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Updated: June 1, 2025
These cheery patients shocked our optimism by telling us that it was hopeless to expect the capture of the hill of Achi Baba by frontal assault and that any further advance at Cape Helles was scratched off the programme.
We returned for a bathe and breakfast in the open, while the destroyers used to pass to and fro between Cape Helles and the Gulf of Saros, and a pearly haze brooded over Imbros. Then back to the trenches, which were always dusty and fly-pestered, to visit men always under fire, but full of bravery and patience. Diarrhoea and dysentery were already sending many of them from the Peninsula.
The Collect was probably being read thus softly at a number of tiny services dotted about the hills of Helles and Suvla. Never shall I hear it again without thinking of the last pages of the Gallipoli story, and of that Advent Sunday of big decisions.
The extremity of Gallipoli Peninsula is as it were an imperial estate, and every day a round of work goes on at Helles, at Greenhill, at Suvla, and the rest. With the coming of summer the ships are coming with the marble, and the stone slabs will climb the hills where once our fellows struggled upward. It is a fine undertaking.
"Stuff!" murmured Monty. "'Tisn't stuff. Have you seen the Special Order of the Day that has been printed and stuck up everywhere, congratulating us on our attack of December 19, which, it says, 'contributed largely to the successful evacuation of Suvla, and telling us that to our Army Corps 'has been entrusted the honour of holding Helles for the Empire'?" "Heavens!" he muttered.
It really did seem the end of the voyage, and the beginning of something utterly new and something so dangerous withal that our pulse-rate quickened with suspense when the Military Landing Officer came aboard, laden with papers, and, sitting at a table in the lounge, gave into the hands of boys, who yesterday were playing quoits-tennis, written orders to proceed at once to such places as W. Beach on Helles or the new front at Suvla.
With the aid of the Fleet it may be possible to land near Cape Helles almost unopposed and an advance of ten miles would enormously facilitate the landing of the remainder South of Gaba Tepe." The truth is, every one of these fellows agrees in his heart with old Von der Goltz, the Berlin experts, and the Sultan of Egypt that the landing is impossible.
At least 5,000 shell were loosed off on to Helles. A lot of the stuff was 6-inch and over. The bombardment was very wild and seemed almost unaimed. Soon after 4 a.m. very heavy columns of Turks tried to emerge from the Ravine against the left of the 29th Division. "It wanted to be the hell of a great attack," as one of the witnesses, a moderate spoken young gentleman, states.
Have lent Birdwood four Battalions of the Royal Naval Division and two more Battalions are landing at Helles to form my own reserve. Two weak Battalions; that is the exact measure of my executive power to shape the course of events; all the power I have to help either d'Amade or Hunter-Weston. Water is a worry; weather is a worry; the shelling from Asia is a thorn in my side.
They are keen and ready for to-morrow. Yes, to-morrow we attack again: I have men enough now but very, very little shell. The Turks have given us three bad nights and they ought to be worn out. With our sea power we can shift a couple of Brigades from Gaba Tepe to Helles or vice versa quicker than the Turks can march from the one theatre to the other.
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