1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [253]
It was a terrible night for the New Zealanders and their progress was cripplingly slow. The effort of climbing precipitous slopes, hacking a way through bush and undergrowth through narrow gorges, scrabbling up rocky heights and pinnacles, negotiating sheer drops, even keeping direction through trackless mountainous terrain, would have been a formidable challenge to skilled mountaineers travelling light and in daytime. But it was pitch dark and the troops were not travelling light. They had no mules, no carts, no means of transporting ammunition, picks and shovels for digging in, plus the vital supplies of food and water and medical supplies that must sustain them, perhaps for days, so in addition to his rifle and pack, each man was carrying a deadly weight. Depending on Greek guides who appeared to be trusting more to luck than to experience, many lost direction in the ‘short cuts’ they proposed and were forced to retrace their weary steps when some tortuous route came to an abrupt end in a cleft too narrow for even a single man to squeeze through. The climb would have taxed the strength of the fittest men. Debilitated as the New Zealanders were by heat and dysentery, it was a wonder that they made it at all.
Not even the men of the Suvla landing force were in fine fettle. They were not yet acclimatised to the enervating heat and even on the offshore islands there was an epidemic of diarrhoea which soon spread to the new arrivals. To cap it all, on the day before the landing large numbers of them had been inoculated against cholera and their arms were stiff and sore as a result. Their Commander, General Sir Frederick Stopford, was also under the weather. The three newly arrived divisions destined for Suvla Bay had been formed into a single new Corps and Sir Ian Hamilton had begged the War Office to supply an experienced senior officer to command it, even going so far as to suggest that General Byng or General Rawlinson would admirably fit the bill. But Byng and Rawlinson were serving in France and invaluable though the experience of either officer would be, Lord Kitchener dismissed out of hand the very idea that they could be spared for months – or even days – on end. And there was another point to be considered. In command of the 10th Division, part of the newly formed IX Corps, was one of the Army’s most senior generals and under no circumstances could Major-General Mahon be expected to take orders from a Corps Commander less senior than himself. It would be an unthinkable breach of etiquette and tradition and not for a moment could Kitchener contemplate such an outrageous idea. A senior man must be appointed, and that was that.
The difficulty was that officers above the rank of Major-General were thin on the ground. Lieutenant-Generals were only one step below Field Marshals, the highest rank in the Army, and only Generals Ewart and Stopford were available for active service – and even they had only been brought out of comfortable retirement by the exigencies of war. The choice had fallen on Sir Frederick Stopford, and although weighed down with honours earned in more than four decades of distinguished service, mostly in staff or administrative posts, Stopford’s experience of soldiering in the field was negligible. He had never led troops into battle, he had never commanded so much as a battalion in an engagement, he was sixty-one years old, and his health was indifferent. But there was no one else. On the eve of the landing at Suvla Bay General Stopford was not a happy man. He had sprained his knee that morning and the Staff Officer sent by Sir Ian Hamilton