Lord Fisher then said that he had understood that the question would not be raised to-day; but Mr. Asquith held that, in view of the steps that had been taken, it could not be left any longer in abeyance. Lord Kitchener considered the attack on the Dardanelles to be one of the utmost importance, and equivalent, if successful, to a victorious campaign fought by the new armies then training; and both Mr. Balfour and Sir Edward Grey dwelt on its political effect upon the Balkans. There then followed a dramatic incident. Lord Fisher, pushing his chair back, rose from the table as though about to leave the room. Lord Kitchener at once followed him, and asked him what he meant to do. He said that he would not return to the Council Table and meant to resign his position as First Sea Lord. For a few minutes the two men, each outstandingly first in his own profession, stood talking by the window, Lord Kitchener urging Lord Fisher to come back to the table. He was the only dissentient, as Lord Kitchener pointed out, everybody else being in favour of the plan; and, after a little fresh argument, Lord Fisher returned and resumed his place among the others.
Mr. Churchill had, however, noticed the incident and, after lunch, had a private talk with Lord Fisher, strongly urging him to undertake the operation, and obtaining his definite, if reluctant, consent to do so. At the afternoon meeting of the War Council, Mr. Churchill then announced that the Admiralty was willing to proceed, and, from that time onward, he never looked back. The matter, in his own words, had passed into the domain of action. By January 28th, therefore, the country was finally committed to a purely naval attack on the Dardanelles with Constantinople as its ultimate objective.
This was the decision, but almost immediately—almost insensibly in fact—the scope of the operations began to widen. From the outset it had been clear that the silencing of the forts would demand a certain number of landing-parties, although it was believed that these need only be small, consisting principally of Marines. Lord Kitchener himself was then of the opinion that, once the ships had completed their passage, the garrison of the Peninsula would evacuate it, and it would cease to have any military importance. He was also quite definite in his statement that there were no more British troops available for the purpose, an opinion which Mr. Churchill did not share, though he was, of course, overborne by Lord Kitchener's authority. Nevertheless the idea of military coöperation grew, as it were, unofficially in the minds of those responsible. Sir Henry Jackson, in a memorandum to be adopted or not, according to Admiral Carden's discretion—pointed out that the naval bombardment was not recommended as a sound operation, unless a strong military force was ready to assist, or at least to follow it up.
Meanwhile the Turkish attack upon Egypt had been defeated; certain of our plans in France and Flanders had been altered; and, on February 16th, at an informal meeting of Ministers, a very important decision was arrived at. This was to send the 29th Division, hitherto destined for service on the Western Front, to Lemnos, an island about sixty miles from the Gallipoli Peninsula—the Division sailing, it was hoped, within ten days. At the same time arrangements were to be made for a further force to be sent if necessary from Egypt; horse-boats were to accompany the 29th Division; arrangements were to be made to assemble a large number of lighters and tugs in the Levant; and the Admiralty was also to build special transports and lighters, suitable for the conveying and landing of 50,000 men where these might be wanted. The military effort was already in embryo, therefore, before the purely naval attack had been begun; and, with all this in mind, we can now transfer our attention to the actual scene of conflict.
It was on February 19, 1915, that Admiral Carden decided to open the bombardment of the entrance forts, namely those of Cape Helles and Sedd-el-Bahr on the northern and European side, and Kum Kale and Orkanieh on the southern or Asiatic. Admiral Carden himself, then fifty-eight, had had a varied and adventurous career; had taken part in the Egyptian campaign of 1882; receiving the medal and the Khedive's Bronze Star; had been present, two years later, at the Eastern Sudan campaign; and, as a commander in 1897, had been with the punitive expedition that followed the Benin massacres. He had reached flag-rank in 1908, and had been Rear-Admiral to the Atlantic Fleet for a year, being the Admiral Superintendent of Malta Dockyard at the outbreak of war.
Under his command, besides a flotilla of destroyers and the seaplane ship Ark Royal, were three old English battleships—the Vengeance, that had already been employed on the Belgian coast; the Cornwallis, that had been at the Nore, in the Third Fleet, christened the "Forlorn Hope"; and the Triumph, formerly the Chilian Libertad, that had been acting as Depot Ship at Hong Kong. With these were the Agememnon, a more modern battleship, though about to have been passed into the Second Fleet; and the Inflexible, which we have last heard of helping to sink the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau near the Antarctic Circle. In addition there were under his command the Suffren, Gaulois, and Bouvet, three old French battleships that, the summer before, had not even been in Commission. All these vessels, however, with the exception of the Triumph, carried 12-inch guns and therefore outranged the forts; and, between them, they mounted a secondary armament of fourteen 7.5-inch, ten 9.2-inch, ten 6.4-inch, twenty-four 6-inch, eighteen 5.5-inch, and sixteen 4-inch guns.
Beginning at eight in the morning, a long-distance shelling was continued till a quarter to three in the afternoon, when the Vengeance, Cornwallis, and Triumph, with the three French battleships—less valuable vessels that could justifiably be risked—drew in to shore and opened fire with their secondary armament of smaller guns. It then became clear that, in spite of the previous five hours' bombardment, the forts had not been silenced, for they immediately opened fire. They effected no damage, however. By nightfall, those on the European side had apparently been put out of action, but one of the Asiatic forts was still replying when the light failed and operations ceased.
Bad weather followed, and it was not till February 25th that the attack could be seriously taken up again, the Fleet having been strengthened in the interval, notably by the Queen Elizabeth with her 15-inch guns. Together with the Irresistible, the Agamemnon, and the French battleship Gaulois, she began a long-range bombardment early in the morning, and this was followed as before by an attack at close quarters—the Vengeance, Cornwallis, and Suffren again taking their part in this, with the Charlemagne and, later in the day, the Triumph and Albion. Even so it was not until evening that the last gun was silenced, and the trawlers, under cover of the fleet, were able to begin clearing away the mines.
Nor could the results of these two days' bombardments have been said to hold great promise for the future. So little damage had been done by the first day's firing that the batteries were all active again by the second; and, at the end of this, when the demolition-parties landed, they found seventy per cent. of the guns still in serviceable condition. Few more dangerous duties, under such circumstances, can be imagined than those undertaken by these little detachments; and, both in the courage with which they were faced and the coolness with which they were completed, the records of the navy and the Royal Marines were more than fully sustained. Particularly prominent was the act of Lieutenant-Commander E. G. Robinson, who on February 26th went alone, under heavy fire, into a hostile gun-position, that might well have been occupied, destroyed a 4-inch gun single-handed, and then returned to his landing-party for a further charge to destroy a second gun that he had found there. Owing to the fact that their white uniforms rendered them so conspicuous as targets, Lieutenant-Commander Robinson refused to allow his comrades to accompany him on either occasion. For this act he was very justly awarded the Victoria Cross.
Meanwhile at home, the lack of unanimity, of whole-hearted enthusiasm in the necessary team-work, and, more than this, of a detailed conception of what was actually intended were beginning to bear their fruits. Thus it had been decided, in the first place—and this had greatly influenced both Lord Fisher and Sir Arthur Wilson—that, if the naval attack were to become unpromising, it would be broken off and its losses cut. That had also been Lord Kitchener's view, but, on February 24th, he stated, at a meeting of the War Council, that if the Fleet could not get through without help, the army would have to come to its aid. By Mr. Churchill that had evidently long been accepted, and preparations, as we have seen, were well under way. Transports had been collected for the despatch of the 29th Division, and it was hoped that it would begin to sail on the 22nd. Two days before, however, Lord Kitchener had decided, for reasons doubtless important, but without consulting his colleagues, that this Division could not be spared, and he had countermanded the transports.