THE VALLEY OF TORMENT
The loss of the crest of Sari Bair was the turning point in the fight for the Dardanelles. The whole of the Turkish forces were thrown into action at this point. The plan of attack had been designed so that a portion at least of these defensive forces should be held up by the advance of the troops which had landed at Suvla Bay. But the advance of those troops was delayed, for reasons which do not rightly come within the scope of this book, and therefore the bulk of the defending forces could be concentrated in one desperate and successful effort to drive back the invaders.
But the defenders paid dearly for their success. The slope up which the New Zealanders had advanced with such painful effort, and over which the victorious Turks were now pouring in dense masses, was ranged by the Anzac artillery, by the guns of the warships and by the Indian Mountain batteries. Their fire was all concentrated upon these serried masses of the enemy, and great gaps were torn in their ranks as they swept over the hill-top.
Even deadlier was the work of the New Zealand machine-gun section, directed by the famous Major Wallingford, D.S.O. A whole book could be written of the feats which the New Zealanders ascribe to this remarkable soldier, "The human machine-gun" as they call him. His quick eye for a tactical advantage had grasped the probability of a rush of Turks over the crest of Sari Bair, and his ten guns were posted to take the fullest advantage of the materialization of that surmise.
In the slaughter that followed those ten guns consumed 16,000 rounds of ammunition, and the claim made of 5,000 hits is probably a conservative estimate. But our own losses had been very heavy. Of the 37,000 men under General Birdwood's command on August 6, 12,000 were out of action on the evening of August 10. Of these quite one half were New Zealanders. Gloriously had they fought. Their silent charges in the dark will for ever remain as the high-water mark of restrained courage and enterprise. Their wounded showed the same qualities of silent endurance and devotion to their fellows.
The New Zealand wounded had an experience that is an epic of suffering. Only the supreme fortitude with which it was endured impels me to give some account of the days and nights spent by over four hundred of these heroes in a place which they have christened the Valley of Torment. It was placed on the rugged side of Sari Bair, a deep depression in the hillside. On one side of it a mountain wall rose in a perpendicular cliff that would have defied a mountain goat to climb it. On the other rose the steep declivity of Rhododendron Ridge. Below, the valley opened out upon a flat plateau, so swept by the guns of both sides that no living thing could exist for one moment upon its flat, clear surface.
The only way in and out of the valley was from above, where the New Zealanders were fighting like possessed beings for the foothold they had won on the crest of Sari Bair. And to this valley the stretcher-bearers had carried the men who had fallen in the fight, a sad little group of wounded men whose numbers were hourly increasing. There, too, crawled those who were less severely injured. And there the unwounded soldiers carried their stricken mates for shelter from the hail of bullets, while the fight lasted.
As the wounded men came in, a devoted band of Red Cross men lent them what aid they could. There was no doctor nearer than the dressing station on the beach, but these Red Cross workers stayed their wounds with bandages, tying tourniquets round limbs to check the flow of arterial blood, and making tortured men as easy as circumstances would permit.
The approach to this valley was so dangerous that no one might come to it by daylight. There was no water there, until one man, less severely wounded than some of his comrades, dug into a moist spot far down the valley, and chanced on a spring that yielded a thin trickle of brackish water.
By midday on August 8 there were three hundred wounded men in this place of refuge, and more were continually arriving. They were suffering from all the terrible manglings that exploding bombs and high explosive shells can inflict. And in the Valley of Torment they lay and endured. Some of them told their experiences, and sought to cheer the rest by predicting a great victory as the result of the attack in which they were taking part. Here and there a man could be heard reciting verses to those who would listen.
No one moaned, and no one uttered a complaint. When a man too sorely wounded died of his hurts, they expressed their thanks that he had been spared further pain. The filling of the little spring was eagerly awaited, so that each man could have his lips moistened with a little brackish water. So there they lay and waited for the night, which might bring them aid.
When night at last came, the weary stretcher-bearers tried to move some of them over the ridge to a safe valley which lay on the other side. A few were so moved, but these men had been working for days and nights without rest or respite, and the task was beyond their strength; for the steepness and roughness of that hillside is beyond description. A message was sent down to the dressing station asking for help, and a reply was sent in the early morning that it would be forthcoming on the following night.
Through the night the parched men were tortured by the sight of water being carried through the valley to the men in the firing line above them. There was none of it for them, and they did not expect any; for they knew the necessities of warfare, and recognized that at such a time the combatant must come first.
The next day came with a hot sun, and clouds of flies. Also there came many more wounded to the Valley of Torment, until the tale of living men exceeded four hundred. And that day many died. Among those who lived the torture from tourniquets that had been left too long on wounded limbs became unendurable. Many of them will never recover the free use of the limbs so tortured; others have already died from the unavoidable mortification which resulted from this long delay.
Meanwhile, down at the dressing stations, the weary doctors were struggling with hundreds of cases just as bad, and men seriously wounded were waiting by scores for their turn for attention. These are the necessary evils of war, accentuated at Gallipoli by the very rough nature of the country in which the fighting took place, and by the severity of the struggle and the importance of the issues depending upon its outcome.
At last that day ended too, and evening fell with a cool breeze. The exhausted men heard the stealthy approach of many men in the dark, from the safe gully that lay beyond the range. And one of them, out of thankfulness, began to sing the hymn—
At even, ere the sun was set,
The sick, O Lord, around Thee lay.
Nearly all of them took up the singing.
While they were still singing, there came over the ridge a large number of soldiers, and put them all on stretchers. Then the new-comers, some thousands in number, ranged themselves in two rows facing one another. The double row of soldiers stretched up to the crest of the ridge, and down the other side into the safe gully that was there. And each stretcher was passed from hand to hand, up the steep ridge and down the slope to the safety that lay on the other side.
When all had been taken from the Valley of Torment, a long procession of men with stretchers was formed, bearing the wounded down to the sea. Two miles it stretched from start to finish, and it serpentined slowly down the gully, each pair of bearers walking with slow care, for the sake of the tortured man who was in their charge.
So the wounded men of New Zealand were carried out of the Valley of Torment. One could fill whole volumes about the tender care of the lightly wounded for their more grievously injured comrades, and of the stoical indifference to pain and personal suffering shown by these men. I have met many of the men who suffered there; and I know that in their eyes the real tragedy of the experience is not the torture they experienced. It is that, after all, their comrades eventually had to forgo the advantage that had been won by so much hardihood and loss of life.
Most handsomely, and for all time, has General Sir Ian Hamilton proclaimed the fact that they were blameless of the final catastrophe. His tribute concludes as follows:—
"The grand coup had not come off. The Narrows were still out of sight and beyond field-gun range. But this was not the fault of Lieutenant-General Birdwood or any of the officers and men under his command. No mortal can command success; Lieutenant-General Birdwood had done all that mortal man can do to deserve it. The way in which he worked out his instructions into practical arrangements and dispositions upon the terrain reflect high credit upon his military capacity. I also wish to bring to your Lordship's notice the valuable services of Major-General Godley, commanding the New Zealand and Australian Division. He had under him at one time a force amounting to two divisions, which he handled with conspicuous ability.
"As for the troops, the joyous alacrity with which they faced danger, wounds and death, as if they were some new form of exciting recreation, has astonished me—old campaigner as I am. I will say no more, leaving Major-General Godley to speak for what happened under his eyes:—'I cannot close my report,' he says, 'without placing on record my unbounded admiration of the work performed, and the gallantry displayed, by the troops and their leaders during the severe fighting involved in these operations. Though the Australian, New Zealand, and Indian units had been confined to trench duty in a cramped space for some four months, and though the troops of the New Armies had only just landed from a sea voyage, and many of them had not been previously under fire, I do not believe that any troops in the world could have accomplished more. All ranks vied with one another in the performance of gallant deeds, and more than worthily upheld the best traditions of the British Army.'
"Although the Sari Bair ridge was the key to the whole of my tactical conception, and although the temptation to view this vital Anzac battle at closer quarters was very hard to resist, there was nothing in its course or conduct to call for my personal intervention."