CHAPTER V
Table of Contents ARRIVAL AT LEMNOS
Table of Contents We were not the only troops on board the Hymettus. There were some gunner officers of siege batteries, and some officers and men of the Royal Army Medical Corps; a stationary hospital with the necessary staff of the R. A. M. C. men, as well as some other odds and ends for various units of the Expeditionary Force already at Lemnos. I happened to be the Senior Officer on board, so was Officer Commanding the troops during the voyage.
I would like to mention here that the captain, chief officer, and chief engineer, of the Hymettus were most helpful in every possible way, and I am glad to be able to pay this little tribute to them for all their kindness to us while we were aboard.
One of the most interesting of our fellow voyagers was Captain Edmunds, R. A. M. C., one of the medical officers in charge of the Australian Hospital stores. He had been taken prisoner by the Germans while attending to the wounded during the retreat from Mons, and he told us many tales of his bad treatment at their hands. He was kept a prisoner for a considerable time, but finally was released owing to some interchange of medical officers between England and Germany.
The voyage to Lemnos was quite uneventful. We, fortunately, missed the Turkish torpedo-boat that tried to sink the Manitou, a transport just ahead of us. This troopship had quite an adventurous time. The torpedo-boat stopped her and the Turkish commander, with rare humanity, called out that he would give them ten minutes to save themselves. I am told that there was a German officer on the bridge who was heard quarrelling with the Turkish commander for being so lenient.
The Manitou lowered her boats in a very great hurry, and unluckily a couple of them tilted up, with the result that some fifty or sixty men were drowned. At the end of the time limit the Turks discharged a torpedo. Now when this missile is first fired it takes a dive before it steadies itself on its course, and as the two vessels were close together, luckily for the Manitou, the dive took the torpedo well under her keel; the same thing happened when the second and third torpedoes were launched; finally, as the Turk was about to open fire and sink the troopship with his guns, a British destroyer raced up at full speed and chased the marauder on to the rocks of a Grecian isle, where the Turkish vessel became a total wreck.
The training of the Zionists went steadily forward on board ship, for many of the men were still quite raw-in fact, I recruited several on the ship a few hours before we sailed. The mules and horses took up a great deal of time every day, but we never had one sick or sorry; and I may say here that we never lost one from sickness all the time we were in Gallipoli, which must, I think, be a record.
On April 20th we arrived at Lemnos and anchored just inside the entrance of Mudros harbour in a blinding wind and rain storm. It will be remembered that when the gods quarrelled, Jove hurled Vulcan out of Olympus on to Lemnos, where he established a forge underground. The morning following our arrival, one of the transports to windward of us began to drag her anchor, so our captain weighed immediately, fearing a collision, and we sailed right through the fleet to the opposite end of the great land-locked harbour. Never in all my life had I seen such a mighty armada of battleships, cruisers, destroyers, transports, etc. The Queen Elizabeth was there, looking for all the world like a floating fortress. There were some quaint French battleships, while the Russian cruiser Askold caused universal attention, owing to her five slim funnels. With the soldier's customary knack of giving appropriate names, the Askold was known throughout the Fleet as "the packet of Woodbines." Our Zionists, as we sailed by, astonished her crew by bandying words with them in Russian.
Our trip up the harbour was not to end without adventure, for, on turning round to cast anchor, our ship ran aground on a mudbank. Here we stuck fast and all the King's horses and all the King's men failed to tug us off again. Time after time naval officers came along with tug-boats and vessels of various kinds which strained to release us, but each attempt was a hopeless failure.
On the afternoon of the 23rd, I got somewhat of a shock on being informed that the Zion Mule Corps was to be divided. The half on the Hymettus was to go with the 29th Division, and the other half, those already on board the Anglo-Egyptian, were to be sent with the Australians and New Zealanders. Of course, this arrangement would have been all right if these three Divisions had been landed at the same place, but as they were to disembark some dozen miles apart it would be impossible for me to keep an eye on both halves of the Corps, and I greatly feared that the half away from my own personal supervision would not prove a success, for officers, N. C. O.'s and men were entirely new to soldiering, and it was too much to expect that they could go straight into the firing line, after only some three weeks' training, and come through the ordeal triumphantly without an experienced commander.
I, therefore, after many vain endeavours to get away, hailed a passing launch, which, as a great favour, put me on board the staff ship, the Arcadian, where I had an interview with the Deputy Quartermaster-General, and begged of him not to divide the Corps, as I feared that those away from my control would prove but a broken reed. He told me, however, that it was impossible to alter matters, and that the Australians and New Zealanders had had practically no transport, except what my Corps would supply, and that in any case we would not be separated for more than four days, because if we could not crush the Turks in that time, between the two forces, we were going to give up the attempt and return to our ships.
Well, we did not crush the Turks in the four days, and, having failed, it was not so easy to get away, and the result was that, owing to lack of experience, and mismanagement in the handling of them, the two troops with the Australians, after a couple of weeks' service with that force, were sent back to Alexandria, without any reference to me, and there disbanded.
As there were no boats available, I had the greatest difficulty in getting away from the Arcadian, and it was only after wasting many valuable hours and meeting with many rebuffs, that I eventually got a kind-hearted sailor to give me a lift back to the Hymettus. A few steam launches were badly needed to enable commanding officers to go aboard the staff ship to discuss with the chiefs of the various departments such items as can only be settled satisfactorily at a personal interview.
I must say that I was not at all pleased with our position on the mudbank, where, in spite of all efforts to move us, we still remained stuck. In the first place, I feared that we would be unable to get away with the rest of the transports on the morning of the 25th, the date fixed for the great attack, and even if by chance another vessel could be found for us, it would mean transhipping all the men, horses, mules, baggage, forage and equipment, which would be an immense labour in an open harbour like Mudros, where it is often blowing half a gale. It is no wonder that, as each attempt at hauling off the Hymettus failed, I grew more and more anxious as to our ultimate chance of getting away in time to see the start of the great fight in Gallipoli.
At last, on the 24th, the naval officers engaged on the work gave up all further attempts to haul us off, and reported the task as hopeless-at any rate until everything was removed from the ship. In the course of an hour I received a signal from the Deputy Quartermaster-General to tranship all my corps, stores, etc., from the Hymettus to the Dundrennon, a transport lying half a mile or more away. On receipt of this message I signalled back and asked for tugs and lighters to enable us to effect the transfer, but, although my signallers endeavoured for hours to attract the attention of those on the staff ship, I entirely failed to get any reply. I finally tried to extort a response of some sort by sending an ire-raising message to the effect that on investigation, I found that many of the men and mules could not swim! But my sarcasm was wasted, for the Arcadian remained dumb.
This failure in the signalling arrangements was very marked all through the two or three days we spent at Lemnos. It was practically impossible to get any message through, and one felt completely cut off from all communication with the staff ship. There were no arrangements for getting about in the harbour. The ship's small boats would have been swamped in the heavy sea, and it was practically impossible to secure a launch.
This failure, together with the wretched signalling arrangements, gave me serious qualms, and I could not help wondering if the muddle ceased here, or did it extend to other and more grave matters which would imperil the success of the expedition?
All day long I was anxiously on the look-out for a tug and lighters to enable me to tranship to the Dundrennon, and at last, at about 6 P.M., I saw a little trawler, towing a string of half a dozen lighters, making her way up the harbour towards us. In a few minutes they were alongside and made fast to the Hymettus, but, alas! I soon discovered that, although the lighters were for us, the tug was about to sail away again. The only order the commander had received was to bring the lighters alongside and make them fast to the Hymettus, and there his task ended. This was...
