passed Achi Baba, viewed from the Aegean side, it was a mass of bursting shells.
Suvla seemed about as far away as Wicklow Head is from Howth, and some of them thought the coast looked like Dublin Bay. The large naval shells bursting on Achi Baba suggested a house going on fire with a suden blaze and immediately going out again, the noise sounding like one continuous roll of thunder.12
Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, destined for a career in Military Intelligence, but on this day a junior offiicer in the 5th Inniskilling Fusiliers, had no idea where his battalion was about to land as his troopship dropped anchor a mile or so from shore. He could hear rifle fire and then,
as the light improved we saw our troops advancing inland. Soon the guns of the fleet opened fire. We could see huge sheets of yellow and purple flame on the hill side … A minelayer appeared and proceeded to lay a line of mines between the shipping and the open sea. They dropped over her stern and bounced some 10 or 15 feet before settling down. They looked like plum puddings of unusual resilience.13
The 7th Dublin Fusiliers landed without much incident, though Frank Laird recalled that shrapnel had caused some injuries in the lighters before the shore was reached.
It afforded food for philosophic thought to consider the time, money and trouble expended in ten months training of a soldier who stops a bullet before he can ever set foot on enemy ground … Our steam barge ran up on a sandy beach without mishap, the hinged gangway in the bow was turned over, and we walked down it on to the soft sand with somewhat of the picnic feeling with which we had often made a landing on Ireland’s Eye in the piping days of peace.14
Oddly, to Lieutenant Noel Drury of the 6th Dublins, Suvla at night lit up by bursting shells had a sort of compelling, bizarre elegance. ‘The scene was very beautiful with star shells going up, and the loom of the early dawn lit up with the beautiful lemon-coloured flash of the naval guns.’15 In fact neither side was oversupplied with guns to effect, or defend against, a landing. The Turks were forced to alternate their fire between the troops on shore and those being landed by the Navy in lighters. The British had only two small calibre mountain guns to support the landing. ‘These two guns were a source of amusement to the men, as every time they were fired they ran backward down the hill with a sweating crowd of gunners chasing after them to haul them into position again.’16
The Dublins, along with most of the remainder of Mahon’s Division had landed much farther south than had been originally intended. The northern part of Suvla Bay had been designated A Beach, it was there that the 10th was supposed to come ashore. But inadequate charting and intelligence, constant bombardment and a level of ‘discretion’ – which came in for subsequent criticism – had prompted the Navy to put them ashore south of Nibrunesi Point. To labour Hanna’s analogy, if the Division had been due to land near Howth Head, it was put ashore closer to Wicklow. The 5th Inniskillings, along with the 6th and 7th Munsters were landed nearer to their original objective. But not, as Ivone Kirkpatrick recorded, until the late afternoon. ‘We ran nicely ashore, the drawbridge worked perfectly and we landed. It was just after four o’clock. I assembled my platoon. At the water’s edge were several British dead, struck down almost before they had set foot on land.’17
As they surveyed the landscape of the furnace into which they had been plunged the eyes of the men of the 10th Division would have been drawn towards the heights around the crescent shaped bay in which they had landed. Close by the southern perimeter of Suvla Bay (Nibrunesi Point) was a low, rolling hillock, one hundred and fifty feet high at most, called Lala Baba. It had been taken in darkness before the 10th had landed. It afforded some protection from the sightline of Turkish troops who were well entrenched on a more distant hill, which, because of the colouration of the soil on its slopes (or the colouring of the burnt scrub, depending on which version you accept) became known as Chocolate Hill. This hill, about two hundred feet in height, was visible on the far side of what the few maps carried by officers characterised as a ‘Salt Lake’. In moister seasons a salt lake it may well have been but on the morning of the 7 August 1915, it was little more than a salty marsh of white sticky mud measuring about a mile across. Nonetheless it constituted an obstacle which had to be circumvented. A direct approach to Chocolate Hill from Lala Baba was not possible, the option was to tour the lake by a northern or southern route, thus leaving oneself wide open to shrapnel and shells. Beyond Chocolate Hill was Green, or Burnt Hill, similar in shape and size to its neighbour. Beyond that again, less than a mile to the north-east was Scimitar Hill. Overlooking a distant plain, dotted with cornfields and olive trees, as well as useless scrub land, was the 900 foot-high Tekke Tepe ridge, the ultimate short-term objective of the troops involved in the Suvla campaign. To the south-east the land rose to join the Sari Bair ridge which overlooked Anzac Cove.
Physically more imposing, however, and looming far more ominously, was a long humpback ridge to the north which dominated the skyline from east to west and whose craggy, water-scraped slopes ended in the sea at the northernmost limit of the bay, Suvla Point. The ridge, Kiretch Tepe Sirt, rose to over 600 feet in places and featured a peculiar erratic cairn in the centre, which was to become known as the ‘Pimple’.
Dry, dusty and fly-infested though it was at the time, the area was not without a stark physical beauty. This has been well captured in the paintings of an artist who accompanied the invading force, Lt Drummond Fish. They depict the area in a rather more sumptuous light than do modern colour photographs but Fish, with the discerning and sceptical eye of the artist, was genuinely impressed with the physical beauty of the place.
The colours were the most wonderful thing about Gallipoli. There were mornings when the hills were as rose peaches – times when the sea looked like the tail of some gigantic peacock, and the sands looked like great carpets of glittering cloth of gold – the place was an inspiration in itself, and if beauty could have stopped a war, that scenery would have done it.18
The Irishmen would have been conscious of a number of other things within minutes of landing. The smell of thyme pervaded the foreshore. It had not yet been obliterated from their nostrils by the stench of putrefying bodies which would be another lasting sensory memory of those who survived Gallipoli. John Hargrave, with the Royal Army Medical Corps, was quick to identify another characteristic odour, that of ‘human blood soaking its way into the sand’.19 A constant irritant would have been the large and persistent flies. These initially, however, merely issued their calling cards, a brief prelude to more unwelcome return visits. Loaded down with packs weighing upwards of sixty pounds the men would also have been conscious of the extreme heat, especially as the morning wore on. A heavy shower in the early afternoon offered some welcome relief.
But the overweening impressions borne in on the first of ‘Kitchener’s 100,000’ to go into action were that soldiering was thirsty, dangerous and rather chaotic work. John Hargrave had made an astute choice, as it turned out, while still on board his transport vessel. He had been offered some sweet, reviving tea but would have had to hand up a pint from his own water issue for boiled water for that tea. ‘I decided that a pint of cold water later on might be a better asset than a pint of hot tea now. I was right – a shade too Boy-Scoutishly prudent in spirit perhaps, but eminently practical.’20 When they boarded the lighters which took them ashore each man carried one and a half pints of water with him. They were told not to drink it unless it was absolutely necessary and then only to take a sip or two at a time. It was one of the many ironies of the Suvla debacle that the lighters themselves actually carried extra water rations but
So far as the lightermen were concerned, speed! speed! was the essence of the operation. Therefore, as soon as each lighter was empty of troops it put about and went back for the next load and that reserve of water was never distributed.21
Frank Laird noted that the killing had started before his battalion arrived.
On our right were pitiable groups of wounded and dead men, stretched under shelter of the head of the beach. Overhead the shrapnel burst continually. A long continuous procession of stretcher bearers passed us, carrying inanimate forms to the beach, with pith helmets placed over their faces to save them from the blazing sun.22
Edgar Poulter was a comrade of Laird’s in the ‘Pals’ Company. ‘They said “Look out for land mines” and we saw the odd fellow coming back, leg blown off or