John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works

by Philip Errington

  This thrust from Suvla against Koja Chemen was designed to complete and make decisive the thrust already begun by the right and left attacking columns. The attack on Chocolate Hill, Scimitar Hill, and Ismail Oglu, was to make that thrust possible by destroying forever the power of the Turk to parry it. The Turk could only parry it by firing from those hills on the men making it. It was therefore necessary to seize those hills before the Turk could stop us. If the Turks seized those hills before us, or stopped us from seizing them, our troops could not march from Suvla to take part in the storm of Koja Chemen. If we seized them before the Turks, then the Turks could not stop us from crossing the valley to that storm. The first problem at Suvla, therefore, was not so much to win a battle as to win a race with the Turks for the possession of those hills; the winning of the battle could be arranged later. Our failure to win that race brought with it our loss of the battle. The next chapter in the story of the battle is simply a description of the losing of a race by loss of time.

  Now the giving of praise or blame is always easy, but the understanding of anything is difficult. The understanding of anything so vast, so confused, so full of contradiction, so dependent on little things (themselves changing from minute to minute, the coward of a moment ago blazing out into a hero at the next turn) as a modern battle, is more than difficult. But some attempt must be made to understand how it came about that time was lost at Suvla between the landing, at midnight, on the 6th – 7th of August, and the arrival of the Turks upon the hills, at midnight, on the 8th – 9th.

  In the first place, it should be said that the beaches of Suvla are not the beaches of seaside resorts, all pleasant, smooth sand and shingle. They are called beaches because they cannot well be called cliffs. They slope into the sea with some abruptness, in pentes of rock and tumbles of sand-dune difficult to land upon from boats. From them one climbs on to sand-dune into a sand-dune land, which is like nothing so much as a sea-marsh from which the water has receded. Walking on this soft sand is difficult: it is like walking in feathers; working, hauling, and carrying upon it is very difficult. Upon this coast and country, roadless, wharfless, beachless and unimproved, nearly 30,000 men landed in the first ten hours of the 7th of August. At 10 a.m. on that day, when the sun was in his stride, the difficulty of those beaches began to tell on those upon them. There had been sharp fighting on and near the beaches, and shells were still falling here and there in all the ground which we had won. On and near the beaches there was a congestion of a very hindering kind. With men coming ashore, shells bursting among them; mules landing, biting, kicking, shying, and stampeding; guns limbering up and trying to get out into position; more men coming ashore or seeking for the rest of their battalion in a crowd where all battalions looked alike; shouts, orders, and counter-orders; ammunition boxes being passed along; water-carts and transport being started for the firing-line; wounded coming down, or being helped down, or being loaded into lighters; doctors trying to clear the way for field dressing-stations, with every now and then a shell from Ismail sending the sand in clouds over corpses, wounded men, and fatigue parties; and a blinding August sun over all to exhaust and to madden: it was not possible to avoid congestion. This congestion was the first, but not the most fatal, cause of the loss of time.

  Though the congestion was an evil in itself, its first evil effect was that it made it impossible to pass orders quickly from one part of the beach to another. In this first matter of the attack on the hills, the way had been opened for the assault by 10 a.m. at the latest; but to get through the confusion along the beaches (among battalions landing, forming, and defiling, and the waste of wounded momently increasing), to arrange for the assault and to pass the orders to the battalions named for the duty, took a great deal of time. It was nearly 1 p.m. when the 31st moved north from Lala Baba on their march round the head of the Salt Lake into position for the attack. The 32nd Brigade, having fought since dawn at Hill 10, was already to the north of the Salt Lake; but when (at about 3 p.m.) the 31st took position, facing south-east, with its right on the north-east corner of the Salt Lake, the 32nd was not upon its left ready to advance with it. Instead of that guard upon its left the 31st found a vigorous attack of Turks. More time was lost waiting for support to reach the left, and before it arrived word came that the attack upon the hills was to be postponed till after 5 p.m. Seeing the danger of delay, and that Chocolate Hill at least should be seized at once, the Brigadier-General (Hill) telephoned for supports and covering fire, held off the attack on his left with one battalion, and with the rest of his brigade started at once to take Chocolate Hill, cost what it might. The men went forward and stormed Chocolate Hill, the 7th Royal Dublin Fusiliers bearing the brunt of the storm.

  At some not specified time, perhaps after this storm, in a general retirement of the Turks, Hill 70, or Scimitar Hill, was abandoned to us, and occupied by an English battalion.

  During all this day of the 7th of August all our men suffered acutely from the great heat and from thirst. Several men went raving mad from thirst, others assaulted the water guards, pierced the supply hoses, or swam to the lighters to beg for water. Thirst in great heat is a cruel pain, and this (afflicting some regiments more than others) demoralized some and exhausted all. Efforts were made to send up and to find water; but the distribution system, beginning on a cluttered beach and ending in a rough, unknown country full of confused fighting and firing, without anything like a road, and much of it blazing or smouldering from the scrub fires, broke down, and most of the local wells, when discovered, were filled with corpses put there by the Turk garrison. Some unpolluted wells of drinkable, though brackish, water were found; but most of these were guarded by snipers, who shot at men going to them. Many men were killed thus and many more wounded, for the Turk snipers were good shots, cleverly hidden.

  All through the day in the Suvla area thirst, due to the great heat, was another cause of loss of time in the fulfilment of that part of the tactical scheme; but it was not the final and fatal cause.

  Chocolate Hill was taken by our men (now utterly exhausted by thirst and heat) just as darkness fell. They were unable to go on against Ismail Oglu Tepe. They made their dispositions for the night on the line they had won, sent back to the beaches for ammunition, food, and water, and tried to forget their thirst. They were in bad case, and still two miles from the Australians below Koja Chemen Tepe. Very late that night word reached them that the Turks were massed in a gully to their front, that no other enemy reserves were anywhere visible, and that the Turks had withdrawn their guns, fearing that they would be taken next morning. Before dawn on the all-important day of the 8th of August, our men at Suvla, after a night of thirst and sniping, stood to arms to help out the vital thrust of the battle.

  Had time not been lost on the 7th, their task on the 8th would have been to cross the valley at dawn, join the Australians, and go with them up the spurs to victory, in a strength which the Turks could not oppose. At dawn on the 8th their path to the valley was still barred by the uncaptured Turk fort on Ismail; time had been lost; there could be no crossing the valley till Ismail was taken. There was still time to take it and cross the valley to the storm, but the sands were falling. Up on Chunuk already the battle had begun without them; no time was lost on Chunuk.

  Up on Chunuk at that moment a very bitter battle was being fought. On the right, on Chunuk itself, the Gloucester and New Zealand Regiments were storming the hill; in the centre and on the left the Australians, English, and Indians were trying for Hill Q and the south of Koja Chemen. They had passed the night on the hillsides under a never-ceasing fire of shells and bullets; now, before dawn, they were making a terrible attempt. Those on Chunuk went up with a rush, pelted from in front and from both flanks by every engine of death. The Gloucesters were on the left and the New Zealanders on the right in this great assault. They deployed past the Farm, and then went on to the storm of a hill which rises some four hundred feet in as many yards. They were on the top by dawn; Chunuk Bair, the
last step but one to victory, was ours, and remained ours all day, but at a cost which few successful attacks have ever known. By four o’clock that afternoon the New Zealanders had dwindled to three officers and fifty men, and the Gloucester battalion, having lost every officer and senior non-commissioned officer, was fighting under section leaders and privates. Still, their attack had succeeded; they were conquerors. In the centre the attack on Hill Q was less successful. There the English and Indian regiments, assaulting together, were held; the Turks were too strong. Our men got up to the top of the lower spurs, and there had to lie down and scrape cover, for there was no going farther. On the left of our attack the Australians tried to storm the Abd-el-Rahman Bair from the big gully of Asma Dere. They went up in the dark with Australian dash to a venture pretty desperate even for Gallipoli. The Turks held the high ground on both sides of the Asma gully, and were there in great force with many machine guns. The Australians were enfiladed, held in front and taken in reverse, and (as soon as it was light enough for the Turks to see) they suffered heavily. As one of the Australians has described it: “The 14th and 15th Battalions moved out in single file and deployed to the storm, and an advance was made under heavy rifle and machine gun fire. After the 15th Battalion had practically withered away, the 14th continued to advance, suffering heavily, and the Turks in great force. As we drove them back, they counter-attacked, several times. The battalion thus got very split up, and it is impossible to say exactly what happened.”

  It is now possible to say exactly that that 14th Battalion fought like heroes in little bands of wounded and weary men, and at last, with great reluctance, on repeated orders, fell back to the Asma Dere from which they had come, beating off enemy attacks all the way down the hill, and then held on against all that the Turk could do.

  By noon, this assault, which would have been decisive had the men from Suvla been engaged with the Australians, was at an end. Its right had won Chunuk, and could just hold on to what it had won; its centre was held, and its left driven back. The fire upon all parts of the line was terrific; our men were lying (for the most part) in scratchings of cover, for they could not entrench under fire so terrible. Often in that rough-and-tumble country the snipers and bombers of both sides were within a few yards of each other, and in the roar and blast of the great battle were countless little battles, or duels, to the death, which made the ground red and set the heather on fire. Half of the hills of that accursed battlefield, too false of soil to be called crags and too savage with desolation to be called hills, such as feed the sheep and bees of England, were blazing in sweeps of flame, which cast up smoke to heaven, and swept in great swathes across the gullies. Shells from our ships were screaming and bursting among all that devil’s playground; it was an anxious time for the Turks. Many a time throughout that day the Turkish officers must have looked down anxiously upon the Suvla plain to see if our men there were masters of Ismail and on the way to Koja Chemen. For the moment, as they saw, we were held; but not more than held. With a push from Suvla to help us, we could not be held. Our men on the hills, expecting that helping push, drew breath for a new assault.

  It was now noon. The battle so far was in our favour. We had won ground, some of it an all-important ground, and for once we had the Turks with their backs against the wall and short of men. At Helles they were pressed, at Lone Pine they were threatened at the heart, under Koja Chemen the knife-point was touching the heart, and at Suvla was the new strength to drive the knife-point home and begin the end of the war. And the Turks could not stop that new strength. Their nearest important reserve of men was at Eski Keui, ten miles away by a road which could scarcely be called a goat track, and these reserves had been called on for the fight at Krithia, and still more for the two days of struggle at Lone Pine. All through that day of the 8th of August Fate waited to see what would happen between Suvla and Koja Chemen. She fingered with her dice, uncertain which side to favour; she waited to be courted by the one who wanted her. Eight hours of daylight had gone by, but there was still no moving forward from Suvla, to seize Ismail and pass from it across the valley to the storm. Noon passed into the afternoon, but there was still no movement. Four hours more went by, and now our aeroplanes brought word that the Turks near Suvla were moving back their guns by ox-teams, and that their foot were on the march, coming along their break-neck road, making perhaps a mile an hour, but marching and drawing steadily nearer to the threatened point. The living act of the battle was due at Ismail; from Ismail the last act, the toppling down of the Turk for ever among the bones of his victims and the ruin of his Ally, would have been prepared and assured. There was a desultory fire around Ismail and the smoke of scrub fires, which blazed and smouldered everywhere as far as the eye could see, but no roar and blaze and outcry of a meant attack. The battle hung fire on the left, the hours were passing, the Turks were coming. It was only five o’clock still; we had still seven hours or more. In the centre we had almost succeeded. We could hang on there and try again, there was still time. The chance which had been plainly ours was still an even chance. It was for the left to seize it for us: the battle waited for the left; the poor dying Gloucesters and Wellingtons hung on to Chunuk for it; the Gurkhas and English in the trampled cornfields near the Farm died where they lay on the chance of it; the Australians on Abd-el-Rahman held steady in the hope of it, under a fire that filled the air.

  If, as men say, the souls of a race, all the company of a nation’s dead, rally to the living of their people in a time of storm, those fields of hell below Koja Chemen, won by the sweat and blood and dying agony of our thousands, must have answered with a ghostly muster of English souls in the afternoon of that 8th of August. There was the storm, there was the crisis, the one picked hour, to which this death and mangling and dying misery and exultation had led. Then was the hour for a casting off of self, and a setting aside of every pain and longing and sweet affection, a giving up of all that makes a man to the something which makes a race, and a going forward to death resolvedly to help out their brothers high up above in the shell bursts and the blazing gorse. Surely all through the 8th of August our unseen dead were on that field, blowing the horn of Roland, the unheard, unheeded horn, the horn of heroes in the dolorous pass, asking for the little that heroes ask, but asking in vain. If ever the great of England cried from beyond death to the living they cried then. De ço qui calt. Demuret i unt trop.

  All through the morning of that day the Commander-in-Chief, on watch at his central station, had waited with growing anxiety for the advance from the Suvla beaches. Till the afternoon the critical thrust on Chunuk and the great Turk pressure at Lone Pine made it impossible for him to leave his post to intervene; but in the afternoon, seeing that neither wireless nor telephone messages could take the place of personal vision and appeal, he took the risk of cutting himself adrift from the main conflict, hurried to Suvla, landed, and found the great battle of the war, that should have brought peace to all that Eastern world, being lost by minutes before his eyes.

  Only one question mattered then: “Was there still time?” Had the Turks made good their march and crowned those hills, or could our men forestall them? It was now doubtful, but the point was vital, not only to the battle, but to half the world in travail. It had to be put to the test. A hundred years ago, perhaps even fifty years ago, all could have been saved. Often in those old days a Commander-in-Chief could pull a battle out of the fire and bring halted or broken troops to victory. Then, by waving a sword, and shouting a personal appeal, the resolute soul could pluck the hearts of his men forward in a rush that nothing could stem. So Wolfe took Quebec; so Desaix won Marengo; so Bonaparte swept the bridge at Lodi, and won at Arcola; so Cæsar overcame the Nervii in the terrible day, and wrecked the Republic at Pharsalia; so Sherman held the landing at Shiloh, and Farragut pitted his iron heart against iron ships at Fort Jackson; so Sir Ian Hamilton himself snatched victory from the hesitation at Elandslaagte. Then the individual’s will could take instant effect. But then
the individual’s front was not a five-mile front of wilderness; the men were under his hand, within sight and sound of him, and not committed by order to another tactical project. There, at Suvla, was no chance for these heroic methods. Suvla was the modern battlefield, where nothing can be done quickly except the firing of a machine gun. On the modern field, especially on such a field as Suvla, where the troops were scattered in the wilderness, it may take several hours for an order to pass from one wing to the other. In this case it was not an order that was to pass, but a counter-order; the order had already gone, for an attack at dawn on the morrow.

  All soldiers seem agreed, that even with authority to back it, a counter-order, on a modern battlefield, to urge forward halted troops, takes time to execute. Sir Ian Hamilton’s determination to seize those hills could not spare the time; too much time had already gone. He ordered an advance at all costs with whatever troops were not scattered, but only four battalions could be found in any way ready to move. It was now 5 p.m.: there were perhaps three more hours of light. The four battalions were ordered to advance at once to make good what they could of the hills fronting the bay before the Turks forestalled them. At dawn the general attack, as already planned, was to support them. Unfortunately, the four battalions were less ready than was thought; they were not able to advance at once, nor for ten all-precious hours. They did not begin to advance till four o’clock the next morning (the 9th of August), and even then the rest of the division which was to support them was not in concert with them. They attacked the hills to the north of Anafarta Sagir, but they were now too late; the Turks were there before them, in great force, with their guns, and the thrust, which the day before could have been met by (at most) five Turk battalions without artillery, was now parried and thwarted. Presently the division attacked, with great gallantry, over burning scrub, seized Ismail, and was then checked and forced back to the Chocolate Hills. The left had failed. The main blow of the battle on Sari Bair was to have no support from Suvla.