When the full story of the Great War comes, at last, to be written, no part of it will thrill our children or our children's children more, or make them prouder of their race, than the chapters which shall tell of how men of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, and India fought stubbornly side by side, and side by side with our gallant French allies, on those hills and plains of Gallipoli.
All the country thereabouts has been dedicated to war and romance from time immemorial. At its entrance, between Kum Kale and Sedd-el-Bahr, the Dardanelles is only two miles wide; it broadens to five miles as you go in, and contracts, when you reach the narrows, to the width of a single mile. Here it was, nearly five hundred years before Christ, that Xerxes threw a bridge of boats across for his conquering army to pass over; and here it was that Leander nightly swam the mile of water that separates Abydos from Sestos, where Hero lived. On the eastern shore, near the mouth of the Dardanelles, and within sight and sound of the thunderous battles of to-day, is the site of that ancient Troy whose long siege rages for ever in Homer's Iliad; but the Greek and Trojan heroes he has immortalised knew no such terrific fighting, did no such deeds of mighty valour as have fallen to the share of the incomparable heroes who are fighting there now.
The powerful forts along either coast-line, the masked batteries among the hills, the torpedo tubes cunningly concealed on the rocky beaches, the sunken-mine fields that bar the channel, and the floating mines that can be sent drifting down on the current to strike and blast an enemy's ships to the bottom, make the forcing of the Dardanelles an infinitely more difficult undertaking than it was when Admiral Duckworth made a bold dash for it and got through with his fleet in 1807; and there are not wanting amateur experts among our arm-chair critics who say confidently that the dispatch of the British and French fleets to force a passage there, last February, without the support of a military expedition on shore, was a casual and wild blunder. It may have been; but it were more rational not to pass judgment until we have all the evidence before us. It was a sudden and vigorous attempt, and we should have been loud in our praise of the daring initiative of whoever was responsible for it if it had succeeded; but it failed, as even some of our best-laid schemes are bound to do, for the age of miracles is past, though the grumblers who expect us to win every time and the enemy to lose every time do not appear to be aware of this.
The most we can safely say is that the February attack by the allied fleets was an unfortunate adventure, for it not only failed, it put the Turks on the alert and spurred them to strengthen their defences and hurry reinforcements to the Peninsula until they had some 200,000 men garrisoning the forts and ready in mile behind mile of trenches to meet the British and French troops that were presently to be sent against them.
On the 13th March General Sir Ian Hamilton left London with his staff to take command of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Army, and a day or two later landed at Tenedos in the Ægean Sea, where, in the dim past, the Greeks had landed when they marched to besiege Troy. After consultations with Vice-Admiral de Robeck, commanding the British Eastern Mediterranean Fleet, with General d'Amade, commander of the French Corps Expéditionnaire, and Contre-Amiral Guepratte, who commanded the French squadron, Sir Ian made careful reconnaissances up the Gulf of Saros along the outer coast of Gallipoli, and rapidly matured his plan of campaign, using Malta as a base of operations, bringing troops thence and from Egypt and concentrating his vast fleet of loaded transports in Mudros Bay, off the Island of Lemnos, which lies out in the Ægean, some twenty miles before the gates of the Dardanelles. Here, with new regiments from the British Isles, from India, and from France, were Australians and New Zealanders who had received their baptism of fire in the Suez Canal campaign; and whilst they lingered for the transport arrangements to be completed they improved the shining hours, or, rather the hours that had no shine in them, by practising every evening the work of rapidly disembarking and making a landing on the shores of Mudros Bay, their genial comrades, the bluejackets, helping them with tips in the art of climbing rope-ladders, in steering a boat and using a boathook.
"What can I say about the Army?" says Mr. Ashmead Bartlett, in his "Dispatches from the Dardanelles." "It is no ordinary body of men. It is essentially Imperial in its composition, and only the British Empire could have brought together such a force from all corners of the earth. Also the majority of the men are volunteers and Colonials. It is the great counter-attack of Australia against the enemy in the east whilst our regular armies are holding the line so gallantly in the west.... I do not suppose that any country in its palmiest days ever sent forth to the field of battle a finer body of men than these Australian, New Zealand, and Tasmanian troops. Physically they are the finest lot of men I have ever seen in any part of the world. In fact, I had no idea such a race of giants existed in the twentieth century." Sir Ian Hamilton, too, was full of praise for his troops from "down under," and considered them "a magnificent lot of men, and as keen as mustard for the job."
In the afternoon of 23rd April an impressive battle service was held aboard the crowded transports, and soldiers and sailors stood bare-headed and listened reverently whilst the chaplain prayed for them, and that, fighting a clean fight for the rights of humanity, they might be strengthened to go on unflinchingly in the face of every difficulty and danger till their arms were crowned with victory. It was the last consecration of those brave men to the high and perilous duty to which they had given themselves. In the evening of the same day transports carrying the troops who were to make the first landing on Gallipoli, and act as a covering force for the main army, moved out of Mudros Bay, with their convoy of warships, and the rest of the expedition followed in their track–a mighty fleet of nearly a hundred transports in all, guarded on every side by a wonderful array of gunboats, destroyers, swift armoured-cruisers, and stately dreadnoughts, including the mammoth Queen Elizabeth.
On the morning of the 24th April the transports anchored off Tenedos. The day was occupied in transferring the troops to a number of cutters and smaller war vessels, and at midnight these were taken in tow by certain of the larger ships, and, silently and without lights, moved away through the darkness, stringing out into long, serpentine lines, towards Gallipoli.
The expedition was divided into two landing parties. Whilst the French created a diversion by bombarding Kum Kale, on the eastern coast, strong forces of English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh were to land at five points, on the beach below Krithia, above Cape Tekeh, at Cape Helles, at Sedd-el-Bahr, and near Totts Battery, on the extreme end of the Peninsula; and after a fierce half-hour's shelling of the forts and defences by the fleet this landing was carried out with the most brilliant success. Simultaneously the Australians and New Zealanders, who had left Tenedos in advance of the rest, were to penetrate the Gulf of Saros and land above Gaba Tepe, where the Peninsula narrows to a sort of bottle-neck, to keep the Turks fully engaged there and prevent them from dispatching reinforcements to oppose the landing farther south. It is a rugged and difficult part of the coast, this above Gaba Tepe, and had been selected for that reason, because the enemy was less likely to anticipate an attack there and would be less prepared for it.
"The beach on which the landing was actually effected," writes Sir Ian Hamilton, in his vivid report, "is a very narrow strip of sand, about a thousand yards in length, bounded on the north and south by two small promontories. At its southern extremity a deep ravine, with exceedingly steep, scrub-clad sides, runs inland in a north-easterly direction. Near the northern end of the beach a small but steep gully runs up into the hills at right angles to the shore. Between the ravine and the gully the whole of the beach is backed by the seaward face of the spur which forms the north-western side of the ravine. From the top of the spur the ground falls almost sheer, except near the southern limit of the beach, where gentler slopes give access to the mouth of the ravine behind. Further inland lie in a tangled knot the under-features of Saribair, separated by deep ravines which take a most confusing diversity of direction. Sharp spurs, covered with dense scrub and falling away in many places in precipitous sandy cliffs, radiate from the principal mass of the mountain, from which they run north-west, south-west, and south to the coast."