With the French upon our right, all seemed at first to go well. The 1st Division carried the first trenches. The 2nd or new Division, with characteristic élan, at last rushed the formidable redoubt which commanded the approach to the southern slope leading up to the crest above Kereves Dere, and had barred the French advance almost since the first advance. From its bulging crescent shape, the French called it the “Haricot.” Unfortunately, here again, as before, the Senegalese and Colonial troops were found unable to retain positions which they had won. Within an hour of the first infantry advance, the Turks projected an overwhelming counter-attack upon the “Haricot,” shelling it heavily and pouring masses of reinforcements down the deep communication trenches. A fatal gap was thus opened between the French and British lines. The right flank of the 2nd Naval Brigade became dangerously exposed. The fortune of the battle turned.
In less than half an hour from their great success, the Howe, Hood, and Anson Battalions were thus subjected to intense enfilading fire. The lately arrived Collingwood Battalion came to their support, but in this their first battle they were almost exterminated, losing over 600 men and their commanding officer, Commander Spearman, R.N., killed.[123] Compelled to retire across the open ground over which they had charged, and exposed to a torrential rain of bullets from machine-guns and rifles, this brigade of the unfortunate but invariably noble division suffered the losses of massacre. Even worse followed. The retirement and partial destruction of the Naval Brigade left the right flank of the Manchesters “in air” upon a very advanced position. Their Brigadier, General Noel Lee, an excellent leader of men, and in civil life partner in a well-known Lancashire shipping and cotton firm, was wounded; many of their officers killed. Yet the men declared they would for ever hold the ground they had so rapidly won; they only asked for help upon their right. To check the enfilading fire their right flank was thrown back to face it, and in the midst of tangled scrub and enemy trenches the brigade fought on two fronts at right angles to each other. It was an impossible position, but still the men clung on. Our reinforcements had already been almost exhausted in drafts to the extreme left, where the advance was held up, as described.
INSUFFICIENT RESULTS
At 6.30, General Hunter-Weston, commanding the VIIIth Corps, after consultation with Sir Ian, was constrained to “pull out” the Manchesters from their exposed and untenable salient. With almost mutinous reluctance the troops withdrew into the first line of Turkish trenches, taken in the first rush, and the remainder of the Division conformed. In spite of an endeavour made by the Royal Fusiliers at 4 p.m. to establish themselves beyond this first line, the 29th Division and the Indians had been unable to advance farther upon the left, and the gain so confidently expected, especially in the centre, was now reduced to an advance of 200 yards in some places and 400 yards in others. The prisoners amounted to 400, including 11 officers, among whom were 5 Germans, the relics of a machine-gun detachment from the Goeben.[124]
During the night an excellent piece of work was accomplished by the Nelson Battalion, R.N.D. (Colonel Evelegh).[125] They were sent up to establish touch between the right of the 42nd Division and the left of the R.N.D. This task involved digging forward a “switch trench” under very heavy fire, but the connection between the exposed flanks was thus made good.
Late in the afternoon of the battle, Major-General De Lisle, famous as a dashing leader of mounted troops in the South African War, and now coming fresh from command of the 1st Cavalry Division in France, arrived at Helles to take over the command of the 29th Division. The news that met him there, illustrated by the streams of wounded passing down to W Beach, was not encouraging. As had happened before in this campaign, and was to happen more than once in the future, the hope of victory had been dashed at the moment when victory appeared most certain, and it had been frustrated by failure at one single point. The losses were unusually heavy—estimated at 5000 at the time—and large numbers of the best remaining officers in the 29th Division and the R.N.D., not to mention the Manchester Brigade, had fallen.[126] Owing to the retirement of the line from the positions they had taken, some of the wounded were of necessity left on the neutral ground together with the dead, and uniforms, hanging loosely upon the shrunken corpses, were long visible at exposed points, whence nothing could be reclaimed. By Sir Ian’s personal orders attempts were made to recover the dead and wounded under the white flag, but they failed.[127] The fact was that when small parties went out under a white flag they were fired upon. This frequently happened at the termination of a severe battle, though the Turks appear to have fired rather as a warning than with immediate intent to kill. But for this hostile attitude it is possible that a formal armistice might have been arranged, such as Sir Ian tacitly granted to the Turks at Helles on May 2, and by negotiation at Anzac on May 24.
SERIOUS LOSSES
Heavy fighting was renewed before dawn on the 6th, and continued at intervals for two days and nights, the Turks repeating their counter-attacks, especially down the upper reach of the Gully Ravine. Here the Royal Fusiliers (86th Brigade) suffered terrible loss. Major Brandreth, a singularly fine officer, then in command of the battalion, wounded on the day of landing, was now killed. Many of the new officers who had lately arrived with the drafts were killed also, including Captain Jenkinson of Oxford, one of the greatest authorities on embryology. By June 8 only one officer, the former Sergeant-Major, was left of those who had originally come out, besides the Quartermaster. Of the original regiment only 140 remained. All the ten officers who had recently joined were lost. Their places were taken by a new Captain from the Dublins, in command, and about fifteen other officers, collected from various regiments, and all strange to each other and the men. The Hampshires (88th Brigade) had fared still worse, having only about 100 of the original men left, and no officers at all.[128] Thus, under the stress of frontal attacks upon entrenched and commanding positions, manned by Turks, and assaulted without suitable or adequate artillery, battalions dwindled to companies, brigades to battalions, divisions to brigades, and an army corps to a division. Amid losses so overwhelming it seemed impossible to retain a regimental spirit. Yet such is the power of a name endowed with traditional honour that in a week or two the new arrivals, both of officers and men, as they came drifting in, became inspired with a resolve to carry forward the inherited reputation maintained by so many deaths.
For the next fortnight repeated small assaults and counter-attacks continued to reduce the numbers, while holding the Turks in check and preserving the activity and confidence of the men. On June 21 the French Divisions captured the “Haricot” Redoubt. The attack began at dawn, and by noon the 2nd Division had occupied the position. But the 1st Division, after taking a line of trenches, was driven out in a counter-attack, and exposed to victorious troops on their left, as so often happened in the French engagements at Helles. In the afternoon General Gouraud called upon his right flank for a renewed effort, and at 6 p.m. the lines were taken again and held. The possession of these lines and the “Haricot” gave the French a partial command of the Kereves Dere, reduced the salient of our centre by bringing up their forces on the right, and generally shortened and straightened out our line across the Peninsula. The French loss was estimated at 2500,[129] the Turkish at nearly three times that amount. But this estimate of “over 7000” is probably an exaggeration, though one of the Turkish trenches, 200 yards long and 10 feet deep, was described as brimming over with the dead,[130] and 50 prisoners were taken.
By this time two brigades of the 52nd Division had arrived, and the third was nearly due. It was a Territorial Division (the “Lowland”), commanded for the first few months by Major-General G. G. A. Egerton. After the fighting of July 12 and 13, he was ordered to a hospital ship owing to natural fatigue; but returning next day, he retained command till mid-September, when he was succeeded by Major-General H. A. Lawrence, son of the great Lord Lawrence of the Indian Mutiny.[131] It was a fairly homogeneous and steady division, and, though rapidly reduced in strength, its improvement after the first month or six weeks was much remarked.