1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [214]
As the night wore on, Gully Beach was an eerie sight, lit intermittently by the beams of search-lights reflected from the sky and by the glow of bobbing lanterns as orderlies moved among wounded lying on the sand. There were three Field Ambulances at the mouth of Gully Ravine, but they were soon swamped and the men were moved quickly through as soon as their wounds were dressed and carried to the beach to be evacuated. Some of them had to wait for many hours. Now and again a ship’s signal lamp flashed out of the dark from the open sea, now and again the splash of oars, the low splutter of a motor engine, a call from the shore, warned that a tow had arrived to carry the wounded away, and stretcher-bearers waded through the shallows to load them aboard the flat-bottomed boats that would take them out to the ships. They could carry, at most, twelve stretcher cases apiece and, inevitably, progress was slow. Shortly after dawn more and more wounded began arriving from the line. At nightfall they were coming still. Very early on the hospital ships were swamped and the wounded were loaded, willy-nilly, on troop transports, on ammunition or supply ships, on any rusty bucket in the area that could be guaranteed to keep afloat on the short passage to Mudros. But the camp hospitals at Mudros were soon filled to overflowing and with nowhere to put the wounded there was no alternative but to leave them where they were. Some stayed on board for many days. On the ill-equipped transports, where there were no bunks, no dressings, no bedpans, no medical facilities of any kind, conditions were frightful. Despite the efforts of frantic medical officers rushing from ship to ship in Mudros harbour, many wounds turned putrid. Many men died.
Willie Begbie survived. But back on the peninsula the remnants of his Battalion found, after the battle, that they were a battalion no longer. With their two sister battalions of the 156th Brigade and with little or no support from artillery they had, at least partially, succeeded in capturing and holding their objectives in the Battle of Gully Ravine. It was a considerable feat for the untried Territorials and the Divisional Commander, General de Lisle, had sent them a special message. It simply said, ‘Well done the Royal Scots!’ But it was only a small consolation. In the five weeks since they had set out, of eleven hundred officers and men who had boarded the trains at Larbert, only seven officers and two hundred and seventeen men remained. It was crushing to reflect that, of those five weeks, three had been spent at sea.
But they had indeed had a fight for it.
Part 6
Slogging On: The Salient to Suvla
It is midday; the deep trench glares…
A buzz and blaze of flies…
The hot wind puffs the giddy airs…
The great sun rakes the skies.
No sound in all the stagnant trench
Where forty standing men
Endure the sweat and grit and stench.
Like cattle in a pen.
Robert Nichols
Chapter 26
By the end of June the Gallipoli campaign had cost some forty-two thousand casualties, killed, wounded and sick. The support of the government was still half-hearted and, although Sir Ian Hamilton had been promised another division, it had not yet been decided to go all-out for Gallipoli or to send reinforcements in sufficient strength to tip the scales. With the military effort divided between two theatres of war the politicians were in a dilemma and there were those who believed that, in