‘The shattering of our youth’
One hundred and four years after teenager Cecil Manson landed on the beaches of Suvla Bay, the words from the pages of his memoir paint a picture of the horror of that hopeless campaign, writes his granddaughter, Bess Manson.
Within weeks of landing with his British platoon at Suvla Bay, Cecil Manson was promoted to captain for the simple reason that his superiors had been killed.
The five months he spent on that ‘‘wretched peninsula’’ had a life-long effect on him. Decades later the clarity of those memories filled the pages of his 1981 memoir A World Away and letters tucked away over the following decades.
‘‘I often wonder whether such a baptism at that early age was good or bad for us,’’ he wrote to one of his fellow soldiers years later. ‘‘. . . I would hate for my own sons to have had to start adult life in that way, yet the general experience, possibly, has helped in some ways in later life.
‘‘Perhaps those early war experiences, besides shattering our youth, also gave us some power or determination to rebuild it and never, till we die, let it go.’’
Cecil had a privileged upbringing in Surrey, England, with his five siblings. At the outbreak of war, he and many of his public school cohorts joined the Officers’ Training Corps.
By the following year, Cecil was aboard the Ulysses to the Dardanelles, ‘‘many of us never to return’’, he recalled.
He wrote about arriving on the darkly looming shore of the Gallipoli Peninsula, where the Anzacs were already encamped. It was a Sunday night. On the heights above Anzac Cove, an occasional flash from a bursting shell broke the darkness and from the distant Helles came the roar of gunfire.
‘‘For a moment my thoughts went to home. An hour or two difference in time . . . the family might, even then at that moment, have been drinking the Sunday night healths, and mine would be among them. How little they could guess the importance of that moment in my life.’’
In a letter to a man from his regiment many decades later he wrote of the first days spent in the hills and trenches of Gallipoli. ‘‘Remember those hectic hours 60 odd years ago? We’re in our 80s now. If you’re like me you’ll remember almost every minute.’’
After landing, they advanced immediately to Chocolate Hill – a small knoll on the far side of the coastal plain. A fellow soldier of 16, who had lied about his age, walked alongside him. Before they reached the hill the young boy was shot dead, Cecil recalled.
They trudged on, fired at by an unseen enemy and by their own ships from behind. As if that wasn’t enough, the scrub caught fire but Cecil and the few men in his platoon who were still together used the smoke for cover as they crawled towards enemy lines.
At one point they stopped and hid as they waited for the rest of their men to arrive.
‘‘I suppose we lay there, in the searing heat, for nearly half an hour. This moment stands out
‘‘In all the din and heat ... I actually wished I could die.’’
Cecil Manson in a letter to a man from his regiment decades later
because if I had not experienced it I would never have believed that sheer physical exhaustion could induce in a young person – almost a desire to die.
‘‘I have remembered this distinctly, all my life. Lying there I almost fell asleep in all the din and heat and in moments of semi-consciousness, I actually wished I could die.
‘‘I only hope when my time comes in old age I will be no less ready.’’
There was nothing during the time that followed to relieve the hopelessness he felt. Possibly, he wrote, the effect of that first day never really wore off. ‘‘The tactics of our generals even then seemed incredibly silly to us.
‘‘We were to spend five months on that miserable strip of land . . . Miserable in its discomfort – for a month or more after landing we had nothing except bully beef and biscuits to eat.
‘‘Not our quartermaster, though. He was comfortably installed in a dug-out near the beach where he consumed special foods and Guinness stout.
‘‘The corpse flies were a plague in the stifling heat. We had to brush them off our food as it reached our mouths. Dysentery was rife.’’
It was here in the trenches he first came across New Zealand soldiers, the British line being linked with the northern end of the Australian and New Zealand position at Anzac Cove.
A handful of the young Kiwi soldiers were sent over to show them the ropes in trench war tactics.
‘‘The difference [between our groups] was obvious . . . whereas our men were inclined to wait to be told what to do, these New Zealanders acted like young generals, planning this and that, showing no fear.’’
He would go on to fight with many Kiwis during World War I and II and eventually marry a New Zealander, Celia Drummond.
(He once said life really began for him when he met Celia at a London party just before the outbreak of World War II.)
In a bitter early winter that had struck that December, Cecil finally left Gallipoli Peninsula, only to be greeted in Alexandria, Egypt, with the news that his father had died just days earlier.
Over a hundred years later, I looked through Cecil’s field message book.
It’s filled not just with day-to-day plans and requests but with sketches of the Gallipoli landscape and those he fought alongside.
His desire all those years ago, in the dust and heat of Gallipoli, to become an artist was eventually fulfilled when he moved to New Zealand with Celia. His paintings were shown in Paris and London and hang in the homes of his family, who see him in every brushstroke.
He would die in 1987, an old, old man, just four months before Celia. And he was ready.