Gallipoli (91 page)

But still, for the Turks watching, such a muted reply seems strange. There are some Anzacs there, but how many? The Turks appear to be almost
worried
for them, and later in the day a message wrapped to a rock is thrown into Quinn's:

The ‘
Soldas Australos
' do not reply, recognising that the note is less an enquiry as to their health and more a query whether they are at home.

On the morning of the third day of silence on the front, a freezing wind lashes the side of Lieutenant Mehmed Fasih's tent, some of the tranquillity of the previous days is lost, and he can't bring himself to get up. Not just yet.

His men had escaped the fate of their other curious comrades, having returned safely in the night with news that ‘there were men guarding the front of the trenches and there were sounds of talking coming from the trenches',
⁷⁴
so they had not proceeded any closer. After lying in until 7.30 am, Mehmed Fasih decides to read the newspaper. Granted, it is eight days old, but still …

Straightening it out before him, he is met with an extraordinary report: ‘The issue of an English evacuation from Chanak is being debated in the House of Lords …'
⁷⁵
Excitedly, he reads on about Monro's report to Kitchener, savouring particularly the words ‘it is impossible, unthinkable for the English to continue to keep its force [on the Peninsula]'.
⁷⁶

Müjde!
Good news! Still, wary of his enemy, whom he has grown to know, and who have pursued all manner of means to survive and make ground, he remains unconvinced. Mehmed Fasih puts down the paper and jots in his diary, ‘I guess the result of all this discussion will become clear later down the line.'
⁷⁷

His superiors, including General Enver in Constantinople and Liman von Sanders here on the Peninsula, are also circumspect about these public declarations of Britain's war strategy, so there is no way these men can easily believe that the Britons would be so imprudent. Surely this is yet another ruse, a campaign of misinformation … but then again, the winter is coming and it is clear from their vantage points that their enemy is suffering.

As for the other Ottoman and German brass, who have already seen the report, there are mixed feelings and long debates about what this really means. Colonel Kannengiesser, for one, does not believe the English capable of swallowing such a large dose of pride. ‘Rumours and suggestions that the enemy were going to evacuate Gallipoli naturally swarmed around us,' he would later recall. ‘I personally did not believe in such a possibility because, taking into account the English character, I considered it out of the question that they would give up such a hostage of their own free will and without a fight.'
⁷⁸

Major Zeki agrees. ‘After the fighting at Hill 60 the papers and news agencies began to talk about evacuation,' he would later recall to Charles Bean. ‘There was a doubt in the air; some thought you were going, some that you would attack, some that you would go on as we saw you digging, digging for the winter. The general view was that you would leave the peninsula.'
⁷⁹

Colonel Mustafa Kemal is very strongly of the view that they will leave. As early as October, he had written in a letter to his friend in Constantinople, ‘The enemy facing us is now exhausted. Hopefully, he will soon be driven away entirely. In any case, the country is safe at this position.'
⁸⁰
And later he recalled, ‘I had realized that the enemy was about to withdraw, and so I had proposed an offensive. But they turned it down.'
⁸¹

Though upset that, once again, his advice is not heeded by his superiors, Colonel Mustafa Kemal is not
quite
at the end of his tether with both General Enver and General Liman von Sanders, but he can certainly see it from here. His health, too, is getting worse by the day and the revered Commander thinks seriously about returning to Constantinople.

AFTERNOON, 26 NOVEMBER 1915, AT ANZAC, A SPY FROM ON HIGH

Everybody out!

Turkish plane coming this way, at a very low altitude. Manfully resisting the impulse to try to shoot it down with rifle and machine-gun fire as they usually do, the Anzacs do as Brigadier-General Brudenell White has specifically instructed:

That evening, the word goes out. Everyone is to stand to on the front trenches, because it is a near certainty that the Turks will send out patrols tonight to find out what is going on.

Sure enough, in the wee hours that night, curiosity really does get the better of the Turks, as the vigilant Anzacs see a few tentative souls coming forward from the Turkish trenches. The Anzacs resist the impulse to shoot, hoping that more will gather. It works. After the first Turks appear and are not shot at, then more come, and all together they start walking towards the Australians and New Zealanders.

Steady, men. Steady … Steady … Steady …

And
now.

‘Then, of course,' one private would recount, ‘everybody opened fire, and that was that. The Turks, of course, realised they had been tricked.'
⁸³

Hopefully, now, the brutes have learned their lesson. Just because things are quiet, it doesn't meant that the Anzacs have
gorn
. The Turks better keep their bloody heads down.

As it happens, however, within hours everyone will be doing exactly that. On the morning of 27 November, another howling and horrifying storm hits the Dardanelles, the worst in these parts for 40 years. The wind howls, the seas rear up, the thunder and lightning flashes, before hail pelts down as never before. A few old villagers, who had refused to leave their lifelong homes nearby, would declare ‘that they had never lived through' such a storm.
⁸⁴
In fact, ‘storm' does not quite do the phenomenon justice. For after the hail then comes the rain for the next 24 hours.

But this is not rain like they know in Australia and New Zealand. This is not just pouring rain, this is
lashing
rain, stinging rain, freezing and flooding rain that turns into a howling blizzard that would not only wake the dead but in many cases also begins to wash them away – with the rain gushing down the hills of both Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay, dislodging corpses and sweeping them into the trenches.

Oh the horror, as the soldiers on the lower slopes are suddenly engulfed with this flood of rotting corpses, in a torrent so strong that several Diggers drown. The only way to survive is to immediately get up and out of those trenches. It means that suddenly, on both sides of a watery no-man's-land, shivering blue-faced soldiers arise to stare at each other.
⁸⁵

While even the Turks are shocked by the ferocity of the storm, at least they are locals, with a better reckoning of local conditions, and at least they have the high ground, meaning the flooding debris rushes more from them than upon them.

And then comes an icy cyclone that would blow a dog off a chain and does in fact blow many tethered donkeys into the sea, and the suddenly snarling Aegean roars up like an enraged lion to, once more, effortlessly destroy one pier and badly damage another.

Under such conditions, as Birdwood would describe it, ‘no boat could get near any of the beaches',
⁸⁶
and such small boats as are anchored near the shore soon end up as wreckage on the beaches. What on earth would they do if such a wind hit during the evacuation, if it happens?

Even through such weather, however, Brudenell White and the group of officers now brainstorming around him remain hard at work, as the winds howl all around. And their persistence is bearing fruit. Brudenell White is deeply satisfied with the outcome of his ‘silence ruse', which has worked like a charm. As he would later recall, ‘the enemy displayed marked uneasiness and eventually reconnoitred our line in several places, suffering many casualties'.
⁸⁷

And now, just five days after receiving confirmation that the evacuation is to go ahead, he despatches his carefully calibrated operational timetable to ANZAC HQ, outlining the next two stages:

It then goes on to outline the precise logistics of achieving this ambitious plan. By Brudenell White's meticulous estimation, the next stage should ‘begin at once'. And within ‘ten working days'
⁸⁹
they could reduce their numbers at Anzac Cove to 22,000.
⁹⁰

Brudenell White knows there will be many objections to his plan, but he is adamant that it is the only way to slip off the Peninsula with as few casualties as possible.

28 NOVEMBER 1915, ANZAC, A VISITATION FROM THE HEAVENS

Strange. Very strange. Private John Cargill from Redfern in Sydney is asleep in his trench just down from Quinn's when it happens. After being stirred awake by something unknown, he looks up and sees strange white flakes floating down.

What the
hell
is that? It looks sort of like frost. But as far as he knows, frost always comes out of the ground, not the sky.

It is curious enough that he nudges his cobber Otty awake. ‘Hey,' he says to the native-born Englishman, ‘I didn't know that frost came out of the [sky].'

‘'Course it don't, you mug,' Otty replies derisively, ‘that's snow.'

‘Snow?'

Snow.

Private Cargill has heard of snow. And this it? Bonza! And yet, when he makes to jump out of the trench to get a better look at it and maybe make a snowball, Otty grabs him.

‘No, stay here,' he says, ‘it'll be there in the morning. If you get up now, you won't be able to get back into your bunk again.'

‘Oh, all right.'
⁹¹

As it turns out, however, Cargill is one of the few who doesn't get up, as many other Anzacs who are similarly seeing snow for the first time are soon up and chiacking, making snowballs and throwing them at each other, even as a full-blown blizzard begins to rage.

Snow! Real snow!

In the morning, the previous ugliness of the trenches – corpses, skeletons, shrapnel, discarded ammunition boxes, rubbish and latrines – is now covered with what Banjo Paterson might have called ‘the vision splendid of a snow-covered field extended'. White snow!

The wonder of it all does not last long, for what comes with it, of course, is a cold more terrible than they have already experienced, and soon enough up by Anzac's side,
‘where the hills are twice as steep and twice as rough … the man that holds his own is good enough'
.

It is so cold that the water in their water bottles freezes, as it does in the water cans, meaning the cooks have a hard time, having to melt the water they need for cooking. So cold that many of the rifles have frozen mechanisms and no longer work. Within 24 hours, men are reporting to casualty stations with ghostly-white, frostbitten feet that are soon to turn black as the flesh dies, and still the mercury falls – and more and more men with it.

At Hill 60, Major Cecil Allanson's 1/6th Ghurkha Rifles are positioned with little shelter and feel the full brunt of the frozen winds. ‘The cold was just intense,' the Major would recall, ‘and I have never seen such courage as I saw through this blizzard. Men found at the parapet facing the Turk with glassy eyes and stone dead, who gave up their lives rather than give in. Imagine the death of slow, accepted torture. It is, at such periods, and at such periods only, that one really does not seem afraid of death.'
⁹²

Perhaps the Anzacs might have been able to withstand it better if they had been issued with winter kit, but that has not been organised yet. Still broadly in their summer clothes, in mostly exposed trenches, they shiver in their shorts, aghast, as icicles form on the ceilings of their dugouts. Tarpaulins and tents collapse under the weight of snow, rations are washed away and ruined, and their hands, not to mention their whole bodies, are so cold they are incapable of anything bar the most basic motions. This includes Charles Bean, who, in his dugout, is so cold he cannot write. He must get up and walk for fear of freezing to death.

Down on the exposed plains of Suvla Bay, it is all much worse. There, in far more open country, where the ground is so rocky that many have not been able to dig trenches and so escape the wind that way, it freezes them clear to the bone … and deeper still. Overall, some 200 drown or die of exposure, while there are a staggering 5000 cases of frostbite at Suvla alone. And on the calendar, at least, winter has not yet begun.

As the storm persists, Brudenell White and his cabal of senior officers, still working practically around the clock on their evacuation plans, become more and more concerned: how on earth would they get currently some 83,000 men off Suvla and Anzac if such a storm should hit again? The vessels would not be able to get close to the shore, and even if they did, there would be no piers left for the men to board them from.