CONTEMPORARY EVENTS
On the 23rd, just after the transports had started, news came from the rugged island of Skyros, eighty miles south-west of Lemnos, that Rupert Brooke, the poet, had died there of blood-poisoning that evening. During his visit to the Royal Naval Division at Port Said, Sir Ian had seen him in his tent upon the sand, prostrate with fever, and had offered him a place on his Staff. With fine resolution, and a modesty equally characteristic, Brooke refused, being determined to abide by the Royal Naval Division, which he had joined before the quixotic fiasco at Antwerp. On April 20 he took part in a field-day on Skyros, and in an olive grove there, high up on the mountain Pephko, looking over Trebaki Bay, he was buried at midnight of the 23rd, his own petty officers carrying his body over the rocks and prickly bushes. A wooden cross, surrounded by lumps of marble, marks the spot. His colonel in the Hood Battalion, Arnold Quilter, Grenadier Guards, who was killed a fortnight later, wrote to his mother: “His men were devoted to him, and he had all the makings of a first-rate officer.” Alas! his friends know that he had all the makings of so much beside, and for them the world was darkened by the loss of so singularly beautiful a character, a personality so fine and full of the noblest promise.[83]
Upon other fronts of the war, the chief events of the weeks following the costly and inconclusive movement at Neuve Chapelle (March 10) were the capture of Przemysl by the Russians (March 22), followed by heavy fighting in the Carpathian passes, and the second battle of Ypres, inaugurated (April 22) on the German side by the earliest use of poison gas.
CHAPTER V
THE LANDINGS
The wind, which had continued to blow hard on April 22, abated next day, and in the afternoon the transports bearing the covering force of the 29th Division began very slowly to move out from Mudros harbour. In that land-locked inlet, the water was now still, and singularly blue. “The black ships,” as the navy called the transports owing to their fresh coat of black paint, wound their way in and out among others still lying at anchor. They passed the battleships and cruisers of our own fleet; they passed the Anzac transports, which were to follow them next day; they passed the battleships and transports of the French contingents, and the five-funnelled Russian cruiser Askold, lying nearer the little islands which protect the entrance of the far-extended haven; and as they passed, the pellucid air which still illuminates the realms of ancient Greece rang with the cheers of races whose habitation the Greeks had not imagined. Perhaps it is in Greek history that we find the nearest parallel to such a scene of heroic joy, the preface to heroic disaster. For when the bright troops of Athenians started for the conquest of Sicily, we read that nearly the whole population of the city accompanied their five-mile march down the Piræus; that there, in sacred silence, libation to the gods was made; and issuing in line ahead from the harbour, the transport galleys raced, in pure exhilaration of heart, to the pointed island of Ægina, fifteen miles away, while far in the air bystanders heard the cries of invisible spirits, like the wailings of women upon the Phœnician shore lamenting the beauty of Adonis yearly wounded.[84]
THE FORCE LEAVING MUDROS
The British covering force consisted mainly of the 86th Brigade (29th Division), under Brigadier-General S. W. Hare, but two battalions of the 87th Brigade and half a battalion of the 88th were attached to it, beside the Plymouth Battalion of the Royal Naval Division, as the General’s own reserve, and the Anson Battalion, detailed for beach duties. Their three transports were escorted by the Euryalus (flagship of Admiral Wemyss, commanding the first and fourth of the seven squadrons into which the fleet was divided), the Implacable, and the Cornwallis, and their station was Tenedos. The next afternoon (Saturday, April 24) they were followed from Mudros harbour by the Queen Elizabeth (flagship of Admiral de Robeck), with Sir Ian Hamilton and the General Headquarter Staff on board, leading the other battleships in line ahead. After them went the Anzac covering force, consisting of the 3rd Brigade under Colonel Sinclair Maclagan (the Queensland, South Australian, West Australian, and a mixed Australian and Tasmanian battalion). The remainder of the Anzac army corps followed, escorted by the Queen (flagship of Admiral Thursby, commanding the second squadron), the London, and the Prince of Wales. Their destination was a point off Imbros, near Cape Kephalos, where they were to wait during the night till the moon went down. The covering force occupied four transports, beside the 1500 men of the brigade placed upon the Queen. General Birdwood’s headquarters were on the Minnewaska, and about thirty transports carried the remainder of his corps. As they passed out of harbour, leaving the Lemnian shore with which many, by practised landings, had become familiar, they too were greeted with tumultuous cheering by the ships which had not started yet, and tumultuously they replied. Moved onward irresistibly into imminent death, knowing that by the morrow’s afternoon at least one in ten of their numbers would have fallen in all the splendour of youthful vitality, still they cheered like schoolboys bound for a football match or a holiday by the sea. Excitement, comradeship, the infectious joy of confronting a dangerous enterprise side by side, made them cheer. Never before had those men known what battle means, but the sinking dread of the unknown, which all men feel as the shadow of extreme peril approaches, was allayed by the renunciation of self, and the clear belief that, whoever else was wrong in the world, it was not they.
The night was very still. The three-quarter moon set soon after 3 a.m., and there was total darkness over sea and mountains until a cold and windless dawn gradually appeared. The water was smooth as a mirror, and a thin veil of mist covered the shore. Just before the sun rose in a blaze of gold, four of the battleships and four cruisers opened fire upon the defences at the main landing-places round Cape Helles, and continued a heavy bombardment. At the same time, the landing of the covering parties at the five selected points around the end of the Peninsula began, and account of them may here be given in succession from the extreme right flank at S to the extreme left at Y.
LANDING AT DE TOTT’S
On the evening of the 24th, about 750 of the 2nd South Wales Borderers under Colonel Casson had come on board the Cornwallis in four trawlers from their transport. Just before sunrise they put off in the trawlers again, each trawler towing six boats, and proceeded up the strait for about 2½ miles to the point called Eski Hissarlik or De Tott’s Battery, on the north-east end of Morto Bay. The Cornwallis followed, with the Lord Nelson as covering ship, but, being delayed by the Agamemnon and some French mine-sweepers coming across her course, she did not reach the point till the men had approached the shore, rowing the boats as best they could, though unaccustomed to the water, and encumbered with their packs, rifles, and trenching tools. Almost before the boats grounded, they leapt into the sea, and struggled to shore, under a heavy rifle fire which immediately opened from the Turkish trenches.