he knew the 10th was not destined for the Western Front. Canny souls decided that tightly cropped hair cuts might make for a more comfortable life in the Mediterranean heat.
One of the sergeants had secured a hair clippers (some said a mule clippers) and, with several brethern of the three stripes, set about shaving the heads of as many of the men as wished for the performance. When the supply of these failed they chased divers others, laid violent hands on them, and shrove them of their flowing locks. We were given to understand that a Hunnish head was an asset in hot spots like the Dardanelles.5
As their transport ship pulled away from Devonport, en route to the Dardanelles, on 13 July 1915 – destined, according to Philip Orr to ‘sail right out of history’6 – Sgt John Hargrave of the 32nd Field Ambulance experienced a certain ominous foreboding, undiminished by the Fife Band of the Irish Fusiliers playing The Wearing of the Green.
A Cockney sailor standing by the bow of a coastal sloop cupped his hands and bellowed across the water, ‘Are we downhearted?’There was time to count seven before a few Irishmen shouted ‘No!’ At this rather half-hearted response, the cheery Cockney grinned a Seven Dials grin and bellowed: ‘Wotcher lookin’ so glum abaht?’ To which no answer came. Before a month was out there was no fife band. It had perished to a man at Suvla Bay.7
While awaiting orders for Gallipoli the 10th was stationed at Mudros on the Aegean island of Lemnos, and at Mitylene. Here, Cooper records, their officers got some idea of what might lie in store for their raw troops, most of whom had yet to experience combat. Some officers of the 29th Division, which had been mauled at V Beach, were at Mudros, resting, many of them had friends among the 10th.
Thus we learned from men who had been in Gallipoli since they had struggled through the surf and the wire on April 24th [sic] the truth as to the nature of the fighting there. They taught us much by their words, but even more by their appearance; for though fit, they were thin and worn, and their eyes carried a weary look that told of the strain that they had been through.8
Such was the understandable level of paranoia after the disaster of V Beach in April that the secrecy surrounding the Suvla landings became a sort of mantra among the higher echelons. It was as if there was some fervent aspiration towards the absoute retention of information within a small and elite coterie. As if the ultimate goal was that nobody should know of Hamilton’s intentions, bar Hamilton and a few upper echeleon staff-wallahs in his confidence. In the end this fetish proved counterproductive. Mahon’s division suffered more than most as a consequence, never fighting as a single unit and, at one point, operating under three separate commands.
Other units were split off by accident but the removal of the 29th Brigade9 from Mahon’s command was deliberate. Its four battaliions, the 10th Hampshires, the 6th Royal Irish Rifles, the 5th Connaught Rangers and the 6th Leinsters were sent to assist General Birdwood’s Anzacs who were still stranded at Anzac Cove more than three months after the April landings there. Here they served briefly under Divisional commander General Sir Alexander Godley, late of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, cousin of Lord Kilbracken of Killegar and (subsequently) the author of an autobiography entitled Life of an Irish Soldier (1939).
The 29th Brigade was landed after dark to avoid the attentions of enemy gunners and to conceal from the Turks the fact that reinforcements were arriving in large numbers for an offensive operation. They had little time to wonder why their resting place on that first night was called Shrapnel Gully before they found out the hard way. Nor had they much opportunity to take in their new surroundings, an arid and deadly environment which had already witnessed the killing and maiming of thousands of young Australians, New Zealanders and Gurkhas. It was a truly inhospitable place.
Take a sheet of brown paper – say two feet by one – fold it lengthways, a few inches from one side and crumple up the bit below the fold into innumerable and inextricable miniature valleys and gullies, running in and out of each other anyhow with razor-edge ridges between them; but ridges which never seemed able to keep a straight line … That gives a rough idea of what the Gallipoli coast line at and near Anzac is like.10
One company of the Leinsters got an early taste of what the Turks had been doing to the Anzac forces. They were sent to relieve a company of Australian troops holding an area called Courtney’s Ridge.
It was like hurrying up a steep flight of stairs to an attic … The trenches were more like permanently built passages, with heavy overhead cover, than normal trenches. The first night’s experience was typical of many other nights – tremendous bursts of rifle and machine-gun fire, kept up for an hour or longer, with short intervals, but often nothing more developed and one was led to conclude that the Turks must have plenty of spare ammunition.11
For the 10th Division the 29th Brigade’s detachment to Anzac Cove was a brutal sideshow. The main event was the landing at Suvla Bay on 7 August. For the first time the sporting ‘Pals’, in D Company of the 7th Royal Dublin Fusiliers, would go into action as a unit. Jocularly known as the ‘Young Toffs’ or the ‘Toffs in the Toughs’ (the ‘Toughs’ being the nickname of the Dublin Fusiliers) they were barely a week away from annihilation on the rocky scrub-covered slopes of Kiretch Tepe Sirt. But their morale was high as they approached the peninsula, first passing by Cape Helles as they made their way north on board the Fauvette. As they passed Achi Baba, viewed from the Aegean side, it was a mass of bursting shells.
Suvla seemed about as far away as Wicklow Head is from Howth, and some of them thought the coast looked like Dublin Bay. The large naval shells bursting on Achi Baba suggested a house going on fire with a suden blaze and immediately going out again, the noise sounding like one continuous roll of thunder.12
Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, destined for a career in Military Intelligence, but on this day a junior offiicer in the 5th Inniskilling Fusiliers, had no idea where his battalion was about to land as his troopship dropped anchor a mile or so from shore. He could hear rifle fire and then,
as the light improved we saw our troops advancing inland. Soon the guns of the fleet opened fire. We could see huge sheets of yellow and purple flame on the hill side … A minelayer appeared and proceeded to lay a line of mines between the shipping and the open sea. They dropped over her stern and bounced some 10 or 15 feet before settling down. They looked like plum puddings of unusual resilience.13
The 7th Dublin Fusiliers landed without much incident, though Frank Laird recalled that shrapnel had caused some injuries in the lighters before the shore was reached.
It afforded food for philosophic thought to consider the time, money and trouble expended in ten months training of a soldier who stops a bullet before he can ever set foot on enemy ground … Our steam barge ran up on a sandy beach without mishap, the hinged gangway in the bow was turned over, and we walked down it on to the soft sand with somewhat of the picnic feeling with which we had often made a landing on Ireland’s Eye in the piping days of peace.14
Oddly, to Lieutenant Noel Drury of the 6th Dublins, Suvla at night lit up by bursting shells had a sort of compelling, bizarre elegance. ‘The scene was very beautiful with star shells going up, and the loom of the early dawn lit up with the beautiful lemon-coloured flash of the naval guns.’15 In fact neither side was oversupplied with guns to effect, or defend against, a landing. The Turks were forced to alternate their fire between the troops on shore and those being landed by the Navy in lighters. The British had only two small calibre mountain guns to support the landing. ‘These two guns were a source of amusement to the men, as every time they were fired they ran backward down the hill with a sweating crowd of gunners chasing after them to haul them into position again.’16
The Dublins, along with most of the remainder of Mahon’s Division had landed much farther south than had been originally intended. The northern part of Suvla Bay had been designated A Beach, it was there that the 10th was supposed to come ashore. But
