7
Patrick Houston Shaw-Stewart passed through Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, at the turn of the twentieth century as part of an exceptional group of young men. The losses amongst them during the war would spur many a conversation about the waste of the Great War. Patrick himself was never at a boarding school until he went to Eton in 1901. The son of a general, he found, to his disappointment, that he was far from the only genuinely gifted King’s scholar. He would spend years tussling for prominence with another Colleger named Foss Prior, who had returned as a master by the outbreak of war, eventually suffering defeat in the competitive environment amongst the scholarship boys. Never gifted at games, Patrick however found sporting employment as a cox of the house four, but described it as ‘a thankless office from every point of view’ for it associated him with ‘a ridiculous set of scugs and scamps’.
Patrick longed for status and fretted frequently over it, at one point so much so that his hair began falling out. A hammer blow was when the mechanics of school life ensured that Foss and not he would one day be Captain of the School. This to Patrick had seemed his ‘only chance of cutting a figure’. He did get his recognition though in 1904 when he beat both his rival and the famed Ronald Knox1 to the Newcastle Prize, the premier academic contest at Eton. ‘This was … fame indeed,’ he concluded. ‘I was greatly petted and applauded, and tremendously happy.’
George Fletcher was on the fringes of this bright set all through Eton and Oxford but his background was very different. Patrick was at the very centre. Alongside him was Julian Grenfell, eldest son of Lord Desborough ‘with his intellectual contempt of intellect’ and wild high spirits that would be followed by bouts of depression. There was Edward Horner too, ‘most generous of hosts and most enthusiastic of companions … despite all protests from his friends an unabashed Whig’. His sisters, one of whom had married Raymond Asquith whilst Edward was still at Balliol, nicknamed him ‘the popinjay’ because he was so preoccupied with his state of dress. Born five weeks after Julian Grenfell he grew up in Somerset before being sent to Summer Fields Preparatory School in Oxford, where he became friends with both Ronald Knox and Julian. Edward was not ecstatically happy at Mr Impey’s house at Eton and struggled. His mother wrote to him in a disappointed vein which almost caused him to break down completely and he referred to one half as ‘long, stormy, troublesome and unsatisfactory’. He wrote once to his sister that ‘I never seem to have succeeded at a single thing since I came to this beastly place … and I’ve disappointed Mother and Daddy ever since I came here.’
And then there was the Hon. Charles Alfred Lister. The eldest surviving son of Lord Ribbesdale, his brother Thomas had been killed during the Somaliland Expedition in 1904. Charles was equipped with ‘generous enthusiasm … reckless fun … nervous breeziness of manner and [an] embarrassing conviction that every second person he met was a “good chap”.’ He was relentlessly cheerful even when the authorities at Oxford sent him down for a term. He went off and worked at a mission in East London. ‘Self-critical, self-conscious but brilliant’, his wit was sharp and getting into an intellectual dogfight with him was not advisable.
Not even his parents could quite fix why, but Charles had found his way into the Labour Party. He was leaning towards socialism at Eton, coinciding with civil unrest in Russia and his sympathy with her people in 1905. He even took up a collection for the Russo–Jewish fund and managed to extract £60 from his schoolfellows. His views were never militant, nor did he force them on others or take them out on the landed gentry that were his own, but he favoured options such as nationalisation of industry. His mother was somewhat troubled by Charles’ political affiliations, although former prime minsiter Arthur Balfour sought to comfort her with the reasoning that ‘Charles would get all sorts of experience and some sort of special knowledge which might be of more use to him than if he … ran an actress’. By the outbreak of war, however, he had left the party. Disappointed by ‘recent methods’, he still believed in the cause but had ‘lost faith in most of the remedies’ that he used to believe in.
Whilst at school this set, Charles, Patrick, Julian, Edward, Ronnie Knox and two other contemporaries, set up their own newspaper at Eton titled The Outsider. It ran for six issues, to both positive and negative reviews before they all began departing for Balliol in the summer of 1906.
On leaving Balliol Charles embarked upon a career with the Foreign Office, firstly at the embassy in Rome and then in Constantinople where he still resided when Britain declared war on Germany. Charles began making a dash for home but his conscience got the better of him and he returned to his post. His determination to get into the firing line did not subside though and he began applying for leave from his job to join the army.
‘The Turks are very cross with us now,’ he reported in August 1914, ‘and we may all have to come home if the Germans manage to rush them into war with Russia. That is now the game … You can’t imagine what a state of suspension we are in here.’ By mid September things still hung in the air and Charles was completely unaware of what was happening as far as his own family was concerned. Unbeknown to him his sister, married to another OE (a grandson of the Duke of Westminster named Percy Wyndham) was already a widow. Wyndham was already in his grave when Charles wrote, ‘Percy must have already done a lot; I hope he will get a VC or something.’ He wouldn’t find out the fate of his brother-in-law or of his younger acquaintance John Manners until he reached England at the end of the month. He was urged to stay on in a diplomatic role but Charles was firm about leaving Turkey. ‘The date of my birth determines that I should [take] active service,’ he declared as he left for home.
After Oxford, Patrick Shaw-Stewart embarked on a career in finance and characteristically excelled. Still in his mid 20s in 1914 he was already a director of Baring Brothers. The powers that be in the organisation thought that given his age it might be prudent to broaden his life experience. At the beginning of the year he was sent travelling in North America, which was a culture shock for him. ‘Someone wrote to me as “Dear Patrick”,’ he exclaimed. ‘I have only seen her once!’ Wide eyed and dismayed by over familiarity and uncouth language he went from Washington to Arizona and then, via the Grand Canyon, to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oregon, Seattle, Vancouver and Calgary before travelling back east through the Rockies, via Iowa, Illinois and Kansas; by which time he had somewhat fallen for ‘this bustling, simple-minded, gaseous, rather incompetent, hospitable nation.’
Patrick returned to England in the summer and when war broke out he was back at Bishopsgate. That August his ‘warlike soul’ prompted him to enquire about joining the Inns of Court OTC and the following month he obtained leave to join the war effort. With a familiar, fierce determination he aimed at getting to the front as soon as possible. ‘Baring Brothers have been perfect angels,’ he wrote. He spent a week cramming languages and after twenty-three days freezing in various passages in the War Office trying to attract someone’s attention he was finally employed. Now an official interpreter he would find himself thrown in at the front in a matter of days, sent with the new Royal Naval Division to try to save Antwerp.
At the outbreak of war Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, found that with the Fleet Reserve, the Royal Naval Reserve and the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, he had far more sailors than he needed. A number of battalions of land forces were formed from this excess of manpower, named after prominent figures in naval history and combined with the regular battalions of Royal Marines to form this new division. With extremely limited infantry experience they did not expect to be sent away for some months but as desperation rose over the situation in Belgium they were despatched before the war was more than a few weeks old. Royal Marines aside, ramshackle did not even begin to describe them. ‘Most’ of the men had a rifle before they left although at least one OE was practically a novice at firing his and the press was erroneously reporting that their bayonets were tied on with string.
Patrick remained at Dunkirk throughout September and October, no closer to the front than when he first stepped off the transport. The cheering crowds and adulation from the native population, who were convinced that they were a precedent for a huge British Army ‘which was to drive the hated Germans from the country’, wasn’t enough to cheer him up. ‘My sword, revolver and wire cutters are honourably rusting … I use my silk pyjamas,’ he quipped. Returning to England the haphazardly formed Royal Naval Division went to Crystal Palace for proper training where Patrick was told that he marched like a Chelsea pensioner and where he was shunted into the Hood Battalion with ‘Oc’ Asquith, the prime minister’s son and the poet Rupert Brooke.
The men themselves came from marine depots, the various reserves, the Merchant Navy and numerous shipping hotspots such as Glasgow, Newcastle, the north of Scotland, London or Bristol. ‘I have got the queerest command … a platoon of old stokers!’ Patrick reported. This rugged band came equipped with ‘extremely fruity language’ and ‘cunning almost inexhaustible’. They had character though. He thought he could get used to them even though he suspected that they had ‘a sort of standing grievance in the back of their evil old minds that they wanted to be in their steel walled pen yelping delight and rolling in the waist, instead of forming fours under the orders of an insolent young landlubber.’
By February 1915 the men of the Hood had been served pith helmets and rumours flew as to where they might be going. ‘Egypt, East Africa, South West Africa, Cameroons, Persian Gulf all freely mentioned’ and Patrick was quietly impressed as he was of the opinion that if he was going to see any of the world at his country’s expense he would much rather it was somewhere like Egypt than the squalor of Flanders. Rumours heightened again when their commanding officer had them solemnly practice forming squares. ‘It may be only to puzzle the poor stokers,’ thought Patrick, but it seemed to him to smack of ‘fuzzy wuzzies and other crude foes.’
In the third week of February the Hood had confirmation. ‘It is the Dardanelles,’ Patrick reported excitedly. ‘All the glory of a European campaign … without the wet, mud, misery and certain death of Flanders.’ He was resolved to take his copy of Herodotus’ Histories with him as a guidebook. The connotations, with his classical education, were not lost on him at all. ‘Think of fighting in the Chersonese, like Miltiades’ or, alternatively, ‘if it is the Asiatic side they want us on, on the plains of Troy itself!’
Turkey had procrastinated over entry into the war but nailed its colours to the wall at the end of October 1914, a month after Charles Lister left for home. Winston Churchill had already had the Royal Navy strike at the Turkish forts at the entrance to the Dardanelles, the straits forming a barrier between Europe and the East. They came under bombardment at the beginning of November but the dire state of events around Ypres on the other side of the continent ensured that nothing else transpired as the focus was on the Western Front.
On New Year’s Day 1915 Russia requested that Britain make some sort of aggressive move against the Turks. Given the strain on all aspects of the British war effort at the time it was a big ask, but nonetheless the idea of an effort that did not involve large bodies of troops was suggested by Kitchener and wholeheartedly pushed by Churchill. The latter’s plan was to force the straits open using naval forces exclusively. This was a failure though and following this lack of success, despite the strain on British resources, in March 1915 land operations to try to conquer the Dardanelles were approved. General Sir Ian Hamilton was put in charge of what was to be dubbed the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force.
The Turks had established their defences at key areas on the Gallipoli Peninsula and if the Allies had a mind to land on the Asiatic side of the straits, further men were stationed at Kum Kale near the site of Troy. In the north-west, near the neck of the peninsula, more troops were stationed near the Gulf of Saros. The peninsula itself was hardly hospitable to an occupying army either. It was dry, sparsely populated, and mountainous in places with barely any shelter. Given the position of the Turks and the previous attempts to force a way through there was also no element of surprise either. The enemy was fully aware of Allied intentions.
The British contingent decided against trying to land on the Asiatic side. The ground was a lot more open which would leave them extremely vulnerable if the Turks decided to come at them in large numbers. Gaba Tepe or ‘Z Beach’, midway up the western side was picked as one landing point; an easier alternative for an invasion and not as securely defended as other potential sites. It was also decided that there would be a number of landings all around Cape Helles, the southern tip of the peninsula, on the premise that any Turkish troops lurking on the beach would be hammered by naval guns prior to the assault on three sides.
So, rather than picking one good plan, it appeared that the Allies would try everything at once and hope for the best. The Australians and New Zealanders would be landing at Z Beach, whilst the Cape Helles landings would be attempted by British troops on V, W, S, X and Y beaches. Whilst they were at it, the French were to create a diversion by landing at Kum Kale on the Asiatic side and the Royal Naval Division, including the Hood, was to feign another landing in the Gulf of Saros to confuse the enemy. The aim of this over-complicated lunacy by the British was to take Krithia, a village at theft of a large, flat hill named Achi Baba on day one. On day two the British would link up with the Anzac troops to the north and storm the higher ground and on day three the Royal Navy would weigh in, steam up the narrows and barge their way through the straits. Ambitious was an understatement.
Whilst Patrick was bored in Dunkirk, on his return to England Charles Lister had joined the 1st City of London (Middlesex) Yeomanry under the command of his brother-in-law to act as an interpreter, as it seemed entirely likely that they would be embarking for France imminently. Charles’ dreams of active service, however, were well and truly scuppered. The regiment was sent to take up a coastal defence role in distant Norfolk. There they dug sorry-looking trenches into the sand cliffs and practiced with a machine gun. ‘A certain amount of spy-hunting gave spice to the early days … but later, when this flagged, the tedium grew intolerable.’ The only highlights occurred when the men spied supposed lights being flashed out at sea by potential spies.
Charles was fully aware of the concentration of Eton friends and other acquaintances; the likes of Shaw-Stewart and Rupert Brooke massing in the Royal Naval Division, ‘The New Argonauts’ heading for the Dardanelles. In February Charles shot to London to talk his way onto their staff and sailed aboard the Cunard Line’s Franconia when they departed for the east. ‘I shan’t regret this stunt, whatever happens,’ he wrote gleefully. ‘It is the most exhilarating feeling to be again on the sea of the ancient civilisations … I feel like a pinchbell Odysseus – longing for the same things, but with the limits and valour of some little city clerk.’
When Charles reached Malta on 10 March he found that the SS Grantilly Castle, carrying the Hood Battalion, was already there and he met his friends for dinners, the opera and ‘generally razzled’. Charles had seen enough of the ship, with its happy mess, full of familiar faces and complete with piano, to know that he quite fancied being a part of it himself. It would beat hands down the role he had been given with the staff, where he was ‘neither fish, flesh nor fowl, being viewed with suspicion as a Headquarters man and yet not sharing in the glories of the red hat and lapel tabs.’
The Royal Naval Division was sent to Egypt to prepare for the campaign. When they docked at Port Said they found Aubrey Herbert. Passed fit following his gunshot wound at Villers-Cotterêts it became apparent that the same basic ruse of sneaking into a regiment was not going to work again as far as active service was concerned. Owing to his linguistic skills and his experience of the east he took up a post at the Arab Bureau with T.E. Lawrence, but was not enamoured of either the work or their superior officer. Whilst Patrick was full of enthusiasm it was a completely different story for the intelligence officers in Cairo. Amongst themselves they talked about it freely. ‘There was, as far as I saw,’ Aubrey recalled, ‘unanimity between military, naval and political officers … who deplored (not to use a stronger word) the idea of attempting to land on the Dardanelles; which the Turks had been happily fortifying and they preferred, on the whole, the idea of Alexandretta far, far to the South.’
In the spring Aubrey sought a permanent change from his unpleasant environment and joined the New Zealand contingent of the Australian and New Zealand Division. Acting as an interpreter/intelligence officer he began preparing for departure to the Gallipoli peninsula to fight the Turks he knew so well. When the Hood arrived Aubrey was happy to find old friends amongst the officers. The razzling continued and they gathered for dinners, lunches and a tour of the pyramids by moonlight. Charles and Patrick had combined to learn precisely one phrase in Turkish: ‘Do not kill me, I am a friend of Herbert Effendi.’
By 2 April Charles Lister had managed, ‘employing the most subterranean methods’ to get himself into the battalion with his friends. Shaw-Stewart claimed that his friend had pulled as many strings to get off the staff as other people pulled to get on it, but his deviousness worked. Within three days Charles had command of a platoon and found himself in the same company as Patrick and Rupert Brooke, both of whom were presently laid up ‘weak as kittens’ with dysentery. Sadly for Patrick, it meant that he missed the wonderful spectacle of his friend elegantly attempting to command his men through drill in his special parade voice. Now experiencing camp life for the first time, Charles felt rather ‘a sort of baby’ amongst his band of hardened naval reservists, many of whom were advancing towards forty. The orders he attempted to bellow out he only understood ‘through a glass darkly’. He had a mind to try to impress those around him and attempted to learn signalling; ‘a useless accomplishment, I fancy, but I must above all give the impression of zeal, as I always feel my position is risky and my accomplishments far behind those of my brother officers.’ Their best officer was an ex-cavalryman and a veteran of Queen Victoria’s wars in Africa. Charles, by his own admission, had seen service on a hillside in Norfolk.
On 10 April, Patrick hauled himself back aboard the Grantilly Castle to find his Eton friend firmly ensconced in the Hood with no intention of leaving. Their dinner table in the mess included Oc Asquith, Brooke, Charles, Patrick and another slightly older OE named ‘Cleg’ Kelly; an Australian-born talented musician who kept them entertained en route.
Everyone referred to them as ‘The Latin Club’ and they remained up after everybody else had gone to bed every night, drinking wine and chatting away. Their conversation flowed from Byzantine emperors to music, to Turkish prisoners. Every destination, every island glimpsed along the way brought to the fore ancient connotations for Patrick and Charles. Lemnos, where Philoctetes was left behind during the Trojan War, Samothrace where Poseidon sat to watch the fighting. Unlike Aubrey, they were firm in their conviction that the campaign would be over swiftly and successfully, the Royal Naval Division at the fore. The dangers of modern war seemed alien. ‘I don’t think this is going to be at all a dangerous campaign,’ Patrick scoffed. ‘We shall only have to sit on the Turkish forts after the fleet has shelled the unfortunate occupants out of them.’
In the third week of April the Hood landed at Skyros, the island of Achilles; where his mother was said to have dressed him as a girl so that he would not be whisked off to Troy. Training continued, but life was merry. They swam, sunbathed; the sub-lieutenants even threw a fancy dress ball for the men. Most of them scraped together odds and ends to dress as old dames or painted themselves black, but one ‘vain spark’ in Charles’ platoon cast himself as Queen Elizabeth. ‘His skirt,’ Charles wrote, ‘is my burberry, his stomacher my cabin curtains; his wimple (non-historic but one must wear something on one’s head) is a boot bag and his veil a blue antiseptic bandage.’ When not ragging with the men, Charles and Patrick managed to get off the ship one day and on to the island to chat with the locals and ramble about taking in the scenery. They returned to find Brooke, who had taken their watches so that they could stay out as long as possible, hanging over the side and bombarding them with sarcasm.
The following day, though, their friend fell ill. Patrick was frightened by the sight of him ‘so motionless and fevered’ as he was lowered over the side and taken to a French hospital on the island. Blood poisoning claimed the poet, before he caught sight of Gallipoli. ‘I shouldn’t have thought,’ wrote Patrick, who had only met Brooke since joining the battalion, ‘that anyone in three months could come to fill so large a space in my life.’ Three petty officers performed the challenging feat of carrying Rupert’s coffin for a mile across rugged terrain, along a stony path where they buried him in an olive grove. Charles, who had known the poet for much longer, helped to dig the grave and stayed behind after the service to cover it with pieces of white marble in the shadow of a bent olive tree leaning over it ‘like a weeping angel’.
When they returned from the burial Cleg Kelly composed an elegy, trying to introduce the feel of Greek temples and the movement of the olive trees as opposed to religious undertones that wouldn’t have suited their friend at all. Perhaps, Charles reflected sadly ‘the Island of Achilles is in some respects a suitable resting place for those bound for the plains of Troy’.
Despite his complete lack of enthusiasm for this new endeavour, Aubrey Herbert had no complaints about his trip save for the fact that the ‘puritanical’ New Zealand Government had ordained that their ship was to be dry of all alcohol. After a three-day voyage they docked at Lemnos where the mood from ship to ship was buoyant. By now he was aware that the New Zealanders would be attacking the central part of the peninsula and Aubrey had been despatched onto the island to buy as many donkeys as he could get his hands on. Some things never changed. His adoration of animals led him to rescue a miniature one that would have been useless for military purposes to keep as a mascot for the division.
On 23 April he watched a magnificent procession of boats depart for the new front. In the afternoon the New Zealanders left in a stiff breeze and the island sparkled behind them in the sunlight. ‘With the band playing and flags flying, we steamed past the rest of the fleet. Cheers went from one end of the harbour to the other.’ The sea was calm all the way across to the Dardanelles. Some of the officers intended to get up early and watch the Australians attack from the deck. Aubrey didn’t want to. ‘I thought that we should see plenty of the attack before we had done with it and preferred to sleep.’
He eventually emerged two hours after the off at 6.30 a.m on 25 April. to the continuous roar of artillery from Cape Helles in the south. Behind the sands at Z Beach the ground rose steeply into cliffs and hills towards the imposing peak of Chunuk Bair and from the shore he could hear the crackle of rifles. At 8.30 a.m. he received his orders and was loaded on to a small craft to be towed ashore. Aubrey eyed it suspiciously as they were herded in. There was no shelter of any kind and as they drifted along bullets splashed into the water alongside them. They watched the outline of bodies on the beach loom larger as they approached land. Aubrey ‘floundered ashore’ and scrambled on to ‘that unholy land’ amidst a shower of bullets. ‘The word was then, I thought rather unnecessarily, passed that we were under fire.’
At Z Beach, which would become known as Anzac Cove, there was initial success but it came at a price. They had been landed in the wrong place, right in front of Chunuk Bair instead of further south where the ground was easier. At about midday the Turks turned their guns on them. The Australians got right up on to the high ground before the enemy counter-attacked under Mustafa Kemal and pushed them back. Aubrey Herbert was running backwards and forwards past hordes of wounded men looking for (fictional) Turkish prisoners that he was supposed to be interviewing. He was appalled at the conditions that he saw and wrote in his diary of 600 wounded men loaded on to one ship and despatched to Egypt in the care of one veterinary surgeon. The commander of the Anzac forces, General Birdwood, wanted to evacuate, citing in particular the plight of the New Zealanders, who had been heavily hit. General Hamilton didn’t want to hear it. He told him that the only option was to ‘dig yourselves right in and stick it out’.
At Cape Helles in the far south the attacks had been a collective disaster. Meanwhile, Charles Lister, Patrick Shaw-Stewart and the rest of the Hood Battalion were carrying out their false landing in the Gulf of Saros. Shortly after dawn on 25 April, transports carrying the naval men began playing about with a collection of rowboats and pretended to set up for an attack. Patrick then listened for two days to ‘the most prodigious bombardment that ever was’ going on to the south whilst they bobbed about on their ship. He couldn’t believe that any Turks would survive such a storm of shells ‘but they have the devils’, he wrote miserably. Rumours had reached the Hood that all was not playing out well on the peninsula and he was glad that they hadn’t formed part of the original landing force. ‘Though our men will probably be very steady,’ he remarked, ‘I doubt they are quite the raging fiends the Australians seem to be when they are raised.’
By the end of April the Hood had been moved down to V Beach to land at what had been a scene of unprecedented slaughter just a few days earlier. Bodies lined the sand and the River Clyde, the modern day Trojan horse that had run aground to land troops by way of holes cut in the side and gangways attached to the hull, dominated the scene. There were ships everywhere and in the dark they reminded Charles of the illuminated Brighton Pier. Occasionally he saw tiny little figures ashore; they looked like ants creeping and crawling about the cliff faces and hillsides. Achi Baba loomed hundreds of feet above them as they waited to come ashore. The noise of the guns was deafening and the Turkish artillery retaliated. Charles, Patrick and their men camped near the shoreline for the night and shivered whilst they watched the red haze of fires on the skyline. The Gallipoli campaign was now well under way.
What followed for the next month and a half was a systematic attempt to carry out the original plan to seize the straits. It began with a massed renewed attack on 28 April which failed; a huge blow to the British idea of a swift victory in this new theatre of war. Having suffered Turkish counter-attacks, on 6 May the assault was thrust again towards the village of Krithia and above it the already familiar Achi Baba.
At midnight on 5 May the Hood were awoken by a crescendo of noise. Charles, buzzing at the idea of actual fighting, was convinced that the enemy was right on top of them. They marched across a soggy ravine, ‘overgrown with lovely water weeds and olives, grey in the moonlight’ to a line of trenches that awaited them. They tucked in behind the firing line. Dawn revealed the Allies in front of them advancing over hoards of Turkish dead.
Charles’ platoon moved off in support. The men in front had gone 2,000 yards when the Turks opened fire with shrapnel. The lines were still primitive and there was no time to improve their positions. The Hood was isolated on the flank and orders came up to retire, but not before the enemy had singled them out for a heavy barrage. The Hood had managed to effect some sort of advance but gains were minimal and the casualties to the Royal Naval Division were shocking. Charles’ company was amongst the last to retreat. As they moved back, a shell exploded sending a shower of shrapnel at him, lodging in his water bottle, his coat and, most ignominious of all, in his backside. There he was, ‘bleeding like a pig’ and limping along when he wanted to be rallying his men. ‘I never saw a Turk within shooting distance,’ he remarked drily. Patrick agreed with his statement.
Charles managed to disguise his injury well until his trousers became soaked in blood. He was deposited on a stretcher, carried down to the beach and sent off to Malta. His company remained in the firing line without him. He likened his battle experience to foreplay. ‘I should like to get back quick, because I have seen just enough to tantalise.’ It hadn’t been glorious, but as far as he was concerned they were not to blame. If the commanding officer had not instructed them to retire then Charles thought that they could have been cut off and annihilated. ‘That day they showed great steadiness for raw troops, but their situation was impossible.’
The New Zealand Brigade had been moved round to Cape Helles to take part in the assault too. The dead lay everywhere. The wounded cried for water in between the trenches. Aubrey Herbert had seen enough. He located medical officers and had them approach General Birdwood about some sort of ceasefire to attend to the situation. The general did not think that the Germans would allow the Turks to carry through such an idea. Aubrey was disgusted. He had been out with a megaphone, which Birdwood quite rightly thought was a futile exercise, trying to convince the Turks to surrender. He was shot at, laughed at and otherwise ignored. He had the same effect as a trench mortar. Every time he stopped to speak he elicited a volley of rifle fire. Unperturbed, Aubrey continued with his ploy to effect a temporary ceasefire to take care of the dead and wounded.
Patrick was one of the few sub-lieutenants who came through unscathed but his love affair with the war was already over. Men around him had been struck and a bullet had lodged in his Asprey steel mirror, which he thought almost as good an advert for the manufacturer as Oc Asquith’s wound had been for the government. The war was a thing that he didn’t think a man ought to miss, but now he had seen it and participated in battle he began to wonder if this was any place for a civilised man.
On 8 May the New Zealanders made their own attempt on Krithia and gained about 400 yards before they were pinned down. Despite this, the battle’s commander, Aylmer Hunter-Weston, ordered them to attack again that evening in pursuit of Achi Baba. The effort failed amidst catastrophic casualty figures for Ian Hamilton’s force.
The smell of bodies had now become unbearable in the stifling heat. Aubrey tried again but was refused permission to try to negotiate a truce. Aubrey was relentless, demanding to board Hamilton’s ship to speak to the MEF’s commander himself. He had no love for Hamilton at the best of times but this was to enhance his distaste. Aubrey labelled him a vain fool and the dislike was mutual. The general, though, did approve a pause in hostilities for burials, providing that it did not appear that the British had asked for it. Aubrey managed to make both sides believe that it was the other who had wanted a ceasefire. A colleague and an Oxford friend remarked that ‘Liman von Sanders says we did, Sir Ian Hamilton says they did. My own opinion is that Aubrey Herbert was responsible for it.’
On 24 May Aubrey’s stomach was in knots, paranoid that something was going to go wrong. He climbed upwards to 400 Plateau above the beach at Anzac Cove through a field of poppies. He had just reached another plateau full of tall corn when the ‘fearful smell of death’ hit him. Corpses were scattered all over the place. He climbed through gullies of thyme and it was ‘indescribable’. A Turkish Red Crescent man gave him a dressing doused in antiseptic to cloak his mouth and nose from the smell. As the soldiers went about their burial work, they were visibly distressed. Aubrey came across two wounded men ‘in all that multitude of silence, crying in the gullies’. He approached one, who lay in the middle of a pile of bodies, pulled out a water bottle and helped him to drink from it. A Turkish captain with him was feeling reflective. ‘At this spectacle,’ he said, ‘even the most gentle must feel savage and the most savage must weep.’
Amongst the bodies the damage done by machine guns was evident by the injuries that the men had sustained: ‘their heads doubled under them with the impetus of the rush and both hands clasping their bayonets’. Aubrey was required to alleviate a fair amount of bickering throughout the day. The Turks argued that the Australians were making off with rifles and the Australians levelled their own charges at the enemy while Aubrey tried to pacify both sides. Craftiness did occur. One chaplain managed to get a trench that had been the source of much bother used as a grave so that it was taken out of use and both sides spied when they could.
Aubrey, being Aubrey, managed to make friends with some of the Turkish troops. The sultan’s men were gleaned from all over the Ottoman Empire. He had a Greek try to surrender to him, an Anatolian gave him a fierce stare to send chills up a man’s spine and the Albanians took to him immediately. They knew Aubrey by name, for after all he had nearly become their king and men began clapping him on the back and cheering. Unfortunately this was in the midst of funeral services occurring across the battlefield and Aubrey quietened them all down quickly. The truce was due to end in the late afternoon and Aubrey joked with the enemy troops that they would shoot at him the next day. The Albanians found the idea ridiculous. That night Aubrey was dousing his throat with whiskey to get rid of the taste of death and coating his legs with iodine where barbed wire had slashed at his skin.
The following day HMS Triumph was sunk in full view of the beach. ‘There was fury, impotence and rage on the beach and on the hill.’ Aubrey heard a captain ranting, ‘you should kill all enemies, not give them cigarettes!!!!’ Men were crying and cursing. ‘Very different from last night when they were all wishing each other luck.’
On 4 June the British and French launched another massed attack on Achi Baba. The 3rd Battle of Krithia was the final attempt to carry out the original plan of attack on the peninsula. At 8 a.m. a bombardment began, concentrating on strongpoints before it became a general barrage on all the Turkish lines three hours later. The French to the right of the Hood were also pummelling the Turkish lines but unfortunately for the allies, the wind blew the smoke from their shells right back into their faces and obscured their view at midday when the Hood burst forward.
As soon as they emerged men began to fall back dead into the trench in a hail of Turkish fire. Those that survived poured into three enemy trenches taking an obscene amount of casualties. They were in dire need of support. To their right, the French were completely mown down by machine guns and the Royal Naval Division was therefore exposed to enfilading fire. Setting off behind the Hood, the Collingwood Battalion fell in their droves before they could even get to the front line. Butchered and in a state of confusion, at lunchtime they were ordered to retreat. As if this was not crushing enough, the following day the Turks launched a forceful counter-attack. The whole offensive ground to a halt and all hopes of an advance evaporated.
Patrick went into battle having just received word that Julian Grenfell and Edward Horner had fallen foul of the Germans and ended up in the same hospital in Boulogne. He had been abruptly pulled out of the line at the very last moment to replace a fallen French interpreter dealing with the troops next door. There was simply no time to think of his friends when the Hood was being slaughtered all around him. The battalion suffered severely on 4 June. Of fifteen officers, six were killed and five wounded, including Cleg Kelly. Patrick was one of only four to come out physically unscathed. He was ‘filled with disgust and rage’ at the folly of it. Trenches were captured but they got nowhere near the summit of the hill. The Hood had lost twenty-six of thirty officers since 6 May and finally attempts to carry out the initial intentions on the peninsula were abandoned. It all appeared to have been for nothing.
Charles Lister was fit to re-join the Royal Naval Division a few days later. His return was mortifying. He sailed in at dawn and the fleet was nowhere to be seen. Just a couple of hospital ships bobbed about with a destroyer or two. The green keel of the sunken Majestic stuck out above the waterline lit by a single lamp, reminding Charles of the oil lamps put on the graves at San Lorenzo cemetery in Rome on All Soul’s night. He found the Hood much changed. The survivors were working on the beach, grossly under-officered and digging saps, sniping, lugging supplies and even carrying out guard duty for high-ranking officers. As on the Western Front, stagnant warfare now kicked in on the Gallipoli Peninsula.
Aubrey’s mood was desolate. He found the inactivity and the calm awful. The likes of his own general, Godley, were not unpopular, but Hamilton was another story. Aubrey despised him. He reported that he had been to the area precisely twice in the early stages of their occupation. ‘I think for a quarter of an hour each time and has never been around the positions at all. GHQ are loathed.’ Aubrey grew more and more bitter towards him. In June he wrote to his wife that Hamilton had ‘the obstinacy of weak men’. He continued his appraisal: ‘I have had one or two instances when I have seen how he and his staff believe what they want to believe in the face of all sense and evidence.’
Neither did Aubrey reserve his venom for General Hamilton. Although an MP himself, he did not refrain from criticising the politicians at home for the ineptitude that he believed was responsible for the army’s plight. Thanks to his wife he had intimate knowledge of what was being said inside 10 Downing Street and was distinctly unimpressed at how miserable Churchill was at his failure. Apparently he had said that if he was Prime Minister for twenty years then it would not make up for the failure of the Dardanelles. ‘I would like him to die in some of the torments I have seen so many die in here,’ Aubrey spat. ‘But his only “agony” you say is missing PM.’
Despite the failure of the expedition thus far, Kitchener, in the face of a disastrous scenario in Flanders, was not about to let the campaign fold. During the summer the beaches on the peninsula were swarming with activity. Sitting in a rest camp with the rest of the Hood, Charles Lister claimed to be quite enjoying himself. ‘I look forward to the rum nights with all the zeal of an old sea dog,’ he reported. He had a light-hearted approach to war but it did not sit well with everybody. Certain occupants took life on the beaches very seriously but he couldn’t. He likened one of them to Blackpool but then noted that ‘its inhabitants take the shells rather seriously and would resent this flippancy’.
There were opportunities for swimming, which Charles loved, although one had to become adept at dodging the bloated corpses of dead horses. Animals of the living variety differed greatly from the tabby cats of the Western Front. Patrick Shaw-Stewart was repulsed by ‘centipedes and other monsters’. Flies were by far the worst irritation. It was impossible to sleep during the day without some sort of protection and Patrick had frantically employed his whole family on thinking up ideas to defeat them. ‘Fly papers, fly whisks, some sulphuric apparatus for smoking them out’ anything that they could think of. ‘Flies by day and flies by night, flies in the water, flies in the food,’ bemoaned one Etonian.
OEs relied on care packages from home as, unlike the Western Front, it was impossible to pop into the nearest town for supplies. The alien climate also disturbed the men’s health. One OE in the Royal Engineers was lucky to have a stash of chlorodyne with him which he began getting his mother to supplement. With it he had managed to cure most of the diarrhoea/dysentery that struck down his sappers. He was also maintaining a stash of arrowroot for similar purposes. ‘I have to harden my heart and be really brutal,’ he wrote, ‘as I think every man in the section has been upset by the heat and unsuitable food at one time or another and any who have a little gut just lie down and collapse.’
Patrick was tired of the squalid existence that he claimed reminded him of the Selli tribe in the Iliad who crouched on the ground and never washed their feet. He had let his red beard grow through and according to Charles he looked like a holy man who had dyed it with henna. The situation was not, of course, helped by the many dead bodies lying about decomposing. Patrick had a pile of them in front of his trench. ‘At dawn a lark got up from there and started singing. A queer contrast. Rupert Brooke could have written a poem on that, rather his subject.’
By mid July the Hood was in the trenches; old Turkish lines. ‘It is fairly whiffy,’ Charles Lister wrote; on account of the bodies that were close by. ‘With the tell-tale stocking or end of boot’ sticking ominously out of the trench walls. They were at risk of snipers during the day and at night when the men were led up and down the communication trenches they tripped over the bodies of unlucky colleagues who had exposed themselves. ‘It is an awful job getting our men past them,’ Charles explained. ‘They have a sort of supernatural fear of trampling on their own dead.’
The lines themselves were cramped and Charles complained that he had had his toes trodden on ‘by every officer and man of a Scotch territorial division’ who came past in driblets, lost and wandering. Patrick managed, even when the trench was ‘a seething mass of humanity’, to remain lucid, but Charles lost his temper and ultimately began jumping up and down on the parapet ‘kicking dust on their heads and … using the most violent language’.
On 1 August he wrote home once again from a sickbed to say that, having been told that they would be taken off the peninsula at the end of the month, suddenly not a man was allowed to leave. ‘So I suppose there will be something doing.’ And indeed there was. The British government had approved the sending of tens of thousands of reinforcements to Gallipoli; New Army and Territorial men; basically whatever they had to hand. This massive influx opened up all kinds of possibilities for Ian Hamilton.
Cape Helles, already the scene of so much devastation, was a write-off. Anzac Cove still looked like the better option but it was now that Suvla Bay to the north, previously ignored, came into play. It had been deemed too far away from the original objectives in April, but now fresh (but inexperienced) troops were ordered to assault it on 6 August under dubiously defined and overcomplicated orders. Men, unready for battle, were thrown into an overly optimistic attack which failed to recognise just how much trouble the Turkish resistance had caused. Not surprisingly they failed.
Aubrey missed the onset of the new offensive as he was off on nearby islands in his capacity as an intelligence officer. He arrived back on 7 August and spent the day interrogating prisoners. The following day he watched the attack. ‘It looked so cruel I could hardly bear to see it.’ It seemed like a horrible dream sequence to him. ‘[I]n the beautiful light, with clouds crimson over them, sometimes a tiny gallant figure in front then a puff of smoke would come and they would be lying still.’
Again the sight of the wounded distressed him greatly. Outside a hospital of sorts he came across an acquaintance who had been wounded during the battle and spent an excruciating day lying out in the sun. ‘He recognised me and asked me to help him, but he was delirious. There were fifty-six others with him.’ It was unbearable having to walk past them all. The smell was appalling as none of the wounded men had been cleaned and he heard some of them call out, ‘we are being murdered.’
One of the objectives in the August offensives was the peak of Chunuk Bair in the Sari Bair range. Aubrey Herbert’s New Zealanders, in his absence, had forged a path towards the summit before they were relieved by the British and trudged back over tall cliffs, deep ravines, and dry river beds and through wooded country in the dark. Early on 10 August Mustafa Kemal launched a counter-attack and thousands of Turks came pouring over Chunuk Bair and tore the British infantry to shreds. The fighting was hand to hand, ‘so desperate a battle cannot be described’. The enemy came at them in waves, washing the British aside.
Down on the beach the wounded on the sand and the men attempting to treat them were under sustained rifle fire from the Turks above. It seemed that nowhere was safe. In his capacity as an interpreter Aubrey didn’t have a specific job to do at that precise time, so once again his concern for the broken men being brought down from the battle came to the fore. They lay in rows, ‘their faces caked with sand and blood’. He grabbed another officer and together they commandeered 200 exhausted New Zealanders of the Canterbury Battalion who had not slept in three days and began carrying them to safety. They passed around all of the water they could. Nobody was of a mind to move the wounded Turks, but Aubrey could not bear their crying. An order had come that they were not to be evacuated until all of their own men had gone. ‘This is natural but was of course an order of lingering death.’ Aubrey went back with water and tried to drag the wounded Turkish soldiers into some shade. He wanted to go up to the battlefield where more men could be heard, of both sides, crying for water but the general refused him permission. What right did he have? Aubrey fumed. ‘Tempers have got very short.’
He found General Birdwood and learned that the prognosis was not good. The Turks had pushed the invaders off Chunuk Bair and the battle appeared lost. The enemy, he said, had been magnificent and Aubrey feared that the New Zealand Infantry Brigade had ceased to exist. ‘The lines of wounded are creeping up to the cemetery like a tide,’ claimed Aubrey, ‘… and the cemetery is coming to meet the wounded.’ On 13 August Aubrey himself contracted a fever. He was full of resolve to carry on, but eleven days later he was put on a hospital ship. Struck down with dysentery he was still claiming to be fit enough to stay when he fainted during an interview with a doctor. Having had three week’s sick leave in Egypt he did return in September but lasted approximately a fortnight before his health completely broke down. As he left Gallipoli, this sideshow of a front, Aubrey wrote ‘I never want to see again a mule, or a backdoor, or a sideshow, or Winston, or flies or bully beef.’ ‘Sooner or later,’ his granddaughter wrote, ‘he saw them all again.’
Meanwhile Charles Lister had returned to the Hood, again sitting in reserve. He had already proved his worth to the men’s morale when he had come back to them after 4 June. Cleg Kelly recalled just how miserable and depressed the battalion’s survivors were until Lister arrived with his irrepressible spirits to charm them back into acceptance about their situation.2 Charles was flagging though. ‘I feel that we shall never fight or move, and I shall not know what has happened if I wake up one morning and don’t see Achi Baba on the skyline.’ His thoughts had already wandered to what he had lost; whether it be on the peninsula or on the Western Front. ‘It will be sad coming back.’ So many friends had died and their old haunts would be ‘full of ghosts’. Things would never be the same again.
On 19 August Charles and his men were preparing to go back into the firing line where he hoped that they would sit tight and forego any more fruitless attacks. This played out when he reported from the trenches a few days later that he was catching up on his reading, but soon afterwards the Turks began tossing shells at them. He shuffled his men along to safety and then went back down the trench thinking the show was over, only to be hit by a piece of flying shrapnel which struck him on the pelvis, damaging his bladder and causing slight wounds to his legs. Charles was operated on immediately but remained unsure as to what exactly had been done as he bobbed up and down on a hospital ship. His doctor, however, was quite pleased with his progress.
After the failure of the August attacks inertia had set in. General Hamilton became a victim of his own failure and ineptitude and was relieved of his command. Patrick was no longer with the battalion, having replaced a liaison officer with the French who had been badly wounded. He was ensconced in ‘inglorious safety on the gilded staff … speaking French for dear life’. A few days later news reached him that Charles had worsened and he died on 28 August. He was devastated. At the time ‘Lord Lister’, as his men called him, had been fending off, despite Patrick’s encouragement, approaches from intelligence people contriving to give him work away from the trenches. He was laid to rest on Mudros.
By October, Patrick was convinced that he too would die on the peninsula, quite possibly of old age as his residence there seemed to be ‘smacking of eternity’. He was soon put out of his misery though. A new front had opened up in the Balkans and it was decided that enough was enough. Patrick Shaw-Stewart was one of the last men to exit this doomed theatre of war as a line was drawn under a disastrous campaign and the Allies prepared to depart. ‘It is pretty sad when you think of what it has cost us,’ he wrote in January 1916, although he was convinced that it was the right decision to go. Of the French contingent only he, the guns and his commanding officer remained, lighting fires and burning anything the Turks might use. ‘I have burnt some queer things, including a bowler hat.’
As Patrick prepared to board the River Clyde the Turks continued to shell them from the direction of Troy. On the beach it was ‘as quiet as the grave’. Not a man was lost during the evacuation of the Gallipoli peninsula, which is more than can be said of the nine months before. There are twenty-nine Old Etonians buried or commemorated on the peninsula as testament to a shambles of a campaign. Herodotus was useless as a guidebook to Patrick now. Each island, each beach, each objective was marred by death and stained with the sacrifice of his friends. As he turned his back on the Dardanelles he wondered what was next. He left behind the ghosts of Charles Lister and Rupert Brooke. In 1915, at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, almost his entire circle of friends would be slaughtered.
Notes
1 Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, the famous theologian.
2 Lt Commander F.S. Kelly was killed on 13 November 1916 on the Western Front. He is buried at Martinsart British Cemetery.