DEATH IN THE DARDANELLES
One hundred years after the Gallipoli campaign decimated British and French forces, Blair Crawford confronts a very personal puzzle: How do we know the past?
How well I remember that terrible day, When the blood stained the sand and the water. — And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda, Eric Bogle
If I should die, think only this of me / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England. — The Soldier, Rupert Brook ( Died April 1915 of blood poisoning while en route to Gallipoli)
The name C. W. Shanks is carved into panel 127 of the Helles Memorial, a 30- metre high obelisk that soars above the rocky Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey, site of one of the greatest Allied military disasters of the First World War.
Like the other 20,838 British and Commonwealth soldiers commemorated at Helles, Lance Cpl. Charles Walter Shanks has no known grave.
He was 27 or 28 years old, unmarried and had been a school teacher before the war.
His war was violent, hellish and short. It began on Aug. 6, 1915 when he landed with the 10th Service Battalion of the Royal Hampshire Regiment. It ended four days later — a century ago Monday — somewhere in the meat grinder that was Gallipoli.
He was my great uncle on my mother’s side and all we know of him comes from a taciturn postcard, his “Active Service New Testament” that somehow survived the war, and a letter from the London orphanage where he was placed with his brothers and sisters. Nearly all British service records from the First World War were destroyed in German bombing raids on London in the second great war.
“It raises a question,” says the Ottawa historian Tim Cook, author of Shock Troops and At the Sharp End, a two- volume history of Canadian troops in the First World War. “How do we know the past? We know about the poets, but what about the private with a Grade 6 education, the ones who didn’t write poetry? What do we know about their experience?”
If it were possible to sit down and have a beer with the dead, I’d buy the round for Charles Shanks.
The Shanks family came from Islington, north London. Charles was born in 1888, the second eldest of six children. In 1897, their father, a stone mason, fell ill and could no longer work. The next year, their mother died of tuberculosis and the four youngest were put into the care of Dr. Thomas Barnardo, who ran orphanages and labour houses for England’s poor. An 1899 photo documenting their intake shows four rag- tag children, their faces etched with an almost unbearable sadness. The three youngest boys — my grandfather, Arthur, among them — would eventually sail to Canada as “Home Children” and work as farm labourers.
Twelve- year- old Charles and his older brother remained in England to care for their stricken father until he, too, died. Charles went into a youth home in Surrey, just outside London.
Snippets of his life come from
family correspondence. Charles played piano. He taught school in the village of Leatherhead, Surrey.
In an undated postcard photo sent to my grandfather, Charles poses in a three- piece suit, sporting wire rim glasses, slicked hair and a fine English moustache, The message is absurdly sparse:
Dear Artie Here is another photo. Please send one of yourself. Kindly note change of address.
In 1914, war was looming in Europe. The assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June triggered a series of confrontations that by August led to the world’s first global war.
Britain ( and Canada) declared war on Germany on Aug. 4, 1914 after German troops invaded neutral Belgium.
Charles was among the first to enlist, likely in October 1914, according to the archives of his regimental museum in Surrey. In a second postcard photo, dated March 25, 1915, just a few months before he died, Charles wears a British Army uniform, his swagger stick tucked in neatly under his left arm. It says, simply:
Your affectionate brother Pte. C. W. Shanks ( Charlie) 13911, A Corps 10th Hamps. Regt., Rath Camp The Curragh, Ireland
It is the last we know of him. What happened next must be pieced together through the experience of others.
It took just a few months for the First World War to turn into a stalemate marked by trench lines that stretched from the North Sea to the Swiss border. Stymied on the Western front, the British hatched a daring plan — some say reckless — to strike at Germany’s ally, the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, in the western Mediterranean. The plan, conceived largely by Winston Churchill, was to breach the narrow Dardanelles Straits into the Sea of Marmara and attack the Turks’ capital of Istanbul.
When the ill-conceived na- val campaign failed, the generals hurled troops ashore, many of them untested men from the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps ( ANZAC), who landed in April 1915 on the heavily defended Gallipoli peninsula. The losses were appalling and the battle soon deteriorated into the same trench warfare stalemate as on the Western Front.
While the campaign in Gallipoli raged, Charles Shanks and the Royal Hampshires were training in Ireland. The regiment was part of Lord Kitchener’s New Army, allvolunteer units recruited in the patriotic fervour of following the outbreak of war. They were sent to Ireland to train as part of the 10th ( Irish) Division. An informal history of the division, published in 1918 by Maj. Bryan Cooper, describes the days whimsically.
“These Curragh field- days were among the pleasantest of the Division’s experiences ... it was exhilarating to march out in the morning, one of eight hundred men ... the hedges on each side bursting into leaf, and the grey clouds hanging overhead.”
But the idyll of the Irish countryside was not to last and on July 6, Charles and the rest of the 10th Battalion boarded the over- crowded steamer Transylvania for the 11day journey to the Greek island of Mudros, the British staging area for the Gallipoli campaign.
It was at Mudros, Cooper writes, the troops met some veterans of the battle.
“Thus we learned from men who had been in Gallipoli since they had struggled through the surf and the wire on April 24th the truth as to the nature of the fighting there. They taught us much by their words, but even more by their appearance; for though fit, they were thin and worn, and their eyes carried a weary look that told of the strain that they had been through. For the first time we began to realise that strong nerves were a great asset in war.”
“It was trench warfare, but on the Eastern Front,” Cook said. “If you read the letters you realize that it’s filthy, filled with rats and with lice burrowing into everyone’s skin. There’s the lack of water — and the dirty water, it all had to be boiled. And there was the ever- present danger that you would be killed by artillery shells or snipers. You never knew if there was a sniper out there waiting for you.”
The Allied forces were bogged down in Gallipoli and that August the British commander, Sir Ian Hamilton, planned a breakout to the north with a second amphibious landing by ANZAC troops at Suvla Bay.
The Royal Hamps were thrown into the fray on Aug. 6, landing secretly by boat at night then hurrying up the steep, ominously named Shrapnel Gully. The men struggled under 60- lb packs, stumbling in the dark on the treacherous slope.
Digging shelter in the thin rocky soil was next to impossible. Cooper describes two officers who tried three times to construct a dugout: the first was abandoned when they hit a recently filled in latrine; in their next two attempts their shovels bit into fresh corpses.
Great blue bottles ( flies) swarmed over every dressing. When one had to change a dressing ... the wound was already crawling with maggots.
LT. NORMAN TATTERSAL OF THE ROYAL ARMY MEDICAL CORPS
Conditions were appalling. The troops baked in the summer Mediterranean sun and water was in desperately short supply and needed to be boiled because of contamination. Flies were everywhere.
“The flies were indescribable,” Cooper wrote. “All food was instantly covered with them, and sleep between sunrise and sunset was impossible except for a few who had provided themselves with mosquito nets.”
It was even worse for the wounded.
“Great blue bottles ( flies) swarmed over every dressing,” wrote Lt. Norman Tattersal of the Royal Army Medical Corps. “When one had to change a dressing... the wound was already crawling with maggots.”
“When t here hundreds of stretchers in a line stretching far back into the scrub from the pier, it meant that anyone far back was likely to remain there for anything up to 36 hours or more.”
Into this hell were thrown the 10th Hampshires. Hampered by poor maps and bad guides, they wandered the battlefield for hours before they took their place in the line, between New Zealand troops on the right and Nepalese Gurkhas fighting on the a hilltop on the prominent ridge known as Chunuk Bair.
Over the next few days, Turkish shelling and machine- gun fire took a constant toll. In places there was no cover and the troops lay exposed in the scorching sun, with mere mouthfuls of water to drink. Any movement drew a torrent of fire from the Turkish lines. A major Turkish counterattack on Aug. 10 caused heavy casualties and pushed the regiment back.
“The Hampshires, who had gone into action on the morning of the 9th, with a strength of approximately twenty officers and over 700 men, had at noon on the 10th one combatant officer and not more than 200 men fit for duty,” Cooper wrote.
It was on Aug. 10 that Charles Shanks perished. It’s impossible to know how. As a member of the service battalion, he would normally have been behind the lines, digging trenches, carrying the wounded and burying the dead. But in the desperate fight for Chunuk Bair, it’s possible every available soldier was sent into battle.
Was he blown to pieces by an artillery shell or picked off by a sniper’s bullet? Was he killed in a bayonet charge against Turkish lines or did he die of wounds while waiting for treatment? Was he one of the thousands of soldiers to die from disease, dysentery or dehydration? There’s no way to know, but there were many ways to die.
After a three- day “rest” — off the front lines, but still under constant Turkish sniper and machine- gun fire — the Royal Hamps were again sent into what had turned into a futile battle. By Aug. 21, Cooper writes, the regiment had nearly “ceased to exist.”
The Gallipoli campaign would drag on for four more months. Bloated, unburied corpses littered the battlefield and baked in the late summer heat. A dysentery epidemic killed thousands of soldiers on both sides of the lines. Hamilton was dismissed as the Allied commander and plans were made for an evacuation.
The arrival of winter brought new misery, first with torrential rain that flooded the trenches, then blizzards and extreme cold that killed more soldiers by hypothermia. The new commander appointed to plan and execute an evacuation was Gen. Julian Byng who would later lead Canadian troops at Vimy Ridge and after the war be appointed Canada’s governor general.
“Byng orchestrated the evacuation, which was about the only successful operation of the entire campaign,” Cook said.
The last Allied troops were gone by early January. The British, Commonwealth and French troops who fought there suffered nearly 60,000 deaths. The Turks lost about the same. More than 100,000 more soldiers on both sides died from disease, according to some estimates.
Today, Gallipoli is remembered as a sideshow to the First World War, an epic failure, plagued by British hubris and poor planning.
The memorial at Helles and several others like it on the peninsula commemorate the lives lost or, in the words of the British war poet Rupert Brooke, who himself died of blood poisoning as he sailed for Gallipoli, the “corner of a foreign field that is for ever England.”
Of Charles Shanks, all that remains are a handful of photos and a Bible, one that he must have left with his sister, Rose, for safekeeping before sailing for war.
The only traces of a man consumed in battle.
Thusfrom menwe learned who had been in Gallipoli since they had struggled through the surf and the wire on April 24th the truth as to the nature of the fighting there. MAJ. BRYAN COOPER OF THE NEW ARMY 10TH DIVISION