We sailed the next morning, and thus avoided the misery of the great November blizzard on the Peninsula.
The Division remained on the Peninsula until the 29th December. Dysentery abated and the flies vanished, but gale and storm carried on the strain, and frostbite was added to the men's trials. The Turks seem to have much increased their supply of munitions, and the loss of life continued day by day. "Asiatic Annie" and other guns across the straits showed renewed activity. A mine explosion on the 4th December killed one of our men and injured eight. Two popular privates, Hancock and Lee, were killed on Christmas Day. One singular innovation was the Turkish practice of shooting steel-headed darts from their aeroplanes. Their chance of striking any man was, luckily, very small.
Nothing daunted the spirit of East Lancashire. Our men held concerts to the very last, and the football eleven survived three rounds of an Army Corps competition, losing their tie in the fourth round on a field in which shells burst repeatedly to the discomfort of the players. Captains J.F. Farrow, F. Hayes and E. Townson returned to strengthen the small band of officers, while R.J.R. Baker, who had been intercepted on his way out and sent to Suvla Bay, was released for service with us.
CHAPTER VIII
The last I saw of the trenches was the tangled line on Fusilier Bluff. The last I saw of Gallipoli was the fading contour of its cliffs as we sailed in the Delta for Mudros and Alexandria. When we touched at Mudros we heard the first whisper of Lord Kitchener's fateful visit to the Eastern Mediterranean.
All questions relating to the initiation and conduct of the expedition are fitly left to the judgment of the Dardanelles Commission. Here have only been expressed ideas that occurred to a Regimental Officer, whose range of vision is always restricted, and whose generalisations are inevitably based on a narrow, personal experience. Yet such ideas may still have a bearing upon the history of the campaign, as the whole theatre of operations at Cape Helles was extraordinarily congested. In a tiny area, barely three miles by four, strategy had no elbow-room when once the Army was committed to the plan of operations that had been adopted. The war with the Turks on the Peninsula became purely a war of tactics. If Inkermann was "the soldier's battle," Gallipoli was the soldier's campaign.
It is easy to criticise in the light of a later standard. Gallipoli was invaded early in 1915, not in 1916 or 1917, when the whole technique of assault had been revolutionised. We landed with the methods practised in England since the Boer War, methods as out of date in France in 1917 as Wellington's methods were in 1815. On later knowledge no one can doubt that a vast concentration of gun power, infinitely equipped and munitioned, a scientific use of barrage fire, nicely adjusted to the movements of a great infantry force, itself organised to develop the fullest use of machine guns, Lewis guns, and grenades, would have broken the defences of Achi Baba. Our Army knew none of these advantages. The artillery was inadequate and was inadequately supplied with high explosives to prepare for an attack in the style afterwards perfected on the Western Front. It was realised nowhere at this period that the rôle of infantry in attack is quite secondary to that of the guns. The bombardment that preceded the infantry assaults at Cape Helles in August did not last over two hours, and certainly never hit the trenches actually in front of the Manchester Territorial Brigade. The gunners could do no more than they did. The resources at their disposal were quite insufficient to atone for the Army's difficulties in point of numbers and in point of ground. It would appear as if we enjoyed no real ascendancy over the enemy either in aircraft or mining. Bombing was most unfamiliar to us on arrival. It appeals to the English sportsman greatly and came to be brilliantly practised, but it was rarely a determining element. The Battalion bombers on Gallipoli were officially known as Grenadiers. Steel hats were, of course, unknown. They would have saved many lives. Visual signalling, on which pains had been lavished during training, proved of little use. The telephone, however, was a godsend, and in our Battalion was admirably worked by Sergeant Stanton.
The one handicap that was above all others a constant and pervading thought in the minds of our men was the shortage in numbers. It was a common belief that more reinforcements would have carried the great advances of June and July over every obstacle. Our drafts were always too small and too few, and the want of men infinitely aggravated the exhaustion of the survivors. With but a part of its old strength, and with no supports whatever between itself and the beaches, a battalion was still expected to hold the same length of line as when it was up to strength. Some two hundred men, for instance, occupied the long stretch of trenches from Skinner's Lane corner to the eastern bird-cage and its numerous forward saps, upon which men had once been employed. The task involved weeks of scanty and broken sleep, and caused our support and reserve lines to be utterly untenanted. Fatigue work was necessary the very hour that a unit had straggled down to a bivouac from the fire trenches. So precious was man power that the doctors were forced to keep unfit men at duty until they dropped. It is impossible to imagine men more worn by sleeplessness and sickness than the jaded Manchester Territorials at the end of a fortnight in the front line. On a moving day Gully Ravine was littered with men who had fallen out of the ranks of a dozen regiments as they trudged, heavily laden, along the winding and dust-swept track.