The delay and confusion due to the oversight of obvious shallows were serious. They were the first step in failure. For by the time the brigade got ashore and sorted itself out it was useless to think of reaching W Hill, or even Chocolate Hill, under cover of darkness. In fact, by the time the battalions were reorganised it was nearly dawn. To protect the left, one battalion (11th Manchester) was now sent up the rocky steep of Karakol Dagh, which it succeeded in clearing of the concealed parties of gendarmes. The Colonel was wounded, the second in command killed, and nearly half the strength put out of action.[180] But its service in saving the rest of the brigade from enfilading fire was inestimable. The 5th Dorsets appears to have followed the Manchesters by mistake of direction.
About the same time another of the battalions (9th Lancashire Fusiliers) succeeded in the task of clearing the low eminence of heath-covered sandhill which stood close at hand to the left front of the landing beach, and was mistaken for Hill 10. The Turks had a strong outpost there, and the loss to this battalion was also considerable. In fact, the brigade stood in an isolated and unsatisfactory position when, just as the eastern sky began to show streaks of brown among the purple, the 32nd Brigade (Haggard’s) began to appear along the sandy spit, coming from Lala Baba, which it had seized and left in charge of the 33rd Brigade (Maxwell’s). As it approached it opened fire upon the low plateau, where confused fighting was still going on. The 9th West Yorks (32nd Brigade) also joined in the attack, and suffered considerable loss.
HESITATION AND CONFUSION
Brigadier-General Sitwell, as senior in command, had now two brigades, half of each still untouched by action. It was the moment for him, one would have thought, to advance at all hazards upon Chocolate and W Hills. Yet he hesitated. Perhaps he thought it went beyond his orders to cross the open plain now that daylight was increasing every minute. Perhaps he was deterred by a brief counter-attack which the Turks, noticing the confusion or supineness of the brigades, attempted against the plateau, though the 9th Lancashire Fusiliers again drove them off with the bayonet, compelling them to retreat through the low bushes on the north edge of the plain. Now that the sun was rising, shrapnel from the two Turkish batteries posted on the hills across the Salt Lake began to burst over his position, and the naval guns, attempting to harass the groups of enemy as they stole away, set fire to a large area of bush straight in his front and to the left.[181] Perhaps he thought enough had been done by battalions already thirsty, tired after a sleepless night, and probably shaken by their first losses in battle. At all events he allowed at least one battalion to gather in crowds under the shelter of some high sand dunes along the shore north of the spit, and there for many hours they lay immovable. The second step in failure had been taken.
The third was already preparing. About an hour before dawn, the ten trawlers and steamers bringing Brigadier-General Hill’s six battalions from Mitylene punctually arrived off the bay. As they all belonged to Sir Bryan Mahon’s 10th Division, General Stopford had intended them to land near A Beach, to seize the whole length of the razor-edge on the north of the bay, to occupy the Kiretch Tepe Sirt, and advance as far as possible towards Ejelmer Bay, whence the great hills of Tekke Tepe could be turned. They were, of course, to be joined by Sir Bryan Mahon’s other three battalions on their arrival with their General from Mudros. But the General had not yet arrived: the navy had witnessed only too plainly the failure of A Beach as a landing-place owing to the shallows, and they had not yet discovered the practicable creeks among the rocks near Suvla Point. Accordingly, General Stopford was advised to land them at B Beach, and after the delay of more than two hours this was done.[182] That is to say, five of the six battalions were landed there with Brigadier-General Hill; but before the 5th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers (of Hill’s own 31st Brigade) had disembarked, Sir Bryan Mahon put into the bay from Mudros with the remaining three, and was landed in the creeks which the navy had now discovered among the rocks east of Suvla Point. Accordingly, the Inniskilling Fusiliers were counter-ordered to join him there. Thus the 10th Division was now divided into three entirely different parts: the 29th Brigade was at Anzac; three battalions of the 31st and two of the 30th were with Hill at B Beach; two battalions of the 30th, one of the 31st, and the 5th Royal Irish (Pioneers) were at Suvla Point, where the Divisional General landed with nothing of his Division left under his command except these four. Confusion of command and position was inevitable.[183]
GENERAL HILL’S NEW ORDERS
Confusion immediately resulted. As Hill with his five battalions was landed in the sphere of the 11th Division on the right, instead of being with his own 10th Division on the extreme left, he was ordered by General Stopford to put himself under the command of Major-General Hammersley. His battalions did not begin to disembark till 5.30 a.m., when it was nearly full daylight. The enemy’s shrapnel was bursting over his boats and the beach. Two of our mountain-guns were hurried up into the Turkish trenches on Lala Baba, though the battery of Field Artillery did not come into action from behind the cover of that hill until evening. The ships also maintained a heavy but ineffectual fire upon invisible or unregistered positions. But the loss at the landing was considerable while Hill was away looking for the Divisional General and new orders. This was a long process. Finding at last that his orders were to combine with the 32nd and 34th Brigades, now under Sitwell’s command upon the dunes near Hill 10, and then to attack Chocolate Hill and advance to W Hill, he mustered the five battalions behind the slopes of Lala Baba, and ordered an advance along the sandy spit. The march round by Hill 10, and then along the north side of the Salt Lake, and again south-east to Chocolate Hill, would describe three parts of a circle. An advance from B Beach along the south side of the Salt Lake would have followed an almost straight line to Chocolate Hill; the ground, though marshy in places, was better going than loose sand, and the apprehended wire was afterwards found to be negligible. By this route General Hammersley could have brought these five battalions into action many hours earlier, could have occupied Chocolate Hill by noon, and pushed on to W Hill before night. It is true they would not then have co-operated with the brigades under Sitwell, but the value of that co-operation was not great.
As it was, owing to the delay of changed command, and to co-operation with a Brigadier in another Division, with whom Hill, having just come from Mitylene, was probably unacquainted, Hill’s column did not begin to leave Lala Baba for the sandy spit till noon. The march across that unprotected spit was a trying passage. The Irishmen (6th Inniskilling Fusiliers, 5th and 6th Royal Irish Fusiliers, of the 31st Brigade, and 6th and 7th Royal Dublin Fusiliers of the 30th Brigade) had started closely packed together for their long sea voyage on the previous afternoon; except for a cup of tea at 3 a.m. and a snatch of their rations after landing, they were empty of food; for some hours they had stood uncertain under a blazing sun and exposed for the first time to shrapnel, often fatal and continually unnerving. The Turkish guns on Anafarta and W Hills had carefully registered the sandy spit, and now swept it with shrapnel from end to end. For sleepless, hungry, and miserably thirsty men, loose sand is the worst of trials. They crossed in batches, or “by a section at a time rushing over.”[184]
HILL’S ADVANCE ROUND SALT LAKE
As each battalion arrived after this ordeal, it formed up under the slight cover of the sand dunes about Hill 10, but it was 3 p.m. before all the five mustered there and Hill could organise the attack upon Chocolate Hill, which was to have been completed before dawn. Keeping only the 6th Dublin Fusiliers in reserve, he pushed the other four battalions forward across the dry bed of the Asmak on the north side of the Salt Lake, and began the difficult movement of wheeling the whole force southward through the open country round the lake shore. It was thus marching across the enemy’s front—an operation of proverbial risk. The farther it advanced, the more exposed the left flank became. Sitwell, as senior officer, was, as we have seen, in command of the 34th and 32nd Brigades, which had lain so many hours under the sand dunes. He was now, indeed, in sole command, since Haggard had been seriously wounded at noon. But he considered he was justified in sparing only two battalions in support (6th Lincolns and 6th Borders, which, however, belonged to the 33rd Brigade and must have been sent over from Lala Baba by their Brigadier-General Maxwell under General Hammersley’s order). Even these two appear to have been moved too late to protect the left flank, for Hill was compelled to defend it, as it was “in air,” by deploying the 5th Royal Irish Fusiliers (Colonel Pike, an excellent officer, who was with the regiment in Ladysmith) and advancing them so as to face half-left. An increasing gap was thus formed between left and right as the force slowly wheeled round the lake, and the 7th Dublins had to be brought up to fill it.