John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works

by Philip Errington

  This word of victory, coming to men who thought for the moment that their efforts had been made in vain, had the effect of a fresh brigade. The men rallied back up the hill; bearing the news to the firing-line, the new, constricted line was made good, and the rest of the night was never anything but continued victory to those weary ones in the scrub. But twenty-four hours of continual battle exhausts men, and by dawn the Turks, knowing the weariness of our men, resolved to beat them down into the sea. When the sun was well in our men’s eyes they attacked again, with not less than twice our entire strength of fresh men, and with an overwhelming superiority in field artillery. Something in the Turk commander, and the knowledge that a success there would bring our men across the Peninsula within a day, made the Turks more desperate enemies there than elsewhere. They came at us with a determination which might have triumphed against other troops. As they came on they opened a terrific fire of shrapnel upon our position, pouring in such a hail that months afterwards one could see their round shrapnel bullets stuck in bare patches of ground, or in earth thrown up from the trenches, as thickly as plums in a pudding. Their multitudes of men pressed through the scrub as skirmishers, and sniped at every moving thing; for they were on higher ground, and could see over most of our position, and every man we had was under direct fire for hours of each day. As the attack developed, the promised help arrived; our warships stood in and opened on the Turks with every gun that would bear. Some kept down the guns of Gaba Tepe, others searched the line of the Turk advance, till the hills over which they came were swathed with yellow smoke and dust, the white clouds of shrapnel, and the drifting darkness of conflagration. All the scrub was in a blaze before them, but they pressed on, falling in heaps and lines; and their guns dropped a never-ceasing rain of shells on trenches, beach, and shipping. The landing of stores and ammunition never ceased during the battle. The work of the beach parties in that scene of burning and massacre was beyond all praise; so was the work of the fatigue parties, who passed up and down the hill with water, ammunition, and food, or dug sheltered roads to the trenches; so was the work of the Medical Service, who got the wounded out of cuts in the earth, so narrow and so twisted that there was no using a stretcher, and men had to be carried on stretcher-bearers’ backs or on improvised chairs made out of packing-cases.

  At a little before noon the Turk attack reached its height in a blaze and uproar of fire and the swaying forward of their multitudes. The guns of the warships swept them from flank to flank with every engine of death: they died by hundreds, and the attack withered as it came. Our men saw the enemy fade and slacken and halt; then with their cheer they charged him and beat him home, seized new ground from him, and dug themselves in in front of him. All through the day there was fighting up and down the line, partial attacks, and never-ceasing shellfire, but no other great attack: the Turks had suffered too much. At night their snipers came out in the scrub in multitudes and shot at anything they could see, and all night long their men dragged up field guns and piles of shrapnel, and worked at the trenches which were to contain ours. When day dawned, they opened with shrapnel upon the beach, with a feu de barrage designed to stop all landing of men and stores. They whipped the bay with shrapnel bullets. Where their fire was concentrated, the water was lashed as with hail all day long; but the boats passed through it, and men worked in it, building jetties for the boats to land at, using a big Turk shell as a pile-driver. When they got too hot they bathed in it, for no fire shook those men. It was said that when a big shell was coming men of other races would go into their dugouts, but that these men paused only to call it a bastard, and then went on with their work.

  By the night of the second day the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps had won and fortified their position. Men writing or reporting on service about them referred to them as the A.N.Z.A.C., and these letters soon came to mean the place in which they were, unnamed till then, probably, save by some rough Turkish place-name, but now likely to be printed on all English maps, with the other names, of Brighton Beach and Hell Spit, which mark a great passage of arms.

  III

  King Marsilies parted his army: ten columns he kept by him, and the other ten rode in to fight. The Franks said: “God, what ruin we shall have here! What will become of the twelve Peers?” The Archbishop Turpin answered first: “Good knights, you are the friends of God; today you will be crowned and flowered, resting in the holy flowers of Paradise, where no coward will ever come.”

  The Franks answered: “We will not fail. If it be God’s will, we will not murmur. We will fight against our enemies; we are few men, but well-hardened.”

  They spurred forward to fight the pagans. The Franks and Saracens are mingled. – The Song of Roland.

  This early fighting, which lasted from dawn on the 25th of April till noon on the following day, won us a footing, not more than that, on the Peninsula; it settled the German brag that we should never be able to land. We had landed upon, had taken, and were holding, the whole of the south-western extremity of the Peninsula and a strip of the Ægean coast, in the face of an army never less than twice our strength, strongly entrenched and well-supplied. We had lost very heavily in the attack, our men were weary from the exceedingly severe service of the landing, but the morrow began the second passage in the campaign, the advance from the sea, before the Turks should have recovered.

  Many have said to me, with a naïveté that would be touching if it were not so plainly inspired by our enemies: “Why did not the troops press on at once the day they landed? The Japanese pressed on the day they landed, so did the Americans in Cuba. If you had pressed on at once, you would have won the whole Peninsula. The Turks were at their last cartridge, and would have surrendered.”

  It is quite true that the Japanese moved inland immediately from their transports at Chemulpho and Chinampo. Those ports were seized before the Russians knew that war was declared; they were not defended by Russian soldiers, and the two small Russian cruisers caught there by the Japanese fleet were put out of action before the transports discharged. The Japanese were free to land as they chose on beaches prepared, not with machine guns and mines, but with cranes, gangways, and good roads. Even so, they did not press on. The Japanese do not press on unless they are attacking; they are as prudent as they are brave; they waited till they were ready, and then marched on. The Americans landed at Daiquiri and at Guanica unopposed, and in neither case engaged the enemy till next day.

  In the preceding chapter I have tried to show why we did not press on at once after landing. We did not because we could not, because two fresh men strongly entrenched, with machine guns, will stop one tired man with a rifle in nine cases out of ten. Our men had done the unimaginable in getting ashore at all; they could not do the impossible on the same day. I used to say this to draw the answer, “Well, other troops would have done it,” so that I might say, what I know to be the truth, that no other men on this earth either would have or could have made good the landing; and that the men have not yet been born who could have advanced after such a feat of arms. The efforts of men are limited by their strength. The strength of men, always easily exhausted, is the only strength at the disposal of a General; it is the money to be spent by him in the purchase of victory, whether by hours of marching in the mud, digging in the field, or in attack. Losses in attack are great, though occasional; losses from other causes are great and constant. All armies in the field have to be supplied constantly with fresh drafts to make good the losses from attack and exhaustion. No armies can move without these replenishments, just as no individual man can go on working, after excessive labour, without rest and food. Our losses in the landings were severe, even for modern war, even for the Dardanelles. The bloodiest battle of modern times is said to have been the Antietam or Sharpsburg, in the American Civil War, where the losses were perhaps nearly one-third of the men engaged. At V beach the Munsters lost more than one-third, and the Dublins more than three-fifths, of their total strength. The Lancashires at W beach
lost nearly as heavily as the Dublins. At Anzac, one Australian battalion lost 422 out of 900. At X beach, the Royals lost 487 out of 979. All these battalions had lost more than half their officers – indeed, by the 28th of April the Dublins had only one officer left. How could these dwindled battalions press on?

  Then for the individual exhaustion. Those engaged in the first landing were clambering and fighting in great heat, without proper food, and in many cases without water, for the first twenty-four or thirty-six hours, varying the fighting with hurried but deep digging in marl or clay, getting no sleep, nor any moment’s respite from the peril of death. Then, at the end of the first phase, when the fact that they had won the landing was plain, some of these same men, unrested, improperly fed, and wet through with rain, sweat, and the sea, had to hold what they had won, while the others went down to the beach to make piers, quarry roads, dig shelters, and wade out to carry or drag on shore food, drink, munitions, and heavy guns, and to do this without appliances, by the strength of their arms. Then, when these things had been done almost to the limit of human endurance, they carried water, food, and ammunition to the trenches, not in carts, but on their backs, and then relieved their fellows in the trenches, and withstood the Turk attacks and replied to the Turks’ fire for hours on end. At Anzac, the A.N.Z. Army Corps had “ninety-six hours continuous fighting in the trenches, with little or no sleep,” and “at no time during the ninety-six hours did the Turks’ firing cease, although it varied in volume; at times the fusillade was simply deafening.” Men worked like this, to the limit of physical endurance, under every possible exposure to wet, heat, cold, death, hunger, thirst, and want of rest, become exhausted, and their nerves shattered, not from fear, which was a thing those men did not understand, but because the machine breaks. On the top of the misery, exhaustion, and never-ceasing peril, is “the dreadful anxiety of not knowing how the battle is progressing,” and the still worse anxiety of vigilance. To the strain of keeping awake, when dead-beat, is added the strain of watching men, peering for spies, stalking for snipers, and listening for bombing parties. Under all these strains the minds of strong men give way. They are the intensest strains ever put upon intelligences. Men subjected to them for many hours at a time cannot at once “press on,” however brave their hearts may be. Those who are unjust enough to think that they can, or could, should work for a summer’s day, without food or drink, at digging, then work for a night in the rain carrying heavy boxes, then dig for some hours longer, and at the end ask me to fire a machine gun at them while they “press on,” across barbed wire, in what they presume to be the proper manner.

  Our men could not “press on” at once. They had not enough unwounded men to do more than hold the hordes of fresh Turks continually brought up against them. They had no guns ashore to prepare an advance, nor enough rifle ammunition to stand a siege. They had the rations in their packs and the water in their bottles, and no other supplies but the seven days’ food, water, and rifle ammunition put into each boat at the landing. To get men, stores, water, and guns ashore under fire, on beaches without wharves, cranes, or derricks of any kind, takes time, and until men and goods were landed no advance was possible. Until then our task was not to press on, but to hang on, like grim death. It was for the enemy to press on, to beat our tired troops before their supports could be landed, and this the Turks very well understood, as their captured orders show, and as their behaviour showed only too clearly. During the days which followed the landing, the Turks, far from being at their last cartridge and eager to surrender, prevented our pressing on by pressing on themselves, in immense force and with a great artillery, till our men were dying of fatigue in driving back their attacks.

  One point more may be discussed before resuming the story. The legend, “that the Turks were at their last cartridge, and would have surrendered had we advanced,” is very widely spread abroad by German emissaries. It appears in many forms, in print, in the lecture, and in conversation. Sometimes place and date are given, sometimes the authority, all confidently, but always differently. It is well to state here the truth, so that the lie may be known. The Turks were never at the end of their supplies. They were always better and more certainly supplied with shells and cartridges than we were. If they were ever (as perhaps they sometimes were) rather short of big gun ammunition, so were we. If they were sometimes rather short of rifles and rifle ammunition, so were we. If they were often short of food and all-precious water, so were we, and more so, and doubly more so. For all our supplies came over hundreds of miles of stormy water infested by submarines, and were landed on open beaches under shellfire, and their supplies came along the Asiatic coast and by ferry across the Hellespont, and thence, in comparative safety, by road to the trenches. The Turkish army was well-supplied, well-equipped, more numerous, and in better positions than our own. There was neither talk nor thought among them at any time of surrender, nor could there have been in an army so placed and so valiant. There was some little disaffection among them. They hated their German officers and the German methods of discipline so much that many prisoners when taken expressed pleasure at being taken, spat at the name of German, and said, “English good, German bad.” Some of this, however, may have been Levantine tact.