was correct but a vacation in Alexandria seems to have restored at least some of his shattered spirit.
‘You would hardly believe him for the same person,’ wrote Nightingale of O’Hara in his diary, ‘he looks so much better for it. He’s an awfully decent fellow and very amusing.’45 Sometime between his leave and the subsequent transfer of his division O’Hara was hit. Towards the end of August the 29th Division was moved to Suvla for the attack on Scimitar Hill but O’Hara was not with them. He had been evacuated to Gibraltar where he died of his wounds on 29 August.
Nightingale, in his letters home, while commenting on the fragile psyche of his brother officers is consistent in his assertions that he himself was suffering no ill effects. He continued to eat heartily, draw (he was a talented artist) and take lots of photographs, like a curious if heavily-armed tourist. But the sub-text of his letters belied his claims of pscyhologicial vigour. He spared his family no details of the horrors of the conflict and the tone of the letters suggests a man who has become so personally inured to what he has witnesssed that he can no longer grasp the difference between normality and extremity. He exhibited a callousness that became more pronounced as his letters became more graphic.
We are a very small lot of the original officers now … All the rest are Territorial Officers and absolute strangers. They know nothing about soldiering and are nearly all senior to me being Captains and Majors! However, they are very keen and are rapidly getting thinned out. One was hit last night during dinner and fell into the soup, upsetting the whole table, and bled into the tea pot making an awful mess of everything and we finally didn’t get dinner till after dark.46
The revelation of the extent of Nightingale’s personal frailty came twenty years later when he killed himself with his service revolver. The date on which he chose to end his life was significant, 25 April 1935, the twentieth anniversary of the V Beach landing. Some wounds endure!
From mid May until their move to Suvla in late August (with the exception of the attempt to take Krithia in late June) the 29th Division settled back into a dreary round of mundane trench warfare. Death was everywhere. It was, quite literally, in the very air itself as hundreds of decomposing, unburied bodies left a stench which men could still recall three quarters of a century later. It was carried, afresh, through the air in the form of shells or bullets which wreaked haphazard havoc on both sides. This daily round of boredom and terror was enlivened occasionally by events such as one described by Geddes.
A divisional signal wagon with four horses came over the ridge about 400 yds from Pink Farm from the direction of the beaches, with field telegraph poles; it appeared to be a gun. The Turks concentrated their shelling on the wagon; the men in charge left the wagon, the horses, so petrified with fear, never moved. Two horses, having charmed lives, survived. Suddenly, two figures were seen cutting the horses loose – Serjeant [sic] Slattery and Private Twomey – who, jumping on their backs amid a hail of shell, galloped the horses out of danger into safety amidst the cheers of their comrades. Bearing charmed lives, they escaped being hit – a miracle. No military decorations could be given for this gallant exploit, but they were awarded a very beautiful medal by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.47
There were few enough awards for gallantry for the Dublins and the Munsters on 25 April. This generated considerable bitterness. It was suggested that the Dublins, in particular, were not in favour with the Divisional commander (Gen. Hunter Weston) The 1st RDF received only 14 awards for gallantry of which the highest was that given to O’Hara, although they suffered more than 2,000 casualties through the entire Gallipoli campaign and nearly 600 deaths. Of course the awarding of medals is not an exact science. For essentially the same action on the night of 1 May 1915 O’Hara got the DSO and Nightingale was merely mentioned in despatches. Nightingale wrote in his diary:
I think the reason there were so few awards to the Dublins and ourselves or to all the landing party, was because there were no senior officers left to report on what happened. It was rather amusing that O’Hara got his award for the same thing I was recommended for, but at the same time it must be remembered that he would have got a D.S.O. anyway for commanding his Bn which he did awfully well considering he was such a young officer to suddenly have to take command.48
Spare a thought also for the 57th Regiment of the Turkish Army which fought to virtually the last man in the defence of V Beach. They had received clear instructions from Kemal. ‘I do not order you to fight, I order you to die.’49 And they duly obliged, in their hundreds. Having inflicted horrendous casualties on the invading force they ran out of ammunition and were forced to resort to bayonets to defend their positions. In recognition of the sacrifice they made in defence of their homeland there is no 57th Regiment in the modern Turkish Army.
The attempt to relieve the static trench warfare on the Western Front had ended in stalemate and in a situation which was a virtual facsimile of the fighting in Flanders and Picardy. What was meant to be the opening act in a new work turned out to be merely the overture. The next act in the opera would take place at Suvla Bay. As the ranks of the regular army were thinning this would feature a cast of ingenues, from Kitchener’s ‘First 100,000’. Suvla was to have traumatic consequences for the Irish nation. But it would be no more effective than anything which had gone before. The strategists had become like a man lost in a convoluted maze, just as he thinks he has found a way out his path leads him to another dead end, exactly similar to the ones which have already barred his exit.
3. THE 10TH DIVISION AT SUVLA BAY
‘Twas better to die ‘neath an Irish sky,
Than at Suvla or Sedd el Bahr.’1
(From The Foggy Dew, Canon Charles O’Neill)
The separatist sentiments which provide the context for those lines from the folk song ‘The Foggy Dew’ might not have had much philosophic appeal to the Irish troops at Gallipoli but by the time of their final evacuation from that morass of incompetence, petulance and shortsightedness most would have agreed with the bald statement as expressed. The landings at Suvla Bay in August 1915 wrote the first page in another military-Gothic horror story, and like most such tales the ending was not a happy one.
By August 1915 the first of Kitchener’s New Army troops were ready to test their Byronic notions about war. The initial attacks on the Dardanelles in April had been a failure and like the gambler who throws good money after bad, General Sir Ian Hamilton was determined to turn the situation around by becoming ever more deeply embroiled in the peninsula he once described as ‘shaped like a badly worn boot’. Kitchener’s saplings were expected to extricate the British from the folly of Gallipoli when what was needed was a host of battering rams
Suvla Bay lies on the western (Aegean) side of the Gallipoli Peninsula some twenty miles due north of Cape Helles and a mere five miles from Anzac Cove, where the troops from Australia and New Zealand, who had joined to fight a war in Europe, had gained a toehold . The notion of landing troops there was not a bad one in itself. The beaches were long, wide and inviting. The area was lightly defended: three Turkish battalions were all that was left to hold Suvla after the troops of the two divisions defending the plain beyond were withdrawn to Helles and Anzac. The possibility of a repetition of V Beach was remote once the element of surprise was maintained.
The strategy was that as the Suvla force (IX Corps, under General Stopford) broke out of its beachhead the Australian and New Zealanders at Anzac Cove would do likewise and between them the two Corps would drive a wedge across the peninsula. To do this the 10th, 11th and 13th Divisions which were to form the IX Corps were required to occupy the heights around Suvla within twenty-four hours of landing and link up with the Anzacs who would be assaulting the Sari Bair ridge, which rose to almost a thousand feet, and which, with its heavily scored sides had defied their attacks and overshadowed their beachhead since the April landings, However, the plan was compromised straightaway when the 13th Division and the 29th Brigade of the 10th (Irish) Division were separated from IX Corps and sent to assist the Anzacs instead.
The 10th (Irish) Division, bar one battalion – the 10th Hampshires – was overwhelmingly Irish, a product of the recruiting frenzy of 1914. It was the first distinctly Irish division in the British