they actually got into the trenches, but were driven out by the bayonet. They must have lost thousands. The fighting is of the most desperate kind – very little quarter asked on either side. The men are absolutely mad to get at them, as they mutilate our wounded when they catch them. For the first three nights I did not have a wink of sleep, and actually fell asleep during the big night attack.38
Writing to his sister about the attack Guy Nightingale does not bother to spare her feelings. His tone is that of a man who has already been utterly desensitised by his experiences.
The Turks attacked again and again shouting Allah ! Allah !. It was most exciting hearing them collecting in a dip in the hill about 40 yards away waiting for their next charge. We mowed them down and only once did they get so close that we were able to bayonet them. When dawn broke, we saw them in hundreds retiring and simply mowed them down. We took 300 prisoners and could have taken 3000 but we preferred shooting them. All the streams were simply running blood and the heaps of dead were a grand sight.39
Elsewhere the 1st Inniskillings, of the 87th Brigade, who had come ashore unopposed on 25 April at X Beach (north of where the Dublins and Munsters met their nemesis) were getting and giving similar treatment. They were defending a position guarded only by a single stand of barbed wire and with long grass in front of their lines which afforded some cover against detection to the attacking Turks. ‘We heard the swish swish of the Turks’ feet as they advanced towards us and the voices of their officers as they gave orders. Somebody sent up a Very light, and they were advancing in a solid mass towards us.’ The Inniskillings let loose a murderous fire against the full frontal assault of the Turks. ‘The effect was deadly. We could hear the shrieks of their wounded and the shouts of their officers as they urged them on; but they never reached our line.’40
A sort of torpor now settled on both sides and the fighting became sporadic and episodic. The troops of two armies were crushed into an area of a few square miles and the corpses of the dead of both forces were ubiquitous. Nightingale, sent forward for a night attack with a contingent of Munsters, found himself sharing an entrenchment with the bodies of men from the King’s Own Scottish Borderers which had lain in the same spot since the landings of 25 April.
These bodies were still lying there highly decomposed and the stench was awful. In the dark we kept tumbling over the bodies and treading on them. When it was light I found I had dug in next to the remains of an officer in the KOSBs whom I had last seen at the Opera at Malta and had spent a most jolly evening with. There were ten KOSBs and seven South Wales Borderers lying there but I only recognised a few.41
It was not until the middle of May that a four-day truce designed for the purpose allowed both sides to bury their dead. By then, ironically, the campaign had become a carbon copy of the stasis of the Western Front.
It was only in retrospect that the full enormity of the losses at V Beach and on other parts of the Gallipoli peninsula became apparent. It took some time for the name ‘Gallipoli’ to acquire the connotations of military disaster and incompetence which it eventually did. The casualty figures were manipulated to give an erroneous impression of the success of the landings themselves. Nightingale noticed this when he was sent a copy of the Times in May.
I see they are breaking the casualties gently to you at home. Out of the 14 officers of ours hit on Sunday April 25th the Times of the 2nd of May only gives Major Jarret killed and five wounded. A lot of the regiments like the Lancashire Fusiliers who lost 20 officers the first day are not mentioned at all ! I think the Dublins are the only complete list. I suppose they’ll try and make out it’s been nothing at all out here, just a scrap with the Turks whereas its been hell and frightfully mismanaged.42
Such were the losses that when an officer like Capt G.W. Geddes returned from having his wounds treated he did so not as a mere Company commander but as CO of the battalion. But he was a much changed man.
Geddes is a ripping commanding officer to work with but he is frightfully worried and his hair is nearly white! I’ve never seen fellows get old so quickly. This morning I saw a fellow called O’Hara in the Dublins whom I hadn’t seen for about a fortnight and I hardly recognised him.43
The constant and vicious fighting of the early days of the campaign had taken their toll. ‘Simply tons of fellows are going off their heads from strain and worry – mostly fellows who have been wounded and come back but there are very few now who have gone through from the beginning and are not the worse for it.’44 One such victim of the fatalism induced by war was Henry Desmond O’Hara. He wrote to his fiancée that he didn’t think he would survive the campaign. His assumption was correct but a vacation in Alexandria seems to have restored at least some of his shattered spirit.
‘You would hardly believe him for the same person,’ wrote Nightingale of O’Hara in his diary, ‘he looks so much better for it. He’s an awfully decent fellow and very amusing.’45 Sometime between his leave and the subsequent transfer of his division O’Hara was hit. Towards the end of August the 29th Division was moved to Suvla for the attack on Scimitar Hill but O’Hara was not with them. He had been evacuated to Gibraltar where he died of his wounds on 29 August.
Nightingale, in his letters home, while commenting on the fragile psyche of his brother officers is consistent in his assertions that he himself was suffering no ill effects. He continued to eat heartily, draw (he was a talented artist) and take lots of photographs, like a curious if heavily-armed tourist. But the sub-text of his letters belied his claims of pscyhologicial vigour. He spared his family no details of the horrors of the conflict and the tone of the letters suggests a man who has become so personally inured to what he has witnesssed that he can no longer grasp the difference between normality and extremity. He exhibited a callousness that became more pronounced as his letters became more graphic.
We are a very small lot of the original officers now … All the rest are Territorial Officers and absolute strangers. They know nothing about soldiering and are nearly all senior to me being Captains and Majors! However, they are very keen and are rapidly getting thinned out. One was hit last night during dinner and fell into the soup, upsetting the whole table, and bled into the tea pot making an awful mess of everything and we finally didn’t get dinner till after dark.46
The revelation of the extent of Nightingale’s personal frailty came twenty years later when he killed himself with his service revolver. The date on which he chose to end his life was significant, 25 April 1935, the twentieth anniversary of the V Beach landing. Some wounds endure!
From mid May until their move to Suvla in late August (with the exception of the attempt to take Krithia in late June) the 29th Division settled back into a dreary round of mundane trench warfare. Death was everywhere. It was, quite literally, in the very air itself as hundreds of decomposing, unburied bodies left a stench which men could still recall three quarters of a century later. It was carried, afresh, through the air in the form of shells or bullets which wreaked haphazard havoc on both sides. This daily round of boredom and terror was enlivened occasionally by events such as one described by Geddes.
A divisional signal wagon with four horses came over the ridge about 400 yds from Pink Farm from the direction of the beaches, with field telegraph poles; it appeared to be a gun. The Turks concentrated their shelling on the wagon; the men in charge left the wagon, the horses, so petrified with fear, never moved. Two horses, having charmed lives, survived. Suddenly, two figures were seen cutting the horses loose – Serjeant [sic] Slattery and Private Twomey – who, jumping on their backs amid a hail of shell, galloped the horses out of danger into safety amidst the cheers of their comrades. Bearing charmed lives, they escaped being hit – a miracle. No military decorations could be given for this gallant exploit, but they were awarded a very beautiful medal by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.47
There were few enough awards for gallantry for the Dublins and the Munsters on 25 April. This generated
