Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  In the third week of April the Hood landed at Skyros, the island of Achilles; where his mother was said to have dressed him as a girl so that he would not be whisked off to Troy. Training continued, but life was merry. They swam, sunbathed; the sub-lieutenants even threw a fancy dress ball for the men. Most of them scraped together odds and ends to dress as old dames or painted themselves black, but one ‘vain spark’ in Charles’ platoon cast himself as Queen Elizabeth. ‘His skirt,’ Charles wrote, ‘is my burberry, his stomacher my cabin curtains; his wimple (non-historic but one must wear something on one’s head) is a boot bag and his veil a blue antiseptic bandage.’ When not ragging with the men, Charles and Patrick managed to get off the ship one day and on to the island to chat with the locals and ramble about taking in the scenery. They returned to find Brooke, who had taken their watches so that they could stay out as long as possible, hanging over the side and bombarding them with sarcasm.

  The following day, though, their friend fell ill. Patrick was frightened by the sight of him ‘so motionless and fevered’ as he was lowered over the side and taken to a French hospital on the island. Blood poisoning claimed the poet, before he caught sight of Gallipoli. ‘I shouldn’t have thought,’ wrote Patrick, who had only met Brooke since joining the battalion, ‘that anyone in three months could come to fill so large a space in my life.’ Three petty officers performed the challenging feat of carrying Rupert’s coffin for a mile across rugged terrain, along a stony path where they buried him in an olive grove. Charles, who had known the poet for much longer, helped to dig the grave and stayed behind after the service to cover it with pieces of white marble in the shadow of a bent olive tree leaning over it ‘like a weeping angel’.

  When they returned from the burial Cleg Kelly composed an elegy, trying to introduce the feel of Greek temples and the movement of the olive trees as opposed to religious undertones that wouldn’t have suited their friend at all. Perhaps, Charles reflected sadly ‘the Island of Achilles is in some respects a suitable resting place for those bound for the plains of Troy’.

  Despite his complete lack of enthusiasm for this new endeavour, Aubrey Herbert had no complaints about his trip save for the fact that the ‘puritanical’ New Zealand Government had ordained that their ship was to be dry of all alcohol. After a three-day voyage they docked at Lemnos where the mood from ship to ship was buoyant. By now he was aware that the New Zealanders would be attacking the central part of the peninsula and Aubrey had been despatched onto the island to buy as many donkeys as he could get his hands on. Some things never changed. His adoration of animals led him to rescue a miniature one that would have been useless for military purposes to keep as a mascot for the division.

  On 23 April he watched a magnificent procession of boats depart for the new front. In the afternoon the New Zealanders left in a stiff breeze and the island sparkled behind them in the sunlight. ‘With the band playing and flags flying, we steamed past the rest of the fleet. Cheers went from one end of the harbour to the other.’ The sea was calm all the way across to the Dardanelles. Some of the officers intended to get up early and watch the Australians attack from the deck. Aubrey didn’t want to. ‘I thought that we should see plenty of the attack before we had done with it and preferred to sleep.’

  He eventually emerged two hours after the off at 6.30 a.m on 25 April. to the continuous roar of artillery from Cape Helles in the south. Behind the sands at Z Beach the ground rose steeply into cliffs and hills towards the imposing peak of Chunuk Bair and from the shore he could hear the crackle of rifles. At 8.30 a.m. he received his orders and was loaded on to a small craft to be towed ashore. Aubrey eyed it suspiciously as they were herded in. There was no shelter of any kind and as they drifted along bullets splashed into the water alongside them. They watched the outline of bodies on the beach loom larger as they approached land. Aubrey ‘floundered ashore’ and scrambled on to ‘that unholy land’ amidst a shower of bullets. ‘The word was then, I thought rather unnecessarily, passed that we were under fire.’

  At Z Beach, which would become known as Anzac Cove, there was initial success but it came at a price. They had been landed in the wrong place, right in front of Chunuk Bair instead of further south where the ground was easier. At about midday the Turks turned their guns on them. The Australians got right up on to the high ground before the enemy counter-attacked under Mustafa Kemal and pushed them back. Aubrey Herbert was running backwards and forwards past hordes of wounded men looking for (fictional) Turkish prisoners that he was supposed to be interviewing. He was appalled at the conditions that he saw and wrote in his diary of 600 wounded men loaded on to one ship and despatched to Egypt in the care of one veterinary surgeon. The commander of the Anzac forces, General Birdwood, wanted to evacuate, citing in particular the plight of the New Zealanders, who had been heavily hit. General Hamilton didn’t want to hear it. He told him that the only option was to ‘dig yourselves right in and stick it out’.

  At Cape Helles in the far south the attacks had been a collective disaster. Meanwhile, Charles Lister, Patrick Shaw-Stewart and the rest of the Hood Battalion were carrying out their false landing in the Gulf of Saros. Shortly after dawn on 25 April, transports carrying the naval men began playing about with a collection of rowboats and pretended to set up for an attack. Patrick then listened for two days to ‘the most prodigious bombardment that ever was’ going on to the south whilst they bobbed about on their ship. He couldn’t believe that any Turks would survive such a storm of shells ‘but they have the devils’, he wrote miserably. Rumours had reached the Hood that all was not playing out well on the peninsula and he was glad that they hadn’t formed part of the original landing force. ‘Though our men will probably be very steady,’ he remarked, ‘I doubt they are quite the raging fiends the Australians seem to be when they are raised.’

  By the end of April the Hood had been moved down to V Beach to land at what had been a scene of unprecedented slaughter just a few days earlier. Bodies lined the sand and the River Clyde, the modern day Trojan horse that had run aground to land troops by way of holes cut in the side and gangways attached to the hull, dominated the scene. There were ships everywhere and in the dark they reminded Charles of the illuminated Brighton Pier. Occasionally he saw tiny little figures ashore; they looked like ants creeping and crawling about the cliff faces and hillsides. Achi Baba loomed hundreds of feet above them as they waited to come ashore. The noise of the guns was deafening and the Turkish artillery retaliated. Charles, Patrick and their men camped near the shoreline for the night and shivered whilst they watched the red haze of fires on the skyline. The Gallipoli campaign was now well under way.

  What followed for the next month and a half was a systematic attempt to carry out the original plan to seize the straits. It began with a massed renewed attack on 28 April which failed; a huge blow to the British idea of a swift victory in this new theatre of war. Having suffered Turkish counter-attacks, on 6 May the assault was thrust again towards the village of Krithia and above it the already familiar Achi Baba.

  At midnight on 5 May the Hood were awoken by a crescendo of noise. Charles, buzzing at the idea of actual fighting, was convinced that the enemy was right on top of them. They marched across a soggy ravine, ‘overgrown with lovely water weeds and olives, grey in the moonlight’ to a line of trenches that awaited them. They tucked in behind the firing line. Dawn revealed the Allies in front of them advancing over hoards of Turkish dead.

  Charles’ platoon moved off in support. The men in front had gone 2,000 yards when the Turks opened fire with shrapnel. The lines were still primitive and there was no time to improve their positions. The Hood was isolated on the flank and orders came up to retire, but not before the enemy had singled them out for a heavy barrage. The Hood had managed to effect some sort of advance but gains were minimal and the casualties to the Royal Naval Division were shocking. Charles’ company was amongst the last to retreat. As they moved back, a shell exploded sending a shower of shrapn
el at him, lodging in his water bottle, his coat and, most ignominious of all, in his backside. There he was, ‘bleeding like a pig’ and limping along when he wanted to be rallying his men. ‘I never saw a Turk within shooting distance,’ he remarked drily. Patrick agreed with his statement.

  Charles managed to disguise his injury well until his trousers became soaked in blood. He was deposited on a stretcher, carried down to the beach and sent off to Malta. His company remained in the firing line without him. He likened his battle experience to foreplay. ‘I should like to get back quick, because I have seen just enough to tantalise.’ It hadn’t been glorious, but as far as he was concerned they were not to blame. If the commanding officer had not instructed them to retire then Charles thought that they could have been cut off and annihilated. ‘That day they showed great steadiness for raw troops, but their situation was impossible.’

  The New Zealand Brigade had been moved round to Cape Helles to take part in the assault too. The dead lay everywhere. The wounded cried for water in between the trenches. Aubrey Herbert had seen enough. He located medical officers and had them approach General Birdwood about some sort of ceasefire to attend to the situation. The general did not think that the Germans would allow the Turks to carry through such an idea. Aubrey was disgusted. He had been out with a megaphone, which Birdwood quite rightly thought was a futile exercise, trying to convince the Turks to surrender. He was shot at, laughed at and otherwise ignored. He had the same effect as a trench mortar. Every time he stopped to speak he elicited a volley of rifle fire. Unperturbed, Aubrey continued with his ploy to effect a temporary ceasefire to take care of the dead and wounded.

  Patrick was one of the few sub-lieutenants who came through unscathed but his love affair with the war was already over. Men around him had been struck and a bullet had lodged in his Asprey steel mirror, which he thought almost as good an advert for the manufacturer as Oc Asquith’s wound had been for the government. The war was a thing that he didn’t think a man ought to miss, but now he had seen it and participated in battle he began to wonder if this was any place for a civilised man.

  On 8 May the New Zealanders made their own attempt on Krithia and gained about 400 yards before they were pinned down. Despite this, the battle’s commander, Aylmer Hunter-Weston, ordered them to attack again that evening in pursuit of Achi Baba. The effort failed amidst catastrophic casualty figures for Ian Hamilton’s force.

  The smell of bodies had now become unbearable in the stifling heat. Aubrey tried again but was refused permission to try to negotiate a truce. Aubrey was relentless, demanding to board Hamilton’s ship to speak to the MEF’s commander himself. He had no love for Hamilton at the best of times but this was to enhance his distaste. Aubrey labelled him a vain fool and the dislike was mutual. The general, though, did approve a pause in hostilities for burials, providing that it did not appear that the British had asked for it. Aubrey managed to make both sides believe that it was the other who had wanted a ceasefire. A colleague and an Oxford friend remarked that ‘Liman von Sanders says we did, Sir Ian Hamilton says they did. My own opinion is that Aubrey Herbert was responsible for it.’

  On 24 May Aubrey’s stomach was in knots, paranoid that something was going to go wrong. He climbed upwards to 400 Plateau above the beach at Anzac Cove through a field of poppies. He had just reached another plateau full of tall corn when the ‘fearful smell of death’ hit him. Corpses were scattered all over the place. He climbed through gullies of thyme and it was ‘indescribable’. A Turkish Red Crescent man gave him a dressing doused in antiseptic to cloak his mouth and nose from the smell. As the soldiers went about their burial work, they were visibly distressed. Aubrey came across two wounded men ‘in all that multitude of silence, crying in the gullies’. He approached one, who lay in the middle of a pile of bodies, pulled out a water bottle and helped him to drink from it. A Turkish captain with him was feeling reflective. ‘At this spectacle,’ he said, ‘even the most gentle must feel savage and the most savage must weep.’

  Amongst the bodies the damage done by machine guns was evident by the injuries that the men had sustained: ‘their heads doubled under them with the impetus of the rush and both hands clasping their bayonets’. Aubrey was required to alleviate a fair amount of bickering throughout the day. The Turks argued that the Australians were making off with rifles and the Australians levelled their own charges at the enemy while Aubrey tried to pacify both sides. Craftiness did occur. One chaplain managed to get a trench that had been the source of much bother used as a grave so that it was taken out of use and both sides spied when they could.

  Aubrey, being Aubrey, managed to make friends with some of the Turkish troops. The sultan’s men were gleaned from all over the Ottoman Empire. He had a Greek try to surrender to him, an Anatolian gave him a fierce stare to send chills up a man’s spine and the Albanians took to him immediately. They knew Aubrey by name, for after all he had nearly become their king and men began clapping him on the back and cheering. Unfortunately this was in the midst of funeral services occurring across the battlefield and Aubrey quietened them all down quickly. The truce was due to end in the late afternoon and Aubrey joked with the enemy troops that they would shoot at him the next day. The Albanians found the idea ridiculous. That night Aubrey was dousing his throat with whiskey to get rid of the taste of death and coating his legs with iodine where barbed wire had slashed at his skin.

  The following day HMS Triumph was sunk in full view of the beach. ‘There was fury, impotence and rage on the beach and on the hill.’ Aubrey heard a captain ranting, ‘you should kill all enemies, not give them cigarettes!!!!’ Men were crying and cursing. ‘Very different from last night when they were all wishing each other luck.’

  On 4 June the British and French launched another massed attack on Achi Baba. The 3rd Battle of Krithia was the final attempt to carry out the original plan of attack on the peninsula. At 8 a.m. a bombardment began, concentrating on strongpoints before it became a general barrage on all the Turkish lines three hours later. The French to the right of the Hood were also pummelling the Turkish lines but unfortunately for the allies, the wind blew the smoke from their shells right back into their faces and obscured their view at midday when the Hood burst forward.

  As soon as they emerged men began to fall back dead into the trench in a hail of Turkish fire. Those that survived poured into three enemy trenches taking an obscene amount of casualties. They were in dire need of support. To their right, the French were completely mown down by machine guns and the Royal Naval Division was therefore exposed to enfilading fire. Setting off behind the Hood, the Collingwood Battalion fell in their droves before they could even get to the front line. Butchered and in a state of confusion, at lunchtime they were ordered to retreat. As if this was not crushing enough, the following day the Turks launched a forceful counter-attack. The whole offensive ground to a halt and all hopes of an advance evaporated.

  Patrick went into battle having just received word that Julian Grenfell and Edward Horner had fallen foul of the Germans and ended up in the same hospital in Boulogne. He had been abruptly pulled out of the line at the very last moment to replace a fallen French interpreter dealing with the troops next door. There was simply no time to think of his friends when the Hood was being slaughtered all around him. The battalion suffered severely on 4 June. Of fifteen officers, six were killed and five wounded, including Cleg Kelly. Patrick was one of only four to come out physically unscathed. He was ‘filled with disgust and rage’ at the folly of it. Trenches were captured but they got nowhere near the summit of the hill. The Hood had lost twenty-six of thirty officers since 6 May and finally attempts to carry out the initial intentions on the peninsula were abandoned. It all appeared to have been for nothing.

  Charles Lister was fit to re-join the Royal Naval Division a few days later. His return was mortifying. He sailed in at dawn and the fleet was nowhere to be seen. Just a couple of hospital ships bobbed about with a destroyer or two. The g
reen keel of the sunken Majestic stuck out above the waterline lit by a single lamp, reminding Charles of the oil lamps put on the graves at San Lorenzo cemetery in Rome on All Soul’s night. He found the Hood much changed. The survivors were working on the beach, grossly under-officered and digging saps, sniping, lugging supplies and even carrying out guard duty for high-ranking officers. As on the Western Front, stagnant warfare now kicked in on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

  Aubrey’s mood was desolate. He found the inactivity and the calm awful. The likes of his own general, Godley, were not unpopular, but Hamilton was another story. Aubrey despised him. He reported that he had been to the area precisely twice in the early stages of their occupation. ‘I think for a quarter of an hour each time and has never been around the positions at all. GHQ are loathed.’ Aubrey grew more and more bitter towards him. In June he wrote to his wife that Hamilton had ‘the obstinacy of weak men’. He continued his appraisal: ‘I have had one or two instances when I have seen how he and his staff believe what they want to believe in the face of all sense and evidence.’

  Neither did Aubrey reserve his venom for General Hamilton. Although an MP himself, he did not refrain from criticising the politicians at home for the ineptitude that he believed was responsible for the army’s plight. Thanks to his wife he had intimate knowledge of what was being said inside 10 Downing Street and was distinctly unimpressed at how miserable Churchill was at his failure. Apparently he had said that if he was Prime Minister for twenty years then it would not make up for the failure of the Dardanelles. ‘I would like him to die in some of the torments I have seen so many die in here,’ Aubrey spat. ‘But his only “agony” you say is missing PM.’

  Despite the failure of the expedition thus far, Kitchener, in the face of a disastrous scenario in Flanders, was not about to let the campaign fold. During the summer the beaches on the peninsula were swarming with activity. Sitting in a rest camp with the rest of the Hood, Charles Lister claimed to be quite enjoying himself. ‘I look forward to the rum nights with all the zeal of an old sea dog,’ he reported. He had a light-hearted approach to war but it did not sit well with everybody. Certain occupants took life on the beaches very seriously but he couldn’t. He likened one of them to Blackpool but then noted that ‘its inhabitants take the shells rather seriously and would resent this flippancy’.