The Dardanelles Conspiracy by Alan Bardos (best ereader for pc TXT) 📗

‘Sorry sir, your lucky jacket’s ruined,’ Boil said pulling his jacket off. Johnny coughed up blood, unable to stop him. ‘Bullet and shrapnel holes, that’s as good as armour now. Lightning won’t strike a third time. Fair swap for my field dressing I reckon.’

Boil gave Johnny his treasure box. ‘You won’t be needing it anyway now you’ve got a Blighty one.’

Williams finished bandaging him and Johnny felt himself lifted up, he clutched onto the letter from Gabrielle, as he slowly began to drift off.

Johnny came round in the dark, back under the cliff on W beach, and watched the murmuring shadows of reinforcements trying to get through the wounded. Hundreds of men were lying in the sand. The wounded next to him looked like they’d been out under the sun all day.

He was desperately thirsty and he gurgled and rattled every time he inhaled. He could feel flies crawling over his face, in his mouth, over his eyes. He heard someone screaming and realised to his horror that it was him.

He quickly shut his mouth and felt his poor tormented chest throb with red hot needles. However long he’d been here it was long enough for the morphine to wear off. He tried to grip the letter from Gabrielle but he’d lost it.

Johnny could hear his stepfather shouting in Welsh, here to pull him up on his poor performance before he died. Someone with great clod hopping boots kicked his head as he stumbled past.

‘Here he is, that’s him.’ Johnny heard William’s voice. ‘Come on.’

‘What the bloody hell have we got here then? Sir, is there room for one more?’ a rough cockney voice shouted above him. ‘For the one the taffy wants us to take.’

‘Sorry, Borden, we’re full. He’ll have to wait for the next trawler,’ a rich plummy voice came back.

‘But it’s him, that bloke we picked up from Bulgaria. The one that shot the mine and saved the boat,’ the cockney said, and Johnny realised it was the Petty Officer from the trawler.

‘Oh, really? How extraordinary. Very well, bring him along,’ the posh voice said and he recognised it as belonging to Sub-lieutenant Barringtons.

‘My God, you’ve got some luck, Williams 19666,’ Johnny managed to croak.

‘Well, there you are then. Luck he calls it. I’ve been up and down this bloody beach all night trying to find a bloody boat to take you. And begging your pardon, sir, I still haven’t had any bloody water.’ Williams gave him another morphine tablet. ‘Of all the bloody stupid things to do, you go and get yourself shot like that.’

‘You can’t win a war hiding in ditches, trying to keep everyone safe.’

Williams chuckled, ‘and now he misquotes Crassus bloody Dawkins at me. Go on sod off.’

Johnny felt himself lifted up. The pain was excruciating and he began to fade into unconsciousness.

He came to in the warm embrace of disinfectant and the gleaming brown eyes of Staff Nurse Lee-Perkins. She was pale and drawn like his old school matron, but Johnny wouldn’t have traded her for a whole troupe of can-can girls.

‘You will take good care of him, miss?’ Johnny heard Borden ask. ‘I know you’re full to bursting. It’s just he was clutching this letter and the address on it was HMHS Sicilia.

‘Of course,’ Gabrielle answered, ‘I can’t believe he’s alive!’

Delirious Johnny rested his head against her and started to conjugate verbs in French.

Historical Note

Despite concerted efforts to drive inland from the beachheads, the Allies never managed to achieve the first-day objectives of the landings. In the face of ferocious Turkish opposition, difficult terrain and poor logistical and artillery support, Gallipoli turned into a stalemate in the East, mirroring the trench warfare of the Western Front it was intended to bypass. The Allied troops were eventually withdrawn in January 1916, having suffered 252,000 casualties and the Ottoman Forces 251,309.

Whether Churchill was the instigator of the Dardanelles campaign or the scapegoat is something that historians still fiercely debate. The idea originated as a way to help the Russians and to open a second front. Churchill was against it at first, but became its biggest exponent and undoubtedly pushed the idea.

The senior figures in the Navy failed to present any strong opposition and the War Council agreed the forcing of the Dardanelles Straits and should be bound by a collective responsibility for the decision.

There was an attempt to bribe Turkey out of the war in 1915, as outlined in this book. If it had been successful, it could have made the whole Dardanelles campaign unnecessary. The crux of the negotiations for the Turks however was a guarantee for the future of Constantinople, which had long been promised to Russia and without it, the negotiations were doomed.

My main sources of information for the bribe were an article in the May 1963 issue of The Royal United Service Institution Journal called ‘A Ghost from Gallipoli’ by Captain G.R.G. Allen and a response to this article by Hall’s biographer, Admiral Sir William James in the November issue of the Journal. James’s biography was also very helpful: ‘The Eyes of the Navy; a Biographical Study of Admiral Sir Reginald Hall’. As well as Halls unfinished memoir published under the title, ‘A Clear Case of Genius: Room 40's Code-breaking Pioneer’ with a foreword by Nigel West. My other constant companions on this subject were ‘Blinker Hall Spymaster‘, by David Ramsay; ‘Room 40 British Naval Intelligence 1914-18’, by Patrick Beesly, ‘Gallipoli’ by James Robert Rhodes and ‘Gerald Fitzmaurice (1865-1939), Chief Dragoman of the British Embassy in Turkey’, by Geoff Berridge.

I have used a bit of artistic licence in the writing of the discussions between the Grand Rabbi and Talat Pasha, throwing Johnny into the centre of things. In doing this I found Henry Morgenthau’s book ‘Ambassador Morgenthau's Story’ extremely helpful. Morgenthau was the