The lady in uniform was Mrs. Richardson herself, inspecting the kennels of BEF bases in France. She was pleased enough with Alec’s care of the dogs to ask if he’d consider becoming a trainer at their school. Without saying why, Alec declined.
“As you wish, Private, I understand,” she said. “My son also said no to staying in England.” She touched her black armband.
“My condolences, ma’am.”
“Thank you. At Loos, last month. He was eighteen.”
In the autumn of 1915, after Alec had dispatched the third cohort of his charges to their canine missions on the Western Front, he himself was likewise dispatched.
18
30 July 15
Sometimes (often) I feel I’m the dimmest man at mess. For example: did you know that turquoise, the word, has to do with geography? I thought it just meant a certain hue or a pretty stone. But no, it’s about Turks! Turkey, Turk-woyse. Sunny Turkish blue. It’s the color of the world here, below and above, the sea and the sky. Along the Greek coast and islands, we pass whitewashed villages. The whitest ever, because the blue all around them is deep and bright at once. Turquoise.
Back to my ignorance. So we’re sailing east, getting closer to the straits, and my fellow juniors fall to swooning about Troy and Achilles and how we’ve a ship in the water called the Agamemnon and if the fighting should move just a tad down the coast, we actually might do battle on the Plains of Ilium! (At this point I’m still following the references, but can’t say I’m feeling any Homeric tingles.)
Then Brewster leaves me in the dust when he holds forth on how Xerxes the tragic Persian emperor whipped the Hellespont to punish it. That’s right, the water! Because he wanted to invade Greece and the oracle said he would win (so he thought), but he couldn’t get his army across the straits. So the ninny had his goons spank the water! Naughty Hellespont! Lunatic. Crazier than Kaiser Wilhelmina. Xerxes the Harebrained.
Anyway, Xerxes loses his shirt, or whatever underthings ancient Persians wore, because what the oracle had actually said was ‘an empire would fall’ if he invaded Greece. Turns out she meant his own.
You probably know about Xerxes, maybe you even know about turquoise. Unlike my mess-mates, who may have paid better attention in school, you’re truly cleverer than I. Not much of a compliment, I’ll grant. You also have an amazing talent to soak up learning, which is but one of your many amazing talents, some of which I’d better stop thinking about.
When we get through it all, I’ll give you this little book to read by our cozy fire and you’ll know how close I’ve been holding you every day.
* * *
5 August 1915
Today nobody’s talking about Homer. Oh there’s some hail-fellow-well-met bragging about our edge over the Turks, those craven yapping gutless goat-eating rug-peddlers, and how they might have got lucky last spring with the Anzac outpost and Helles but now a large dose of British manhood at Suvla will set them to rout. Blather, blather.
Of course what we’re not saying is what we all know, i.e., that none of us, not a single one of us junior officers nor the NCOs nor any of our men has ever seen battle. The most experienced have been in training for less than a year, others for just a few months. Many (most?) never even held a gun before signing on. And here we are, the first of Kitchener’s New Army, all volunteers, to actually fight! Egad!
Tomorrow we disembark after dark. Less than 24 hours. Between you and me, I can hear my pulse pounding in my ears. And how do I qualify as a leader of men into war? Because I read economics at Cambridge and played varsity tennis?
* * *
17 Aug
We set off from Imbros right after sunset on the 6th aboard ten destroyers each towing a beetle that would shuttle us to shore. Silence, blackout, not even cigarettes. Flotilla on the dark sea a grand sight, eerie because soundless, then dividing for diverse destinations. Destroyers Beagle, Bulldog, and Grampus bring us toward our landing site on Suvla Bay.
What looked smooth in planning proves a madhouse. The beetle, a blunt-nosed barge with an engine tacked on, hard to get free from the destroyer and still harder to steer. Except for the engine throbbing, all’s quiet in the approach.
We run aground on a shoal farther out in the water than planned, maybe a hundred yards. Yet Captain orders the gangplank lowered. Soon as he speaks, rapid shots burst on us from the shore. Our first time under fire.
The men don’t know what to do for cover and try flattening on deck. I hoarse-whisper some rot: “He can’t see us; he’s just taking potshots. Let’s get off this damned tub while it’s still dark. We’re here now!”
And—to my amazement—they stand, God love them, ready to follow me!
Water well over our heads, each of us with sixty pounds, more, on his back, and many can’t swim. One naval skipper strips down and dives in with the end of the towrope from the destroyer tied round him and swims to shore and secures it to a rock so we might have something to hang on to. Bullets pock the water around him the whole time.
We want to cheer him but stick to orders and keep our mouths shut. His show of backbone bucks the men up, as I think does seeing us officers go over first and with the help of the lifeline make our way, noses just above water.
Halfway to shore at last we touch bottom. We stagger onto the beach, gear and uniforms soaked, weight doubled. Facing battle at last: wet, already worn dead, shivering, ordered not to shoot. (Can’t shoot anyway—rifles clogged with water and sand.) Bayonets in place. We’re to charge with blades only. Except us officers, who have no rifles, just gentlemanly pistols.
In the dark, the Turks keep firing at the empty landing boats. We get to thirty yards of their trench on the hill before they realize. Fewer of them than I thought, 40 or so. Still they take some of us down.
That’s when I see my first man killed: a Turk, bayoneted in the gut, side, and back, left to bleed on the sandy ground. Several more quickly thereafter.
Then I hear others approaching. I’m useless, with my pistol and forbidden to fire. A good thing too. Those charging us are some of our own, East Yorks of the 32nd, landed farther south. We took them for the enemy.
Turns out that they belonged there, not us. We’d landed too far south, near the 32nd’s objective, Lala Baba fort. Captain determines to set things right. He orders us to make our way up to Hill 10: mission to take it.
Big problem now thirst. Out of water. But even if we’d triple rations, still not enough: we’d swallowed whole quarts of salt sea getting ashore from the boats and squandered fresh water trying to clean the sand from our guns (before we find our piss more efficient). Many men even offer the little left of their drinking water to cool our one machine gun enough to keep firing.
Meantime the Turks never ease up their sniping. How good they are! Lost hours mean we’re exposed in daylight. Chilly night air gives way to hot hot sun and thirst gets truly maddening. Where are our reserves?
Out in the bay we see destroyers and transports teeming with men that seem never to move. Meantime we keep up our assault on Hill 10, many going down under fire. Hours later, reserves arrive and we fall back toward the beach. We take roll. Two hundred and more wounded or killed!
* * *
17 Aug later
So that’s how we landed ten days ago.
One can no longer say that one has never seen battle. One has seen, smelled, touched, tasted, swallowed, and shit it out, explosively.
Back in school, when they were rubbing our noses in Homer, it seemed to me the bard spent most of his time describing somebody hacking off somebody else’s arms, legs, or head. Enough! You see one act of Iron Age savagery, you’ve seen ’em all. On the other hand, he got the ferocity right. How did he manage that? Wasn’t he blind?
Does Homer ever write about boredom? Doesn’t he skip the ten years the Greeks spent camped out on the Trojan beach playing cards swatting flies waiting for their damn generals to make up their minds?
When I dream, I dream about water. Not that I
dream much—too thirsty to sleep. A dream faucet. Turn the tap and water flows without end. Madness to think about, but here on the shore, every drop brought hundreds of miles in a ship when there’s plenty just over the hill. But that’s their water. Ours gets pumped from the ships onto barges, then piped into troughs on the shore, whence we fill our bottles.
Rationed one pint per day. Thirst makes animals of us all. A brother junior manages thus: takes a mouthful and spits it back into his mug. Then again, later, sips the same water he spit out. That’s discipline.
Not so our men. When the barge arrives, they’re so desperate they cut the pipes with their knives and suck them. Those trenched farther inland must carry their company’s bottles back over three miles of sand and rocks, like two-legged mules getting shot at most of the way. Yet, yet they beg for the duty—because the carriers get to drink their fill at the barge. Warm brown dirty water.
* * *
18 August
Medics the real heroes—in harm’s way with no means to fight back. Sick and wounded lined up on the shore. Bandaging and tagging those not fatal for transport out to the Red Cross ship offshore. Quiet the dying with a bit of dope, bear the wounded through trenches too shallow for full cover, jostled in agony, the bearers sick themselves, potshots never letting up all the while.
Medics are villains too because after dispensing juju drops to the sick, they send them back to the trenches where nobody gets better but worse. Higher-ups holding guns to their Hippocratic heads to send the sick back into the fight.
* * *
19 Aug
Major ordered me treated for dysentery. Spent hours waiting on the beach fanning flies from those who could not. Black flies, our hell their heaven—heat, blood, shit everywhere, maggots in wounds, God help us.
Still we keep losing people, more and more, wounded, killed, sick. What’s the plan, the purpose? Nobody knows. Staff remains at HQ, a yacht called the Jonquil anchored safe distance offshore.
* * *
21 Aug
Today the earth caught fire. Anzacs here since April tell us this land was green once upon a time. Hard to picture, all barbed wire and ruts now, scrub bushes and thorns, all tinder-dry. The brush caught fire from sparks during the attack—spread instantly.
We were already out when the fire broke, had to run through the flames, gunned by the Turks all the while. The ones who died fast from a bullet were lucky, because the wounded burned alive where they fell, fire torching their own ammo. Hearing them moan & die.
Turk grenades have longer fuses than ours—so tempting to pick up & toss back before they go off. Saw a fellow with good pitching arm doing so. Luck failed and one went off in his right hand. He kept it up with his left. Yes, I saw him do it! Died later.
We mill round, always under fire, getting sick from our own filth—diarrhea, dysentery, wiping our bums with newspaper scraps till they ran out, then letters from home, then leaves, when the leaves were gone nothing.
No water to spare for washing and the Turks watching the waves should we try to rinse off in the sea. We spent our time scratching shallow trenches with shovels smaller than toys in ground needing hammer and chisel. Yesterday we got orders to take the W Hills. So today we tried, as above, and, made God’s earth catch fire.
19
29 Sept 1915
Hopeless. There I’ve said it, albeit silently and only to you. (Which is like saying it to myself because we’re one.) I dare not say it to anybody else, or even think it too loudly, because we’re all thinking the same and we’re bound to overhear one another’s thoughts, jammed close as we are together, and that might lower the already impossibly low spirits of our men, especially the sick ones—who are about half of all the men up and down the shore. Officers fare no better, self included.
To one another we say: Complete Trust in the High Command. We mean the opposite.
If we needed any proof of our hopelessness, we got it some days ago when the French pulled two divisions out of Gallipoli. To dispatch them for better use on the Western Front. Au revoir! Merde …
What are we doing here? Rumor says take the Sea of Marmara. Hah! We can’t climb the hill twenty yards in front of us. Then what? Rumor says seize Constantinople. And how the hell would that get the Germans out of Belgium?! Which is what we’re fighting for—remember? Never mind. This tantrum is dragging me lower and lower.
If I weren’t sick and depressed to death, maybe I’d be equal to the misery, or if I weren’t in a state of constant high anxiety over the safety of my men. Or if I weren’t so very, very afraid for you, which means that I’m afraid for me, since I have no life except with you.
Glad you can’t see these words now—or me in this rotten state of self-pity.
* * *
18 Oct 15
We juniors, at our level of insignificance, are not shown the photos from above. Word does get around, though. Seems the Turks (who daily prove more determined and skillful) have an overwhelming advantage of supply lines and terrain. (It takes aerial reconnaissance to see that?) As the photos also show, the Turks have a fleet at ready in the water by Constantinople. So much for the Sea of Marmara.
Yesterday General Hamilton departed his HQ at Imbros—involuntarily, permanently, and none too happy. Canned. (Word does get round.) He’d been absolutely certain of victory in the Dardanelles. Monro’s taking over for him—much less keen than Hamilton on this whole Gallipoli crusade, so one hears.
And now we’ve another enemy at work against us: the weather. When the winds blow from the south, they’re deadly hot, full of the North African deserts. They stir the sea to crashing, pounding the supply docks, soaking whatever we’ve stashed on shore, making havoc with the tents, and scaring the bejeezus out of us all.
* * *
9 Nov
Your birthday. 22 years old today. Put me in such a wretched mood this morning to remember. Because we’re apart, as we were last year. Also because time moves in but one direction and won’t give back these days taken from us.
I’m doing better now this p.m. Guess why? Because I’m remembering 9 November 1913! Such waywardness on Bernard Street! We’d barely known each other ten weeks—is it possible?—and yet it seemed forever! Because my life began when we met.
Love hoodwinked time, at least for a little while then.
* * *
11 Nov 15
At first these November winds, blowing mostly cool from the northeast—the Caucasus?—seemed a blessing, sending the flies back to hell. Spirits even rose a bit among us. Still always thirsty, but less mad than in the heat. (Also, cold stink from the latrines less sickening than hot.)
But as the north winds keep persisting, they’ve gone from cool to cold, damp to raw, and hint at worse to come—we’ve only summer uniforms.
Monro quietly took off for Alexandria about a week ago, so one hears. To confab with his fellow bigwigs—about ‘something.’ (Everybody hopes evacuation, though no one says.)
While the mighty dither, debating pros and cons, men are dying every day from sniping and sickness.
* * *
18 Nov
Fickle, crazy, demon winds! Three days past now they shifted south again, and dry, blowing a groundswell against the shore. We could land no supplies—the barges and pontoon docks smithereened by the waves. No bread! Water, already scarce, half-rationed.
Then the sky goes deadly black, lightning bolts over the Aegean, search beams from the big ships sweeping through the midday darkness over the sides of the cliffs, the ships themselves rolling and tugging their anchor chains. Hellish nightmare!
Still silence from the High Command.
* * *
2 Dec
On the evening of 26 Nov it began to rain, soaking through our tents and summer uniforms. After three hours of this downpour, when you’d swear there was no water left to fall in all the heavens, the rain came even harder, trenches filling to three feet. Waist-deep.
Then the real flood.
On the
hillcrests, the Turkish trenches had likewise filled. When the water’s weight reached the tipping point, the trenches burst and sent everything rushing down from above us in torrents.
The water sought sea level. It cared nothing for our puny efforts to hold it off, rushed through our encampments right into the Aegean, taking lots of our stuff along, but fortunately none of our men.
There’s more. It’s worse.
The temperature falls, fast and steadily, throughout the next day. Anything wet from the rain froze & everything was wet.
On 28 Nov, not long after midnight, it starts to snow. Gently first, big wet flakes, then the wind picks up, and the snow becomes a blizzard, blinding and endless.
HQ sends supplies. But our men got turned around in the storm & failed to meet the delivery. So HQ left it for us to pick up later. We sent a second party, who failed to return. I led another group to search. We found them lying in the snow.
Seems the Quartermaster had sent us plenty of rum for the cold. They’d drunk the rations meant for dozens of men. One was dead, frozen. The rest we slapped to keep them moving and alive.
Can’t say I blame them for wanting to sleep forever in the snow.
* * *
9 Dec
Yesterday came the orders we’ve been waiting for: to evacuate. We’ve about a week to prepare. Some men actually disappointed with our ‘failing.’ They’re better soldiers than I.
Most disheartening to me the orders to kill our horses, about two hundred all together, at night, out of sight of the Turks, with silencers on the pistols.
Alec Page 15
