of whom were wounded.
On that day the Germans attacked along a line between Arras and the sea and the 2nd Leinsters were back on the defensive, baulked in their attempt to reach Lille, the great industrial city of the French north west. In defence of a town called Premesques, near Armentieres, one of the most bizarre incidents of the entire war occured. It involved the historian of the Leinsters, F.E. Whitton, then a Captain, and fellow Captain R.A. Orpen-Palmer. The latter was the son of a Kerry-based Church of Ireland rector, Rev. Abraham Orpen-Palmer. His younger brother later commanded a battalion of the Royal Irish Fusiliers. R.A. Orpen-Palmer was known, simply as ‘O-P 1’ while his brother was ‘O-P 2’.59 Both Whitton and Orpen-Palmer were wounded and captured. Whitton was unable to walk and Orpen-Palmer, who had lost an eye in the fighting, was temporarily blind. Somehow both managed to escape from their captors, members of a regiment from Saxony. But their hopes of reaching the British lines were slim, given their disabilities. Nonetheless they succeeded in overcoming them. Writing two years later Frank Hitchcock, whose diary of the trenches Stand To became a classic of the war, recalled that, ‘some years afterwards I met a Sergeant in the 1st Royal Fusiliers who recalled the fact of seeing Leinster officers stumbling into their entrenchments. The blinded one, he said, was being directed by the one he was carrying.’60 Under cover of darkness and with a single pair of eyes and legs the two men had managed to blunder their way to the British lines.
The war now settled into a slough of entrenched immobility. All along the line from Alsace-Lorraine to the sea a narrow strip of land was given over to the belligerents. Civilians (who are rarely mentioned in First World War diaries), other than the owners of the ubiquitous hostelries known as estaminets, simply left the armies to it. In retrospect many were to see the first three months of hostilities as the heady halcyon days of innocence. Then, the war was fought, largely, between professional soldiers who were disposed to take a broadminded approach to the prospect of unalloyed discomfort and violent death. These were men who cared little who their enemy was nor who their allies were. As their ranks thinned they were replaced by a far less jaundiced breed, men to whose youthful idealism the British government had appealed. From the trauma of the Great War a new moral order would emerge. But that was in a future not yet predetermined.
Let us leave the last word to the men digging trenches across Northern France and Southern Belgium and coming to grips with narrowing horizons and the shock of the new quotidien. ‘No sooner is a trench dug than it fills with water … the soil is clay, and so keeps the water from draining away even if that were possible … pumping has been tried, but not with much success. The weather continues wet, and there does not seem to be any likelihood of a change. Consequently, we may expect some fresh discomforts daily.’61
2. GALLIPOLI: THE V BEACH LANDINGS
Where Aegean cliffs with bristling menace front
The Threatening splendour of that isley sea
Lighted by Troy’s last shadow, where the first
Hero kept watch and the last Mystery
Shook with dark thunder, hark the battle brunt!
A nation speaks, old Silences are burst.1
(Francis Ledwidge, ‘The Irish in Gallipoli’)
‘Murphy’s Law’ (‘everything that can go wrong, will’) in all its military applications is wasteful and profligate of human life. When cruel misfortune is allied to human error and incompetence on a vast scale the result is pure tragedy. Such was the confluence of physical and metaphysical forces which resulted in the carnage of Gallipoli, a campaign which could have changed the trend of the war (even of history itself) but whose legacy instead was one of bitterness and recrimination.
The underlying idea was as flawless as the planning and execution were flawed. Force the Dardanelles, draw thousands of German troops from the Western Front to reinforce a tottering Turkish army, take Turkey out of the war and open up a short, warm-weather supply route to your Russian ally. It was worth the commitment of the resources of the Navy and the overstretched army. But like so many of the grand designs of the Great War it was bungled by men inadequate to the prodigious tasks allocated to them. The plan was conceived by Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. Kitchener was unenthusiastic. The Secretary of State for War was already overcommitted to the Western Front and preparing for a Spring offensive in 1915. He had only one division (the 29th) to spare and his new volunteer troops were not yet adequately trained.
The Gallipoli campaign began as a naval operation. Royal Navy vessels bombarded Turkish forts along the Gallipoli peninsula and Royal Marines even effected a landing. But the element of surprise seemed to apply almost equally to both sides. The Marines withdrew for lack of follow-up support and the Turks, with the aid of German officers, led by Field Marshall Liman von Sanders, began to prepare for the invasion they now knew would come sooner or later. Kitchener, finally succumbing to the notion that the landings were necessary, appointed General Sir Ian Hamilton as commander of what would be known as the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. The forces he had at his disposal – less than half the number required to do the job properly2 – included the 29th Division (a regular Army unit based in India); a Royal Navy division; a French division; and the troops of the Australian and New Zealand Army under General Birdwood, who had expected to be serving in France.
The initial phase of the Helles/Gallipoli campaign was characterized by an Allied arrogance over and above the norm. This was typified by a leaflet issued to British and Australian soldiers as they waited in Egypt to be shipped to the Aegean – it contained the following useful piece of information ‘Turkish soldiers as a rule manifest their desire to surrender by holding their rifle butt upward and by waving clothes or rags of any colour. An actual white flag should be regarded with the utmost suspicion as a Turkish soldier is unlikely to possess anything of that colour.’3 Intelligence work was so bad that some troops went into battle armed with information gleaned from Egyptian travel guides.
The main landings were to take place near the southern tip of the Gallipoli peninsula at Cape Helles on beaches designated by the initials S,V,W,X,Y and Z. Having established a beachhead the troops would then take the heights of Achi Baba (six miles to the north east of V Beach) and the town of Krithia. Two famous Irish battalions of the 29th Division, the 1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers and the 1st Royal Munster Fusiliers (86th Brigade), accompanied by the 2nd Hampshires (of the 88th) were assigned V Beach for their landing. It was overlooked by the quiet coastal village of Sedd el Bahr. The nearby Australian landings, which took place at night, near Ari Burnu, were stalled when the local Turkish commander, an obscure officer named Mustapha Kemal, pushed them back to the beach that became known as Anzac Cove. Kemal later became the far less obscure Kemal Ataturk, the ‘Father of Modern Turkey’.
Hamilton’s intention was to disorientate the Turks with a series of simultaneous landings on 25 April 1915. Some incursions, as it transpired, were virtually unopposed. But the Commander-in-Chief was less than adequately aware of the state of the Turkish defences on individual beaches. Also, with so many separate landings taking place communications became overstretched. As with the future landings at Suvla Bay in August 1915, Hamilton was effectively incommunicado. He was on board ship, out of radio contact with his divisional commanders and, ‘out of the loop’.
The plan for landing the Dublins and Munsters was well thought out. It just didn’t work. It had two essential elements. An old collier River Clyde, with openings cut into her port and starboard bows, was to be run ashore and beached. Troops were then to descend via gangways to barges and walk across these to the shore without getting their feet wet. In addition lighters with the 1st Dublins on board (forty men per boat) would be towed offshore and would row up to the beach before discharging their troops. From offshore the guns of two naval battleships would pound the Turkish defences around the fortress of Sedd-el-Bahr, which dominated the beach. ‘It was surmised that by 8.00 a.m. the ground above the beaches would have been won; by noon we should be in the vicinity of the village of Krithia, and have taken the hill of Achi Baba that night,’4 wrote the CO of the Munsters, Lt Col Tizard. The supposition was outrageously optimistic; in fact by nightfall the Dublins and Munsters had not even secured the beachhead.
V