Don’t duck. It upsets the men, said Great Grandad before being shot dead
As he joins the royals at the Gallipoli centenary, HARRY MOUNT tells a very personal story
FOR such a tragic place, Gallipoli is heartbreakingly beautiful.
Yesterday’s service for the dead of the Commonwealth and Ireland was held at a staggeringly pretty spot, right at the southern tip of the peninsula.
There, the Cape Helles Memorial was freshly carved with the words: ‘Lest we forget 25 April 2015’.
As we stood remembering the dead in the early evening light, I glanced to the west, over to the turquoise Aegean; and then to the east, and the shimmering, milky blue water of the Dardanelles. This is the narrow channel up to Istanbul that Winston Churchill, disastrously, thought was the magical route to bypassing the deadlock on the Western Front, and winning the Great War.
A century ago today, a vast allied force landed on the Gallipoli peninsula in one of the most heroic, but doomed, campaigns of the conflict. As Prince Charles read from John Masefield’s poem Gallipoli, 11 warships – from Turkey, France, Australia, New Zealand and Britain – gathered in the Dardanelles strait below.
It was hard not to think of the ships that didn’t make it up that stretch of water a century ago. Faced with a channel packed with mines, the Allies instead tried to fight their way up the beaches on to the Turkish-held cliffs – with disastrous results.
Most moving of all was a reading by Roger Boissier CBE, whose father, Lieutenant Commander EG Boissier, planned the burial of the poet Rupert Brooke a century ago this week. Brooke died from illness on his way to Gallipoli.
His reading of Brooke’s The Dead rolled across the Aegean to the island of Skyros, where Brooke lies.
A century on, Anglo-Turkish relations are a lot rosier. Prince Charles spent most of the day side by side with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s strongman for more than a decade.
But the real star of the show was Charles’s son, Prince Harry. In his sparkling white dress uniform, he stood head and shoulders above the rest of the great and the good.
His reading from AP Herbert’s The Bathe enraptured the audience: ‘Here the dust blows ever in the eyes/And wrangling round are the weary fevered men/Forever made with flies.’
The Dardanelles divides Europe from Asia. Yesterday’s service was held on the European side of the water. On the other side lay Asia and – on the horizon – the mound of Troy, where the most famous conflict in history, the Trojan War, was fought 3,000 years ago.
When my great-grandfather came to fight – and die – at Gallipoli a century ago, he was deeply excited at the thought of sailing to Troy. Brigadier-General Lord Longford, who was wounded in the Boer War, read classics at Oxford but, at the age of 50, he’d never made it to this cradle of European civilisation.
He never did quite make it to Troy though. In August 1915, he was killed by a Turkish bullet, leading the men of the 2nd South Midland Mounted Brigade of the 2nd Mounted Division, in the last fatal push of the Gallipoli campaign, a few miles north of where I stood yesterday.
Thomas Longford was one of 29,500 British and Irish servicemen killed at Gallipoli; another 140,000 were wounded. Altogether, the Allies lost more than 250,000 dead and wounded.
The Australians and New Zealanders, who commemorate their dead today with Anzac Day, lost 11,000 men, with another 25,000 wounded. Casualties to Ottoman forces, with some Germans, were more than 300,000, with more than 87,000 dying.
At yesterday’s service, 15 of us Gallipoli descendants – brought over by the Government and the Gallipoli Association – represented a wide cross-section of British life.
The ancestors included Private William Hewitt of the 1st/7th Manchester Regiment, and Private Harry Cronshaw of the 1st/7th Lan- cashire Fusiliers. They both died at Gallipoli, Hewitt falling during the 3rd Battle of Krithia. Cronshaw was killed manning a machine gun in Gulley Ravine.
One descendant, Lyn Edmonds, from Godmanchester, Cambridgeshire, was tracing the journey of her grandfather Private Benjamin Hurt, who landed on April 25. Despite being wounded a few weeks later, he stayed to fight on until January 1916.
From Derbyshire, he joined up, aged 17, in 1909, and fought with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Of the 1,012 members of his battalion who landed a century ago, only 90 or so remained on the peninsula when the unit was withdrawn in early 1916.
‘It’s a privilege and emotional experience to be here in April to remember my grandfather exactly 100 years later, and on the very spot where he landed under fire,’ said Mrs Edmonds.
‘He was so fortunate to have survived the terrible campaign, and I will be thinking of his many friends who did not return.’
Gallipoli is now a lovely national park, rich in vines, wheat and white apple and pink cherry blossom.
Still, everywhere I looked yesterday, in among the fertile fields, I could see white clumps of stone: the Turkish memorials and the vast graveyards kept in immaculate condition by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
They never found my great-grandfather’s body. He fell in no man’s land, where the stretcher parties couldn’t reach.
The gunfire was so heavy that bullet met bullet in mid-air and formed squashed, lead crosses. You can still see them in the Gallipoli Museum.
Fearing his body wouldn’t be recognised, Longford had had his coat of arms, a crowned eagle, tattooed on his chest, along with the family motto: Gloria Virtutis Umbra – Glory is the shadow of virtue.
But, by the time the war was over
‘He knew he was going to die’ ‘They never found his body’
and the bodies collected, the dead were beyond recognition.
My great-grandfather knew he was going to die. Just before marching to his death, he called over his second-in-command, Fred Cripps, and said: ‘I wanted to say goodbye to you, as we shall both inevitably be killed this afternoon.’ Longford was only half right: Cripps survived. As they strode across the bright, white ground of a dried-up salt bed, shells burst overhead, splattering them with shrapnel.
Miraculously, both Longford and Cripps made it to the shelter of a low mound, called Chocolate Hill, which is still clogged with cocoacoloured mud today
As mist and darkness descended, Cripps, who had been shot in the leg, ducked down amid intense gunfire. ‘Don’t duck, Fred,’ said Longford, ‘It does no good and the men don’t like it.’
They were his last words. Longford was killed by rifle fire as he marched toward the enemy, walking stick in one hand, map in the other.
As the ceremony drew to a close last night at Cape Helles, the sun began to set over the Aegean horizon. A few miles away, at anchor in the Dardanelles, sat HMS Bulwark, the flagship of the Royal Navy.
Earlier yesterday, Prince Charles and Prince Harry j oined the descendants of the Gallipoli veterans on board as we toured the ship.
Charles said: ‘Despite the appalling sacrifices made by so many in two world wars, intolerance combined with the willingness to use the most barbaric violence remain a persistent and prevailing source of division and conflict.
‘We all have a shared duty to find ways to overcome intolerance to fight against hatred and prejudice so that we can truly say we have honoured the sacrifice of all those who have fought and died here in Gallipoli and elsewhere.’
HMS Bulwark won’t be at anchor f or l ong. This week, i t was announced she is being prepared for deployment to the southern Mediterranean to take on the people-smugglers of Libya.
A century after Gallipoli, the Mediterranean remains a beautiful but cruel sea.
THE attack began at sea, before we could even spy land. The 15in guns on our flagship, the Queen Elizabeth, opened fire and what a noise it was, rather like an express train going through a tunnel.
As we neared Gallipoli beach, the enemy opened fire, and suddenly all hell was let loose and we were among it. Shells were bursting overhead, in the water, on the land, everywhere, all around us. The fire from the Turks got heavier until it was like hail whipping up the water.
The noise was tremendous but, I don’t know why, I seemed to have no fear. I was 18 years old, a boy from Leeds who had volunteered for the Army even before the war began — simply because I loved horses, and a soldier’s life gave me the chance to work with them.
Now here I was, on the Turkish coast, about to take part in a bitter pitched battle planned by the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. I had never faced fire before.
Below decks on a nearby boat my beloved Timbuc was tethered with the other horses. He was a black gelding 16 hands high, with two white hind socks and a white star on his forehead. Timbuc was my constant companion — at night I slept beside him for warmth, and we understood each other as though we talked the same language.
I didn’t know it yet, but Timbuc and I would serve right through World War I together . . . until a parting so heart-breaking it would leave me weeping every Remembrance Day for the rest of my life.
At that moment, though, I had no thought of the future. As our flotilla of 200 boats pushed closer to the beach, in a maelstrom of bullets and artillery fire, I saw my first comrade killed: a shell burst, shrapnel hitting the troops packed onto our landing craft.
All we could do was watch as he bled to death. He became whiter as his sunburn paled, and all of us knew we could be next.
We looked at each other — some silently, some shaking, some yelling excitedly — all of us waiting our turn to land. We put his body over the side. I still see his face to this day.
The strip of coastline in front of us at Cape Helles on the Gallipoli Peninsula was called V Beach. It was 300 yards long, with rows of barbed wire its entire length, and a line of trenches with firing bays for machine guns and pompoms, the guns that hurled large explosive shells.
A few brave souls ahead of us managed to fight their way ashore, where they flung themselves flat, with a low sandbank as their only cover.
One sailor managed to pole his wooden troop carrier to the water’s edge, but when he turned to urge the men onto the beach he saw they were all dead. As we watched, the sailor was hit by bullets, and his little boat slipped back into the sea and sank.
A brigade of men from the 29th Division, to which I was attached as a signaller, were aboard a ship close by, called the River Clyde. The plan was to run the ship aground, so the men could rush down stairways from doors cut in the hull and storm the beachhead.
But the Clyde could not quite make it to shore. The holes were opened and the men tumbled down the stairs, in full kit, laden with their rifles and rations and extra ammunition — into the deep water where they drowned.
There were bodies f l oating everywhere and around our boat the sea was red with blood. Boats drifted by full of the dead and wounded, while drowning men clung to wreckage and struggled to stay afloat, until they were hit by a bullet or bomb-burst.
On that day I left my boyhood behind. I was the youngest of four children, born in a house on the Barnsley Road i n Cudworth, Yorkshire, in 1897.
My father was a teacher, but he was drowned when I was five years old. Determined we should not starve, our mother took us to Leeds, where she got work as a seamstress.
Mother was a small woman with a strong, determined character, whose parents were farmers near Wakefield. Every summer we went to stay on the farm, and I used to help my grandfather wash the pigs on Saturdays.
My brother Joseph and I would try to ride the cows, too. They had a hide like sandpaper, and when we jumped on them they bucked and threw us off. My uncle taught me at ten years old how to handle a gun and shoot rabbits; I did not think then that I would ever have to use a rifle to kill a man.
Joseph, who was several years older than me, joined the Leeds Rifles. I used to march alongside him when the battalion were in town. But I missed the farm animals, and whenever I could get away from my lessons I went to watch the horses pulling hansom cabs, buses and delivery carts.
The only way I could ride a horse in Leeds was to hire one for an hour, if I could afford it, from the Leeds Cab Company. These were muscular beasts and it was a thrill to trot around the streets and into the parks.
The horses were bred to be placid and calm, and it took a real dig with the heels to get them to go above a canter. ‘ Don’t gallop!’ the cabmen would shout as I rode off.
As soon as I was old enough, I signed up for the Territorial Army, joining a mounted unit of the Royal Engineers Signals Corps on my 17th birthday. Finally, I could be with horses every evening and weekend.
We were trained in the old technology of Morse code and semaphore, as well as the modern telephones and wireless radio. But my favourite skills involved driving a six-horse team at a gallop, rolling out signals cable from a wagon at high speed. When war was declared with Germany on August 4, 1914, I kissed my sisters, Annie and Winifred, goodbye. My mother’s strength seemed to evaporate as her arms tightened around me.
It would be the last time she would hug her boy. The man who returned would be very different from that naive, enthusiastic, smartly dressed lad. Yet throughout the war, I could feel her embrace when I closed my eyes, even during the worst of times.
At Gibraltar Barracks in Leeds, I made firm friends with two other l ads, Albert Jones and ‘ Wilkie’ Wilkinson. My nickname was ‘Timber’ Woodcock.
We were all horsemen, and our job was to round up all the horses from stables, ridings schools, farms and businesses — tens of thousands of horses, from heavy Shires and Clydesdales to stocky Galloways and Shetlands. The Army was not mechanised, and it was the horses that would pull all the equipment.
My horse Timbuc was given to me because no one else could control him. He was a real Wild West mount, and so feisty my mates joked he should be
Drowning men clung to wreckage until they
were hit by a bullet
sent to Timbuktu. The name stuck. I was too young to go to France, and as New Year 1915 came round I was trying to help the horses survive an English winter in open quarters. Most of them had always had warm stables and couldn’t cope with standing day and night in the cold.
Finally, we found dry barns for them, covered with warm straw to lie on. On the first night they ate it instead! Before spring came, we had embarked for the Dardanelles. Churchill wanted us to secure Constantinople, opening the southern supply lines to Russia.
Timbuc was keen to get there: as I led him up the gangway at Avonmouth docks, he nudged me in the back as if to say, ‘Hurry up!’ We went round and down into the bowels of the ship, clattering on iron plates, into the dark claustrophobic hold. Each horse had a stall just 2ft 3in wide, not big enough to lie down, with a metal trough for their feed and water.
At first, as we sailed down to Gibraltar, we swept out the hold each day, but the manure left a long trail in the sea that enemy submarines might follow. So we left it where it was and got used to the smell. By the time we reached Alexandria in Egypt, the horses were a foot deep in dung.
Timbuc and his pals were hoisted onto the dock in canvas slings, lowered by pulleys. After two weeks cooped up and unable to lie down, they were weak, and it was very sad to see Timbuc’s knees sagging. It took a lot of love and care to get him back to full strength.
We spent weeks in Egypt. I bought Timbuc strings of figs in the bazaars — he loved them. We didn’t have much idea where we were heading, and it turned out that our commanders didn’t know much more.
The head of the whole fleet, General Ian Hamilton, wrote in his diary: ‘The Dardanelles might be on the moon for all the military information I have got to go upon.’ So much for British Army intelligence.
As we re-embarked, all we were told was that we’d be fighting Germany’s allies, the Turks — and that the Turkish army would turn and run at the sight of one English sergeant waving a Union Jack. So help us, we believed what we were told.
The truth was very different: the Turks were a ferocious, well-disciplined enemy, with excellent leadership and morale, and a vast arsenal of artillery. At V Beach on April 25, 700 heavy guns of varying calibres were trained on our landing craft. They also had an excellent spy network, and our preparations in Egypt had given them three weeks’ notice to fortify the beachheads.
Of the thousands of men who attempted the landing that morning, just a dozen or so were alive on V Beach the next day. My comrades and I survived because our landing boat was cut free from the steamer towing us, probably by shrapnel. With no power or sail, all we could do was drift with the current.
Slowly and helplessly, we were carried around to the north, until the battle was out of sight, and our boat lodged under a cliff. The heat was baking. Some of the men suggested trying to swim back, but we’d seen too many drown in their heavy kit.
So we waited, and at dusk a boat hailed us and towed us back for the next day’s attack. When dawn came, it started again. Before we got ashore, we saw one of the survivors on the beach, a giant Irishman named Corporal William Cosgrove, step out from the sheltering sandbank and start, with utter coolness, to wrench the barbed wire posts out of the ground and clear a path through.
The Turks threw a hail of bullets at him and we saw him shot again and again, pieces of his clothing flying off him.
But he carried on, until he had made a road through the wire. Later, having survived, we heard he had been awarded a Victoria Cross.
Then we made it to the beach. No covers had been supplied for our rifles, and some had got a good soaking in seawater. Instead of joining the attack, many had to get out brushes and oil and clean their weapons on the beach, while under Fearless: The film War Horse and (inset) Norman Woodcock heavy fire. Slowly we worked our way up to the trench at the top. When I got there, our boys were pulling the rifles out of the hands of the Turks inside: to my recollection, none of the enemy came out alive.
As we fought, men stopped to help others, trying to staunch the flow of blood from the l i mbs of their comrades who had been shot or blown to pieces — men with legs missing, dragging themselves to find shelter. Everywhere there lay bodies. By the time the orders came to ‘dig in’, or construct new trenches to defend the landing site, we had little ammunition left and less water.
The ground was hard and we had no digging tools — neither did we have any idea where our communications equipment or our horses were. We had not laid a single telephone line.
We had time to eat our ‘ i ron rations’, the emergency food packs that contained dry biscuits, tea and cheese. There was also one tin of corned beef between five men. Many men found seawater had got into their rations and ruined them.
That night at 10pm, the Turks attacked again, trying to push us back into the sea. They advanced German f ashion, shoulder to shoulder, firing from the hip. Our support fire from the Navy was next to useless. Because of the lie of the beach, the gunners on deck couldn’t see the enemy. The shells were bursting in the air, doing no harm.
But in our shallow trenches, we shot and did not miss. Because we were so low on bullets, we had to take cartridges from any man who was killed. As the enemy got closer we fixed bayonets and broke into small groups fighting with a fury that defies words.
I saw one Turk hurl himself, bayonet first, onto a Tommy and run him through. The lad toppled forwards onto him and as the two men fell, another British soldier killed the Turk with a bayonet thrust through the ribs. Tommy and the Turk died in each other’s arms.
Many times afterwards I thought of what I had seen but could not speak of it to anyone. They wouldn’t believe it. As we fought, the ground filled up with bodies, most killed in hand-to-hand combat. The sound of the dying is something that has stayed with me.
That night, along a five-mile front, we lost 10,000 men killed and wounded — and the enemy losses were even greater. The horses suffered terribly, too. Hundreds lay at the water’s edge, killed by shells and thrown over the cliffs in the hope that the sea would take them. It didn’t. But by a miracle, my Timbuc had survived.
In two days, I went from a young recruit with a mind full of wonder and imagination about the glory of battle, to a soldier who had killed with rifle and bayonet.
What Timbuc had made of it all is beyond imagining. But there was much more to come for both of us. And it would lead to a parting that shattered my battle-hardened heart.
EXTRACTED from On That Day I Left My Boyhood Behind by Norman Woodcock and Susan Burnett published by Acorn Independent Press, price £9.99. © 2015 Norman Woodcock and Susan Burnett.
Hundreds of animals lay dead
in the water No one but me could tame my horse Timbuc