This afternoon the ferry steamer from Mudros with George Calderon on board arrived at Helles and its draft of soldiers from Britain landed ‘under the crumbled ruins of a white castle’ as he put it, i.e. the old fort at Sedd el Bahr. The full details of what he did today are contained in his letter to Kittie tomorrow.
Judging from the Official History, George and the other officers from the 9th Battalion Ox and Bucks were part of a ‘reinforcing draft’ of 2700 men arriving now for the crack 29th Division, which was part of VIII Corps under Hunter-Weston (see my post of 24 May). ‘With the arrival of the new drafts’, the official historian tells us, Hunter-Weston was ‘fairly confident that […] a successful attack could be made against the whole breadth of the enemy’s position’. But he still had to convince his Commander-in-Chief, Sir Ian Hamilton.
Today in London the new Coalition Government announced its cabinet. Winston Churchill was replaced as First Lord of the Admiralty by former Conservative prime minister Arthur Balfour. Churchill was being increasingly cast as the villain in the Dardanelles tragedy. At Gallipoli very few knew this, and morale remained high.
Next entry: ‘New Western Polovtsians’
