With this, however, all further comparison ended; the dust covered all, billowing, choking and vile, and the Turkish shells came through it with the noise of express trains crashing in the sky. This noise was continuous at times, and the soldiers endured it, not as a temporary pain, but as a natural condition of life. It was as inevitable as the weather. You were hit or not hit. Eating, sleeping and waking the long scream went on. These slopes by the sea were supposed to be rest areas, but they were often more dangerous than the frontline trenches a mile or two inland, since they exposed such obvious targets to the enemy: the piers, the incoming boats, the men bathing. From their perch on Achi Baba the Turks overlooked the whole bridgehead, and when the dust lifted they could see every tent, every gun emplacement, every man and animal that moved above the cliffs. The horses and the mules were terribly exposed to this bombardment, but they appeared to notice nothing until they were actually hit. Some blessed lacuna in the brain allowed them to stand there calmly with unfrightened eyes when the bursting shrapnel had sent all human beings to the ground. ‘Fountains of earth, fountains of water,’ a French doctor wrote to his wife; ‘shells cover us with a vault of steel, dissolving, hissing and noisy… without this radiantly beautiful light it would be frightfully sad.’
There were some — notably the more elderly men who were experiencing shellfire for the first time — who simply could not stand it and had to be invalided home: ‘Weak minds were upset,’ the doctor wrote. ‘Few were able to keep a real and immediate notion of things. There is a physical exaltation which deforms and obscures everything and makes one incapable of reasoning.’
The cool weather had lasted until the end of May, and during that time the soldiers were perfectly healthy. May was an idyllic month that year with wild flowers blooming everywhere, even between the front lines, and tremendous sunsets fell on Imbros and the monolithic rock of Samothrace. The shelling was not really troublesome and the men slept in tents. Then in June when the Turks set up their big guns behind Achi Baba a furious digging began, and the Army went underground into trenches and dugouts, sometimes uncovered to the sky, sometimes with a sheet of galvanized iron and a layer of earth for a roof. At first there was no regular shelling from Asia and the side of the cliffs facing south and east was a favourite spot for a home; it was known as Sea View Terrace. Then one day new guns opened up from Kum Kale across the straits, and the shells burst directly at the front doors of the dugouts which had seemed so safe before. The French corps held the eastern tip of the peninsula opposite Asia, and they suffered worst of alclass="underline" 2,000 quarts of irreplaceable wine went up one day. By the end of the month a network of trenches and sunken roads stretched outward from the beaches to the front line, and it was possible to walk for miles without showing one’s head above the ground.
The colours of the landscape changed. Grass vanished from the ground, and in place of green crops there were now wide areas covered with the fading purple flowers of the wild thyme, the dried-up sticks of asphodel, an occasional dusty pink oleander, a green fig or a pomegranate with its little flame-coloured blossom on the fruit. All the rest was brown and bare and ankle-deep in dust, a semi-desert scene. With the increasing heat the summer insects and animals emerged, and many of the soldiers, their lives narrowed down to the few square yards of ground around them, became aware for the first time of tarantulas and centipedes, the scorpion and the lizard, the incessant midday racket of the cicadas in the trees. Mackenzie, straining his eyes through his binoculars to see an attack at the front, found a tortoise crawling across his line of vision.
By July the heat reached a steady eighty-four degrees in the shade. But there was no shade: from four in the morning until eight at night the sun glared down and made an oven out of every trench and dug-out. It was a fearful heat, so hot that the fat of the bully beef melted in the tins, and a metal plate would become too hot to touch. Some of the soldiers were supplied with topees, but most wore the same uniform which had been issued to the Army in France: a flat peaked cap, a thick khaki serge tunic and breeches, puttees and boots. There were no steel helmets.
On the heights above, the Turks had a constant supply of good drinking water, but with the exception of one or two springs in Gully Ravine there were no wells in the Cape Helles bridgehead; water had to be brought by sea from the Nile in Egypt, 700 miles away, pumped ashore and carried up to the front by mules. Sometimes the men were down to a third of a gallon of water a day for all purposes, and it was even worse at Anzac, where they were forced to condense salt water from the sea.
In the end probably these discomforts were not too much, and the men adjusted themselves. But the thing that was absolutely unbearable was the flies. They began to multiply in May; by June they were a plague, and it was a plague of such foulness and persistence that it often seemed more horrible than the war itself. The flies fed on the unburied corpses in no-man’s-land, and on the latrines, the refuse and the food of both armies. There was no escape for anybody even when night fell. No tin of food could be opened without it being covered instantly with a thick layer of writhing insects. One ate them with the food and swallowed them with the water. You might burn them off the walls and ceiling of your dugout at night but another horde would be there in the morning. You washed and shaved with flies about your face and hands and eyes, and even to the most toughened soldier it was horribly apparent that they were often bloated with feeding on the blood of dead animals and men. Mosquito nets were almost unknown, and one of the most valuable possessions a soldier could have was a little piece of muslin veiling, which he could put over his face when he ate or slept. To avoid the flies some of the men learned to write their letters home in the darkness of their dug-outs at night.
From June onwards dysenteric diarrhœa spread through the Army and soon every man was infected by it.[20] Many of the soldiers were able to endure it without reporting sick, but some soon became too weak even to drag themselves to the latrines, and by July, when over a thousand men were being evacuated every week, the disease had become far more destructive than the battle itself. Quite apart from the discomfort and the self-disgust it created an overmastering lassitude. ‘It fills me,’ Hamilton wrote, ‘with a desperate longing to lie down and do nothing but rest… and this, I think, must be the reason the Greeks were ten long years in taking Troy.’
The flies no doubt were principally to blame for the spread of the disease, but the food can scarcely have helped: the salt and fatty bully beef, the absence of all green vegetables. The N.A.A.F.I. stores of later campaigns did not exist at Gallipoli, and there were no means by which the soldiers could buy small luxuries to vary the monotony of their diet. There was a rum ration which was doled out at long intervals, very occasionally they got eggs or perhaps a parcel from home, or even fresh fish (by throwing hand-grenades into the sea) but for the rest it was a monotonous routine of milkless tea, bully beef and plum and apple jam.
The medical services came near to breaking down during this period; they had been organized on the principle that hospitals would be set up on the peninsula soon after the original landing, and when this failed to happen hurried arrangements were made to establish a base under canvas on the island of Lemnos, while the more serious cases were evacuated to Egypt, Malta and even England. Lemnos soon became overwhelmed by the increasing number of casualties and there were never enough hospital ships to cope with the overflow.
And now in June the doctors were faced with this major epidemic of dysentery in the Army. ‘Well, you won’t die of it,’ was the current phrase. But men did die, and the bodies were simply sewn up in blankets and buried in the nearest cemetery. The great majority who survived suffered dreadfully, and perhaps unnecessarily at times. Horse-drawn ambulances bumped down to the beaches with the sick and wounded, and then there would be hours of waiting in the unshaded lighters before they were finally got away. Conditions in the islands were not much better. On Lemnos the patients lay about on the ground in their thick cord breeches and they were pestered by flies. There were no mosquito nets, and often no beds, not even pyjamas.
20
Dysentery was nothing new on the Gallipoli peninsula. Xerxes’ soldiers were infected with it on their return march from Greece to the Hellespont in the fifth century B.C.