John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works

by Philip Errington

  Late on the 26th of April, the French corps landed men at V beach, and took over the trenches on the right of the ground won – i.e., towards the Straits. At noon the next day the whole force advanced inland, without much opposition, for rather more than a mile. At nightfall on the 27th, they held a line across the Peninsula from the mouth of the Sighir watercourse (on the Ægean) to Eski Hissarlik (on the Straits). The men were very weary from the incessant digging of trenches, fighting, and dragging up of stores from the beach. They dug themselves in under shell and rifle fire, stood to their arms to repel Turk attacks for most of the night, and at eight next morning began the battle of the 28th of April. The French corps was on the right, the 29th Division (with one battalion of the R.N. Division) on the left. They advanced across rough moorland and little cultivated patches to attack the Turk town of Krithia. All the ground over which they advanced gave cover of the best kind to the defence. All through the morning, at odd times, the creeping companies going over that broken country came suddenly under the fire of machine guns, and lost men before they could fling themselves down. In the heather and torrent-beds of that Scotch-looking moorland, the Turk had only to wait in cover till his targets appeared, climbing a wall or getting out of a gully, then he could turn on his machine guns, at six hundred shots a minute each, and hold up the advance. From time to time the Turks attacked in great numbers. Early in the afternoon our advance reached its farthest point, about three-quarters of a mile from Krithia. Our artillery, short of ammunition at the best of times, and in these early days short of guns too, did what it could, though it had only shrapnel, which is of small service against an entrenched enemy. Those who were there have said that nothing depressed them more than the occasional shells from our guns in answer to the continual fire from the Turk artillery. They felt themselves out-gunned and without support. Rifle cartridges were running short, for, in spite of desperate efforts, in that roadless wild land with the beaches jammed with dead, wounded, stores, the wrecks of boats, and parties trying to build piers under shellfire, it was not possible to land or to send up cartridges in the quantity needed. There were not yet enough mules ashore to take the cartridge-boxes, and men could not be spared: there were too few men to hold the line. Gradually our men fell back a little from the ground they had won. The Turks brought up more men, charged us, and drove us back a little more, and were then themselves held. Our men dug themselves in as best they could and passed another anxious night, in bitter cold and driving rain, staving off a Turk attack, which was pressed with resolute courage against our centre and the French corps to the right of it. There were very heavy losses on both sides, but the Turks were killed in companies at every point of attack, and failed to drive us farther.

  The next two days were passed in comparative quiet, in strengthening the lines, landing men, guns, and stores, and preparing for the next advance. This war has shown what an immense reserve of shell is needed to prepare a modern advance. Our men never had that immense reserve, nor, indeed, a large reserve, and in those early days they had no reserve at all, but a day to day allowance, and before a reserve was formed the Turks came down upon us with every man and gun they had, in the desperate night attack of the 1st of May. This began with shellfire at 10 p.m., and was followed half an hour later by a succession of charges in close order. The Turk front ranks crept up on hands and knees without firing (their cartridges had been taken from them), and charged our trenches with the bayonet. They got into our trenches in the dark, bayoneted the men in them, broke our line, got through to the second line, and were there mixed up in the night in a welter of killing and firing beyond description. The moon had not risen when the attack came home. The fighting took place in the dark: men fired and stabbed in all directions, at flashes, at shouts, by the burning of the flares, by the coloured lights of the Turk officers, and by the gleams of the shells on our right. There were 9,000 Turks in the first line, 12,000 more behind them. They advanced, yelling for God and Enver Pasha, amid the roar of every gun and rifle in range. They broke through the French, were held, then driven back, then came again, bore everything before them, and then met the British supports, and went no farther. Our supports charged the Turks and beat them back; at dawn our entire line advanced and beat them back in a rout, till their machine guns stopped us.

  Upon many of the dead Turks in front of the French and English trenches were copies of an address issued by a German officer, one Van Zowenstern, calling on the Turks to destroy the enemy, since their only hope of salvation was to win the battle or die in the attempt. On some bodies were other orders, for the Mahometan priests to encourage the men to advance, for officers to shoot those soldiers who hung back, and for prisoners to be left with the reserves, not taken to the rear. In this early part of the campaign there were many German officers in the Turkish army. In these early night attacks they endeavoured to confuse our men by shouting orders to them in English. One, on the day of the landing, walked up to one of the trenches of the 29th Division, and cried out: “Surrender, you English, we ten to one.” “He was thereupon hit on the head with a spade by a man who was improving his trench with it.”

  This battle never ceased for five days. The artillery was never silent. Our men were shelled, sniped, and shrapnelled every day and all day long, and at night the Turks attacked with the bayonet. By the evening of the 5th of May the 29th Division, which had won the end of the Peninsula, had been reduced by one-half and its officers by two-thirds. The proportion of officers to men in a British battalion is as one to thirty-seven, but in the list of killed the proportion was as one to eleven. The officers of that wonderful company poured out their lives like water; they brought their weary men forward hour after hour in all that sleepless ten days, and at the end led them on once more in the great attack of the 6th – 8th of May.

  This attack was designed to push the Allied lines farther forward into the Peninsula, so as to win a little more ground, and ease the growing congestion on the beaches near Cape Helles. The main Turkish position lay on and about the hump of Achi Baba, and on the high ground stretching down from it. It was hoped that even if Achi Baba could not be carried, the ground below him, including the village of Krithia, might be taken. The movement was to be a general advance, with the French on the right attacking the high ground nearer to the Straits, the 29th Division on the left, between the French and the sea, attacking the slowly sloping ground which leads past Krithia up to Achi Baba. Krithia stands high upon the slope, among orchards and gardens, and makes a good artillery target; but the slope on which it stands, being much broken, covered with dense scrub (some of it thorny) and with clumps of trees, is excellent for defence. The Turks had protected that square mile of ground with many machine guns and trenches so skilfully concealed that they could not be seen either from close in front or from aeroplanes. The French line of attack was over ground equally difficult, but steeper, and therefore giving more “dead ground,” or patches upon which no direct fire can be turned by the defence. The line of battle from the French right to the English left stretched right across the Peninsula with a front (owing to bends and salients) of about five miles. It was nearly everywhere commanded by the guns of Achi Baba, and in certain places the enemy batteries on the Turk left, near the Straits, could enfilade it. Our men were weary, but the Turks were expecting strong reinforcements: the attack could not be delayed.

  Few people who have not seen modern war can understand what it is like. They look at a map, which is a small flat surface, and find it difficult to believe that a body of men could have had difficulty in passing from one point upon it to another. They think that they themselves would have found no difficulty, that they would not have been weary nor thirsty, the distance demanded of them being only a mile, possibly a mile and a quarter, and the reward a very great one. They think that troops who failed to pass across that mile must have been in some way wanting, and that had they been there, either in command or in the attack, the results would have been different.

&
nbsp; One can only answer, that in modern war it is not easy to carry a well-defended site by direct attack. In modern war you may not know, till fire breaks out upon you, where the defence, which you have to attack, is hidden. You may not know (in darkness, in a strange land) more than vaguely which is your “front,” and you may pass by your enemy, or over him, or under him without seeing him. You may not see your enemy at all. You may fight for days and never see an enemy. In modern war troops see no enemy till he attacks them; then, in most cases if they are well-entrenched with many guns behind them, they can destroy him.

  The Allied officers, looking through their field-glasses at the ground to be attacked, could see only rough, sloping ground, much gullied, much overgrown, with a few clumps of trees, a few walls, orchards, and houses, but no guns, no trenches, no enemy. Aeroplanes scouting over the Turks could see men but not the trenches nor the guns; they could only report that they suspected them to be in such a place. Sometimes in the mornings men would notice that the earth was turned newly on some bare patch on the hill, but none could be sure that this digging was not a ruse to draw fire. The trenches were hidden cunningly, often with a head cover of planks so strewn with earth and planted with scrub as to be indistinguishable from the ground about. The big guns were coloured cunningly, like a bird or snake upon the ground. From above in an aeroplane an observer could not pick them out so as to be certain, if they were not in action at the time. Brave men scouting forward at night to reconnoitre brought back some information, but not more than enough to show that the Turks were there in force. No man in the Allied army expected less than a desperate battle; no officer in the world could have made it anything but that, with all the odds against us. Nothing could be done, but cover the Turk position with the fire of every gun on shore or in the ships, and then send the men forward, to creep or dash as far as they could go, and then dig themselves in.

  Let the reader imagine himself to be facing three miles of any very rough broken sloping ground known to him, ground for the most part gorse-, thyme-, and scrub-covered, being poor soil, but in some places beautiful with flowers (especially “a spiked yellow flower with a whitish leaf”), and in others green from cultivation. Let him say to himself that he and an army of his friends are about to advance up the slope towards the top, and that as they will be advancing in a line along the whole length of the three miles, he will only see the advance of those comparatively near to him, since folds or dips in the ground will hide the others. Let him, before he advances, look earnestly along the line of the hill, as it shows up clear, in blazing sunlight, only a mile from him, to see his tactical objective, one little clump of pines three hundred yards away, across what seem to be fields. Let him see in the whole length of the hill no single human being – nothing but scrub, earth, a few scattered buildings of the Levantine type (dirty white with roofs of dirty red), and some patches of dark Scotch pine, growing, as the pine loves, on bleak crests. Let him imagine himself to be more weary than he has ever been in his life before, and dirtier than he has ever believed it possible to be, and parched with thirst, nervous, wild-eyed, and rather lousy. Let him think that he has not slept for more than a few minutes together for eleven days and nights, and that in all his waking hours he has been fighting for his life, often hand to hand in the dark with a fierce enemy, and that after each fight he has had to dig himself a hole in the ground, often with his hands, and then walk three or four roadless miles to bring up heavy boxes under fire. Let him think, too, that in all those eleven days he has never for an instant been out of the thunder of cannon, that waking or sleeping their devastating crash has been blasting the air across within a mile or two, and this from an artillery so terrible that each discharge beats, as it were, a wedge of shock between the skull-bone and the brain. Let him think, too, that never for an instant, in all that time, has he been free or even partly free from the peril of death in its most sudden and savage forms, and that hourly in all that time he has seen his friends blown to pieces at his side, or dismembered, or drowned, or driven mad, or stabbed, or sniped by some unseen stalker, or bombed in the dark sap with a handful of dynamite in a beef-tin, till their blood is caked upon his clothes and thick upon his face, and that he knows, as he stares at the hill, that in a few moments, more of that dwindling band, already too few, God knows how many too few, for the task to be done, will be gone the same way, and that he himself may reckon that he has done with life, tasted and spoken and loved his last, and that in a few minutes more he may be blasted dead, or lying bleeding in the scrub, with perhaps his face gone and a leg and an arm broken, unable to move but still alive, unable to drive away the flies or screen the ever-dropping rain, in a place where none will find him, or be able to help him – a place where he will die and rot and shrivel, till nothing is left of him but a few rags and a few remnants and a little identification disc flapping on his bones in the wind. Then let him hear the intermittent crash and rattle of the fire augment suddenly and awfully in a roaring, blasting roll, unspeakable and unthinkable, while the air above, that has long been whining and whistling, becomes filled with the scream of shells passing like great cats of death in the air; let him see the slope of the hill vanish in a few moments into the white, yellow, and black smokes of great explosions shot with fire, and watch the lines of white puffs marking the hill in streaks where the shrapnel searches a suspected trench; and then, in the height of the tumult, when his brain is shaking in his head, let him pull himself together with his friends, and clamber up out of the trench, to go forward against an invisible enemy, safe in some unseen trench expecting him.

  The 29th Division went forward under these conditions on the 6th of May. They dashed on, or crawled, for a few yards at a time, then dropped for a few instants before squirming on again. In such an advance men do not see the battlefield. They see the world as the rabbit sees it, crouching on the ground, just their own little patch. On broken ground like that, full of dips and rises, men may be able to see nothing but perhaps the ridge of a bank ten feet ahead, with the dust flying in spouts all along it, as bullets hit it, some thousand a minute, and looking back or to their flanks they may see no one but perhaps a few men of their own platoon lying tense but expectant, ready for the sign to advance, while the bullets pipe over them in a never-ending bird-like croon. They may be shut off by some all-important foot of ground from seeing how they are fronting, and from all knowledge of what the next platoon is doing or suffering. It may be quite certain death to peep over that foot of ground in order to find out, and while they wait for a few instants, shells may burst in their midst and destroy a half of them. Then the rest, nerving themselves, rush up the ridge, and fall in a line dead under machine gun fire. The supports come up, creeping over their corpses, get past the ridge, into scrub which some shell has set on fire. Men fall wounded in the fire, and the cartridges in their bandoliers explode and slowly kill them. The survivors crawl through the scrub, half choked, and come out on a field full of flowers tangled three feet high with strong barbed wire. They wait for a while, to try to make out where the enemy is. They may see nothing but the slope of the field running up to a skyline, and a flash of distant sea on a flank, but no sign of any enemy, only the crash of guns and the pipe and croon and spurt of bullets. Gathering themselves together, their brave men dash out to cut the wire, and are killed; others take their places, and are killed; others step out with too great a pride even to stoop, and pull up the supports of the wires and fling them down, and fall dead on top of them, having perhaps cleared a couple of yards. Then a couple of machine guns open on the survivors, and kill them all in thirty seconds, with the concentrated fire of a battalion.

  The supports come up, and hear about the wire from some wounded man who has crawled back through the scrub. They send back word, “Held up by wire,” and in time the message comes to the telephone which has just been blown to pieces by a shell. Presently, when the telephone is repaired, the message reaches the gunners, who fire high-explosive shells onto the wire, and
onto the slopes where the machine guns may be hidden. Then the supports go on over the flowers, and are met midway by a concentrated fire of shells, shrapnel, machine guns, and rifles. Those who are not killed lie down among the flowers, and begin to scrape little heaps of earth with their hands to give protection to their heads. In the light sandy marl this does not take long, though many are blown to pieces or hit in the back as they scrape. As before, they cannot see how the rest of the attack is faring, nor even where the other platoons of the battalion are; they lie scraping in the roots of daffodils and lilies, while bullets sing and shriek a foot or two over their heads. A man peering from his place in the flowers may make out that the man next to him, some three yards away, is dead, and that the man beyond is praying, the man beyond him cursing, and the man beyond him out of his mind from nerves or thirst.

  Long hours pass, but the air above them never ceases to cry like a live thing with bullets flying. Men are killed or maimed, and the wounded cry for water. Men get up to give them water, and are killed. Shells fall at regular intervals along the field. The waiting men count the seconds between the shells to check the precision of the battery’s fire. Some of the bursts fling the blossoms and bulbs of flowers into the bodies of men, where they are found long afterwards by the X-rays. Bursts and roars of fire on either flank tell of some intense moment in other parts of the line. Every feeling of terror and mental anguish and anxiety goes through the mind of each man there, and is put down by resolve.