Many have said to me, with a naïveté that would be touching if it were not so plainly inspired by our enemies: "Why did not the troops press on at once, the day they landed? The Japanese pressed on the day they landed, so did the Americans in Cuba. If you had pressed on at once, you would have won the whole Peninsula. The Turks were at their last cartridge, and would have surrendered."
It is quite true that the Japanese moved inland immediately from their transports at Chemulpho and Chinampo. Those ports were seized before the Russians knew that war was declared: they were not defended by Russian soldiers, and the two small Russian cruisers caught there by the Japanese fleet were put out of action before the transports discharged. The Japanese were free to land as they chose on beaches prepared, not with machine guns and mines, but with cranes, gangways and good roads. Even so, they did not press on. The Japanese do not press on unless they are attacking: they are as prudent as they are brave: they waited till they were ready and then marched on. The Americans landed at Daiquiri and at Guanica unopposed and in neither case engaged the enemy till next day.
In the preceding chapter I have tried to show why we did not press on at once, after landing. We did not, because we could not, because two fresh men strongly entrenched, with machine guns, will stop one tired man with a rifle in nine cases out of ten. Our men had done the unimaginable in getting ashore at all, they could not do the impossible on the same day. I used to say this, to draw the answer, "Well, other troops would have done it," so that I might say, what I know to be the truth, that no other men on this earth either would have or could have made good the landing; and that the men have not yet been born who could have advanced after such a feat of arms. The efforts of men are limited by their strength: the strength of men, always easily exhausted, is the only strength at the disposal of a general, it is the money to be spent by him in the purchase of victory, whether by hours of marching in the mud, digging in the field, or in attack. Losses in attack are great, though occasional, losses from other causes are great and constant. All armies in the field have to be supplied constantly with fresh drafts to make good the losses from attack and exhaustion. No armies can move without these replenishments, just as no individual men can go on working, after excessive labour, without rest and food. Our losses in the landings were severe, even for modern war, even for the Dardanelles. The bloodiest battle of modern times is said to have been Antietam or Sharpsburg, in the American Civil War, where the losses were perhaps nearly one-third of the men engaged. At V Beach the Munsters lost more than one-third, and the Dublins more than three-fifths of their total strength. The Lancashires at W Beach lost nearly as heavily as the Dublins. At Anzac, one Australian battalion lost 422 out of 900. At X Beach, the Royals lost 487 out of 979. All these battalions had lost more than half their officers, indeed by the 28th April the Dublins had only one officer left. How could these dwindled battalions press on?
Then for the individual exhaustion. Those engaged in the first landing were clambering and fighting in great heat, without proper food, and in many cases without water, for the first 24 or 36 hours, varying the fighting with hurried but deep digging in marl or clay, getting no sleep, nor any moment's respite from the peril of death. Then, at the end of the first phase, when the fact that they had won the landing was plain, some of these same men, unrested, improperly fed, and wet through with rain, sweat and the sea, had to hold what they had won, while the others went down to the beach to make piers, quarry roads, dig shelters, and wade out to carry or drag on shore food, drink, munitions and heavy guns, and to do this without appliances, by the strength of their arms. Then when these things had been done almost to the limit of human endurance, they carried water, food and ammunition to the trenches, not in carts but on their backs, and then relieved their fellows in the trenches and withstood the Turk attacks and replied to the Turks' fire for hours on end. At Anzac the A.N.Z. Army Corps had "96 hours' continuous fighting in the trenches with little or no sleep" and "at no time during the 96 hours did the Turks' firing cease, although it varied in volume; at times the fusillade was simply deafening." Men worked like this, to the limit of physical endurance, under every possible exposure to wet, heat, cold, death, hunger, thirst and want of rest, become exhausted, and their nerves shattered, not from fear, which was a thing those men did not understand, but because the machine breaks. On the top of the misery, exhaustion and nerve-ceasing peril, is "the dreadful anxiety of not knowing how the battle is progressing," and the still worse anxiety of vigilance. To the strain of keeping awake, when dead-beat, is added the strain of watching men, peering for spies, stalking for snipers and listening for bombing-parties. Under all these strains the minds of strong men give way. They are the intensest strains ever put upon intelligences. Men subjected to them for many hours at a time cannot at once "press on," however brave their hearts may be. Those who are unjust enough to think that they can, or could, should work for a summer's day, without food or drink, at digging, then work for a night in the rain carrying heavy boxes, then dig for some hours longer, and at the end ask me to fire a machine gun at them while they "press on," across barbed wire, in what they presume to be the proper manner.
Our men could not "press on" at once. They had not enough unwounded men to do more than hold the hordes of fresh Turks continually brought up against them. They had no guns ashore to prepare an advance, nor enough rifle ammunition to stand a siege. They had the rations in their packs and the water in their bottles, and no other supplies but the seven days' food, water and rifle ammunition put into each boat at the landing. To get men, stores, water and guns ashore, under fire, on beaches without wharves, cranes or derricks of any kind, takes time, and until men and goods were landed no advance was possible. Until then, our task was not to press on, but to hang on, like grim death. It was for the enemy to press on, to beat our tired troops before their supports could be landed, and this the Turks very well understood, as their captured orders show, and as their behaviour showed only too clearly. During the days which followed the landing, the Turks, far from being at their last cartridge, and eager to surrender, prevented our pressing on, by pressing on themselves, in immense force and with a great artillery, till our men were dying of fatigue in driving back their attacks.
One point more may be discussed, before resuming the story. The legend, "that the Turks were at their last cartridge and would have surrendered had we advanced," is very widely spread abroad by German emissaries. It appears in many forms, in print, in the lecture and in conversation. Sometimes place and date are given, sometimes the authority, all confidently, but always differently. It is well to state here the truth so that the lie may be known. The Turks were never at the end of their supplies. They were always better and more certainly supplied with shells and cartridges than we were. If they were ever (as perhaps they sometimes were) rather short of big gun ammunition, so were we. If they were sometimes rather short of rifles and rifle ammunition, so were we. If they were often short of food and all-precious water, so were we, and more so, and doubly more so. For all our supplies came over hundreds of miles of stormy water infested by submarines and were landed on open beaches under shell fire, and their supplies came along the Asiatic coast and by ferry across the Hellespont, and thence, in comparative safety, by road to the trenches. The Turkish army was well supplied, well equipped, more numerous and in better positions than our own. There was neither talk nor thought among them at any time of surrender, nor could there have been, in an army so placed and so valiant. There was some little disaffection among them. They hated their German officers and the German methods of discipline so much that many prisoners when taken expressed pleasure at being taken, spat at the name of German, and said "English good, German bad." Some of this, however, may have been Levantine tact.
Late on the 26th April, the French corps landed men at V Beach and took the trenches on the right of the ground won, i.e., towards the Straits. At noon the next day the whole force advanced inland without much opposition, for rather more than a mile. At nightfall on the 27th, they held a line across the Peninsula from the mouth of the Sighir watercourse (on the Ægean) to Eski Hissarlik (on the Straits). The men were very weary from the incessant digging of trenches, fighting, and dragging up of stores from the beach. They dug themselves in under shell and rifle fire, stood to their arms to repel Turk attacks for most of the night, and at eight next morning began the battle of the 28th of April. The French corps was on the right. The 29th Division (with one battalion of the R.N. Division), on the left. They advanced across rough moorland and little cultivated patches to attack the Turk town of Krithia. All the ground over which they advanced gave cover of the best kind to the defence. All through the morning, at odd times, the creeping companies going over that broken country came suddenly under the fire of machine guns, and lost men before they could fling themselves down. In the heather and torrent-beds of the Scotch-looking moorland the Turk had only to wait in cover till his targets appeared, climbing a wall or getting out of a gulley, then he could turn on his machine guns, at six hundred shots a minute each, and hold up the advance. From time to time the Turks attacked in great numbers. Early in the afternoon our advance reached its furthest point, about three quarters of a mile from Krithia. Our artillery, short of ammunition at the best of times, and in these early days short of guns, too, did what it could, though it had only shrapnel, which is of small service against an entrenched enemy. Those who were there have said that nothing depressed them more than the occasional shells from our guns in answer to the continual fire from the Turk artillery. They felt themselves out-gunned and without support. Rifle cartridges were running short, for, in spite of desperate efforts, in that roadless wild land with the beaches jammed with dead, wounded, stores, the wrecks of boats, and parties trying to build piers under shell-fire, it was not possible to land or to send up cartridges in the quantity needed. There were not yet enough mules ashore to take the cartridge-boxes and men could not be spared; there were too few men to hold the line. Gradually our men fell back a little from the ground they had won. The Turks brought up more men, charged us, and drove us back a little more, and were then themselves held. Our men dug themselves in as best they could and passed another anxious night, in bitter cold and driving rain, staving off a Turk attack, which was pressed with resolute courage against our centre and the French corps to the right of it. There were very heavy losses on both sides, but the Turks were killed in companies at every point of attack and failed to drive us further.
The next two days were passed in comparative quiet, in strengthening the lines, landing men, guns and stores and preparing for the next advance. This war has shown what an immense reserve of shell is needed to prepare a modern advance. Our men never had that immense reserve, nor, indeed a large reserve, and in those early days they had no reserve at all, but a day to day allowance, and before a reserve was formed the Turks came down upon us with every man and gun they had, in the desperate night attack of the 1st of May. This began with shell-fire at ten P.M., and was followed half-an-hour later by a succession of charges in close order. The Turk front ranks crept up on hands and knees without firing (their cartridges had been taken from them) and charged our trenches with the bayonet. They got into our trenches in the dark, bayoneted the men in them, broke our line, got through to the second line and were there mixed up in the night in a welter of killing and firing beyond description. The moon had not risen when the attack came home. The fighting took place in the dark: men fired and stabbed in all directions, at flashes, at shouts, by the burning of the flares, by the coloured lights of the Turk officers, and by the gleams of the shells on our right. There were 9,000 Turks in the first line, 12,000 more behind them. They advanced yelling for God and Enver Pasha, amid the roar of every gun and rifle in range. They broke through the French, were held, then driven back, then came again, bore everything before them, and then met the British supports and went no further. Our supports charged the Turks and beat them back; at dawn our entire line advanced and beat them back in a rout, till their machine guns stopped us.
Upon many of the dead Turks in front of the French and English trenches were copies of an address issued by a German officer, one Von Zowenstern, calling on the Turks to destroy the enemy, since their only hope of salvation was to win the battle or die in the attempt. On some bodies were other orders, for the Mahometan priests to encourage the men to advance, for officers to shoot those soldiers who hung back, and for prisoners to be left with the reserves, not taken to the rear. In this early part of the campaign there were many German officers in the Turkish army. In these early night attacks they endeavoured to confuse our men by shouting orders to them in English. One, on the day of the landing, walked up to one of the trenches of the 29th Division and cried out, "Surrender, you English, we ten to one." "He was thereupon hit on the head with a spade by a man who was improving his trench with it."
This battle never ceased for five days. The artillery was never silent. Our men were shelled, sniped and shrapnelled every day and all day long, and at night the Turks attacked with the bayonet. By the evening of the 5th May the 29th Division, which had won the end of the Peninsula, had been reduced by one-half and its officers by two-thirds. The proportion of officers to men in a British battalion is as one to thirty-seven, but in the list of killed the proportion was as one to eleven. The officers of that wonderful company poured out their lives like water; they brought their weary men forward hour after hour in all that sleepless ten days, and at the end led them on once more in the great attack of the 6th-8th of May.