Then there dawned the day when the Royal Naval Air Service armoured motor-cars dashed into action, grappling wire entanglements, and sped back, with the Turkish shells bursting after them from the guns on Achi Baba as they retired.
Unforgettable will remain the memory of the panorama: the calm of the sea, the havoc on shore, the placidness of the shipping, the activity of the fleet. Down below me in the mountain glens, where trickled sparkling brooks, patient Greek shepherds called on Pan pipes for their flocks, and took no more notice of the distant roar of battle—the crackle of rifles and machine guns could be heard—than of the murmuring of the sea on the seashore; and like it, unceasingly, day and night for weeks, was a horrible deadly accompaniment of one's dreams.
CHAPTER XIV
AN UNFULFILLED ARMY ORDER
It is impossible to contemplate the position at Anzac on Wednesday, 28th April, when the fighting for a foothold on the peninsula had finished and the Turks had been crushed back, without feeling that the battlefields of France and Flanders had not taught the lessons that were only too startlingly obvious—that success was only won by adequate reserves being ready to hurl against the enemy in extremis. Granted that two or three days—Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday—were necessary for the reorganization of the Australian lines, bent but not broken, and full of fighting vigour, and eager to fulfil the task that was set them of breaking across the peninsula at this, almost its narrowest neck, there seems to be no explanation why there was such a miscalculation by experienced Generals of Turkish strength, and lack of reserves, which left the Turks the same three days to lick their wounds and bandage them, and return, greatly reinforced, to the fray. It becomes more inexplicable still when it is found that certain Army Corps orders were issued for a general advance, and that a chance word alone was the means of that advance being altered to a mere straightening of a portion of the strongly entrenched line. I do not think it was because we feared the Turks: that would be to pay him more credit than his actions warranted. It was, to put it quite plainly, faulty Staff work. Events are too near to attempt to place the blame; for assuredly there was some one blameable for the great wasted opportunity to crush the Turkish army of Liman von Sanders.
Behind the apparent chaos of Anzac Cove and the fighting force on the hills during the first three days there was, nevertheless, the great purpose that mattered. Every one was doing his utmost to reduce the lines of communication, the stores on the beach, and the army itself to their proper and normal state. Those days from Tuesday onward may be regarded as showing some of the finest Staff organizing work that has been done in the campaign. By Friday the position was completely reorganized. Units had been rested and linked up; trenches had been straightened, strengthened, and defended against attack. Water, ammunition, food, were trickling in regular streams up the gullies; guns were in position, and fresh troops had been landed to relieve the strain and hurry matters forward. Unfortunately, it seems, they were not in sufficient numbers apparently to justify a general offensive immediately. The 1st Light Horse Brigade, under Brigadier-General Chauvel, and the Royal Marine Light Infantry, those young troops that had seen their first service in the defence of Antwerp, were put into the trenches to relieve the men who had won their first fight and fame in a three days' battle. For seventy-two hours these heroes had been without sleep; they were dropping in their tracks from fatigue. They had had water and biscuits and bully beef, but until Wednesday nothing warm to eat or drink. All day and night small parties of perhaps as many as 50, perhaps only 10 men, were to be seen going from one section of the line to another; men who had been collected a mile away from their original unit, who had got separated in the wild rushes over the hills, who had gone into the firing-line at the nearest point at which they found themselves to it. It was essential that commanders should have their own men before any move forward could be attempted on a large scale. In digging alone, the men suffered terrible hardships after their advances, strategical retreats, and the endless fatigues for water, food, and munitions.
In order, therefore, that the battalions could be reformed and rearrangements made in the commands of the companies, units were withdrawn at various points from the firing-line, as they could be spared, and placed in reserve gullies, where the men obtained good sleep and rest, a hot meal, and, generally, a swim down on the beach.
Now, in this 1st Division reorganization work no officer took a greater or finer part than Colonel C. B. B. White, the Chief of General Staff to General Bridges, ably supported by Major Glasfurd. He seemed indefatigable, never perturbed, always ready to remedy a defect. Major Blamey, who was Intelligence Officer, carried out daring reconnaissance work towards Maidos, leaving our lines under cover of darkness and penetrating to a distant ridge and determining much of the enemy's position on the right. Meanwhile, complete field telephone communication had been established under most awful conditions, directed by Major Mackworth, D.S.O., whose gravest difficulty was the constant breaking of the lines, through men stumbling over them in the saps and shrapnel fire, that led to the beach and the Army Corps headquarters, not usually a matter for much worry, as being distant many miles from the firing-line, in an ordinary battlefield.
On 28th and 29th April a comparative calm stole over Anzac. Gradually the Turks had ceased their intense bombardments of the gullies. Their waste of ammunition had been enormous, 600 shells falling often in the course of a few hours in one small gully; yet the damage on the beach was almost negligible. Their shelling of the cove was now regulated to odd times, and never lasted for more than half an hour or an hour. The Australians had orders not to waste their rifle fire in blazing away into the darkness to no purpose, and scarcely fired a shot except at periods throughout the night when fierce bursts foreshadowed an enemy counter-attack. Anzac of the first days and Anzac of this second period was a contrast as of a raging ocean to a placid sea.