From the outset the Dardanelles Campaign attracted me with peculiar interest. The shores of the Straits were the scene of the Trojan epics and dramas. They were explored and partly inhabited by a race whose legends and history had been more familiar to me from boyhood than my own country’s, and more inspiring. They belonged to that beautiful part of the world with which I had become personally intimate during the wars, rebellions, and other disturbances of the previous twenty years. But, above all, I was attracted to the Campaign because I regarded it as a strategic conception surpassing others in promise. My reasons are referred to in various chapters of this book, and indeed they were obvious. The occupation of Constantinople would have paralysed Turkey as an ally of the Central Powers; it would have blocked their path to the Middle East, and averted danger from Egypt, the Persian Gulf, and India; it would have released the Russian forces in the Caucasus for action elsewhere; it would have secured the neutrality, if not the active co-operation, of the Balkan States, and especially of Bulgaria, not only the most resolute and effective of them, but a State well disposed to ourselves and the Russian people by history and sentiment; by securing Bulgaria’s friendship, it would have delivered Serbia from fear of attack upon her eastern frontier, and have relieved Roumania from similar apprehensions along the Danube and in the Dobrudja; it would have confirmed the influence of Venizelos in Greece, and saved King Constantine from military, financial, and domestic temptations to Germanise; above all, it would thus have secured Russia’s left flank, so enabling her to concentrate her entire forces upon the Lithuanian, Polish, and Galician frontiers from the Memel to the Dniester.
The worst apprehensions of the Central Powers would then have been fulfilled. Blockaded by the Allied fleets in the Adriatic, and by the British fleet in the Channel and the North Sea, they would have found themselves indeed surrounded by an iron ring, and, so far as prophecy was possible, it seemed likely that the terms which our Alliance openly professed as our objects in the war might have been obtained in the spring of 1916. The subsidiary and more immediate consequences of success in the Dardanelles, such as the supply of munitions to Russia, and of Ukrainian wheat to our Alliance, were also to be considered. The saying of Napoleon, in May, 1808, still held good: “At bottom the great question is—Who shall have Constantinople?”
Under the prevailing influence of “Westerners” upon French and British strategy, these probable advantages were either disregarded or dismissed, and to dwell upon them now is a useless speculation. The hopes suggested by the conception in 1915 have faded like a dream. The dominant minds in our Alliance either failed to imagine their significance, or were incapable of supplying the power required for their realisation while at the same time pressing forward the proposed offensive in France. The international situation of Europe, and indeed of the world, is now changed, and the strategic map has been completely altered. Early belligerents have disappeared from the field, and new belligerents have entered the shifting scene. Already, in 1918, the Dardanelles Expedition has passed into history, and may be counted among the ghosts which history tries in vain to summon up. It is as an episode of a vanished past that I have attempted to represent it—a tragic episode enacted in the space of eleven months, but marked by every attribute of noble tragedy, whether we consider the grandeur of theme and personality, or the sympathy aroused by the spectacle of heroic figures struggling against the unconscious adversity of fate and the malign influences of hostile or deceptive power.
In treatment, I have made no attempt to rival my friend John Masefield’s Gallipoli—that excellent piece of work, at once so accurate and so brilliantly illuminated by poetic vision. Mine has been the humbler task of simply recording the events as they occurred, with such detail as seemed essential to complete the history, or was accessible to myself. In this endeavour, I have trusted partly to the books and documents mentioned below, partly to information generously supplied to me by many of the principal actors upon the scene; also to my own notes, writings, and memory, especially with regard to the nature of the country and the events of which I was a witness. Accuracy and justice have been my only aims, but in a work involving so much detail and so many controverted questions mistakes in accuracy and justice are scarcely to be avoided. I know the confusion of mind and the distorted vision so frequent in all great crises of war, and I know from long experience how ignorant may be the criticism applied to any soldier from the Commander-in-Chief down to the private with a rifle.
The mention of the private with a rifle suggests my chief regret. The method I have followed, in treating divisions or brigades or, at the lowest, battalions as the units of action, almost obliterates the individual soldier from consideration. Divisions, brigades, and battalions are moved like pieces on a board, and Commanding Officers must regard each of them only as a certain quantity of force acting under the laws of time and space. Yet each of the so-called units is made up of living men—men of distinctive personality and incalculably varying nature. Men are the actual units in war as in the State, and I do not forget the “common soldiers.” I do not overlook either their natural failures or their astonishing performance. In various campaigns and in many countries I have shared their apprehensions, their hardships, their brief intervals of respite, and their laborious triumphs. They, like the rest of mankind, have always filled me with surprised admiration or poignant sympathy. Among the soldiers of many races, but especially among the natives of these islands, whom I could best understand, I have always found the fine qualities which distinguish the majority of hardworking people, all of whom live perpetually in perilous hardship. I have found a freedom from rhetoric and vanity, a simple-hearted acceptance of life “in the first intention,” taking life and death without much criticism as they come, and concealing kindliness and the longing for happiness under a veil of silence or protective irony. But a book of this kind has little place for the mention of them, and that is my regret. Like a general, I have been obliged to consider forces mainly in the mass, and must leave to readers the duty of remembering, as I never cease to remember, that all divisions and all platoons upon the Peninsula were composed of ordinary men like ourselves—individual personalities subject to the common sufferings of hunger, thirst, sickness, and pain; filled also with the common delight in life, the common horror of death, and the desire for peace and home. As in the case of general mankind, it was their endurance, their courage, self-sacrifice, and all that is implied in the ancient meanings of “virtue,” which excited my wonder.
Among those who have given me very kind assistance either on the Dardanelles Peninsula or in London, I may mention with gratitude General Sir Ian Hamilton, G.C.B., etc.; General Sir William R. Birdwood, K.C.B., K.C.S.I., etc.; Major-General Sir Alexander Godley, K.C.B., etc.; Major-General Sir A. H. Russell, K.C.M.G., etc.; the late Lieut.-General Sir Frederick Stanley Maude, K.C.B.; Major-General Sir W. R. Marshall, K.C.B.; Major-General H. B. Walker, C.B.; Major-General Sir William Douglas, K.C.M.G.; Major-General F. H. Sykes, C.M.G.; Major-General Sir D. Mercer, K.C.B.; Brigadier-General Freyberg, V.C.; Colonel Leslie Wilson, D.S.O., M.P.; and Lieut. Douglas Jerrold, R.N.V.D.; Vice-Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, K.C.B., etc.; Rear-Admiral Heathcote Grant, C.B., etc.; Captain A. P. Davidson, R.N.; Captain the Hon. Algernon Boyle, R.N.; Staff-Surgeon Levick, R.N.; and the Rev. C. J. C. Peshall, R.N. It would indeed be difficult to draw up a complete list of the Naval and Military officers to whom I owe my thanks.
Having taken many photographs on the Peninsula, I posted them, as I was directed, to the War Office, and never saw them again. I can only hope that any one into whose possession they may happen to have come upon the route, may find them as useful as I should have found them in illustrating this book. My friend, Captain C. E. W. Bean, has generously supplied me with some of his own photographs in their place. For the rest I am permitted to use official pictures, taken by my friend, Mr. Brooks. They are of course far superior to any I could have taken, but some are already familiar.
The maps are for the most part constructed from the Staff Maps (nominally Turkish, but mainly Austrian I believe) used by the G.H.Q. upon the Peninsula. Some also are derived from drawings by Generals and Staff Officers. For the larger maps of Anzac and Suvla I am indebted to the assistance of Captain Treloar and the Australian Staff in London, with permission of Sir Alexander Godley, and Brigadier-General Richardson (formerly of the Royal Naval Division); and to Mr. S. B. K. Caulfield.
The following is a list of the chief books and documents which I have found useful:—
Sir Ian Hamilton’s Dispatches.