by Peter Hart
Captain Albert Mure, 1/5th Royal Scots, 88th Brigade, 29th Division
This amazing ability to carry on despite the carnage was not unique to any nation; it simply reflected a battlefield necessity. Men had to become hardened to the horrors that surrounded them or they would go mad. Some hardy, or possibly insensitive souls seemed to do more than take it all in their stride. As an example, what passed for a joke in the French Foreign Legion would certainly have aroused critical comment in most social circles.
One of our greatest needs was cigarettes, and after a battle certain of us used to volunteer to creep out and search the dead Turks for tobacco, of which they seemed to have plenty. One night I found a nice big packet of tobacco in the coat pocket of a dead Turk. On the way back to our lines I rolled myself a cigarette but at the first puff I was nearly sick. God knows how long that Turk had lain out there but the tobacco had become tainted by his decaying body and was putrid. I rolled about twenty cigarettes and distributed them to the men in my company, who were duly grateful – until they tried to smoke them! Our jokes were a bit on the gruesome side, but then so were the conditions in which we were living and dying.36
Private Cornelius Jean de Bruin, Légion Étrangère, 1st Régiment de Marche d’Afrique, 1st (Métropolitaine) Brigade, 1st Division, CEO
The men of the Foreign Legion certainly had the capability to extract the best from their situation.
Along the beach were buried the enemy corpses. They had been hurriedly buried just under the sand and pebbles. The crabs swarmed about them in their hundreds. If you knocked over one of the Turkish boots their hideous living contents came scuttling out – terrifying! The Legionnaires quickly harvested this veritable larder to make delicious bouillabaisse – we certainly didn’t eat it – although they said it was delicious!37
Lieutenant Henri Feuille, 52nd Battery, 30th Regiment, CEO
But not everyone could maintain such sangfroid when surrounded by horrors and under nerve-racking stress. As Captain Mure inspected his men one morning he encountered a distressing case of complete mental collapse.
I saw a chap lying on the ground. He was moaning and whimpering, and seemed to be partly comatose. I asked if he was hit, but no one seemed to know, or to know what was wrong with him. I lugged him up on to his feet, but he just fell down again. I hoisted him up again. He lay down. As fast as I pulled him up, he threw himself or fell back on to the ground. I tried to walk him up and down. I might as well have invited Achi Baba to come and waltz with me. He would lie down and groan and weep, and he would do no other thing. I tried to buck him up, to cheer him to sanity, to goad him to courage. It was no good. So I sent him off to the doctor, who told me, when I asked that afternoon, that the poor fellow was off his head, and probably would not recover.38
Captain Albert Mure, 1/5th Royal Scots, 88th Brigade, 29th Division
With the putrefying corpses came the flies. Buzzing around them in swarms, they provided an extra torment for the living. As May passed the weather grew ever hotter and the soldiers’ movements were restricted.
We were invaded by millions of flies. There was no escape from these beastly insects. They swarmed around everywhere. Drinking and eating was a real nightmare and I avoided no matter how hungry I was rice pudding, which was served up frequently, mixed with currants and dehydrated fruit. It was difficult to distinguish currants from flies. They looked alike in this repulsive mixture. Immediately the lid was taken off the dixie the flies would swarm down and settle on the rim in a cluster and many of them would fall into the pudding. The spreading of jam on to a hardtack biscuit was indeed a frustrating exercise. Driven by the pangs of hunger, the hated apricot jam was tolerated of sheer necessity. A concerted effort by at least three of us to transfer the jam from the tin on to the biscuit was necessary, one to open the tin, another to flick away the flies and a third to spread the jam and cover up. The ceilings of our bivouacs, a waterproof sheet, were black with flies crawling over each other and falling on top of one as you tried to rest.39
Gunner Dudley Meneaud-Lissenburg, 97th Battery, 147th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery
The flies were an irritation buzzing around the soldiers’ faces, but even more seriously they were feeding on the liquid faeces that filled the open latrines. No fewer than 500 flies could breed from a single deposit of human excrement and the latrines were consequently fertile breeding grounds. It was estimated by one medical handbook that one female fly could be the originator of some 5,598,720,000,000 descendant adult flies in just six months!40 ‘Millions of flies’ was not an exaggeration.
Latrine discipline was regarded – in theory – as paramount and the latrines were meant to be covered over and fly-proof. The army was well aware of the theory and practice of camp sanitation: in the sanitary manuals a multiplicity of carefully drawn diagrams of Heath-Robinson constructions seemed to cover every possible combination of disastrously malfunctioning bodily functions. But this was not a camp, it was a battlefield every inch of which was under fire. At Gallipoli there was not the wood, the ground space, the disinfectants, or the time to cope with the sheer scale of the problem that overwhelmed the sanitary men. With toilet paper a treasured luxury, the loving letters sent from home often met an unfortunate fate. Men were forced to wipe themselves on vegetation and eventually just used their hands and then wiped them clean as best they could in the dirt or on their filthy uniforms. Hygiene became non-existent.
As a result, the flies that landed on Gunner Meneaud-Lissenburg’s food would have been carrying a cocktail of all the infectious agents that made dysentery so widespread. And even as he and his mates were releasing their insides into the crude open trench latrines, there was no respite.
Seated on a pole placed horizontally on, and supported by trestles on either side of and over a deep, narrow trench swarming with flies, surrounded by a low and inadequate screen, could be seen the incumbent armed with a bunch of leaves, or a rolled piece of paper, striving to keep away the flies. Bouncing up and down on the pole, and smacking the leaves against his backside he looked like a jockey riding his hardest to win a race whilst we in the stands cheered lustily.41
Gunner Dudley Meneaud-Lissenburg, 97th Battery, 147th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery
But dysentery was no joke. Both the amoebic and, even worse, the bacillary varieties of dysentery took a heavy toll of the Allied forces. Men were racked with gripping abdominal pains. Often there was nothing but slimy blood-stained mucus for all their straining efforts and soon their backsides were rendered red raw from their endlessly repeated visits to the latrines. In severe cases they could suffer a prolapsed bowel. Men in the throes of dysentery did not have the time, the strength or the opportunity to make it to the latrines and fouled themselves, further undermining the sense of self-worth that is so vital to maintain morale on active service. There were also water shortages at Helles, making dehydration a curse that would eventually hollow out men from within, reducing them to mere shadows of their former selves. Conventional treatment, which centred on a special diet, was all but impossible at Gallipoli.
Other diseases spread rapidly among the weakened soldiers. Paratyphoid went hand in hand with dysentery, so patients often had both complaints at the same time. The symptoms varied greatly in severity but included a fever, head and stomach aches, retching or vomiting, shivering fits, a severe bronchial cough, diarrhoea, vertigo, deafness, aching limbs, rose spots on the torso and in some cases, perversely, constipation. The sheer number of possible symptoms made diagnosis difficult. The conventional treatment of aspirin and a liquid diet was again fairly irrelevant to conditions on Gallipoli. Malaria was a problem specific to those soldiers from the 29th Division who had contracted the disease during their sojourn in the east and who found themselves suffering feverish relapses. Meanwhile, sandfly fever preyed mainly on the French troops, spread by the bites of a tiny hairy fly that seemed to breed in the cellars and old battlements of their base at Sedd el Bahr fort. In this world of misery, the ma
in symptoms of jaundice, as typified by a yellow staining of the skin and the whites of the eyes, were the least of the soldiers’ worries. In any case jaundice was seen more as a symptom of men suffering from liver complaints or anaemia rather than a specific disease.
Even if they were not actually ill, nearly all the Allied soldiers were reduced to a frenzy of sweaty itching by the attentions of lice. The female louse would lay about sixty whitish pinhead-sized eggs in the fibres of their uniforms, usually in the seams or natural folds. These would hatch in about ten days and the young lice would almost immediately begin to suck blood from their unwilling soldier hosts, soon infesting every hairy part of their bodies. As the lice strolled about their domain they caused excessive itching exacerbated by their bites, which created tiny puncture marks within an area of inflammation. On the Western Front when the troops were out behind the line they could visit delousing centres, where their uniforms would be heat-sterilised or even replaced. This was impossible at Gallipoli. As a result thousands of men spent hours stripped of their shirts and trousers burning down the seams with matches or candles to destroy the eggs nestling there.
In these conditions very few soldiers were in good health and most had one or more of the common complaints. Some were so weakened by their ordeal that their major body functions began to close down, resulting in complaints like ‘soldier’s heart’, which left men breathless at the slightest exertion. The strength of the army was literally being leached away.
EVEN AT SEA THE ALLIES were beginning to suffer. The great pre-dreadnoughts sitting off shore like enormous tethered goats made obvious targets, but until the German U-boats arrived they seemed safe enough. Or at least they did until early on the morning of 13 May, when a Turkish torpedo boat, the Muavenet-i Milliye, crept out and launched an audacious attack on the Goliath which was on duty guarding the right flank of the French position just inside the Straits. On board was the youthful Midshipman Wolstan Weld-Forester.
CRASH! Bang! Cr-r-r-ash! I woke with a start and sitting up in my hammock gazed around to see what had so suddenly roused me. Some of the midshipmen were already standing on the deck in their pyjamas – others, like me, were sitting up half dazed with sleep. A party of ship’s boys crowded up the ladder from the gun-room flat, followed by three officers; one of these, a Sub-Lieutenant, called out: ‘Keep calm and you’ll all be saved!’ Up to that moment it had never dawned upon me that the ship was sinking, and even then I thought it improbable until I noticed that we were already listing to starboard.42
Midshipman Wolstan Weld-Forester, HMS Goliath
Weld-Forester made his way up on to the quarterdeck.
The ship was now heeling about 5 degrees to starboard and I climbed up to the port side. It was nearly pitch-dark. A seaman rushing to help lower the boats charged into me and I turned and swore at him. Gradually a crowd gathered along the port side. ‘Boat ahoy! Boat ahoy!’ they yelled; but, as the ship listed more and more, and there was no sign or sound of any approaching vessel, the men’s voices seemed to get a bit hopeless. Inside the ship everything which was not secured was sliding about and bringing up against the bulkheads with a series of crashes. She had heeled over to about twenty degrees, then she stopped and remained steady for a few seconds. In the momentary lull the voice of one of our officers rang out steady and clear as at divisions: ‘Keep calm, men! Be British!’43
Midshipman Wolstan Weld-Forester, HMS Goliath
Again the ship heeled rapidly and, realising she was going down, Weld-Forester decided he would have to jump for it if he was not to be caught up in the ferocious undertow that would be generated when the ship sank.
Raising my arms above my head I sprang well out board and dived. Just before I struck the water my face hit the side of the ship. It was a horrid feeling sliding on my face down the slimy side, and a second later I splashed in with tremendous force, having dived about 30 feet. Just as I was rising to the surface again a heavy body came down on top of me. I fought clear and rose rather breathless and bruised. I swam about 50 yards away, to get clear of the suction when the ship went down. Then, turning round and treading water, I watched her last moments. The noise of crashing furniture and smashing crockery was continuous. Slowly her stern lifted until it was dimly outlined against the deep midnight sky. Slowly her bows slid further and further under until, with a final lurch, she turned completely over and disappeared bottom upwards in a mass of bubbles. She had been our home for nearly 10 months – she was gone – vanished – in less than 4 minutes.44
Midshipman Wolstan Weld-Forester, HMS Goliath
After a terrifying battle with the currents that raced through the Straits he was eventually picked up by a naval cutter and taken aboard the Lord Nelson. Three of his fellow young midshipmen had been lost. On hearing the alarms they had rushed to their action stations in the after torpedo room deep down in the bowels of the Goliath. Midshipman Christopher Tennant later heard of their fate.
Perhaps they did not hear the clang of the shutting of the bulkhead hatches and doors, or the bugle sounds of ‘Abandon Ship!’ as she foundered and the lights went out. They were trapped in the torpedo room alone and in the dark. Soon it must have been all so quiet and still as the ship came to rest on the bottom of the sea some 100 feet below. Three days later we heard that one of them, MacLeod, had been picked up dead but with air still in his lungs.45 It might, I think, have been just possible to enter the torpedo tube while the outer door was closed and then the inner door could be opened, using the manual controls. As the outer door opened, the water would rush in with tremendous force but perhaps MacLeod could have struggled out. If so, how did they decide who should have the chance? How long did they wait in silence and the dark before the attempt was made?46
Midshipman Christopher Tennant, HMS Lord Nelson
In all, some 570 of the total crew of 750 were killed.
This was bad enough, but once the U-21 arrived and sank the Triumph off Anzac on 25 May, the situation became entirely hopeless. Still the old Majestic was left sitting alone and unguarded off W Beach. Two days later, the U-21 carefully manoeuvred into position to launch a pair of torpedoes at 06.45 on 27 May. The U-21 was spotted too late and the twin explosions and sudden cataclysmic inrush of water doomed the Majestic. Aboard the ship was one of the official journalists covering the campaign, Mr Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett.
I was aroused by men rushing by me and someone trod on, or stumbled against, my chest. This awoke me and I called out, ‘What’s the matter?’ A voice replied from somewhere, ‘There’s a torpedo coming!’ I just had time to scramble to my feet when there came a dull heavy explosion about 15 feet forward of the shelter deck on the port side. The hit must have been very low down, as there was no shock from it to be felt on deck. The old Majestic immediately gave a jerk over towards port and remained with a heavy list. Then there came a sound as if the contents of every pantry in the world had fallen at the same moment. I never before heard such a clattering, as everything loose in her tumbled about. You could tell at once she had been mortally wounded somewhere in her vitals and you felt instinctively she would not long stay afloat. The sea was crowded with men swimming about and calling for assistance. I think that many of these old reservists, who formed the majority of the crew, had forgotten how to swim, or else had lost all faith in their own powers.47
Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, Daily Telegraph
Thanks to the swarms of small vessels that rushed in to rescue the crew, only forty-three of the 700 men died.
The arrival of the U-boats recast the balance of forces at Helles. As at Anzac the great ships of war could no longer prowl night and day off the beaches; now they could only appear in special circumstances. Lesser ships – destroyers – would take up much of the work of supporting the troops. Many of the troops ashore felt deserted after the big beasts had gone. This was a not unnatural reaction. For they were almost totally isolated, sitting at the end of a tenuous supply chain open to disruption and disaster every link of the
way.
The United Kingdom was some 2,000 miles away and the nearest fully functioning naval base was Alexandria, in Egypt. This undoubtedly possessed everything required from a port, equipped as it was with spacious quays, cranes, lighters, tugboats, plentiful labour and of course capacious storage areas. Yet it was nearly 700 miles from Gallipoli. The advanced base of Mudros on the island of Lemnos was sixty miles from Helles, but it was by no means the complete article. Mudros Bay offered a good natural anchorage, but that was all – a phenomenal amount of work was required to build it up into a military supply base. Piers soon snaked out into the bay, a decent water supply was secured, camps set up and huge stores established with interconnecting roads and light railways. Two large freighters were retained to act as floating supply and ordnance depots, while the liner Aragon acted as headquarters for the multifarious supply and communications staff. Mudros may have been remote but back in the 1840s detailed harbour charts had been prepared by a Royal Navy party under the command of one Captain Corrie, who was commemorated, certainly without his knowledge, as follows by one of his team:
The somewhat fantastic names of the jagged peaks took our fancy. They ran thus: ‘DEN, MAD, EBEIR, ROC’. And then one day some bright lad read them backwards and discovered that they spelt, ‘Corrie be damned!’48
