn Ali,
who would become the caliph.
The problem of the conflict of loyalties for the Muslims was
stressed by the Viceroy of India, who had tried to reassure Muslim
subjects by explaining that the war was not inconsistent with their
loyalty to King George and the British Empire. To complicate
matters, the majority of men in the Indian army, and the population
of Egypt, were Muslim.
Britain’s prime minister, H. H. Asquith, dismissively mocked the
invasion in a letter: ‘The Turks have been trying to throw a bridge
across the Suez Canal and in that ingenious fashion to find a way
into Egypt. The poor things and their would-be bridge were blown
into smithereens, and they have retired to the desert’. By
coincidence, on the other side of the Mediterranean, the British
were about to reverse the roles and begin an offensive action
against Turkey.
On 2 April in Cairo, not all Australians observed Good Friday as
a Holy Day. Many were out to have a good time. One group, fed up
with being fleeced, protested that they were being overcharged. A
small punch-up quickly became a large fight, developing into what
was described as a riot. A few houses went up in flames and three
soldiers were killed. The next day Cairo was declared out of bounds
to the Australians by the exasperated British authorities. However,
historian John Laffin said that ‘the Battle of the Wazzer’ was not
‘a first-class riot…[the men were] determined to exact some sort of
revenge for certain injuries which they believed [they] had incurred
in an infamous street… While they were ransacking a house, a story
started that a Maori was stabbed there. This led to beds, mattresses
and clothing being thrown into the street and bonfired. A number of
mounted British Military Police arrived and used their revolvers but
had the sense to withdraw…A Greek drinking shop was accidentally
burned and the Egyptian fire brigade, which tried to put out the
flaming bonfire, was roughly handled, but there was no serious
trouble. Most of the Anzacs present were spectators…Burning the
bedding of the brothels concerned was a public service…There has
only once been a case of Diggers getting seriously out of hand and
even that incident could have been prevented had the English staff
officers understood something of the Digger temperament’.
A week after the Wasser riot, troops embarked for an unknown
destination, rumoured to be on the other side of the Mediterranean.
But everyone – even the Turks – knew the place was Gallipoli. The
British invasion was referred to as ‘the worst-kept secret in the
war’. Even the price of wheat in Chicago dropped in anticipation of
Russian ships sailing through ‘the liberated Straits’ with the
Russian wheat crop from the Black Sea ports.
Originally the operation had been put under the aegis of what was
designated the Constantinople Expeditionary Forces, so it was known
that the purpose of the invasion was the capture of Constantinople,
the enemy capital. In February and March, when the British navy
tried to bombard the Gallipoli peninsula, the sailors had scrawled
slogans such as ‘Turkish Delight’ or ‘To Constantinople and the
Harems’ on the sides of the ships.
When the infantry and artillery departed from Mena, they began,
as Major Arthur Olden later wrote in his book on the 10th Light
Horse, West Australian Cavalry in the War, to ‘move out on
their great adventure, trained, equipped, eager and full of sympathy
– some of it derisive – with the Light Horse at being left behind’.
Horses, mules and donkeys were being brought in for officers,
ambulance work and cartage, but the precipitous terrain behind the
shore was unsuitable for mounted troops. They would be shipped over
when the advance got closer to Constantinople. For the time being,
the men of the Australian Light Horse brigades remained in Egypt
with their horses, while the infantry troops of the Anzacs were to
be the first troops to land at Gallipoli.
Frantic haste with the preparations for the Gallipoli invasion
caused problem after problem. Even the maps and medical facilities
were woefully inadequate. Lord Kitchener, the former high
commissioner for Egypt who had become secretary of state for war,
selected the chief-of-staff from his old Boer War days, 62-year-old
Sir Ian Hamilton, as the commander-in-chief.
Hamilton’s record as a junior officer showed great courage and
some tactical flair, but his success at that level was not
replicated in the higher command.
Beguiled by the clanship of British society and the sycophancy of
the British officer class into succumbing to loyalty to his friends,
he found it difficult to stand up to his seniors, especially those
who had been his mentors in the past, such as Kitchener. When
Kitchener told Hamilton who his chief-of-staff was to be, instead of
rejecting the offer or demanding the right to chose his own man, he
had little choice but to concur. This inability to assert his own
will was to manifest itself over and over again during the Gallipoli
campaign; Hamilton failed to impose his own rules on his generals.
B. H. Liddell Hart, in The War in Outline, criticised the
lack of organisation and the inadequacy of the pre-campaign
preparations: At the War Office not a single preparatory step had
been taken.
[Hamilton] was hurried out to the Dardanelles at a day’s notice.
The information he had been sent comprised a pre-war handbook on
the Turkish army, an old report on the forts, two tourist guide
books on western Turkey and a map which proved inaccurate…On arrival
in the Mediterranean, Hamilton found that his troops had been so
chaotically distributed in their transports that they had to be sent
to Alexandria for redistribution, thus entailing several weeks’
further delay.
As mines and patrols made close survey before the landings
impossible, preinvasion information about the territory and the
strength of the Turkish resistance was inadequate. There were
criticisms that the size of the Turkish forces had been
underestimated. Aubrey Herbert, describing the troops and ships
before the landing, wrote: ‘The general impression amongst the
intelligence is that we shall get a very bad knock…The intelligence
and Hamilton don’t seem to be in touch…It seems incredible that we
are not better informed…’.
T. E. Lawrence headed the team collating the information for the
maps and charts, and details of the topography for the invasion, and
also acted as liaison officer between military intelligence and the
Survey of Egypt, which produced and printed the maps. Their size was
perfect – they could fold into an officer’s map case – but their
content was later greeted with criticism. The fact that some of the
information about the geographical features of the area was
inaccurate, inadequate – or both – cannot really be laid at
Lawrence’s door. Collation had been handicapped by old maps and lack
of information.
The only maps available were based on ones used in the Crimean
War, 1853–56. Up-to-date knowledge gained from aerial reconnaissance
reports of tents, trenches and gun batteries was woefully
inadequate. However, after the first landing at Cape Helles, a set
of Turkish maps was captured. It was reproduced in Cairo with
anglicised names, and arrived in time for the landings at Suvla.
The first pre-landing casualty of the Gallipoli expedition was
the poet Rupert Brooke. He was one of the earliest of more than one
hundred thousand deaths occurring during the 'deliverance of
Constantinople'. On 23 April, the eve of the departure for
Gallipoli, he died of a septic infection from a mosquito bite on his
lip. His coffin was taken to Skyros and carried to an olive grove by
twelve Australian soldiers. The next day they sailed for Gallipoli.
Had Brooke not died he would have been part of a branch of the
Marine Light Infantry at Anzac Cove.
A 32-year-old idealist, with dazzling good looks, he was known as
'the handsomest young man in England', attracting attention wherever
he went.
A spell of fighting in Belgium had inspired him to write poems
that conveyed the desperate sorrow of youth about to die. In his war
sonnets he evoked a mystical idea of homeland, stressing what men
were fighting for. His line, ‘If I should die think only this of
me’, struck a cord of empathy with the brothers, sisters, mothers,
fathers, wives and grandparents of the men who were at the Front.
Chapter Two
Arrival in Gallipoli
On Friday 23 April, in Mudros Harbour, one of the mightiest
seaborne invasions in history was about to commence. The first of
200 ships were off and moving forward to a tumult of excited and
deafening cheers from the surrounding vessels, crammed with soldiers
who would soon follow, including a French Division and the 29th
British Division. Even the weather was auspicious. The wind, which
had blown every cloud away, had now dropped, and the sky over this
Greek island in the eastern Mediterranean was the brightest of
blues. Ashore it seemed that all the spring flowers had burst into
bloom at once.
This was the biggest offensive undertaken by Britain and France
in the early stages of the war, and the Australians were to be the
first troops going ashore. Their objective was historic: like the
Crusaders before them, they were en route to capture Constantinople,
the capital of Turkey and great city of the Islamic world. Their
route was via Gallipoli, just 132 miles away. The peninsula of
Gallipoli guards the three seas of antiquity: the Mediterranean, the
Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea, the world’s oldest maritime trade
route and a magnet to merchants, pirates, conquerors and statesmen.
Since ancient times, the dramatic headlands and rugged hills of
Gallipoli have acted as a barrier between Europe and the Orient,
between West and East, a gateway to Constantinople.
This new invasion was rightly considered by many strategists to
be fraught with danger. Two years before World War I had even begun,
the Italians had tried to storm Gallipoli but, like many before
them, had been repulsed.
This time, nothing had been spared apart from the horses: men,
seaplanes, battleships. At this stage, the majority of the animals
landing with the troops were just beasts of burden; the cavalry
would come later.
This was not just a simple advance into the heartland of Turkey,
the centre of the Ottoman Empire, but a sophisticated diversionary
tactic dreamt up by politicians and generals in London. Opening up a
new front in the east would, they believed, shatter the stalemate in
France. According to Churchill, then a 41-year-old aspiring
politician, First Lord of the Admiralty and one of the main
advocates of the operation, it would also attack Germany through the
‘back door’. Another advantage was opening up the Black Sea to trade
again. Russia could then ship out her wheat and be supplied with the
munitions she so desperately needed.
The Russians, Greeks and Bulgarians also hoped to gain
Constantinople, not only for its prized seaways, but because it had
great religious significance and was the birthplace of Eastern
Orthodoxy. Like Rome, Constantinople is built on seven hills. Only
by occupying ‘the city of the world’s desire’, taken by the Turks in
1453, could Russia be sure that her ships could safely sail from the
Black Sea into the Aegean, the Mediterranean and beyond. Even the
anti-Tsarist literary hero, Feodor Dostoevsky, wrote in 1876: ‘It
goes without staying that sooner or later Constantinople should be
ours’.
No vessel can leave the Black Sea without first sailing through
the Bosphorus, straddled by Constantinople. Having navigated the
narrow channel, a ship next has to sail across the Sea of Marmara
and finally through the thirteen-mile channel of the Dardanelles,
which in earlier times was called the Hellespont. It had been sailed
through by Jason and swum across by Leander to visit his beloved
Hero, deeds immortalised by many writers and poets.
Chanak and Troy lie on the Dardanelles’ eastern Asiatic side and
Gallipoli is on its western European bank. The nation holding either
of these two banks – or both – controls all the shipping from
southern Russia, Bulgaria and Rumania, including the rich basin of
the Danube, the Crimean ports of Odessa and Sebastopol, and the
mouths of four rivers: the Danube, the Dniester, the Dnieper, and
the Don. As the icy expanses of the Baltic were not navigable in
winter, these straits were essential for Russian trade.
For a century Britain had been Turkey’s strong ally. The two
countries had fought side by side in the Crimean War against Russia.
This war had given the English language the word ‘jingoism’. Crowds
had gathered in Trafalgar Square in the early 1850s waving not the
Union Jack but the Ottoman crescent and star flag singing:
We
don’t want to fight, But by jingo if we do, We’ve got the ships,
We’ve got the men, We’ve got the money too.
We’ve fought the bear before, And if we’re Britons true, The
Russians shall not have Constantinople! After the Crimean
campaign, Britain maintained links with the Sultans in their
palaces. When Russia attacked the Balkans via the Caucasus in 1877,
Queen Victoria herself sent bandages to wounded Turkish soldiers.
But in the same way that the decadent occupant of the throne of the
House of Osman, Sultan Abdul Hamid II – Abdul ‘the Damned’ – had
many wives and countless concubines in his harem, he also believed
he could have more than one ally, even if one was in alliance with
his old enemy, Russia. For thirty years this intriguer played off
the European powers against each other. His successor indulged in
similar games.
Many paradoxes resulted from Britain’s closeness to Turkey.
Firstly, she had trained the Turkish navy. Ever since 1911,
seventy-two British naval advisers and staff under Rear-Admiral
Arthur Limpus had been stationed in Constantinople, helping to
modernise the Turkish navy. As a result, the British navy knew the
seas they were about to invade very well indeed. Two years earlier,
when the Italians had tried to take the Gallipoli peninsula, British
officers had advised the Turks on how to defend it. However, as
Edwardian attitudes still prevailed, it was considered ungentlemanly
for Limpus to fight against the men he had taught to fight or the
places he knew so well, so he never fought in the Gallipoli theatre.
Secondly, munitions manufacturer Vickers had been one of the
suppliers of the Turkish arsenal, so a large number of the Turkish
mines used in the Dardanelles to blow up British ships were made in
the north of England. In 1915 British guns would also be among those
used by the Turks against the British on the peninsula. Thirdly, two
super-dreadnought battleships were nearing completion in the north
of England. Ordered by Turkey in 1911, they were impounded by the
British at the beginning of August 1914. These mighty vessels had
been paid for by coins dropped into collection boxes in villages
throughout Turkey. Britain’s action outraged and embittered the
nation.
The decks of the moving ships were overcrowded with raw Anzac
troops who had never seen battle. The voices of over 10,000 patriots
seemed to be raised as they sang ‘Australia Will Be There’, a song
that became an emotive chant during the war: On land or sea,
wherever you be, Keep your eye on Germany! For England, Home and
Beauty Have no cause to fear! Should auld acquaintance be forgot?
No! No! No! No! No! Australia will be there! Australia will be
there! When the singing faded, the bands kept playing and the
troops kept cheering.
Within a week, they thought, the Union Jack would be high above
the domes and minarets of Constantinople. None of the men knew that
the British, French and Russians had four weeks earlier concluded a
secret agreement to hand over Constantinople and the nearby Turkish
coasts to the Russians. This agreement, reached in London,
completely reversed Britain’s traditional policy of keeping Russia
well out of Turkey. No longer was Britain preserving a barrier
against Russian expansion. But it was war; and Russia was an ally,
not an enemy. Nor did the Australian soldiers know that the Sultan
had earlier proclaimed a jihad. Religion reared its head on
both sides. As the ships neared their destination, men who had not
attended a church service for years crowded onto the decks to sing
the hymns in the ‘Service Before Battle’ and hear the chaplain pray
for victory.
At midnight on 24/25 April, the ships were still moving. An hour
or so passed. They halted. But had they landed on the correct beach?
Did a current pull them too far up the coast? Had the landing cove
been changed at the last minute? Had secrecy blocked information, so
that officers were not sufficiently briefed about the right
destination? Under a setting moon, they lowered themselves into the
rowing boats, gripping the loose rope ladders that swayed with their
weight. At about 3.30 am, steamboats started towing them the
two-and-a-half miles to shore. Moving in darkness, they glided onto
seashores of pebbles, about a mile north of Gaba Tepe, Ariburnu –
the ‘Cape of Bees’, a name honouring the wild bumblebees which had
made thousands of hives in holes eroded in the cliff-face. Soon,
though, it would be known as Anzac Cove.
As dawn broke, the Australians were the first Allied troops to
wade ashore on the beaches of the Gallipoli peninsula. Spasmodic
shell and machine-gun fire whipped up the sand in front of the
assault craft. The Turks were prepared to meet the invaders. Bullets
hit the men, the water, and the shingle of the beach. Some men
jumped out of the boats. But once they were in the water many were
pulled down by the weight of their packs and drowned.
Others in the boats and on the beach hardly dared raise their
heads and look up. Some, defying bullets and shrapnel, ran across
the pebbles, stumbling on fallen comrades. There was no cover. Men
died trying to drag injured mates to a safer position. Some lay dead
in the boats; others, unable to move, lay in agony on the beach. As
the beach became piled with mutilated bodies, some of the injured
were stacked onto linked barges. The sea around the cove was red
with blood. Boats kept bringing more and more men. By 2 pm, 12,000
Anzacs were ashore – dead, injured and alive. Fighting went on
ceaselessly, even in the dark, for forty-eight hours.
Leaving those who were incapacitated behind, the soldiers fixed
bayonets and scrambled up the pathless cliffs, pulling at the dry
crumbling earth. The inhospitable nature of the terrain challenged
them. With their boots and clothes heavy with seawater, the men
found much of the going very rough.
Shinning up the deep sandstone chasms and gullies, they soon lost
touch with each other, but managed to lever and pull themselves up
by the tangle of low green scrub and a prickly holly-like bush with
spiked leaves, which inflicted nasty scratches. As the soldiers
clambered up, they came across patches of sweet-scented flowers,
mostly yellow or mustard-coloured. The chain of communication
collapsed. Neither messages from the officers on the beach, nor men
and supplies, were getting through to the men surging forward over
the hills. Disorganisation reigned. Each man high up in the scrub
relied on personal endeavour. Communication between the command on
the ships and beach headquarters was almost as ineffective.
While being peppered with bullets and shrapnel, some of the men
managed to edge up to the uppermost ridge, where they caught
glimpses of the Narrows, the mile-wide stretch of water immortalised
by the English poet, Lord Byron, who had swum across it in 1810.
Next stop was to be Constantinople. But the Australian troops had
to turn back or be killed, for close in the hinterland, riding at
the head of his Division (around 12,000 men) towards them, was their
nemesis, Mustafa Kemal.
The overall commander of the Turkish troops was Liman von
Sanders, who would also often be in the fray, risking death and
smelling the stench of the battles. Liman von Sanders was an
unbending, resolute, stout, 64-yearold German general who brought
monogrammed silk sheets on campaign and relished the ‘von’ with
which the Kaiser had recently ennobled him. A year earlier he had
been sent to Turkey to reorganise the Ottoman army.
Apart from being fastidiously dressed and a cavalry officer, he
had little in common with Kemal, then a 34-year-old with steely blue
eyes, prominent cheekbones, an elegant nose and light brown hair,
who more often than not was smoking a cigarette. The only son of a
clerk at the Salonika Customs House, Kemal, like many well-educated
Turks, was fluent in French, with polished manners and dignified
deportment. Stubborn and thin-lipped, and adored by his soldiers, he
was to later to be referred to as ‘the saviour of Gallipoli’. For
seven and a half months he took the lead in the northern sector
above Anzac Cove. Other Turkish and German officers also performed
exceptionally at Gallipoli, but it was Kemal’s name that was to
stand out.
Despite his abilities, Kemal was then only a divisional
commander. There had been reluctance to send him to the front, as
many Turks in authority regarded him as a somewhat dangerous person,
a leader of the progressives. The Turkish minister of war, Enver
Pasha, who in 1913 had staged a coup d’état that had given him, as
war minister, effective power and control in Turkey, was always in
two minds towards Kemal. Aware of Kemal’s brilliance, he felt that
one day Kemal might outshine him.
Although ambivalent about the West, Kemal had tried to adopt a
few Western ways, even learning the waltz and taking ballroom
dancing lessons.
When he was a military attache in Bulgaria and in Constantinople,
he had to shake off gossip about excesses of whisky drinking and
women. But whatever his personal failings, once on the battlefield
he inspired his troops. They would follow him to the ends of the
Earth. Fellow officers, though, often found Kemal difficult, as he
could not abide criticism.
Without Kemal’s presence, the Australians might well have reached
the far side of the hills and dominated the Narrows. Then, and only
then, would they have cleared the channel of mines and conquered
Constantinople.
Kemal galloped here, there and everywhere building up a delaying
force.
Collecting the men from his two battalions wherever he found
them, he pushed them into any gap. He kept thrusting them forward in
a non-stop attack, wheeling field guns and howitzers into position.
After a few hours, while his men – who, confusingly, also wore khaki
uniforms – were briefly resting, Kemal sped ahead towards Chunuk
Bair, where he saw another group retreating. For three hours they
had been firing at the Australian soldiers landing on the beach, and
they had not a bullet left.
The soldiers pointed at a line of Australians who were quickly
advancing and were closer to Kemal than his own troops. Kemal gave
the command to fix bayonets, lie down and keep the Australians at
bay while a Turkish officer raced back to fetch the rest of the
regiment, and more bullets and shells.
Additional soldiers rushed into action with heavy guns, emptying
them on the Anzacs as they tried to surge over the ridge, forcing
them to scatter and take cover in the sparse scrub. Never did Kemal
let up in his relentless defence. He sent two battalions forward to
halt the invaders as they crawled and clawed up the steep slopes.
Pushing forward the big howitzers to shell the beach, directing
shrapnel and explosives on the incoming boats and men, Kemal stopped
the Australian and New Zealand forces. As more Allied corpses piled
up on the shingled beaches, he effectively froze the Australians and
New Zealanders into an area close to the shore.
Half of the Australians and New Zealanders who landed during the
first couple of days became casualties. A quarter of the Australians
who perished there during the nine months of the campaign died in
those ghastly first five days. In less than forty-eight hours, seven
transports arrived at Alexandria, Egypt, carrying 3346 casualties.
John Laffin, in Damn the Dardanelles, puts the figures for
the three days 25–28 April as: killed – 2,500 men and 150 officers;
wounded – 6,000 men and 250 officers. He does not, though, stipulate
which army – the British as a whole, or the Anzacs in particular.
The Turks, too, suffered terrible casualties.
The first objective of the Australians was to capture the third
ridge of the Sari Bair range, a stepping stone towards the Narrows.
‘The Narrows’ became a place that haunted the Australians, always so
physically close, yet unreachable. Kemal knew that whoever held
those heights controlled the entire area – and ultimately the
Dardanelles. In his diary, Kemal wrote that the decisive moment of
the landing, the instant that he won the battle, was after he gave
his famous order: ‘I don’t order you to attack, I order you to die.
In the time it takes us to die, other troops and commanders can
come and take our places’. As Islam is the only religion that has a
specific doctrine of fighting for the faith, for martyrdom, many
Turkish soldiers were quite willing to die. In confronting the
Christian infidel, Kemal’s soldiers were finding salvation, for the
Koran says: ‘The sword is the key to Heaven and Hell’. The Turks
were a ferocious force in defending their homeland.
When ammunition ran out again, hand-to-hand fighting took its
place.
Finally the Anzacs were driven back to the coastal spurs and
ridges.
Confusion was rife. As both sides were camouflaged within the
hills, it was difficult for gunners on ships to distinguish between
their own men and the Turks. At such a distance, gunfire could not
be sure of hitting foe rather than friend. So the huge guns at sea
were not fully utilised. While the ships fulfilled their role by
delivering every cartridge, ounce of food and supplies, and most of
the water to the men, they were woefully inadequate at providing
battle protection and support.
Men hit before landing could not be brought ashore, so remained
in the boats as they plied back to the fleet bringing more and more
troops. Not even the worst pessimist could have expected the flow of
wounded that poured out from Gallipoli. Some boats – along with
dirty, verminous transports, without doctors or stores – went from
ship to ship, desperately searching for a place to offload the
injured and dead. For example, Colonel Howse, ADMS 1st Australian
Division, said that he was told by one non-commissioned officer
(NCO) of one boat that he tried seven transports before getting the
wounded taken on.
Many of the vessels moving the wounded were neither staffed nor
equipped to take their pitiful cargoes. On the Hindoo, two
medical officers with two surgical panniers cared for 800
casualties, many on the verge of death. Conditions on the SS
Lutzow were worse. Here one lone veterinary surgeon was expected
to care for 600 wounded during the four-day voyage to Egypt. One
medical orderly on another vessel wrote that the boats were so
jammed with bodies that as soon as a man died he was tossed as
quickly as possible into the sea. Everywhere men suffered from the
filth, the ineffective system of hygiene and lack of either water or
someone to bring it to their parched mouths. On one ship there were
between 400 and 500 wounded, with only one bedpan; wounds left
untreated for seven days suppurated. This often caused deaths that
would not normally have occurred with such injuries. Arrangements
ashore were equally chaotic. On Gallipoli, the medical facilities
were initially like those encountered by Florence Nightingale in the
nearby Crimea sixty years earlier. Again the wounded were obliged to
lie for days under shellfire, until transport could be found to take
them. Only the numbers of the dead solved the problem of
overcrowding.
In his diary, the official historian, C. E. W. Bean, wrote about
the censorship that stopped the people in Australia knowing what was
actually happening to their troops. ‘People in Australia, when fifty
casualties were published, seem by the latest reports to have been
almost shocked. We know that by then the list was really 5,000 for
this division alone...’ Appalled by hospital services that were
strained and inadequate beyond belief, Mabel Brookes (later Dame)
echoed the criticism that a great deal of the suffering was due to
poor administration. Her husband, Norman, Australia’s first
international tennis star, who had won the Wimbledon championship in
1914, headed the Australian Red Cross in Cairo. Deeply moved by the
uncomplaining heroism of the 17,000 wounded men who arrived in Egypt
before the end of May, she recorded their pain in her memoirs,
Crowded Galleries. Men lay in their drying and oozing blood,
with no drugs to kill the pain, often without any blankets. Many
were waiting for amputations. ‘On 14 May, Luna Park [a temporary
hospital in Heliopolis] with 1,750 patients had four medical
officers, 15 sisters and 40 orderlies, mostly untrained. Kerosene
tins were used for dressing trays and water was sterilised in dixies.
Mudros took 6,000 cases irrespective of Cairo…the Red Cross in Egypt
had not been sufficiently planned nor, indeed, had the whole medical
service…’ Another hospital nearer Cairo, called the Atelier, took a
thousand, while canvas was thrown over the tennis courts at the
Ghezireh Sporting Club to take another 1250, and two Australian
hospitals were improvised at Lemnos.
Apart from trying to keep the men alive, bedding, bedpans and
other medical necessities had to be improvised and clothes had to be
found for the men, most of whom had been separated from their kits.
Pinned down around Anzac Cove, the soldiers were unable to
penetrate far inland. Their maximum achievement was about 1250
metres east of the beach. So dreadful were the casualties, so bleak
the outlook, that the Anzac commander had sent a request to Hamilton
on the Queen Elizabeth, on the first night, for permission to
evacuate the men. Hamilton refused. They were to stay at their
posts, ‘dig in’ and ‘dig, dig, dig’.
The troops duly dug in. Instead of an advance to Constantinople,
the troops were stuck in one place. This new front, which had been
created to break the sour stalemate of trench warfare in France,
turned into the same thing that had occurred in France – men
deadlocked in trenches. Battle had deteriorated into the same
trench-slogging match. Each man was in a trap, surrounded either by
the sea or Turks. The sole way out was by boat. In his poignant
memoirs Facey described the cat-and-mouse affair: ‘We had to work
hard digging new trenches…When daylight came the Turks would see
that our line had moved closer. They would shell hell out of the
trench for a day or two…’. With the combined strength of the British
navy, army and new air force, combat developed into continual
sniping, interrupted by short bursts of extreme and violent
activity.
At Gallipoli, the army did not supply all the necessary
ambulances for its wounded. The Red Cross supplied one, the poet
John Masefield another.
When war had broken out, he had volunteered as an orderly at a
British Red Cross hospital in France. Horrified by the inadequacy of
medical facilities, Masefield raised enough money in England to
purchase a 32-horsepower twin-screw motorboat, two smaller launches
and a barge. He drove the speedboat to Gallipoli himself, taking his
small flotilla across the treacherous Bay of Biscay and around
Gibraltar into the Mediterranean to reach his destination. Each
night, under cover of darkness, the new ambulances sped across the
sixty miles of sea to Gallipoli, to fetch British, French and Anzac
wounded from the beaches.
If you enjoyed this prologue and
chapters one and two of
First to Damascus
and
would like to read more you can purchase this fine book from
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