1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [208]
Behind the trenches steep cliffs led down to the beach. Inland, less than half a mile away, was Gully Ravine, a deep declivity two miles long, many metres wide and, in places, as much as a hundred feet deep. The British trenches bisected it half-way up its length and just above Y beach and to the north a network of enemy trenches formed a redoubt on the clifftops, spanned Gully Ravine and stretched away on the inland side as far as Krithia. Staring across at the bristling new defences it was difficult to believe that the landing at Y beach had been unopposed and that Colonel Matthews, commanding the Y beach force, had walked with his ADC to the outskirts of Krithia only a mile away. He had not been asked to capture it alone, though his troops might have easily done so. His orders had been to wait for the troops advancing from V beach and, when they reached him, to join in on the left of their advance and thus widen the front of the attack. Lacking any other orders, in the absence of any news, and with no message of any kind reaching him from higher authority, he dutifully went on waiting while his troops kicked their heels on the clifftops enjoying the pleasant spring sunshine and admiring the view. The Turks had ample time to muster and march to Y beach to oppose them. Much later Matthews was criticised for failing to act with initiative, but his orders had been explicit, and it had apparently occurred to no one to suggest how he should act if the troops at V beach failed to make headway.
Directly across the peninsula at the northern tip of Morto Bay it had been the same story. The South Wales Borderers landed unmolested at S beach and they were waiting too. There were no Turkish troops within miles, and on 25 April the British troops at S beach and Y beach outnumbered by several times the entire Turkish force – only five battalions – in the sector south of Achi Baba. The two British contingents were just five miles apart on either side of the peninsula. They might easily have advanced and spread out to join hands across it, walked into Krithia and pushed on to Achi Baba. By cutting off the few Turkish troops who were so gallantly resisting at the beaches at Cape Helles they might very well have altered the course of the campaign.
The day after the landing, when V beach was finally secured and the village of Sedd-el-Bahr was stormed and captured, a copy of a desperate message fell into British hands. It had been hastily scribbled by a junior Turkish officer and it reeked of panic:
My Captain, either you must send up reinforcements and drive the enemy into the sea or let us evacuate this place because it is absolutely certain that they will land more troops tonight. Send doctors to carry off my wounded. Alas, alas my Captain, for God’s sake send me reinforcements because hundreds of soldiers are landing. Hurry up. What on earth will happen my Captain.
But there were no reinforcements within reach to be sent. The following day, dazed and weakened by casualties, the remnants of the eight Turkish companies at V beach streamed away up the hill. There was no pursuit, for the landing force was too exhausted to do much more than consolidate hard-won positions and steel themselves to meet the counter-attacks they believed would surely be launched. But there were no counter-attacks at V beach or anywhere else, for the south of the peninsula was being evacuated. The night after the landings, under cover of darkness, the weary Turkish soldiers who had fought so hard to thwart the landing pulled back several miles to meet reinforcements from the north and, with Achi Baba behind them, they started digging a line of strong defences in front of Krithia.
Recently they had been considerably strengthened and, by late June, a succession of strongly defended redoubts and trenches ran across the spur of land that dominated the beaches on the seaward side of Gully Ravine and across the ground on its inland side barring the road to