It will have been gathered from the fighting that followed the terrible May attack of the Turks, when they lost so heavily in trying to dislodge the Australians from Anzac and British from Helles, that nothing would have satisfied our commanders better than for a Turkish attack to develop during the end of July. This, I feel certain in saying, would have been repulsed, as others had been repulsed, and would have left the Turkish army weak, just at the moment when General Sir Ian Hamilton had completed all his plans for the continuing of the Great Adventure begun in April. The rumours of a projected Turkish attack at Anzac proved groundless. The Australians were left unmolested, while the Turks, conceiving that the British still intended to attempt the assault of Achi Baba, had gathered on the end of the peninsula great reserve forces. General Hamilton's strategy had had much to do with this (the great sacrifices of the attacks on Krithia would not then have seemed so vain had the full plan succeeded), for in his mind was just the reverse idea—that Anzac should be the turning-point, the pivot of all operations, as it had been intended from the first. It was to become the centre of an unlinked battle front, of which Cape Helles was the right flank and Suvla Bay was to be the left. An attack launched from this left—a new and an entirely unexpected left—would leave a way for the centre to push forward. Then automatically would the right have advanced.

This strategy was really an elaboration of the early plan of the Commander-in-Chief, aimed at the cutting of the Turkish communications to the great dominating fortress of Kelid Bahr, which afterwards could be reduced at leisure with the co-operation of the Navy. It has been often asked what advantage would have accrued from the Australians and the new British troops reaching Maidos and holding the heights of Koja Chemen Tepe. None less than the forcing of the Turkish communication from Europe into Asia, and that they should be compelled to undertake the very hazardous and doubtful operation of keeping intact the Gibraltar of the peninsula—the Kelid Bahr fortress—by supplying it across the Narrows from Chanak and the badly railwayed coast of Asia Minor.

But there were alternative plans open to General Hamilton, and such will always give opportunity to military strategists to debate the one adopted. What General Hamilton knew in May was that he would have 200,000 new British troops by August at his command, with 20,000 Australian reinforcements on their way and due to arrive about the middle of the same month. His army, as he commanded it then, was about 150,000 strong (including the French Expedition), and its strength might easily be diminished to 100,000 by August owing to normal wastage, Turkish offensives, and sickness that began to make itself evident. Two hundred thousand men to attack an Empire! In the days of its Byzantine glory, in the times of the early struggles for Balkan supremacy, such an army would have been considered noble. Now, though British, it was not enough. Apparently the situation on the Western front did not warrant another 100,000 men that General Hamilton had asked for more than once, to give him a safe margin, being granted him. The Turks, released from their toils against Russia on the east in the Caucasus—the Mesopotamian front not seriously threatened and the attack on the Canal being impossible—found ample men at their disposal. On the other hand, they had a long and vulnerable coast-line to guard, but the 900,000 men of that German organized and commanded army, made a powerful fighting force. Nearly 400,000 troops were apportioned for service on the peninsula. I am not asserting that that number of men were facing the landed armies, but they were available, some perhaps as far away as Adrianople or the Gulf of Enos. If General Hamilton's problem was a difficult one, Enver Pasha's way was not exactly smooth. He was harassed by lack of heavy ammunition, the populace were wavering, while above all hung the terrible threat of another landing on the European or Asiatic shores.

But one factor the British leader had to ponder deeply was the submarine menace that had been threatening the very existence of the already landed armies. Two fine warships, the Triumph and Majestic, had been sunk in May while shelling and guarding the positions ashore, and the fleet had been compelled to seek shelter in the harbour of Mudros. Even though monitors, with 14-in. guns, were soon available to maintain the invaluable support that the battleships had previously given to the army, there was not the weight of artillery of a highly mobile nature, ready for any emergency, without the Admiralty were prepared to hazard a great loss. Transportation of troops and stores was dangerous and subject to irritating, and even dangerous, delays. General Hamilton sums up the situation in a masterly fashion in his final dispatch:—

It has been pointed out before what need there was for studying the moon at Anzac. In the fixing of the date for the new landing the Commander-in-Chief had to find a means of "eliminating" the moon. That is, he had to find the night which would give him the longest hours of darkness, after the arrival of his forces. He found that on 7th August the moon would rise at 2 p.m. The weather might be depended on to be perfect, so that before the light would be fully cast over the movements of the troops ashore it would be almost dawn. General Hamilton would have liked the operations to have commenced a month earlier, he says, but the troops were not available. He had to fill in the time by keeping the enemy occupied and wearing them down with feints. To have waited for another month till the whole of his command had actually arrived on the adjacent islands of Mudros and Imbros, where their concentration had been planned, would have been to come too close to the approaching bad season and increase the element of risk of the Turks discovering the plans. So the die was cast.

Early in July, I was in Alexandria—the main base of the army. Even there the general opinion seemed to be that surely soon there must be an attack, for such vast quantities of stores were being sent to the peninsula. Never could one forget the sight of the wharves at that seaport, burdened to their utmost capacity with cases that contained not only the staple food of the army—beef and biscuits—but butter, cheese, jams, and vast quantities of entrenching weapons. The whole of Egypt was scoured for the last man that could be spared. Whole companies of Australians were organized from the men who had been left on guard duty—men who were keen to get away, but had been compelled to stay. Reinforcements were hurried forward to complete their training, even in the rear of the firing-line of Anzac. Hospital ships were prepared, hospitals were cleared in anticipation of the thousands of returning wounded.

At Mudros Harbour camps and bivouacs were scattered all round the harbour front. I saw a whole brigade of British troops disembarked from the massive Mauretania and bivouacked under the open sky. Immensely cheery bodies of men they were, waiting for the weeks to slip by till the appointed day. This island of Lemnos lay 40 miles from the firing-line. Closer by 30 miles to the firing-line was Imbros, where thousands of other troops were gathered as far as the capacities of the island (the water supply was the problem; a ship was moored close inshore and pumped water all day into long lines of tanks) permitted. In order to refresh the men already in the fighting-line they were rested at Imbros in battalions, the only relief they had had, since they landed, from the roar of the shells. But there came a day when this had to cease, for the resources of the naval and trawling services were strained to the utmost collecting stores and bringing forward fresh troops.

Kephalos Bay, at Imbros, was not much of an anchorage, but a boom and protecting nets kept out the submarines, and good weather favoured the operations. Gurkhas, Maoris, New Zealanders, Australians, and British troops were on the island, camped amongst the vineyards, that were just ripening. General Hamilton's headquarters were on the most southern promontory of the island, and near by were the aeroplane hangars, from which, morning and evening, patrols rose, sweeping up the Straits. Never out of sight of the land, never out of the sound of the guns, one viewed from this point the vast panorama of the peninsula. General Hamilton guided the operations from that spot, as being the most central and giving rapid access to any one of his three fighting fronts. Wharves had been built by parties of Egyptian engineers, who had been brought up specially from Cairo. The presence of Turkish prisoners in camp in a hollow and the native Greeks in their loose, slovenly garments, completed the extraordinary concourse of nations that were represented on this picturesque and salubrious island.

In the harbour were anchored some of the weirdest craft that the Navy possessed—the new heavy monitors that had been of such service already along the Belgian coast and the baby monitors that had been down the African coast and up the Tigris River. Four large and two small of these shallow-draught craft there were, whose main attribute was their unsinkableness. In the same category must be ranged the converted cruisers of old and antiquated patterns—for naval ships—from whose sides bulged a false armour-shield which was calculated to destroy the torpedo before it reached or could injure the inner shell of the vessel. And, lastly, to this extraordinary fleet must be added the armoured landing-punts, that sometimes drifted, sometimes steamed about the harbour, crammed with a thousand troops each. The motive-power was an oil-engine that gave them a speed of just 5 miles an hour. From the front there hung a huge platform that could be let down as required: across it the troops, emerging from the hold, where they were packed behind bullet-proof screens, might dash ashore. As all the weight of the craft was at the stern, its blunted prow would rest on the shore. From these strange vessels the troops destined for service at Suvla Bay practised landing assiduously.

Finally, there were the preparations on the peninsula itself. Terraces and trenches had to be prepared for the new army that was to be secretly conveyed at night to the Anzac and from which they would issue forth to the support of the Australians and form the link with the British armies to operate on the left flank at Suvla Bay. I suppose the observers in the German aeroplanes that were chased from above our lines might well have wondered why the ledges were being dug in the sides of the small valleys—that is, if they could detect them at all. What they certainly would not see would be the huge quantities of ammunition, millions and millions of rounds, that for days was being taken out through the long sap to our No. 2 outpost on the north, already strengthened with reinforcements from the Light Horse and New Zealand Rifle regiments. Both at Imbros and at Anzac there were vast numbers of Egyptian water-cans and ordinary tins (which probably once had contained honey or biscuits), ready filled with water for the landing troops. Down at the wells in the valleys pumps had increased the capacity of the daily supply, and the tanks in the gullies were kept full—except when the wretched steam-engine employed at Anzac, broke down. Why so poor a thing should have been obtained it is difficult to conceive, when more up-to-date plant might easily have been found.

But the greatest feat of all was the landing of guns, both at Helles and at Anzac. At the end of July there were at Cape Helles one hundred and twenty-four guns, composed of the following units:—

VIIIth Army Corps, comprising the artillery of 29th Division, 42nd Division, 52nd Division, and Royal Naval Division. Attached were 1st Australian Brigade (Colonel Christian): 6th Australian Battery (Major Stevenson), 3rd New Zealand Battery.

At Anzac there were over seventy guns, under Brigadier-General Cunliffe Owen, when the great offensive began, from 10-pounder mountain batteries to a 6-in. battery of field guns, howitzers, and a 9-in gun. There were guns on every available ridge and in every hollow; they were along the great northern sap, firing over it on to the northern slopes of the Sari Bair ridge, until they gradually were dragged out along the beach to the new ground won by the Australian and New Zealand Division. Owing to the closeness of the enemy positions, the small space available at Anzac, and the height of the hills, the guns were firing across one another's fronts.

In all this magnificently conceived plan of General Hamilton's, one thing that stands out above all others is the manner in which the Turks were deceived. This in some measure may be attributed to the way in which the Turkish and German observing aeroplanes were chased from the skies, for the French and British aviators had the upper hand. On a few occasions the enemy did venture forth, but only at great altitudes; invariably very swiftly they were compelled to return to their lines by the Allied aviators. The enemy's hangars behind the forts at Chanak were destroyed during one air raid, organized by Flight-Commander Sampson, from Tenedos. Now, General Hamilton determined on certain main ruses, and left the formulation of any plans to help the Anzac position to Lieut.-General Birdwood, which I shall mention in their place. As for the general scheme, the Commander-in-Chief writes:—

Once the date was decided, a certain amount of ingenuity had to be called into play so as to divert the attention of the enemy from my main strategical conception. This—I repeat for the sake of clearness—was:—

• 1. To break out with a rush from Anzac and cut off the bulk of the
• Turkish army from land communication with Constantinople.
• 2. To gain such a command for my artillery as to cut off the bulk of
• the Turkish army from sea traffic, whether with Constantinople or
• with Asia.
• 3. Incidentally to secure Suvla Bay as a winter base for Anzac and all
• the troops operating in the northern theatre.

My schemes for hoodwinking the Turks fell under two heads:—

• First, strategical diversions meant to draw away enemy reserves not yet
• committed to the peninsula.
• Second, tactical diversions meant to hold up enemy reserves already on
• the peninsula.

Under the first heading came a surprise landing by a force of 300 men on the northern shore of the Gulf of Saros; demonstrations by French ships opposite Mitylene along the Syrian coast; concentration at Mitylene; inspections at Mitylene by the Admiral and myself; making to order of a whole set of maps of Asia, in Egypt, as well as secret service work, most of which bore fruit.

Amongst the tactical diversions were a big containing attack at Helles. Soundings, registration of guns, etc., by monitors between Gaba Tepe and Kum Tepe. An attack to be carried out by Anzac on Lone Pine trenches, which lay in front of their right wing, and as far distant as the local terrain would admit from the scene of the real battle. Thanks entirely to the reality and vigour which the Navy and the troops threw into them, each one of these ruses was, it so turned out, entirely successful, with the result that the Turks, despite their excellent spy system, were caught completely off their guard at dawn on the 7th August.