Thunder at Dawn

by Alan Evans

  Beginning with his delight in the voyage and all the marvellous romance of our surroundings, I led him on to speak of himself. Both his parents had died when he was a boy at school. They had left him enough to go to Oxford upon (without the help of the Exhibition he had won), and he had but just completed his second year there when the war broke out. For some mysterious reason he had immediately enlisted instead of applying for a commission, like his friends. I gathered — though not from anything he directly said — that he had had a hard time in the ranks. The majority of his companions in training had come down from the north with the first draft of Tynesiders; and though, God knows, the Tynesider as a fighting man has been unsurpassed in this war, they were a wild, rough crowd before they became soldiers, and I can understand that for a high-strung, sensitive boy of his type the intimate daily round of eating, talking, and sleeping with them, must have made large demands on his patriotism and grit. But he said it did him good; and it was only the pestering of his guardian and relations that after six months forced him to take a commission. He had a curious lack of confidence in his fitness to be an officer — a feeling which is deplorably absent in hundreds not half as fit as he was; but from what I had seen of his handling of his platoon on the voyage (and the men are difficult after a week or two at sea) I was able to assure him that he need have no qualms. He was, I discovered, pathetically full of military ambitions; he dreamed already, he confessed, of decorations and promotions and glorious charges. In short, he was like many another undergraduate officer of those days in his eagerness and readiness for sacrifice, but far removed from the common type in his romantic, imaginative outlook towards the war.

  Romantic is the only word, I think, and it is melancholy for me to remember that, even then I said to myself, ‘I wonder how long the romance will last, my son.’

  But I could not guess just how terrible was to be its decay.

  *

  We were not to be long at Mudros. For three days we lay in the sweltering heat of the great hill-circled bay, watching the warships come and go, and buying fruit from the little Greek sailing boats which fluttered round the harbour. These were days of hot anxiety about one’s kit hourly each officer reorganized and redisposed his exiguous belongings, and re-weighed his valise, and jettisoned yet more precious articles of comfort, lest the weight regulations be violated and for the sake of an extra shirt the whole of one’s equipment be cast into the sea by the mysterious figure we believed to watch over these things. Afterwards we found that all our care was in vain, and in the comfortless camps of the Peninsula bitterly bewailed the little luxuries we had needlessly left behind, there so unattainable. Down in the odorous troop-decks the men wrote long letters describing the battles in which they were already engaged, and the sound of mythical guns.

  But on the third day came our sailing orders. In the evening a little trawler, promoted to the dignity of a fleet-sweeper, came alongside, and all the regiment of gross, overloaded figures, festooned with armament and bags of food, and strange, knobbly parcels, tumbled heavily over the side. Many men have written of the sailing of the first argosy of troopships from that bay; and by this time the spectacle of departing troops was an old one to the vessels there. But this did not diminish the quality of their farewells. The rails of the King’s ships were thick with men as we passed, and they sent us a great wave of cheering that filled the heart with sadness and resolution.

  In one of the French ships was a party of her crew high up somewhere above the deck, and they sang for us with surprising precision and feeling the ‘Chant du Depart’; so moving was this that even the stolid Northerners in our sweeper were stirred to make some more articulate acknowledgment than the official British cheer; and one old pitman, searching among his memories of some Lancashire music-hall, dug out a rough version of the Marseillaise. By degrees all our men took up the tune and sang it mightily, with no suspicion of words; and the officers, not less timidly, joined in, and were proud of the men for what they had done. For many were moved in that moment who were never moved before. But while we were yet warm with cheering and the sense of knighthood, we cleared the boom and shivered a little in the breeze of the open sea.

  The sun went down, and soon it was very cold in the sweeper: and in each man’s heart I think there was a chill. There were no more songs, but the men whispered in small groups, or stood silent, shifting uneasily their wearisome packs. For now we were indeed cut off from civilization and committed to the unknown. The transport we had left seemed a very haven of comfort and security; one thought longingly of white tables in the saloon, and the unfriendly linen bags of bully-beef and biscuits we carried were concrete evidence of a new life. The war seemed no longer remote, and each of us realized indignantly that we were personally involved in it. So for a little all these soldiers had a period of serious thought unusual in the soldier’s life. But as we neared the Peninsula the excitement and novelty and the prospect of exercising cramped limbs brought back valour and cheerfulness.

  At Malta we had heard many tales of the still terrifying ordeal of landing under fire. But such terrors were not for us. There was a bright moon, and, as we saw the pale cliffs of Cape Helles, all, I think, expected each moment a torrent of shells from some obscure quarter. But instead an unearthly stillness brooded over the two bays, and only a Morse lamp blinking at the sweeper suggested that any living thing was there. There came over the water a strange musty smell; some said it was the smell of the dead, and some the smell of an incinerator; myself I do not know, but it was the smell of the Peninsula for ever, which no man can forget. We disembarked at a pier of rafts by the River Clyde, and stumbled eagerly ashore. And now we were in the very heart of heroic things. Nowhere, I think, was the new soldier plunged so suddenly into the genuine scenes of war as he was at Gallipoli; in France there was a long transition of training-camps and railway trains and billets, and he moved by easy gradations to the firing-line. But here, a few hours after a night in linen sheets, we stood suddenly on the very sand where, but three weeks before, those hideous machine-guns on the cliffs had mown down that immortal party of April 25. And in that silver stillness it was difficult to believe.

  We shambled off up the steady slope between two cliffs, marvelling that any men could have prevailed against so perfect a ‘field of fire’. By now we were very tired, and it was heavy work labouring through the soft sand. Queer, Moorish-looking figures in white robes peered at us from dark corners, and here and there a man poked a tousled head from a hole in the ground, and blinked upon our progress. Someone remarked that it reminded him of nothing so much as the native camp at Earl’s Court on a fine August evening, and that indeed was the effect.

  After a little the stillness was broken by a sound which we could not conceal from ourselves was ‘the distant rattle of musketry’; somewhere a gun fired startlingly; and now as we went each man felt vaguely that at any minute we might be plunged into the thick of a battle, laden as we were, and I think each man braced himself for a desperate struggle. Such is the effect of marching in the dark to an unknown destination. Soon we were halted in a piece of apparently waste land circled by trees, and ordered to dig ourselves a habitation at once, for ‘in the morning’ it was whispered ‘the Turks search all this ground.’ Everything was said in hoarse, mysterious whispers, presumably to conceal our observations from the ears of the Turks five miles away. But then we did not know they were five miles away; we had no idea where they were or where we were ourselves. Men glanced furtively at the North Star for guidance, and were pained to find that, contrary to their military teaching, it told them nothing. Even the digging was carried on a little stealthily till it was discovered that the Turks were not behind those trees. The digging was a comfort to the men, who, being pitmen, were now in their element; and the officers found solace in whispering to each other that magical communication about the expected ‘searching’; it was the first technical word they had used ‘in the field,’ and they were secretly proud to know what it me
ant.

  In a little the dawn began, and the grey trees took shape; the sun came up out of Asia, and we saw at last the little sugarloaf peak of Achi Baba, absurdly pink and diminutive in the distance. A man’s first frontal impression of that great rampart, with the outlying slopes masking the summit, was that it was disappointingly small; but when he had lived under and upon it for a while, day by day, it seemed to grow in menace and in bulk, and ultimately became an overpowering monster, pervading all his life; so that it worked upon men’s nerves, and almost everywhere in the Peninsula they were painfully conscious that every movement they made could be watched from somewhere on that massive hill.

  But now the kitchens had come, and there was breakfast and viscous, milkless tea. We discovered that all around our seeming solitude the earth had been peopled with sleepers, who now emerged from their holes; there was a stir of washing and cooking and singing, and the smoke went up from the wood fires in the clear, cool air. D Company officers made their camp under an olive-tree, with a view over the blue water to Samothrace and Imbros, and now in the early cool, before the sun had gathered his noonday malignity, it was very pleasant. At seven o’clock the searching began. A mile away, on the northern cliffs, the first shell burst, stampeding a number of horses. The long-drawn warning scream and the final crash gave all the expectant battalion a faintly pleasurable thrill, and as each shell came a little nearer the sensation remained. No one was afraid; without the knowledge of experience no one could be seriously afraid on this cool, sunny morning in the grove of olive-trees. Those chill hours in the sweeper had been much more alarming. The common sensation was: ‘At last I am really under fire; today I shall write home and tell them about it.’ And then, when it seemed that the line on which the shells were falling must, if continued, pass through the middle of our camp, the firing mysteriously ceased.

  Harry, I know, was disappointed; personally, I was pleased.

  *

  I learned more about Harry that afternoon. He had been much exhausted by the long night, but was now refreshed and filled with an almost childish enthusiasm by the pictorial attractions of the place. For this enthusiastic soul one thing only was lacking in the site of the camp: the rise of the hill, which here runs down the centre of the Peninsula, hid from us the Dardanelles. These, he said, must immediately be viewed. It was a bright afternoon of blue skies and gentle air — not yet had the dry north-east wind come to plague us with dust-clouds and all the vivid colours of the scene were unspoiled. We walked over the hill through the parched scrub, where lizards darted from under our feet and tortoises lay comatose in the scanty shade, and came to a kind of inland cliff, where the Turks had had many riflemen at the landing, for all the ground was littered with empty cartridges. And there was unfolded surely the most gorgeous panorama this war has provided for prosaic Englishmen to see. Below was a cool, inviting grove of imperial cypresses; all along the narrow strip between us and the shore lay the rest-lines of the French, where moved lazy figures in blue and red, and black Senegalese in many colours. To the left was the wide sweep of Morto Bay, and beyond the first section of Achi Baba rising to De Tott’s Battery in terraces of olives and vines. But what caught the immediate eye, what we had come to see and had sailed hither to fight for, was that strip of marvellously blue water before us, deep, generous blue, like a Chinese bowl. On the farther shore, towards the entrance to the Straits, we could see a wide green plain, and beyond and to the left, peak after peak of the mountains of Asia; and far away in the middle distance there was a glint of snow from some regal summit of the Anatolian Mountains.

  That wide green plain was the Plain of Troy. The scarcity of classical scholars in Expeditionary Forces, and the wearisome observations of pressmen on the subject of Troy, have combined to belittle the significance of the classical surroundings of the Gallipoli campaign. I myself am a stolid, ill-read person, but I confess that the spectacle of those historic flats was not one, in diplomatic phrase, which I could view with indifference. On Harry, ridiculously excited already, the effect was almost alarming. He became quite lyrical over two little sweepers apparently anchored near the mouth of the Straits. ‘That,’ he said, ‘must have been where the Greek fleet lay. God! it’s wonderful.’ Up on the slope towards De Tott’s Battery the guns were busy, and now and then Asiatic Annie sent over a large shell from the region of Achilles’ tomb, which burst ponderously in the sea off Cape Helles. And there we sat on the stony edge of the cliff and talked of Achilles and Hector and Diomed and Patroclus and the far-sounding bolts of Jove. I do not defend or exalt this action; but this is a truthful record of a man’s personality, and I simply state what occurred. And I confess that with the best wish in the world I was myself becoming a little bored with Troy, when in the middle of a sentence he suddenly became silent and gazed across the Straits with a fixed, pinched look in his face, like a man who is reminded of some far-off calamity he had forgotten. For perhaps a minute he maintained this rigid aspect, and then as suddenly relaxed, murmuring in a tone of inflexible determination, `I will.’ It was not in me not to inquire into the nature of this passionate intention, and somehow I induced him to explain.

  It seemed that in spite of his genuine academic successes and a moderate popularity at school and at Oxford he had suffered from early boyhood from a curious distrust of his own capacity in the face of anything he had to do. In a measure, no doubt, this had even contributed to his successes. For his nervousness took the form of an intimate, silent brooding over any ordeal that lay before him, whether it was a visit to his uncle, or ‘Schools,’ or a dance: he would lie awake for hours imagining all conceivable forms of error and failure and humiliation that might befall him in his endeavour. And though he was to this extent forewarned and forearmed, it must have been a painful process. And it explained to me the puzzling intervals of melancholy which I had seen darkening his usually cheerful demeanour.

  ‘You remember last night,’ he said, I had been detailed to look after the baggage when we disembarked, and take charge of the unloading party? As far as I know I did the job all right, except for losing old Tompkins’ valise – but you can’t think how much worry and anxiety it gave me beforehand. All the time on the sweeper I was imagining the hundreds of possible disasters: the working-party not turning up, and me left alone on the boat with the baggage — the Colonel’s things being dropped overboard — a row with the M.L.O. — getting the baggage ashore, and then losing the battalion, or the working-party, or the baggage. It all worked out quite simply, but I tell you, Benson, it gave me hell. And it’s always the same. That’s really why I didn’t take a commission – because I couldn’t imagine myself drilling men once without becoming a permanent laughing-stock. I know now that I was a fool about that – I usually do find that out – but I can’t escape the feeling next time.

  ‘And now, it’s not only little things like that, but that’s what I feel about the whole war. I’ve a terror of being a failure in it, a failure out here — you know, a sort of regimental dud. I’ve heard of lots of them; the kind of man that nobody gives an important job because he’s sure to muck it up (though I do believe Eccleston’s more likely to be that than me). But that’s what I was thinking just now. Somehow, looking at this view — Troy and all that — and thinking how those Greeks sweated blood for ten years on afternoons like this, doing their duty for the damned old kings, and how we’ve come out here to fight in the same place thousands of years afterwards, and we still know about them and remember their names — well, it gave me a kind of inspiration; I don’t know why. I’ve got a bit of confidence — God knows how long it will last — but I swear I won’t be a failure, I won’t be the battalion dud — and I’ll have a damned good try to get a medal of some sort and be like — like Achilles or somebody.’

  Sheer breathlessness put a sudden end to this outburst, and since it was followed by a certain shyness at his own revelations I did not probe deeper. But I thought to myself that this young man’s spirit of romance would die har
d; I did not know whether it would ever die; for certainly I had never seen that spirit working so powerfully in any man as a living incentive to achievement. And I tell you all this, because I want you to understand how it was with him in the beginning.

  But now the bay was in shadow below us; on the hill the solemn stillness that comes over all trenches in the hour before dusk had already descended, and away towards the cape the Indians were coming out to kneel in prayer beside the alien sea.

  The Romance of War was in full song. And, scrambling down the cliff, we bathed almost reverently in the Hellespont.

  II

  Those first three days were for many of us, who did not know the mild autumn months, the most pleasant we spent on the Peninsula. The last weeks of May had something of the quality of an old English summer, and the seven plagues of the Peninsula had not yet attained the intolerable violence of June and July. True, the inhabited portion of the narrow land we had won already was a wilderness, the myrtle, and rock-rose, and tangled cistus, and all that wealth of spring flowers in which the landing parties had fallen and died in April, had long been trodden to death, and there were wide stretches of yellow desert where not even the parched scrub survived. But in the two and a half miles of bare country which lay between the capes and the foot-hills of Achi Baba was one considerable oasis of olives and stunted oaks, and therein, on the slopes of the ridge, was our camp fortunately set. The word ‘camp’ contains an unmerited compliment to the place. The manner of its birth was characteristic of military arrangements in those days. When we were told, on that first mysterious midnight, to dig ourselves a shelter against the morning’s searching, we were far from imagining that what we dug would be our Peninsular ‘home’ and haven of rest from the firing-line for many months to come. And so we made what we conceived to be the quickest and simplest form of shelter against a merely temporary danger — long, straight, untraversed ditches, running parallel to and with but a few yards between each other. No worse form of permanent dwelling-place could conceivably have been constructed, for the men were cramped in these places with a minimum of comfort and a maximum of danger. No man could climb out of his narrow drain without casting a shower of dust from the crumbling parapet on to his sleeping neighbour in the next ditch; and three large German shells could have destroyed half the regiment. Yet there were many such camps, most of them lacking the grateful concealment of our trees. Such targets even the Turkish artillery must sometimes hit. There were no dug-outs in the accepted sense of the Western Front, no deep, elaborate, stair-cased chambers, hollowed out by miners with miners’ material. Our dug-outs were dug-outs in truth, shallow excavations scooped in the surface of the earth. The only roof for a man against sun and shells was a waterproof sheet stretched precariously over his hole. It is sufficient testimony to the poverty of the Turkish artillery that with such naked concentrations of men scattered about the Peninsula, casualties in the rest-camps were so few.