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By Root 1735 0

the destroyer Jonquil where he had slept all night on deck, General Stopford was as ignorant as anyone of the situation ashore and he was certainly in no position to influence events. It had been his intention to land with the troops and set up his Headquarters ashore but he had changed his mind and elected to stay on board – perhaps because of his injured knee, perhaps because he imagined that from the Jonquil he would obtain a more coordinated view. Either way it was a fatal mistake. Only half his staff was on board, the ship was not equipped for communication and small boats which might have carried messages to and from the shore were so scarce that it took one officer, desperate to discuss the situation with his Commander on board the Jonquil, six hours before he could find a vessel available to make the journey. As for Stopford himself, for all he knew of the situation he might as well have stayed on Lemnos. According to the single message which he succeeded in transmitting to GHQ he was satisfied that the troops had landed, adding with no hint of dismay that they had been unable to progress far beyond the beach. Its complacent tone did little to allay the anxiety of Sir Ian Hamilton, although he was comforted by the assumption that the message had been long delayed and merely described the situation early in the morning of the 7th. But as the hours passed and no news of further progress reached him, his anxiety deepened for he had heard from other sources that opposition at Suvla had been slight and he was desperate for confirmation that the troops had advanced and seized the Anafarta Hills. The fact was that they had hardly advanced at all.

Spr. J. Johnston.

Presently next morning the word came over from someone who appeared to be in charge with orders saying ‘Do not retire, stay and dig trenches for yourselves where you are, and hold them as long as possible,’ so after a while we were down in a trench deep enough to afford us some cover. This was done with our entrenching tools, because the picks and shovels had been landed with our tool carts elsewhere! Then we dug towards the others on each end of us and connected up the trenches together. Soon after we had finished a couple of our company officers arrived and took over. At about midnight that night we were told to fall in and form ranks, and we marched under cover of darkness over to a place called Lala Baba where we started again digging trenches. We had come about one and a half miles or so along the edge of the Salt Lake which was a dry bed at the time. We were soon put to work again setting up barbed wire entanglements there, and afterwards at Chocolate Hill.

The order to ‘dig in’ had not come from Sir Ian Hamilton and it was the last thing he intended, especially in the light of the disturbing news brought back by a reconnaissance aircraft. Strong columns of Turkish reinforcements had been spotted marching towards Suvla from Bulair. It would be some hours before they got there, and there was still time for the troops to advance – but it was fast running out. The previous afternoon a message from Hamilton had urged Stopford to ‘Push on rapidly’ and to ‘Take every advantage before you are forestalled,’ but it had been couched in terms of such tentative encouragement that it might easily have been read as an expression of Hamilton’s confidence in his Corps Commander rather than a direct order from the man at the top. Not for the first time in Hamilton’s dealings with subordinates his characteristic gentle courtesy had betrayed him in a crisis which demanded overt bluntness and resolution.

A second laconic message received next morning, 8 August, revealed with horrifying clarity that General Stopford’s imagination had stopped short at achieving the landing itself and that, contrary to the evidence, it was still inflamed by the belief that rows of trenches bristling with hostile troops stood in the path of an advance. Stopford had even taken the trouble to send a message of congratulation to the troops on their achievement so far, and he was in high spirits