CHAPTER X

RETROSPECT

“So awakened in their hearts the strongest of all fellowships, the fellowship of the sword.”

—  W. B. Yeats.

WHAT does one recollect most clearly when one looks back at Gallipoli?

A multitude of memories cluster together: dry, sand-floored gullies, thirsty men crowded round a well, Indians grooming their mules, lithe, half-naked Australians, parched, sun-dried scrub, but above and beyond all these one remembers the graves. Not a man came back from the Peninsula without leaving some friend behind there, and it is bitter to think that the last resting-place of those we loved is in the hands of our enemy. Not all the dead of Gallipoli lie in the Peninsula itself. There are crowded cemeteries at Malta and Alexandria, and many a brave body has been lowered over the side of a hospital ship into the Aegean to mingle his bones with those of Argonauts and Crusaders and all the heroes of a bygone age. Nevertheless, when one thinks of Gallipoli one thinks first of graves.

You could not walk far in the Peninsula without seeing them, sometimes thickly crowded together outside a field-ambulance, sometimes a solitary cross marking the spot where a sniper's victim had been buried. Each of these tombs had at its head a little wooden cross bearing the man's name, regiment, and rank, and the date of his death, and in some cases his comrades had done a little more. Here Australian gunners had made a pattern with fuse caps on the earth that covered their friend, and there a lid of a biscuit-tin had been beaten into a plaque, bearing a crucifix. Death had made strange bedfellows: in one little cemetery high up at the Chailak Dere behind Rhododendron Ridge there lay side by side Private John Jones, Royal Welsh Fusiliers and Sergeant Rotahiru of the Maoris. From the two ends of the earth Christian and Buddhist and Sikh had come to fight in the same cause, and in death they lay together. It was my lot in the last days of September to endeavour to compile a register of where the men of my Battalion had been interred, and as I went from grave to grave writing down the name of one Irishman after another I was irresistibly reminded of Davis's lines:

“But on far foreign fields from Dunkirk to Belgrade

Lie the heroes and chiefs of the Irish Brigade.”

Now the age-long quarrel with the Turk had carried Irishmen even further afield and the “Wild Geese” who fought on the Danube under Prince Eugene found their successors in those of the l0th Division who lay under the Cross of Christ in the barren waste of Gallipoli.

Not indeed that every grave was marked with a cross. Some had fallen within the enemy's lines and others were hastily buried under the parados of a captured trench without even a stone to mark where they lay. In the heat of battle, it was impossible to delay for forms and ceremonies, and often even the names of the fallen were not noted. Only those who died in hospital were buried with proper rites, but it mattered little where the bodies of the heroes rested. The whole land is one shrine, made sacred by the memory of devotion to duty and self-sacrifice, and no man could wish to lie else- where than in the ground he had won from the enemy.

Yet it seemed a pity that it should be knocked to pieces so soon. Much labour spread over many weary months had gone to form it and to make it worthy of the name of Irish, and it was tragic that it should practically be annihilated with so little tangible result achieved. It is not perhaps altogether easy for the civilian to understand how sorrowful it seems unless he realises that a unit trained to arms has a spiritual as well as a material being. A battalion of infantry is not merely a collection of a thousand men armed with rifles; it is, or at any rate, it should be, a community, possessing mutual hopes, mutual fears, and mutual affection. Officers and men have learnt to know one another and to rely on one another, and if they are worth their salt, the spiritual bond uniting them is far stronger and more effectual for good than the power conferred by rank and authority. In the 10th Division the bonds uniting all ranks were unusually strong. In the first place came love of Ireland shared in equal degree by officers and men. Second to this, and only second, was pride of regiment, happiness at forming part of a unit which had had so many glorious deeds recorded of it and resolution to be worthy of its fame. The names of the battalion, Dublins, Munsters, Inniskillings, Connaught Rangers, spoke not only of home, but also of splendid achievements performed in the past, and nerved us to courage and endurance in the future.

Above and beyond these feelings, common to all Irish soldiers, the 10th Division had a peculiar intimacy gained from the circumstances of its formation. It was the first Irish Division to take the field in war. Irish Brigades there had often been; they had fought under the fleur-de-lys and the tricolour of France and under the Stars and Stripes as well as they had done under the Union Jack. But never before in Ireland's history had she sent forth a whole division (but for one battalion) of her sons to the battle-field.

The old battalions of the Regular Army had done magnificently, but they had necessarily been brigaded with English, Scotch and Welsh units. The 10th Division was the first Division almost entirely composed of Irish battalions to face the enemy. Officers and men alike knew this and were proud of their destiny. As the battalions marched through the quiet English countryside, the drums and fifes shrilled out "St. Patrick's Day" or "Brian Boru's March," and the dark streets of Basingstoke echoed the voices that chanted "God Save Ireland" as the units marched down to entrain. Nor did we lack "the green." One unit sewed shamrocks on to its sleeves, another wore them as helmet badges. Almost every company cherished somewhere an entirely unofficial green flag, as dear to the men as if they were the regimental colours themselves. These constituted an outward and visible sign that the honour of Ireland was in the Division's keeping, and the men did not forget it.

There was singularly little jealousy in the Division. Naturally, where there were two battalions of one regiment in the same brigade, each one of them cherished the belief that they and they alone were the true representatives of the old regiment, but this was only wholesome emulation. Where this cause for rivalry did not exist units were on very good terms, and at Basingstoke, where the different messes first really got to know one another, there was any amount of friendship and good fellowship. Every battalion, of course, behaved that it was the finest Service Battalion in the Army, but it was also convinced that the remainder of the Division, though inferior to itself, reached a very much higher standard than any other unit in K.1.

Having regard to this sentiment it was with great regret that officers and men found that the Division was not destined to take the field as a whole. The first shock was the loss of the artillery, and the realisation that we should be compelled to rely on the support of strange gunners when we took the field. Next came the fact that the 29th Brigade was detached and sent to Anzac, where in turn it met with yet a further sub-division, its battalions going into action as isolated units.

Finally, the mischance that sent the 5th Inniskillings, the two battalions of Munster Fusiliers, and the Pioneer battalion into action on the Kiretch Tepe, while the remainder of the 30th and 31st Brigades were fighting under General Hill at the other end of the Suvla area, destroyed the last chance that the Division as a whole might place some distinct achievement to its credit.

Of the dash and eagerness of the men there was no doubt. All they needed was to be told what they were to do, and they would carry it out whatever the cost. They showed, too, on the 16th August, that in addition to eagerness in the charge, a quality never lacking in Irish soldiers, they possessed the rarer and finer military quality of dogged tenacity. Whoever may be blamed for the small success achieved in Gallipoli, no discredit rests on the rank and file of the 10th Division.

The circumstances attending the formation of absolutely new units had brought officers and men into a somewhat unusual relationship. In the old Regular Army, except for a few N.C.O.s and old soldiers who have wives and families in married quarters, and an occasional indiscreet youth who marries off the strength, the family life of the soldier never comes under the officers' notice at all. In the New Army things were very different. The rapid expansion of our military forces that took place in August and September, 1914, had placed a tremendous strain on the resources of Paymasters and Record Officers. The confusion and delay inevitably caused by this often meant considerable hardship to the soldier's family, and he had no one to turn to for help but his officer.

First came the question of men whose employers were prepared to increase their pay to the level of their previous wages provided they could prove that they had enlisted. As a rule, the official papers were long in coming, and in consequence company-commanders made out certificates that the men were serving, which, though unofficial, proved effective. Next came the question of allowance; separation allowance and allowance to dependants, which involved an enormous amount of work and entailed a close acquaintanceship with the details of each man's family history. Finally came the work of stamping and keeping up-to-date the National Insurance cards, which formed the last remaining bond that linked the soldier to his civilian life.

Meanwhile, officer and man had been gaining insight into each other's character. The Company Commander had watched his men change from a mob in civilian clothes to a disciplined body in khaki. He had been busy picking out the intelligent, encouraging the backward, stimulating the lazy, and checking the first steps of a few towards drunkenness and vice. In all this he had had the invaluable assistance of his company sergeant-major, and an intimacy had grown up between them of no ordinary kind. When it was severed, as it too often was, on the field of battle, the survivor felt that he had been maimed and deprived of an invaluable support.

On a smaller scale a similar relationship arose between the subaltern and his platoon-sergeant, while among the specialists, signallers and machine-gunners, the bond between officer and men was even closer as became those who shared a common mystery. The whole unit had grown up together; the men in the ranks had watched the subaltern who had joined ignorant of the rudiments of drill acquire knowledge and self- confidence, and in the process had learned to trust him themselves. The officers had seen with pleasure a boy selected for a lance-corporal's stripe because he showed signs of intelligence, gradually gaining experience and the power to command men, until sometimes he graduated into an excellent sergeant. There were many common memories; wet days on the Curragh, long treks in the Hampshire dust, scuffles in the hedgerows during a field-day, bivouacs in a twilight meadow, all combined to cement the feeling of friendship between officer and men. Sometimes these memories went back to a period before the War. Nearly all the officers were Irish, and most of them were serving in their Territorial units, with the result that they often found privates who were their near neighbours and knew the woods, and the bogs, and the wet winding roads of home. All this was good; it gave the Division a character that it could not otherwise have obtained, but it had its black side when men began to fall. It was not merely Number So-and-so Private Kelly who was killed, it was little Kelly, who had cooked (very badly) for the mess at Basingstoke, or Kelly who had begged so eagerly not to be left behind with the first reinforcements, or Kelly, the only son of a widowed mother, who lived on the Churchtown Road, three miles from home.

To the staff and the High Command, men must necessarily be no more than cyphers on a casualty list, but to the regimental officer it is very much otherwise, and every man who falls causes a fresh pang to his commander's heart. Few things are more distressing to an officer than to hear the roll of his unit called after an engagement, to look in vain among the thinned ranks for many familiar faces, to hear no answer given to name after name of the men with whom his life has been bound up for months. This and not any extreme of physical suffering is the hardest ordeal that a soldier has to face.

Nor was this loss of friends and comrades the only cause of sorrow. The same feelings have been felt in every unit of the New Army after a strenuous engagement, but the l0th Division had a special reason for regret since the 10th Division was a thing unique in itself. Ireland is a land of long and bitter memories, and those memories make it extremely difficult for Irishmen to unite for any common purpose. Many have believed it impossible, and would have prophesied that the attempt to create an Irish Division composed of men of every class, creed and political opinion would be foredoomed to failure. And yet it succeeded.

The old quarrels, the inherited animosities were forgotten, and men who would have scowled at one another without speaking became comrades and friends. Only those who know Ireland can realise how difficult this was.

The Division was not composed of professional soldiers; many of the officers and men had played, or, at least, had relatives who had played, an active part in the agrarian and political struggles that have raged in Ireland for the last forty years. Yet all this went for nothing; the bond of common service and common sacrifice proved so strong and enduring that Catholic and Protestant, Unionist and Nationalist, lived and fought and died side by side like brothers. Little was spoken concerning the points on which we differed, and once we had tacitly agreed to let the past be buried we found thousands of points on which we agreed. To an Englishman this no doubt appears natural, for beneath all superficial disagreements the English do possess a nature in common and look on things from the same point of view, but in Ireland up to the present things have been very different. It is only to be hoped that the willingness to forget old wrongs and injustices, and to combine for a common purpose, that existed in the l0th Division, may be a good augury for the future.

No doubt the experience of the two other Irish Divisions of the New Army has been the same. Both of them have since won abundant glory in France. When the War is over, all these combats shared together, and dangers faced side-by-side, should count for something in the making of the new Ireland.

No doubt it may seem to the outsider that all this is founded on an unstable foundation, and that the 10th Division did not do so much after all. Measured by the scale of material results he may seem correct. At Suvla, indeed, they claim to have taken Chocolate Hill and to have gained ground along the Kiretch Tepe Sirt, part of which they were unable to hold. At Anzac two battalions seized part of the Chunuk Bair and held it until they were driven off, a third succeeded in maintaining its position on Rhododendron Ridge, while the fourth captured the wells of Kabak Kuyu and gained a footing for a time on Hill 60. All these were but incidents in what was itself an unsuccessful campaign, yet officers and men did all that was required of them. They died. There was no fear or faltering, there was no retirement without orders.

The 10th Division, young soldiers without knowledge or experience of war, were plunged into one of the hardest and fiercest campaigns ever waged by the British Army, and acquitted themselves with credit. They make no claim to exclusive glory, to have done more than it was their duty to do, but they have no cause to be ashamed. Their shattered ranks, their enormous list of casualties, show clearly enough what they endured, and the words used by Sir Ian Hamilton of one brigade are true of the whole Division. He wrote: —

“The old German notion that no unit would stand a loss of more than 25 per cent, had been completely falsified. The 13th Division and the 29th Brigade of the 10th (Irish) Division had lost more than twice that proportion, and in spirit were game for as much more fighting as might be required.”

This may reasonably be applied to the 30th and 31st Brigades as well as to the 29th, for the best proof of the enduring spirit of the Division may be found in the fact that when after having lost nearly 75 per cent, of its original strength, it was hastily filled up with drafts and sent under-officered and barely rested to fight a new and arduous campaign single-handed, it did creditably.

In some quarters, particularly in Ireland, which is a sensitive and suspicious country, it has been suggested that the services of the Division have not been adequately recognized. Little is to be gained by engaging in a controversy on this point. No doubt if on the grounds that the Gallipoli campaign was unsuccessful, the men who fought there are refused a clasp to their medals, and the regiments who took part in it are not permitted to add its name to the battle honours on their colours, much resentment will be aroused, but it is hardly likely that this will occur. If precedents are needed, Talavera and Busaco, both of which figure as British victories, were followed by retirements and by no definite result other than the exhaustion of the enemy's forces. Corunna, too, which was merely a repulse of a pursuing enemy, followed by embarkation and evacuation, is considered a victory, and while these names are emblazoned among the battle-honours of regiments there is little reason for excluding Gallipoli, where men suffered as much and fought as bravely.

But, after all, these considerations, though sentiment endears them to the soldier, are minor matters. The soldier's true reward is the gratitude of his fellow-countrymen, and that we have in full measure obtained. Ireland will not easily forget the deeds of the 10th Division.

Source: The Tenth (Irish) Division at Gallipoli by Major Bryan Cooper, 1917.