Mahon, a Galwayman, had been a career soldier since joining the 8th (Royal Irish) Hussars in 1883. His chief claim to military celebrity was his leadership of the column which had relieved Mafeking during the Boer War.
At the time he took over the 10th Division he was fifty-two years of age. His service in Egypt and India had bronzed his face and sown grey in his hair, but his figure and his seat on a horse were those of a subaltern. He scorned display, and only the ribbons on his breast told of the service he had seen.2
So wrote Major Bryan Cooper, rather overfondly, of his commanding officer. Mahon may well, habitually, have disguised his rank but he was, nonetheless, highly conscious of it, and of his own dignity and importance. Many would judge harshly what they were to perceive as the placing of his innate sense of self-worth and pride over the well-being of his soldiers in one of the sorriest chapters of Irish military history, the defence of Kiretch Tepe Sirt on the night of 15 August 1915. John Hargrave, who was a Sergeant in a Royal Army Medical Corps unit attached to the 10th Division offers a more colourful description of a Mahon,
with large aggressively out-jutting ears, and full lips enfolding a secret smile half hidden under a trim but strangely piebald grey-and-(startlingly)-saltwhite moustache. Without doubt one of the ‘Black Celts to the West of the Shannon’, with deepset, heavy-browed, sullen-brooding eyes, as fiercely ‘dead’ and gloomy as a Fitful Head stormcloud stagnant over Inisheer.3
The 10th brought with it to Suvla Bay its own, unofficial, historians. It is one of the most exhaustively chronicled campaigns in which Irish soldiers played a major role in the Great War. Chief among them was Bryan Cooper. Cooper had been a Unionist MP for South Dublin until 1910, one of the last to be elected to a southern constituency (bar Edward Carson who as MP for Trinity was an exceptional case, and Maurice Dockrell, elected in Rathmines in 1918). He would later serve as an Independent TD for Dublin County before throwing in his lot with Cumann na nGaedhael in the 1920s (sometime after he had helped save that government in a crucial division, by, reportedly getting the ‘tiebreak’ TD drunk and putting him on the train back to Sligo before the vote). When he died, in 1930, the symbolism at his funeral might have served as an appropriate metaphor for so many of Ireland’s World War 1 veterans, his coffin was draped in both the Tricolour and the Union Jack. A clue to his temperament is provided by Professor Joe Lee, who describes him as ‘a respected ex-Unionist –respected not least for his formidable capacity for alcohol’.4
After seven months of training in Dublin, at the Curragh and in Basingstoke in England the men of the 10th were eager for action. After a few days at Gallipoli the romantic gloss of war, so typical of that era, would wear off quickly. One of the most celebrated units of the 10th Division, D Company of the 7th Royal Dublin Fusiliers, would suffer more than most. It consisted of footballers (mostly rugby players) who had responded to a call to enlist as a ‘Pals’ unit and had done so at Lansdowne Rd. Thirty five year old Frank Laird, a member of D company, had joined out of a combination of curiosity and peer group pressure. Once their pith helmets had been issued he knew the 10th was not destined for the Western Front. Canny souls decided that tightly cropped hair cuts might make for a more comfortable life in the Mediterranean heat.
One of the sergeants had secured a hair clippers (some said a mule clippers) and, with several brethern of the three stripes, set about shaving the heads of as many of the men as wished for the performance. When the supply of these failed they chased divers others, laid violent hands on them, and shrove them of their flowing locks. We were given to understand that a Hunnish head was an asset in hot spots like the Dardanelles.5
As their transport ship pulled away from Devonport, en route to the Dardanelles, on 13 July 1915 – destined, according to Philip Orr to ‘sail right out of history’6 – Sgt John Hargrave of the 32nd Field Ambulance experienced a certain ominous foreboding, undiminished by the Fife Band of the Irish Fusiliers playing The Wearing of the Green.
A Cockney sailor standing by the bow of a coastal sloop cupped his hands and bellowed across the water, ‘Are we downhearted?’There was time to count seven before a few Irishmen shouted ‘No!’ At this rather half-hearted response, the cheery Cockney grinned a Seven Dials grin and bellowed: ‘Wotcher lookin’ so glum abaht?’ To which no answer came. Before a month was out there was no fife band. It had perished to a man at Suvla Bay.7
While awaiting orders for Gallipoli the 10th was stationed at Mudros on the Aegean island of Lemnos, and at Mitylene. Here, Cooper records, their officers got some idea of what might lie in store for their raw troops, most of whom had yet to experience combat. Some officers of the 29th Division, which had been mauled at V Beach, were at Mudros, resting, many of them had friends among the 10th.
Thus we learned from men who had been in Gallipoli since they had struggled through the surf and the wire on April 24th [sic] the truth as to the nature of the fighting there. They taught us much by their words, but even more by their appearance; for though fit, they were thin and worn, and their eyes carried a weary look that told of the strain that they had been through.8
Such was the understandable level of paranoia after the disaster of V Beach in April that the secrecy surrounding the Suvla landings became a sort of mantra among the higher echelons. It was as if there was some fervent aspiration towards the absoute retention of information within a small and elite coterie. As if the ultimate goal was that nobody should know of Hamilton’s intentions, bar Hamilton and a few upper echeleon staff-wallahs in his confidence. In the end this fetish proved counterproductive. Mahon’s division suffered more than most as a consequence, never fighting as a single unit and, at one point, operating under three separate commands.
Other units were split off by accident but the removal of the 29th Brigade9 from Mahon’s command was deliberate. Its four battaliions, the 10th Hampshires, the 6th Royal Irish Rifles, the 5th Connaught Rangers and the 6th Leinsters were sent to assist General Birdwood’s Anzacs who were still stranded at Anzac Cove more than three months after the April landings there. Here they served briefly under Divisional commander General Sir Alexander Godley, late of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, cousin of Lord Kilbracken of Killegar and (subsequently) the author of an autobiography entitled Life of an Irish Soldier (1939).
The 29th Brigade was landed after dark to avoid the attentions of enemy gunners and to conceal from the Turks the fact that reinforcements were arriving in large numbers for an offensive operation. They had little time to wonder why their resting place on that first night was called Shrapnel Gully before they found out the hard way. Nor had they much opportunity to take in their new surroundings, an arid and deadly environment which had already witnessed the killing and maiming of thousands of young Australians, New Zealanders and Gurkhas. It was a truly inhospitable place.
Take a sheet of brown paper – say two feet by one – fold it lengthways, a few inches from one side and crumple up the bit below the fold into innumerable and inextricable miniature valleys and gullies, running in and out of each other anyhow with razor-edge ridges between them; but ridges which never seemed able to keep a straight line … That gives a rough idea of what the Gallipoli coast line at and near Anzac is like.10
One company of the Leinsters got an early taste of what the Turks had been doing to the Anzac forces. They were sent to relieve a company of Australian troops holding an area called Courtney’s Ridge.
It was like hurrying up a steep flight of stairs to an attic … The trenches were more like permanently built passages, with heavy overhead cover, than normal trenches. The first night’s experience was typical of many other nights – tremendous bursts of rifle and machine-gun fire, kept up for an hour or longer, with short intervals, but often nothing more developed and one was led to conclude that the Turks must have plenty of spare ammunition.11
For the 10th Division the 29th Brigade’s detachment to Anzac Cove was a brutal sideshow. The main event was the landing at Suvla Bay on 7 August. For the first time the sporting ‘Pals’, in D Company of the 7th Royal Dublin Fusiliers, would go into action as a unit. Jocularly known as the ‘Young Toffs’ or the ‘Toffs in the Toughs’ (the ‘Toughs’ being the nickname of the Dublin Fusiliers) they were barely a week away from annihilation on the rocky scrub-covered slopes of Kiretch Tepe Sirt. But their morale was high as they approached the peninsula, first passing by Cape