Gallipoli (92 page)

Nevertheless, such an experience certainly galvanises the Allied leadership when it comes to the impossibility of holding on in these parts through the winter. ‘Though I had so much disliked the idea of evacuation when it was first mooted,' General Birdwood would record, ‘I now threw myself into the project with all my heart.'
⁹³

Further helping to concentrate their minds on the need to get out is that, from late November, it is obvious that the much feared modern heavy shells from Germany and Austria – just like those used in France on the Western Front with such devastating effect – have started to arrive.

Private George Scott is with his mates in a spot called Victoria Gully – never before touched by shellfire – when he suddenly gets wind of a two-up game up the way. George loves two-up and heads off just 30 seconds or so before a shell from a newly arrived Austrian howitzer battery lands fair among them. He rushes back to find all his mates killed, bar Sergeant Jack Herbert, who is just alive. ‘They've got me downstairs, Scottie,' he whispers with his dying breath. ‘No more fun for me!'
⁹⁴

Major Cecil Allanson is similarly hit shortly afterwards and comes to, blinded, in a hospital ship, aware he is being given the last sacrament. A short time later, he is just about able to speak and whispers a question to the person in the next bed: ‘Am I dying, as I have just been given the last rites?'

‘Be of good cheer,' the voice comes back. ‘I have also been given them, and I only have jaundice …'
⁹⁵

But there is no denying the increasingly heavy and accurate fire descending upon them. Clearly the road – and, more pertinently, the railway line – from Berlin to Constantinople is now open, and hell is rushing their way. Unless, of course, they are no longer here …

All they need is the say-so from London and they could swing into operation. It is with this in mind that on 1 December a frustrated General Monro, in Mudros, sends a cable to the War Office:

At Anzac Cove, morale continues to fall …

The shells continue to strike with ever greater power and frequency, and one day at this time Charles Bingham and his mates in the 1st Field Ambulance note, as a shell bursts nearby, ‘the body of a man going up in the air, arms and legs spread out. He must have gone fully 50 feet up and landed and lay where he was quite dead I believe … There were arms and legs and entrails all over the place, one leg was found near the beach and the head right up on top of the hill.'
⁹⁷

There is only so much more he can bear. ‘If only I can see dear old home again,' he writes in his diary, ‘I would die quite content, but it's a chance only. Things here aren't as cheerful as could be and I pray to God that he will spare me to get away from it without being a coward.'
⁹⁸

7 DECEMBER 1915, LONDON, DISCRETION IS THE BETTER PART OF VALOUR

In the weeks since the powers in London received first Monro's and then Kitchener's recommendations to evacuate the Gallipoli Peninsula, the debate has been intense between the ‘Stayers' and the ‘Evacuationists', with the fault line between tracing a remarkably similar divide between the Easterners and Westerners of old.

Yes, the War Committee had officially advised on 23 November that the evacuation go ahead on ‘military grounds', but the Stayers, led by the likes of Admiral Wemyss and Commodore Keyes, as well as politicians such as Lord Curzon, had strongly disagreed.

According to the Stayers, the way forward is for four British divisions in Salonica to be sent to Gallipoli to make a further push in the hope of a breakthrough. Even Lord Kitchener, despite his own advice to the government in favour of evacuation, is entertaining this idea.

A great obstacle to this plan – not at all untypically for the British when it comes to foreign policy, and in fact a tradition to rival plum pudding – is the French. Those in power in Paris refuse to abandon the Salonica campaign and the embattled Serbs. What's more, there's talk of them moving their troops
from
the Dardanelles
to
Egypt!

The British are hamstrung. With their available manpower, it is not possible to pursue winter campaigns in both the Balkans and the Dardanelles. Yet if they stay at the Dardanelles, they may well risk their alliance with France …

It is every bit as unimaginable as the thought of trying to hold onto the Dardanelles without them is horrifying.

As the first week of winter comes to an end, the British Cabinet meets on this day, and immediately afterwards Prime Minister Asquith pens a letter to King George to inform His Majesty of the decision:

(Indeed, the simultaneous evacuation of Helles has been discussed over the weeks but, not only are there not enough boats at hand, thanks to the storms the piers there are in a shambles. Helles can freeze over, but it will still have to wait.)

9.30 AM, 8 DECEMBER 1915, MUDROS, PULLING OUT ALL THE STOPS

Birdwood has no sooner received news of the evacuation than he sends one of his own to inform Godley – who has just been promoted to lead Anzac – who passes the message on to the man with the plan, Brigadier-General Brudenell White:

For the mastermind, this cable means he can now begin with the real work. Within the hour, at Anzac, Brudenell White sends out the first of many daily orders to come, detailing to Divisional Commanders how many guns and men are to head to the beach
that night
for evacuation to winter headquarters. But, against any of them being taken prisoner, Brudenell White tells all bar his most intimate staff that the reason they're leaving is ‘to minimize water and supply difficulties'
⁴
over the coming winter months, and instructs them to tell others the same. The reductions over the last fortnight have seen the troops at Anzac Cove fall from 41,700 down to 36,000.

The subtractions had started with the barest trickle of sick and wounded, a trickle that in previous days had turned into a rivulet. With the order from London, the rivulet becomes a river, a full flow of men coming down from the higher reaches of the trenches.

And, just to keep the Turks guessing, they continue to maintain periods of complete silence in different trenches night after night so that, come the time, the Turks really will be properly schooled not to associate that silence with an evacuation …

‘We put it down to your wanting a quiet period [after the blizzard] to dig out your front trenches also,' Major Zeki would later recount. ‘We were, however, ordered to send out patrols and get into your trenches. Every unit had to send a patrol, but every patrol reported your line held.'
⁵

10 DECEMBER 1915, DARDANELLES, EAST IS EAST, WEST IS WEST, AND ONE MAN HEADS NORTH

After more than ten exhausting months on the Peninsula, fighting tooth and nail, heart and soul – and putting his own life on the line countless times – Colonel Mustafa Kemal is near the point of collapse. He must leave for Constantinople to recuperate. Astride his horse, he looks out over this bloodied land with powerful emotions. In his time here, he has earned the kind of reputation that can only be ‘earned on the battlefield',
⁶
something he hopes will allow him to accomplish even greater things. And yet it has come only with the sacrifice of tens of thousands of young, courageous men who have brought these invading armies to their exhausted knees. With a strong sense of both pride and sorrow, he rides away …

12 DECEMBER 1915, GALLIPOLI, THE WORD SPREADS

Among the Anzacs, of course, this kind of secret cannot be kept for long.

For have yers
heard
?

An evacuation. They're going to pull us out. Get us back to Cairo.

As this second freezing week of December comes to a close, the word inevitably spreads like wildfire – the only warm thing going – up the tracks, along the trenches, down the gullies to Anzac Cove. It swirls around the thousands of crosses in the cemeteries, heading all the way up to Quinn's Post, Russell's Top and places beyond.

Or is it just one more furphy?

Among the lower ranks, no one is sure, but mostly the stunned men refuse to believe it can be true. Many don't
want
to believe it, feeling very strongly that after so many of their mates had been cut down to win this land with blood, it is simply incomprehensible that they would give it back to the Turks.

Soon enough, however, there is no denying it. First the men see materiel being shifted from the frontlines down towards the beaches, where obviously a lot of work is being done on the piers. Then more and more of the heavy guns and cases of ammunition start coming down the hills. The real key, though, is that the ranks start to thin, and even newly arrived reinforcements are suddenly sent back to Alexandria with no explanation. The normal trickle of men returning to Gallipoli, having recovered from wounds, also ceases.

It is appalling.

Around Trooper Bluegum, the attitude is clear:
We're damned if we'll evacuate. We are going to see this game through.
⁷

Adding to that feeling is the contemplation of just how impossible it would be to withdraw without the action turning into a Turkish turkey shoot as the Diggers flee their guns.

‘It seemed,' our favourite Trooper would write, ‘that the job of getting out was fraught with more potentialities of disaster than the job of getting in. The landing on April 25 was responsible for some slaughter. The evacuation, we reckoned, would be carnage.'
⁸

On the other hand, it explains why their ranks have been so clearly thinning in recent weeks, and as the freezing conditions continue to grip them by their extremities, thoughts of the warmth in Egypt are not altogether unattractive. It also explains why the quarter-master staff have suddenly loosened up … Those who had once guarded supplies like they were the crown jewels act like they have suddenly found Christ, transformed into inordinately generous souls.

One young soldier marvels at his new gumboots … that he never even signed for! Stretcher-bearer Charles Bingham is equally amazed: ‘We could take anything we wanted out of the store …'
⁹
And he and three of his mates do just that. They walk into their camp's store and take an entire case of pineapple rings and Ideal milk. Retreating to a quiet spot, they sit down and eat the pineapple till they feel sick, burping from indigestion. Never mind, though. There are also more five-gram tablets of bicarbonate soda than they know what to do with, and after taking those, they sit down and have
another
feast.

And yet even when it becomes official on 14 December and the men are all told that it is
on
, they are also told in strictest terms that not even the word ‘evacuation' can be mentioned.

Night after night it goes on …

Company after company descend the newly widened tracks, often down steps cut into the frozen soil to make it easier for heavy traffic, carrying their rifles with butt plates covered in cloth, with whatever supplies they can carry and whatever animals they can lead, and walk onto piers covered with several layers of blankets to deaden the noise. From there, they climb onto the ten ‘motorised lighters', barges and small boats that will take them to the three ferry ships for troops (plus one for animals, one for guns, one for vehicles) just offshore from just after dusk to just before dawn.

With the rising sun, the Turkish observers can see just the same numbers of men disembarking from barges, and just the same number of donkeys hauling boxes of supplies on high. What they don't know is that the sole job of those men disembarking is to do this every morning for nearly two weeks straight, and the boxes being hauled by the donkeys have nothing in them. Those massive piles of stores down by the beach? Yes, some of them are real, marked for destruction when the time comes to go, as they simply can't get all of them away in time, but many of them are dummy stores – no more than piles of empty boxes held down by tarpaulins. Every day, the Anzac becomes more facade than force.

For the same reason, those remaining soldiers light extra cooking fires to cover for those who are gone, and those in the ever thinner frontline trenches are wanton in their waste of ammunition to keep up the impression that they are there in great numbers.

It's all in keeping with Brudenell White's plan to create an illusion of normality, ‘that we should do our utmost to avoid alarming the enemy in any way'.
¹⁰

Charles Bean, of course, chronicles the ongoing evacuation in minute detail. And no matter that on 13 December an order goes out that from noon that day no further mail is to be sent or received; the next night Charles Bean writes to his parents for later posting, ‘I want to see the end of Anzac. I don't want actually to be in the last lot to leave the beach, because the risk of being killed or cut off is too great … It is an adventure – no one can foretell the ending. It depends largely on the weather. Tonight we have ideal conditions – a cloudy sky covering the half moon; but a very smooth sea.

‘There are three more nights to go …'
¹¹

It will, Bean knows, be touch and go. Although all has gone extraordinarily well so far, the truth is that with just one mistake, one slip by one man, the Turks would become aware of what is happening and the inevitable result would be the catastrophic overwhelming of the troops who remain. The Allies are getting to the precarious point where the ranks are so thin that even a small probe by the Turks would break through. Winston Churchill, following events from afar in France, predicts disaster in these final days. ‘The hour of Asquith's punishment and K's exposure draws nearer,' he writes with some fervour to his wife, Clementine.
¹²

On the night of 15 December, no fewer than 2662 soldiers and officers are in the process of being removed from Anzac while supplies are stacked up on the beach, ready to be destroyed with fire or acid if, as now seems likely, the men won't be able to manage to remove them. With only restless sleep possible on this night, Bean constantly rises from his bunk to peer into the darkness, the landscape flickeringly illuminated by a moon obscured by scudding clouds, and the regular explosion of shells. As time hangs ever heavier, he constantly looks at his watch by the light of a struck match, just as he had done when this all began. A cold wind is starting to blow – ‘the waterproof sheet at the door of my dugout began to fidget to and fro in the gusts'
¹³
– and the clouds are getting bigger and blacker. It is a real worry, for if the bad weather returns, the whole evacuation program will be shot. As might they be. From Anzac Cove, he hears the hoots of a steamer. Offshore he can see a hospital ship, hovering, waiting, almost
expecting
trouble. Down on the beach, the incinerators are burning brighter than usual.

Bean goes back to his bunk, but the sound of the flapping sheet and the terror of it all makes sleep impossible. His hands and the soles of his feet are tingling, just as they used to before he went out to bat in a big cricket match. After everything they have gone through, this rising gale looks likely ‘to stop everything for a week! For two weeks! It would perhaps make a shambles of our piers, like that other gale did. They would take weeks to rebuild, and would the Turks with their great new howitzers let us do it?'
¹⁴

Finally, though, the weather calms and things return to their normal, frigid, calm state and that – normal – is all that counts.

‘During the last week at Anzac,' Bean would record, ‘almost every thought and action was tested by the rule of “normality”. Too much activity was regarded with as much general disfavour as too little.'
¹⁵

Yes, totally abnormal things are happening, like the dumping of lots of extra ammunition and the like into latrines or the sea, but it's all happening at night. And there are one or two abnormal things happening in the day, like ‘improving defences by erecting barbed-wire entanglements',
¹⁶
but they are calculated exceptions to the rule.