As daylight broke the battle assumed the character of a hunt, with the Turkish officers serving in the role of beaters driving the game on to the guns. A wild, almost berserk excitement filled the Australian and New Zealand ranks. In order to get a better view many of the soldiers jumped up and sat astride the parapets and from there they blazed away at the screaming mass of Turks before them. The Anzac soldiers who had been held in reserve could not bear to be left out of the fight; they came pressing forward offering to pay for a place on the firing line. In one trench two soldiers actually fought one another with their fists for a vacant position on the parapet, and there was a kind of mad surrealism in the shouts and cries along the line as each new Turkish rush came on. ‘Backsheesh’ ‘Imshi Yallah’, ‘Eggs is cooked’.[17] Once an Australian was heard shouting to the Turks as they fell back from his trench, ‘Saida (good-bye). Play you again next Saturday.’
By 5 a.m., when a hot sun was beginning to stream down on to the battlefield, the attack was broken. But the orders to the Turks were that they should continue the fight until they got through to the sea, and so they went on with the struggle for another six hours, each new charge getting a little feebler than the last. Mustafa Kemal had been reduced to the command of a single division, the 19th, for the period of the offensive, and he alone, of the four divisional commanders engaged, had succeeded in making any headway. When at midday Essad Pasha decided to break off the action 10,000 of his men had fallen, and of these some 5,000, dead, dying and wounded, were lying out in the open between the trenches.
Other heavier battles than this were fought at Gallipoli, but none with such a terrible concentration of killing, none so one-sided, and none with so strange an aftermath. Through the long afternoon the wounded lay with the dead on the battlefield, and although the trenches on either side were only a yard or two away no one could go out and bring them in without taking the risk of being instantly shot.
‘No sound came from that dreadful space,’ the Australian history of the campaign relates, ‘but here and there some wounded or dying man, silently lying without help or any hope of it under the sun which glared from a cloudless sky, turned painfully from one side to the other, or slowly raised an arm towards heaven.’
Birdwood was warned by his medical staff that, quite apart from any feelings of humanity, the dead should be buried as quickly as possible to prevent infection spreading through the Army. When the afternoon had passed without any sign of the Turks renewing the attack, he sent off Aubrey Herbert to ask Hamilton aboard the Arcadian if he might arrange an armistice.
Herbert was an odd figure on the Anzac bridgehead — indeed, he would have been odd in any army on any battlefield: a Member of Parliament turned soldier, an eccentric, a poet and a scholar who, far from hating the Turks, was captivated by them. This did not mean he was disloyal — he was determined that they should be defeated — but he knew Turkey and Turkish very well, and he believed that with better handling by the politicians they might have been converted into allies. Of all the band who had been with Rupert Brooke at Alexandria he was the one most possessed of ideas, and despite his short-sightedness, his impulsive and agitated manner, he was very brave and saw very clearly under the façade of things. Hamilton was glad enough to have him on his staff as an intelligence officer with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, but he noted in his diary that he was ‘excessively unorthodox’.
Herbert chose to do his intelligence work in the front line at Anzac, and he proceeded to war in the manner of a nineteenth-century gentleman-adventurer. Servants were engaged at Lemnos, suitable horses and mules acquired, an adequate kit assembled, and off he went with an extraordinary assemblage of Greek and Levantine interpreters to the peninsula. There were staff troubles almost at once. A spy mania was raging through the Anzac bridgehead — the fear of spies seems to be endemic in every crisis in every military campaign — and his interpreters were arrested as many as four and five times a day. A terrible hail of shrapnel once fell on Herbert’s dugout, and the cook, a Greek named Christopher of the Black Lamp, with the tears pouring down his face gave two hours’ notice, though why it should be two hours and not two minutes he was unable to explain. Among these and other domestic anxieties Herbert continued with his work of questioning the Turkish prisoners and of acting as a kind of general confidant of the commanders in all questions relating to the habits and character of the enemy.
His methods of propaganda were very direct. He crawled into the foremost trenches and from there he addressed the enemy soldiers in their own language, urging them to desert, promising them good treatment and pointing out that the real quarrel of the Allies was not with Turkey but with the Germans. At times he actually got into trenches which communicated directly into the enemy emplacements, and lying on the dead bodies there, he called to the Turks through a single barrier of sandbags. Occasionally they would listen and enter into argument with him. More often they replied with hand-grenades — a thing which did not make Herbert very welcome with the Anzac troops — and in Constantinople one of the newspapers announced that there was someone in the Anzac bridgehead who was making a low attempt to lure the Turks from their duty by imitating the prayers of the muezzin.
It now fell to Herbert to put the case to Hamilton for an armistice. He argued that unless something was done quickly the situation would become intolerable: our own wounded as well as Turkish were still lying in the open, and in the hot sun the dead bodies were decomposing rapidly. Hamilton answered that he would not initiate any proposal himself, because the enemy would make propaganda of it, but if the Turks liked to come forward he was willing to grant them a cessation of hostilities for a limited period. It was agreed finally that notes could be thrown into the Turkish trenches telling them of this.
Meanwhile all May 20 had gone by and unknown to Hamilton and Herbert the soldiers at the front had already taken matters into their own hands. Towards evening an Australian colonel caused a Red Cross flag to be hoisted on a plateau at the lower end of the line. He intended to send out his stretcher-bearers to bring in a number of wounded Turks who were crying out pitiably in front of his trenches. Before they could move, however, the Turks put two bullets through the staff of the flag and brought it down. A moment later a man jumped up from the Turkish trenches and came running across no-man’s-land. He stopped on the parapet above the Australians’ heads, spoke a few words of apology, and then ran back to his own lines again. Immediately afterwards Red Crescent flags appeared above the enemy trenches, and Turkish stretcher-bearers came out. All firing ceased along the line, and in this eerie stillness General Walker, the commander of the 1st Australian Division, got up and walked towards the enemy. A group of Turkish officers came out to meet him, and for a while they stood there in the open, smoking, and talking in French. It was agreed that they should exchange letters on the subject of an armistice at 8 p.m. that night.
While this was going on another impromptu parley with the enemy had opened on another section of the line. It was now growing late and Birdwood, as soon as he heard what was happening, issued an order that no further burials were to be made that night. A note signed by the General’s A.D.C. was handed to a Turkish officer: ‘If you want a truce to bury your dead,’ it said, ‘send a staff officer, under a flag of truce, to our headquarters via the Gaba Tepe road, between 10 a.m. and 12 noon tomorrow.’
17
Or ‘Eggs-a-cook’, an expression used by the Egyptian vendors when they sold eggs to the Anzac troops during their stay in Egypt.