In the silence of the forest, the revolution whispered, but Dimitri and his comrades were not ready to listen. Not yet.

  Souchon intervenes

  Shell the enemy! May 4th, 1916

  On the bridge of dreadnought battlecruiser Sultan Yavuz Selim, all was quiet for a moment, as every sailor and officer on the bridge awaited Admiral Wilhelm Souchon’s go-ahead order.

  The Ottoman fleet was sailing beyond the Sea of Marmara and into the Strait of Gallipoli, right below the Chunuk Bair heights. From the get-go, the fleet had stayed in the Sea of Marmara, well out of sight of the Entente fleet that would have loved to get a chance at sinking it.

  Now, the plan, as per Souchon’s discussion with the commander of the scratch force and the defenses of the Gallipoli Heights (Chunuk Bair), their role would be crucial if the enemy broke through and reached the heights' crest. While the naval guns could not shell the reverse downward slope because of the firing angle, they would be able to deliver a heavy bombardment if the enemy showed itself on top.

  “Sir, we can see the first enemy flags up there, it’s time to …” Souchon held his hand to stop Vice Admiral Hubert von Rebeur-Paschwitz from speaking further. He’d agreed with Kemal that the best way to do this was to wait for the enemy to be concentrated enough that naval gunfire would fire for maximum effect. It was also about giving the Turkish troops time to temporarily retreat north to evacuate the area and avoid friendly fire.

  Souchon’s brain told him to fire now, but he waited. “Sir,” said the Vice-Admiral again, insistent. The German Admiral took a sweeping glance at his proud ships. Above, the vast ridge of Chunuk Bair rose like a jagged wall over the Gallipoli peninsula, its slopes scarred by trenches, scrub, and the faint flicker of Ottoman muzzle flashes. The sea was calm, almost eerily so, as if nature itself held its breath for what was about to unfold. And then, it was time. “Order the fleet to fire, and tell every captain to fire at will until I give the signal to stop.”

  Sultan Yavuz Selim was the first to spit its broadside. A blossom of fire expanded from her forward turret, yellow turning white-hot at its core before dissolving into a rolling cloud of smoke. A heartbeat later, her aft turret answered. BOOM–BOOM.

  The concussion rolled across the strait like a physical force, slapping the water into ripples and shaking the decks of the ships beside her.

  High above, the shells screamed upward, tiny sparks rising toward the clouds, before arcing down toward Chunuk Bair. The ridge vanished behind two enormous geysers of earth and flame. Dust and shattered rock billowed skyward, followed by the faint echo of shredding timber and collapsing parapets.

  Then came Reşadiye, her heavy guns booming in a steady, methodical rhythm. Each shot erupted in a perfect sphere of fire, with sharply defined features at first, then unraveling into smoke tendrils that wrapped the turret like a shroud. Her shells landed farther up the slope, smashing into Ottoman reserve trenches that had been emptied moments before. One hit a dugout; an entire section of hillside bulged outward before disintegrating into a sliding avalanche of debris.

  Sultan Osman-ı Evvel joined in next, her own broadsides lighting the strait with a chain of fireballs across her port side. Her gunners worked with furious speed, each turret discharge illuminating the superstructure in flashes of orange. The shells raced overhead in parallel arcs, exploding in a tight cluster on the crest of Chunuk Bair, blasting scrub, sandbags, and gun barrels into the air in a volcanic plume. Even from the ships, men could see debris silhouetted against the rising sun.

  Farther back, the pre-dreadnought battleship Lemnos bellowed her booming salvos, each shot sounding like an old titan waking from slumber. Her lighter guns spat secondary fire that peppered the forward slopes, sending smaller bursts dancing across the ridgelines.

  Meanwhile, the armored cruiser Hamidiye fired a rapid succession of shells that walked their way along Rhododendron Ridge toward the approaches to Chunuk Bair, each impact kicking up clouds of dust and sending splintered trees snapping like matchsticks.

  From above, the effect was apocalyptic. The entire crest of Chunuk Bair was swallowed by rolling smoke, flame, and shockwaves. Trenches collapsed inward, dugouts burst open like clay ovens, and the once-solid ridge seemed to ripple under the barrage. The booming of the guns echoed down the strait in thunderclaps, bouncing between the cliffs and sending tremors across the water.

  For a moment, the ships fired as one, a full broadside from an entire squadron, and the strait flashed like a string of suns igniting in sequence. The air shook. The water trembled. The mountain seemed to recoil. When the smoke thinned, Chunuk Bair looked less like a ridge and more like the torn edge of a crater, with its peak shaved, its slopes pitted, and its trenches mangled under the rain of steel. The bombardment had not simply hit the mountain; it had reshaped it.

  Ten minutes into the rolling barrage, Souchon decided that it was time. “Signal every ship to stop firing, and signal Kemal’s people that they can commence their counterattack.”

  The Battle for Chunuk Bair Part 2

  I order you to die again! May 4th-5th, 1916

  “I am sorry, soldiers, but I have to order you to die once more for the Empire. The enemy is up there, thinking themselves victorious and jubilant. Watch as the wrath of Allah smashes their arrogance.”

  Mustapha Kemal’s words had soon been followed by the five fleet broadsides that shattered the Entente assault to smithereens. And then, he’d sent his men to the attack. They ran, yelled, and climbed back to the area they’d vacated only moments before, through the billowing smoke fog covering the area – smashing into the Entente, shattering their ranks. “Here goes nothing,” said Kemal, watching as all of his reserves were sent into the fighting.

  The man’s plan had been simple. The Entente had too many troops and was coming too strongly at him to resist. He’d tried to keep them at bay on the slopes, but had made a contingency plan in case the pressure became unbearable and they broke through. Souchon’s fleet would intervene and gun them down from the Gallipoli Strait below.

  The battle that unfolded was one hell of a mass of humanity firing, fighting, bayonets raised, buzzing machine gun bullets, and shell explosions from arcing artillery fire.

  (…)

  Kemal watched the heights burn. From his forward command post on a lower spur of Chunuk Bair, he could see the ridge line silhouetted against a dirty orange sky, the horizon pulsing with the flashes of Entente guns. French tricolors, British Union Jacks, Serbian standards, and the unfamiliar Stars and Stripes all flickered through the smoke like scraps of color in a furnace. They had come in numbers no Ottoman officer had expected to see on this peninsula: Seventy-five thousand men at Cape Helles plus another forty thousand at ANZAC Cove, columns pushing north after the breakthrough, their bayonets pouring over the southern ridges in an endless stream.

  For three days, Kemal had ordered his men to bleed for every fold of ground. They had fought from scrubby gullies, from caves, from trenches that were shallow graves. Now the Entente tide was almost at the crest of Chunuk Bair itself. “Let them come,” he said quietly.

  His staff stared at him in the cramped dugout, lit only by a single lamp and the occasional flare of distant shell bursts. On the map, the ridge line looked like a spine, his defensive positions marked in black grease pencil. Many of those little crosses were already wiped out, the units they represented destroyed or scattered.

  “Pasha,” one colonel ventured, “if we fall back now, the line …” “The line is the ridge, not the earth,” Kemal cut in. He tapped the map where the crest overlooked the strait. “We hold them here, we die here. We let them spill over the top…” His finger slid down the seaward slope toward the inked curve of the Dardanelles. “Then the fleet will speak.”

  Below, in the narrow waters of the strait, the silhouettes of Yavuz Sultan Selim, Reşadiye, Sultan Osman-ı Evvel, Lemnos, and Hamidiye glowed faintly where their funnels bled smoke into the night. Their guns were silent for the moment, their crews standing by, waiting for the signal that would allow them to fire at the ridge without murdering their own countrymen. Kemal had given that condition himself to Souchon: “When the foreigner’s boots are on our crest and not before. Then, wait for them to pool in sufficient numbers, then strike.”

  By dusk, the last of his forward battalions were withdrawing from the crest line in controlled, bitter steps, slipping behind the reverse slope, leaving only thin screens of riflemen and machine-gun teams to maintain the illusion of a solid front. The Entente artillery mistook this managed retreat for collapse and intensified its barrage. Shells walked their way up the slope, shredding scrub and sandbags, throwing bodies, Turk and foreigner alike, into the air.

  Then, at last, the Entente infantry broke over the top. From Kemal’s position, they looked like ants swarming along the jagged spine of the ridge, with Serbs in worn field grey, British and New Zealanders in khaki, French in horizon blue, Americans moving with stiff, aggressive purpose. They hoisted flags, unfurled signal panels, and began to dig in, spade blades flashing as they carved new trenches into the captured ground. Officers swept binoculars along the peninsula's interior, pointing toward the unseen heartland of Anatolia.

  Kemal’s eyes, however, were on the far side. “Signal the fleet,” he said. A flare hissed into the dark, arcing high above the ridge, green over red, the prearranged pattern. A few seconds later, down in the strait, the Ottoman line came alive. But there had been no need; Souchon was an old hand and knew his business.

  Yavuz fired first. Her broadside lit the narrow water like dawn, a chain of blossoming fireballs bursting from her turrets. The thunder rolled up the slopes a heartbeat later, followed almost instantly by Reşadiye and Sultan Osman-ı Evvel, then the lower, heavier boom of Lemnos. Hamidiye’s secondary guns barked in quick succession, stitching the lower slopes with fire.

  The shells howled upward, bright streaks fading into invisible death. Then Chunuk Bair erupted. High-explosive shells detonated along the crest in a frenzy of flame and pulverized rock. Half-dug Entente trenches collapsed as if they were made of paper. Men were lifted from the ground and hurled into the air. Flags disappeared in a single blast; signal panels became burning rags. A Serbian company that had just reached the summit vanished in a rolling yellow-white flash, leaving nothing behind but a crater and shredded packs.

  More shells slammed into the reverse slope, catching units as they moved up to consolidate the position. One American battalion marched into a storm of steel and disappeared within it, leaving behind only scattered, smoking figures stumbling in circles. French and British officers screamed for their men to dig in, spread out, lie flat, anything that could shelter them, but there was nowhere to hide on that exposed crest, nowhere the naval guns could not reach.

  The mountain itself seemed to recoil, its sides vomiting dust and black smoke. From the strait, the Ottoman ships continued to fire methodically, each discharge another glowing flower blooming along the side of the hull, another shell racing toward the ridge.

  Then, as abruptly as they had started, they were done firing. Kemal watched until his staff could hardly breathe; until the ridgeline was no longer a line at all but a ragged, smoking wound. “Now,” he said at last. “While they are dazed.”

  He turned to his operations officer. “Order the counterattack. All twenty-two thousand. Every regiment still standing in this sector. They go now.”

  “And the right flank, Pasha?” “Fifteen thousand, as planned. Send them down toward ANZAC Cove. If they reach the bottom, the enemy’s throat is in our hands.”

  Messengers exploded into motion. Bugles blared up and down the Turkish lines, shrill and urgent. Officers shouted, banners lifted. The tired but unbroken survivors of the Gallipoli defense, including Anatolian peasants, Arab volunteers, Kurds, Circassians, the battle-scarred 57th and 64th Regiments, and many others, rose from their shallow trenches and scrapes, fixed bayonets, and began to move.

  They climbed. Up the broken gullies, along scrub-choked spurs, across ravines still stinking of cordite and unburied dead, the Ottoman counterattack surged toward Chunuk Bair.

  (…) 57th Ottoman Regiment (…)

  Mohamed Celal’s world was dust and blood and the taste of iron in his mouth. He scrambled on all fours up the shattered slope, fingers clawing at loose stones and torn roots. His rifle bounced on its sling against his shoulders; the bayonet, already stained from earlier fights, jabbed at his side with each lurching step. Around him, the remnants of the 57th Regiment climbed with him, hunched shapes in ragged uniforms, faces streaked with grime, eyes narrowed against the dust that rained constantly from above.

  “Yallah, Celal, move!” shouted Sergeant Hasan just behind him. “You want the Germans to brag they retook the ridge for us?” Celal managed a breathless grin and forced his legs to keep going. Above, the crest of Chunuk Bair was hidden behind a curtain of smoke. The naval bombardment still rolled across the top, though the intervals between impacts were lengthening as the fleet shifted its fire. Occasionally, a shell would land short, blasting the upper slope and sending rocks bouncing down like deadly hail.

  He could hear the Entente machine guns now, firing in short, furious bursts, then silence; panicked strings of fire raked too high over their heads, aimed at ghosts in the smoke. They were shooting half-blind, stunned by the bombardment, trying to guess where the Ottoman counterattack was coming from.

  Celal knew exactly where he was going. Not ten days before, he had been part of the desperate defense that had first thrown the ANZACs back from this very ridge. Every gully, every twisted tree, every fold of earth had been etched into his memory. Now he saw it all again, only more ruined: trees reduced to black sticks, trenches flattened into shallow scars, bodies, some Ottoman, some foreign, half-buried in the churned ground.

  A shell landed somewhere to his left, the blast punching the air out of his lungs. He dropped instinctively, covering his head as a wave of dirt washed over him. When he raised his face again, the man who had been climbing beside him was gone. Only a spilled rifle remained, stock splintered, the bayonet bent.

  Hasan grabbed Celal by the collar and hauled him upright. “On your feet, Mehmet! Allah will sort the dead later. We are still among the living.”

  They scrambled upward again, joining a wider torrent of men converging on a shallow gully that led directly toward the crest. Bullets began to whip overhead more frequently now, pinging off rocks, flicking spurts of dust from the ground. Someone shouted in English; another voice cursed in French. Celal’s heart hammered as he realized they were close, so close he could hear the foreign officers shouting orders, their voices cracking. “Fix bayonets!” Hasan roared, though most already had.

  Celal brought his rifle around, the steel flashing in the weird half-light. His throat felt dry. He muttered the Fatiha under his breath, words slipping out between clenched teeth. Around him, others whispered prayers in Turkish and Arabic, some clutching small Qurans sewn into their tunics.

  The gully ended in a steep lip of earth. The crest lay just beyond. Hasan raised his hand, fingers spread. Celal crouched, muscles coiled. Men jostled close on either side of him, shoulders touching. The air was full of dust, and the stench of burned flesh floated down from above. “Now!” Hasan bellowed. They surged up and over.

  The crest of Chunuk Bair hit Celal’s senses at once: the blinding light after the smoke, the shriek of bullets passing inches from his face, the sudden sight of foreign helmets and uniforms only a dozen strides away. A tangle of shattered sandbags and broken planks marked what had once been an Entente firing step. Now it was a killing ground.

  A British soldier rose from behind a knocked-out machine gun, eyes wide, fumbling for his rifle. Celal didn’t think; his bayonet drove forward almost on its own, punching into the man’s chest. The Britisher gasped, grabbed at the blade, then slid away. Celal wrenched the rifle free, blood streaking the steel.

  To his left, a knot of New Zealanders tried to form a firing line, but an Ottoman grenade (of German manufacture) landed among them, blasting men off their feet in a spray of shrapnel and dirt. To his right, French and Serbian troops scrambled to man a trench only half-dug, some still holding shovels instead of weapons. The first wave of Turks crashed into them with a roar, rifles and bayonets and even shovels swinging.

  Mehmet found himself face-to-face with an American. The kid was boyish, freckles smeared with ash, helmet askew. The man raised a pistol, his hand shaking. The shot went high, whining past Celal’s ear. He smashed the rifle butt into the man’s wrist; the pistol flew away. They collided, grappling, boots sliding in the churned mud. Celal felt a fist slam into his ribs, then another. He brought his knee up, hard, and the American folded. The Turk drove him backward over the lip of the trench, where he disappeared among the tangle of bodies below.

  “Forward!” Hasan shouted somewhere in the chaos. “Drive them off the ridge! For the 57th! For Anatolia!” Mehmet climbed over the shattered parapet and into what remained of the Entente position. It was a muddle of broken lumber, twisted corrugated metal, half-filled rifle pits, and mounds of earth kicked up by naval shells. Dead and wounded lay tangled together: Serbs, Britons, French, Turks, Australians, Americans, all colors of uniforms smeared into the same dun shade by dust and blood.

  The Ottomans kept going, wave after wave. Mehmet realized dimly that he was shouting as he ran, though he could not hear his own voice over the roar. He tripped on a body, went down hard, rolled, and came up again. A machine gun opened up somewhere to his right, mowing down a line of men, but then a Turkish squad swarmed it, bayonets flashing.

  The Entente line began to buckle. Someone blew a sharp, urgent whistle. Celal saw British and French officers trying to pull their men back, pointing toward a secondary line farther along the ridge. But the naval bombardment had ruined their defenses; there was nowhere safe to fall back to, no prepared trenches to rally in. The crest was shattered, and now the Turks were among them, too close for organized fire.