THE AUGUST BATTLES AT CAPE HELLES

In the history of the expedition to the Dardanelles, the August battles in the area of Cape Helles figure as a pinning or holding attack by the British Army, designed to occupy the enemy while the Suvla Bay landing was effected. The line of communications that linked the Achi Baba position with Maidos and Gallipoli was to be cut by our forces operating from Suvla and Anzac, and the Narrows were to be opened to our fleet by the capture of Sari-Bair. The epic of the actual Suvla effort has been nobly told in both Sir Ian Hamilton's dispatches and Mr Masefield's Gallipoli.

The Regimental officer at Cape Helles naturally knew very little of the strategy underlying these operations, and nothing of events at Suvla or Anzac, though Suvla was but thirteen miles and Anzac but five from Fusilier Bluff. His could only be the impressions of an eyewitness in an orbit limited to his Brigade. During the whole of our Gallipoli experiences, we were only conscious of Divisional organisation and personnel through the literature and correspondence of the orderly-room, or from mere glimpses on the occasion of our rare visits to the base on Gully Beach. I am glad to have once seen the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Ian Hamilton. He passed our Headquarters on the Western Mule Sap, walking briskly towards the trenches. The fine appreciation of the Manchester Territorial Brigade's work on the 4th June, which he wrote in his dispatches, made his name a name always to conjure with, but to the man in the trenches, an Army Commander can at most be but a shining name. Consequently, the story of the fighting in August, as we saw it, must needs be silent on all vexed questions of high policy, and also on the more famous struggle to the north of Achi Baba. Its limitations are true to life.

On the 5th August we learnt that our Army was to assault the enemy's position simultaneously with the enterprise at Suvla.

Three points were emphasised in our instructions. First, the frontage and depth of the sector to be carried by each unit was carefully and personally explained to us by General the Hon. H.A. Lawrence, who was at that time our Brigadier. Secondly, we had to tell our men that the Turkish lines would have been rendered almost untenable before their advance, in consequence of the heavy bombardment, which was to precede the attack. Thirdly, we were to emphasise to the men that Turkish morale was on the wane. Prisoners, whose only words were "English good; Turkey finish," were, I fancy, responsible for this last venture in optimism.

We had every reason to anticipate that the attempt was to be a thorough onslaught, not a mere demonstration, and would probably lead to success. The discovery that the Turks had in reality been massing for an attack on our lines within a few hours of our own assault was only made afterwards.

At 2.20 P.M. on the 6th August, the British guns opened on the Turkish positions in front of the 29th Division, and at 3.50 P.M. we could see our infantry advance under a hail of musketry and machine-gun fire. Our guns lengthened range, and we saw shells fired by our warships in the Gulf of Saros bursting along the crest of Achi Baba. Through the periscope we watched the tin back-plates, worn by our men for the enlightenment of artillery observers, twinkling under the dust and smoke. Some other Manchesters were lending a hand in the battle already, and were struggling under heavy shrapnel fire to gain a footing in the trenches immediately to the north of the sector to be assaulted by the Brigade on the morrow. Then gradually the firing sank. By 4.45 P.M. there was a distinct lull. One of our Companies (C Company) under Captain G. Chadwick, was sent as reinforcements. A stream of wounded (Manchesters, Worcesters, Munsters) began to file past our lines into the winding nullah. We knew little as to what had happened. The sky above the shell-riddled ridge of Achi Baba was serene and purple in the glow of evening, but the fog of war was upon us.

Suddenly, at 6.40 P.M., a message came that two of our Companies were required at once to help the Worcester Regiment, who had taken part in the assault about a mile to the north of where we were. A Company (Captain A.E.F. Fawcus) and D Company (Captain H. Smedley) were ordered to comply. The men were resting for the work planned for the next day. They got ready hurriedly, and moved in fast-gathering darkness along a labyrinth of unfamiliar trenches to a position from which the Worcesters had advanced in the afternoon.

Our information was most vague. The Worcesters had gone "over the top" many hours earlier and had disappeared. They were believed to be holding trenches somewhere beyond, but they were out of touch with our line, and it was intended to reinforce them. The night was dark, and the direction to be taken after leaving our trenches could only be roughly indicated. A Company lined up first, and went over the top like one man. D Company, which was to move to the right of A, then lined up along the fire step and followed.

Our men passed into a tornado of fire, and drifted forward on a broken moor, already littered with dead and wounded. Both Companies eventually lined up in shallow depressions of ground, but there was no trench to receive them.

Meanwhile, many of our wounded had straggled back to the trench from which they started, and numbers of wounded Regulars of the 29th Division who had lain out for many hours were brought in by our men during the long night. This was the one bright touch in its story. We laid down these brave men on the narrow fire-step, and our stretcher-bearers worked nobly. Several men went out with stretchers under heavy fire, and fetched in as many survivors as they could find. One, I remember, was called Corris. At midnight the Colonel and Captain P.H. Creagh, our Adjutant, left for Headquarters, where the morrow's plan of operations was being partially recast. The hours passed. At last two messengers clambered back with reports from Fawcus and Smedley. Lance-Corporal H.L. MacCartney brought the former's.

The only sensible course was for our parties to come in. I noticed that MacCartney's hand was broken and bleeding, and suggested to him that someone else should go back with my message of recall. He insisted on his ability to go, and with a companion he climbed over the parapet. A few moments later he was shot through the heart. Smedley's messenger was Lance-Corporal G.W.F. Franklin, whose services on the field won him a commission, and who played a splendid part in the subsequent annals of the Battalion. He was given a like message of recall for Captain Smedley, and with it he too clambered back over the parapet and passed out into the night.

At 3.30 A.M. on the 7th August the two Companies toiled homewards, having lost heavily. Davidson, a plucky Australian officer attached to us, was among the killed. He had been in charge of a working party which wandered in the darkness into the Turkish lines, and was there destroyed.

After a couple of hours' sleep, we rose to take our part in the renewed offensive. A heavy bombardment was to precede a general advance. As the front-line trenches lay within a few yards of the Turks, they were now practically cleared of men in order to avoid casualties from our own gunfire. The scheme laid down for our Battalion required a north-east advance by C and B Companies out of the narrow defile known as Krithia nullah. A gap was therefore made overnight in the barrier that had hitherto crossed the mouth of the defile and linked our fire trenches with those neighbouring. A machine gun was placed at the north-west corner of this gap under cover of the end of our fire trench. On the south-east side of the gap, a barricade ran up a steep slope to the trenches of other Manchesters, whose assault was to be simultaneous with ours. Owing to the clearance of the fire trenches, the assaulting parties had, unfortunately, to move across the open. The nullah was twisted and partly covered by curving banks on either flank; so that it was hoped that our men might nevertheless avoid complete exposure. The great hope, however, was that the British guns would succeed in wrecking the redoubt that commanded the outlet of the nullah before the infantry moved.

We waited at the spot where the support line ran down to the nullah and from which C Company was to emerge, while our artillery thundered against the enemy's position. Then the hour came, and C Company, under Chadwick (bravest of the brave), moved in single file into the nullah and onward towards the gap in the front-line barricade and the Turkish redoubt beyond.

B Company, under Captain J.R. Creagh, followed in their wake.

At the same time a battalion of the Manchesters, commanded by Lieut.-Col. Darlington, was launched against the Turkish line on the left of the redoubt, and another, under Lieut.-Col. Pilkington, against the line on its right. The redoubt itself was at the apex of a broad angle of trenches.

It was at once obvious that our guns had been unable to affect the strength and resisting power of the enemy's front line. Each advancing wave of the Manchesters was swept away by machine-gun fire. A few of them gallantly reached the Turkish trenches and fell there. Long afterwards, during the last flicker of a British offensive in December, some Lowland Scots soldiers of the 52nd Division found in trenches on the west of the nullah the bodies of some of the Manchester men, who had also this day fought a way to their objective and perished.

We saw shrapnel bursting along the nullah, through which C Company was passing, and progress seemed stopped. I ran along the deserted saps that connected our support line with the front firing trench, and came to the gap. Some twenty yards ahead, a group of about thirty men were lying together in the shallow water-course, mostly dead. Another group was gathered under cover by the gap. The rest of C and B Companies were still running up to the gap from the support line through the long grass of the nullah, and dropping in their tracks under the constant fire of the redoubt. Chadwick and J.R. Creagh were both in the forefront of the advance, and Chadwick signalled back its hopelessness. His subaltern, Bacon, had been the first to pass the gap, and had been killed on emerging. The whole battle in this sector was really over, and I stopped the men under cover from moving out into the open. In the late afternoon the survivors of the little group in front crawled back to safety. The dead were gathered in by the devoted stretcher-bearers under Sergeant Mort, during the evening. One party, under Corporal F. White, had alone penetrated to within a few yards of the redoubt. He held his men together through the afternoon and brought them in under cover of darkness, for which the D.C.M. was his reward. Mort had won the D.C.M. earlier in the campaign.

All through that hot afternoon the wounded Manchesters trailed back to the busy dressing-stations, pictures of suffering and patience. The attack still further reduced the numbers of the original Territorial units, already greatly diminished by casualties.

station

In Khartum Station.
Col. Gresham. General Wingate.

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In the Turkish trench captured on 4th June.

We wondered to what extent the effort at Cape Helles had eased the great task of the armies operating from Anzac and Suvla Bay. The guns used to boom all day long from the hidden north until the 22nd August, when the attempt was given up. Several weeks passed before we realised that the valiant armies there had laboured in vain, and that Sari-Bair had remained unconquered.

We were far more conscious of the limited results of the battle on the Cape Helles side of Achi Baba.

To the right of the line attacked by the Manchester Brigade and some 200 yards east of Krithia nullah, the Lancashire Fusiliers succeeded, with great gallantry, in capturing a small plot known as the Vineyard, which the Turks in six days' hard fighting were unable to regain.

Regarded purely as a holding attack during the main enterprise from Suvla, the offensive fully achieved its purpose. It was, however, difficult to look upon it in this somewhat narrow light from the point of view of a Regiment which took part in the actual adventure.

Of the many personalities that struck one's imagination during this August battle, the majority were simply of the rank and file, whose pluck and unselfishness were incomparable. Of most I have forgotten the very names. There was a postman from Bradford, who was forty-seven years old and had thirteen children. I remember his telling me of South African experiences. He fell. Most of our men were far younger. Many were mere boys, whose days in the Camel Corps at Khartum had been their first taste of manhood. Their Company Sergeant-Major, Leigh, was mortally wounded by shrapnel while running up the nullah.

Of our officers, Captains Smedley and Chadwick survived to be pillars of strength during the whole campaign. About the time when I finally left the unit Captain Smedley joined the Egyptian Army as a Bimbashi, and Chadwick the Royal Flying Corps. Chadwick received a Serbian decoration.

Fawcus, who distinguished himself by his cool leadership on the night of the 6th August, left the Battalion very soon afterwards to conduct a newly formed Bombing School on the Peninsula. He was the recipient of many well-earned honours, and ultimately, as a battalion commander, won wider fame in another theatre of war.

A number of the men received cards from Divisional Headquarters, expressing appreciation of their gallantry: Sergeants W. Harrison and M'Hugh; Corporal (afterwards Company Sergeant-Major) J. Joyce; Lance-Corporal (afterwards Lieutenant) G.W.F. Franklin; Lance-Corporal (afterwards Lieutenant) W.T. Thorp; Corporals Hulme and Cherry; Privates Anderson, Beckett, Bradbury, Fletcher, Hayes, Hamilton, Maher, Murphy and Walsh. Joyce was afterwards awarded the Russian Order of St George.

On the 15th August 1915 we were relieved by a Lowland Scots Brigade of the 52nd Division, and moved to what were then called the Scotch dug-outs, a bivouac about two and a half miles behind the fire trenches upon the central plateau of the Peninsula. It was hot and dusty, but five minutes' walk led the weary to the cliff. We used to go down its steep side on to the coast road, full of soldiers of the Allied Armies, of carts and mules with long tassel fly protectors, and of Indian or Zionist muleteers. Across the road a lighter was moored, from which we bathed happily in a peaceful sea, with the pale blue contours of Imbros and Samothrace cut clearly against the sky, and our trawlers and cruisers moving up and down on their ceaseless watch between Cape Helles and Anzac. Here and here alone was it possible to forget the brown wilderness above the cliff, and all the toil and bloodshed between ourselves and the summit of Achi Baba.

Casualties are soon forgotten in war. In the dusty and exposed dug-outs, which were now our refuge, men revived. After the recent losses, it was good to see our clever Territorials transforming what looked like dog biscuits into a palatable porridge, cooking rice and raisins, picking lice from their grey woollen shirts, reading papers (all very light and very old), grumbling, but ever cheerful. It was in the Scotch dug-outs that we heard of the loss of the Royal Edward and of the German entry into Warsaw; but already mails and food held the first place in our minds. Man readjusts his sense of proportion as he enters a theatre of war.

On the 19th August, Colonel Canning became temporary Brigadier. I thus became Commanding Officer in his absence. The same day we left our bivouac, and after a long, hot, march, through the dusty gorge called Gully Ravine, we relieved another unit in the firing line on the northerly side of that great artery of British life and traffic.