Gallipoli (89 page)

Surprisingly – given that he has the air of a man who knows all there is to know – he even asks a few questions as he continues to make his way around. And the more he inspects the situation, the more obvious it becomes to him that he is standing in the middle of military hell on earth – where there is no spot secure from artillery, where the enemy has all the advantages of numbers, supply, observation
and
height. After surveying the whole thing intently, Kitchener puts his hand on Birdwood's arm and says with some feeling, ‘Thank God, Birdie, I came to see this for myself. You were quite right. I had no idea of the difficulties you were up against. I think you have all done wonders.'
³⁷
(It is the same unexpected kind of warmth the Secretary for War had displayed when they had met at Mudros. The normally undemonstrative Kitchener, at least with fellow officers, had leaned in and squeezed Birdwood's arm, saying, ‘I can't tell you how glad I am to have you with me again, Birdie, and be away from all those bloody politicians.')
³⁸

And then, with as little ceremony as the way he arrived, Lord Kitchener, with his entourage, returns to the pier at North Beach and is taken off through the now heavy swell on the small lighter that awaits.

Though on the subject of possible evacuation he remains non-committal, upon returning to the flagship
Lord Nelson
later that afternoon and having more discussions, it would seem, at least to General Birdwood, that, ‘Kitchener had begun to dislike the idea of evacuation less than formerly.'
³⁹

That may just be Birdie's hope getting the better of him, however, as Kitchener's visit coincides with the formation of a ‘small committee of naval and military officers working at Mudros',
⁴⁰
including Lieutenant-Colonel Cecil Aspinall, who are already busy drawing up a broad master plan for evacuation.

Two days later, Kitchener sends a cable:

15 NOVEMBER 1915, LONDON, AN EASTERNER HEADS TO THE WESTERN FRONT

Winston Churchill has had enough.

When Prime Minister Asquith profits by Kitchener's absence to form a smaller, five-member War Committee, which excludes the two principal architects of the Dardanelles disaster – Churchill and Lord Kitchener – the erstwhile First Lord of the Admiralty tenders his resignation to Asquith on the same day: ‘Knowing what I do about the present situation, and the instrument of executive power, I could not accept a position of general responsibility for war policy without any effective share in its guidance & control …

‘I therefore ask you to submit my resignation to the King. I am an officer, and I place myself unreservedly at the disposal of the military authorities, observing that my regiment is in France.'
⁴²

Four days after his resignation is accepted, Churchill pauses only to take a parliamentary Parthian shot at Jacky Fisher for having thwarted him in his magnificent plans for the Dardanelles. ‘I did not receive from the First Sea Lord,' he gravely tells the House, ‘either the clear guidance before the event, or the firm support after, which I was entitled to expect. If the First Sea Lord had not approved the operations, if he believed they were unlikely to take the course that was expected of them, if he thought they would lead to undue losses, it was his duty to refuse consent. No one could have prevailed against such a refusal. The operation would never have been begun …'

His advice now to the government is consistent with what he has been saying all along: do nothing on the Western Front that costs more in Allied lives than the enemy's. And in the meantime, ‘in the East, take Constantinople, take it by ships if you can; take it by soldiers if you must; take it by whichever plan, military or naval, commends itself to your military experts, but take it, and take it soon, and take it while time remains'.
⁴³

With which, Winston takes his hat, his coat and his umbrage and shortly afterwards a ticket for the Western Front, where he is promoted to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and placed in command of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers.

17 NOVEMBER 1915, BACK AT GALLIPOLI, A HARBINGER OF HELL?

And isn't that just the experience of mankind through the ages? No matter the advances in weaponry, the leaps of lethalness that every generation must face, still nature is capable of generating a fury that truly defines the word, making man's attempts to match it appear puny. So it is on this afternoon as a storm hits the Dardanelles, of such power in its wind, rain, thunder, lightning and COLD that it is nigh
biblical
in proportions.

Oh, repent ye sinners, and shelter from His wrath if you can, as most damaging of all are the enormous breakers that pick up vessels and hurl them on the shore, holing their hulls, shattering their sterns and bows on the rocks and – most worryingly of all – washing away all but one of the piers that are the lifeline for all at Anzac Cove.

Walking among the piles of debris on the beach the next morning, ‘just lined with wrecks of punts and tugs etc, and also mules and ponies in all directions',
⁴⁴
Charles Bean – who has turned 36 on this day – comes across Commander George Gipps, who tells him they have just 40 hours' water left at Anzac.

‘How do you think we're going to get on in the winter?' Bean asks.

Gipps is incredulous. ‘The winter!' he exclaims. ‘I think we're within two days of a disaster.'
⁴⁵

Inevitably, the talk among both the senior military officer corps and the correspondents turns to evacuation – whether it is first even possible, and, if that, advisable. ‘The result of all this will be, probably, a sort of Crimea,' Bean writes in his diary. ‘I think we can hang on, in a sort of way – but at the cost of the utmost suffering to which our past trials have not been a fleabite by comparison.'
⁴⁶

Even to those who advocate evacuation most passionately, however, it is obvious that the key must be secrecy. Under no circumstances must the Turks get wind that they are even thinking of it, for forewarned would be forearmed, and the Turks being ready to pounce at the first sign of their leaving would lead to certain catastrophe at the point when they no longer have the men to resist.
Secrecy
, above all.

18 NOVEMBER 1915, THE LORDS BREAK THEIR SILENCE

Great Britain's magnificent House of Lords – boasting some 600 years of history, secure in the knowledge that the power of the sun that never sets on the British Empire is always at high noon here at the heart of the Houses of Parliament – is, nevertheless, troubled. For decades, nay
centuries
, the great affairs of the day discussed in this great chamber have traditionally been all about how to maximise the success already achieved. But of late, where the news from just about every military front is bad, and the suspicion has grown that the problem lies not with the Empire itself but the way His Majesty's Government administers it, the venerable Baron Ribblesdale, politician and huntsman, who had lost his last son and heir at Gallipoli just six weeks earlier, can bear it no longer.

Rising from his seat, this epitome of an English aristocrat gazes momentarily at his fellow Lords, all of them seated in an elongated semicircle before the throne, which perches upon a raised platform at the far end of the chamber, before his clipped Oxford tones ring out across the august assembly. ‘I turn for a moment to the Dardanelles,' he begins. ‘It is common knowledge, I believe, that Sir Charles Monro, who was sent out the other day to the Dardanelles, has reported in favour of withdrawal from the Dardanelles and adversely to the continuance of winter operations there … Perhaps his decision was not one that the Government liked very much. I would ask, has Lord Kitchener been sent out to give a second opinion on the Dardanelles, or has he gone out to act and to withdraw the Expedition?'
⁴⁷

For many, including Malcolm Ross, New Zealand's official war correspondent, these remarks are flippant to a fault, and their publication cause a measure of despair. As Ross later writes, ‘One read in the papers speeches of Members of [the British] Parliament asking light-heartedly why the forces were not withdrawn from the Dardanelles, as if it were a process of merely picking up baggage and walking off. People talking like that could not have the faintest conception of the conditions under which we [have] been holding on …'
⁴⁸

It surely won't be long before the Turks and the Germans get wind of this …

22 NOVEMBER 1915, A BREAKTHROUGH AT MUDROS

After long discussion, Lord Kitchener cables the Prime Minister from Mudros:

Of course, eight months earlier, this would have been enough. On matters military, Kitchener commanded, others obeyed. But not now. So reduced are his stocks that, while his view is to be taken into account, the decision remains one for the Cabinet to make, and this will require further deliberation.

At least, however, Kitchener's view is in accord with that of many other significant figures. Prime Minister Asquith, as he advises the War Committee, ‘feels bound to advise the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula on military grounds, notwithstanding the grave political disadvantages which may result from this decision'.
⁵⁰

For when it comes to making a sane decision, do they have a
choice
? It is now obvious to most of them – led by the outraged Lloyd George and Bonar Law – that to leave the forces they have now on the Gallipoli Peninsula, unaided, would see them simply hold their position at best, and lose it at worst. To have them break through the Turkish positions would require more troops and resources of artillery and ammunition than Great Britain actually has to spare. Nowhere is the position worse than at Anzac, where the Commanders on the ground had told Kitchener that keeping the supply lines open during the forecasted harsh winter was expected to be more than problematic.

They
must
be evacuated.

Against that, from back at Mudros, Commodore Keyes and Admiral Wemyss have been arguing as furiously as ever that the whole battle
still
can be won, by forcing the Narrows, at which point the troops at Gallipoli could triumphantly march on Constantinople.

But make no mistake, Admiral Wemyss makes clear to the Admiralty in a cable:

Wemyss and Keyes are supported in London by the likes of the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Lord Curzon, who is insistent that any evacuation would condemn to death half the troops, and he refuses to countenance it, whatever Kitchener says. ‘I wish to draw it in no impressionist colours,' he writes, in a paper soon circulated to Cabinet, ‘but as it must in all probability arise. The evacuation and the final scenes will be enacted at night. Our guns will continue firing until the last moment … but the trenches will have been taken one by one, and a moment must come when a final
sauve qui peut
takes place, and when a disorganized crowd will press in despairing tumult on to the shore and into the boats. Shells will be falling and bullets ploughing their way into the mass of retreating humanity … Conceive the crowding into the boats of thousands of half-crazy men, the swamping of craft, the nocturnal panic, the agony of the wounded, the hecatombs of slain. It requires no imagination to create a scene that, when it is told, will be burned into the hearts and consciences of the British people for generations to come.'
⁵²

These prove to be merely his opening remarks …

And then there are their French allies – backed by the Russians – who fervently want Salonica reinforced to assist France's retreating army in Serbia and protect the other Balkan states.

For the moment, thus, Cabinet decides to overrule the recommendations of both Kitchener and the War Committee, and postpone a final decision until after the Anglo-French War Conference at Calais on 4 December 1915. The British hope they can convince the French to abandon the Salonica campaign altogether. But, yes, in the meantime, it is only prudent to have those on the Gallipoli Peninsula
prepare
to get out, so that if evacuation does happen, all can be ship-shape and with ships waiting.

The main thing from now is to get it underway and ensure that, as the War Committee has decided, ‘Every possible precaution is to be taken to preserve secrecy, upon which the feasibility of the operation so largely depends.'
⁵³
The greatest challenge will obviously be to keep the evacuation secret from the many watching Turkish eyes, and get as many men off before the Turks become aware and likely launch their final assault.