Blood and Thunder (19 page)

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.