LAST WORDS ON GALLIPOLI

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 We landed with the methods practised in England since the Boer War, methods as out of date in France in 1917 as Wellington's methods were in 1815.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.

Sir Ian Hamilton wrote of our men early in August: "The —— Manchesters are a really good Battalion. Indeed, the whole of that Brigade have proved themselves equal to veteran Regulars. The great misfortune has been that there are no drafts ready to fill them up quickly. Had they been at once filled up, as is the case in France, they would be finer than ever. As it is, I fear lest the remnants may form too narrow a basis for proper reconstruction when ultimately the drafts do make their appearance."

The drafts we received on Gallipoli were the cream of the 2nd and 3rd reserve lines, which had been organised at home under Colonels Pollitt and Hawkins. They gave up their ease and often their ranks in order to serve England better, but their numbers were small. The work of reconstruction, to which Sir Ian Hamilton looked forward, came afterwards in Egypt.

Sometimes the infantryman wondered whether, even if the essential reinforcements arrived, they would ensure victory. On this point it is difficult to judge. The home Government had committed itself to the project of an offensive on the Western Front in the autumn of 1915, in spite of the huge obstacles that confronted the Allies in that theatre of war. The tactics of the period did not even organise trench raids.

The memory that dominates all recollections of Gallipoli is that of the grandeur of the British soldier. Though he took no part in the miracle of the landings, the East Lancashire Territorial proved himself worthy of comradeship with even "the incomparable 29th Division." He ranked with the Anzac and the Lowland Scot in the great adventure. The original 1st-line of our Battalion were really destroyed in Turkey with their comrades of the same Brigade, but their gallantry in the early assaults and their inflexible fortitude in the trenches—pestered by flies, enfeebled by dysentery, stinted of water, and worn out by hardships—are a lasting title to honour.

Their story, as told in the pages of the Sentry, was read by General Wingate a few months later "with mixed feelings of joy and sorrow—sorrow for the many good friends who have laid down their lives for their King and Country, and joy that it has fallen to the lot of the gallant Battalion, of which I have the honour to be Colonel, to have behaved so gloriously in one of the hardest and most deadly campaigns in which British troops have ever been engaged."

It is a source of pride to have known and lived with such men.