Free Gallipoli by Alan Moorehead

the Prime Minister twenty minutes before the Council meeting began on the morning of January 28, so that they could
have the matter out. The discussion went off very quietly at 10 Downing Street. Fisher stated his objections to both the Dardanelles and the Zeebrugge operations, and Churchill answered that he was
prepared at any rate to give up Zeebrugge. Asquith, being left to decide, fell in with Churchill’s proposal: Zeebrugge should be stopped but the Dardanelles was to go forward. Fisher said no
more and the three men went into the War Council together.
    It appeared to Churchill that Fisher had accepted the decision, but here he was quite wrong, for the Admiral, in silence and rage, was preparing his protest. Directly Churchill had finished
explaining to the Council the latest position of the Dardanelles plan, Fisher said that he had understood that this matter would not be raised that day: the Prime Minister knew his views.
    To this Asquith replied that in view of the steps which had already been taken, the question could not very well be left in abeyance.
    Fisher at once got up from the table, leaving the others to carry on the discussion, and Kitchener followed him over to the window to ask him what he was going to do. Fisher replied that he
would not go back to the table: he intended to resign. Kitchener’s answer to this was to point out to Fisher that he was the only one in disagreement; the Prime Minister had taken the
decision and it was his duty to abide by it. After some further discussion he eventually persuaded the Admiral to come back to the table again.
    Churchill had noticed this incident, and as soon as the Council rose he invited Fisher to come to his room at the Admiralty in the afternoon. There is no record of the conversation that then
took place, but it appears, in Churchill’s phrase, to have been ‘long and very friendly’, and at the end of it Fisher consented to undertake the operation.
    ‘When I finally decided to go in,’ Fisher said later, ‘I went the whole hog,
totus porcus
.’ Nothing, not even this extremity of his
affairs, could quite upset that robust spirit; he even added two powerful battleships, the
Lord Nelson
and the
Agamemnon
, to the Dardanelles Fleet.
    Returning with the Admiral to the afternoon meeting of the Council, Churchill was able to announce that all at the Admiralty were now in agreement, and that the plan would be set into motion.
From this point onwards there could be no turning back. Turkey, the small gambler, was in the thick of the big game at last.

CHAPTER THREE
    S OMEWHAT more than half way down the Gallipoli Peninsula the hills rise up into a series of jagged peaks which are known as Sari Bair. Only the steepest
and roughest of tracks leads to this spot, and except for an occasional shepherd and the men who tend the cemeteries on the mountainside, hardly anybody ever goes there. Yet the view from these
heights, and especially from the central crest which is called Chunuk Bair, is perhaps the grandest spectacle of the whole Mediterranean.
    On first reaching the summit one is quite unprepared for the extreme closeness of the scene which seemed so distant on the map and so remote in history; an illusion which is partly created, no
doubt, by the silence and the limpid air. To the south, in Asia, lie Mount Ida and the Trojan plain, reaching down to Tenedos. To the east, the islands of Imbros and Samothrace come up out of the
sea with the appearance of mountain tops seen above the clouds on a sunny morning; and one even fancies that one can descry Mount Athos on the Greek mainland in Europe, a hundred miles away. The
Dardanelles, which split this scene in two, dividing Asia from Europe, are no more than a river at your feet.
    On a fine day, when there is no movement on the surface of the water, all this is presented to the eye with the clear finite outlines and the very bright colours of a relief map modelled in
clay. Every inlet and bay, every