Gallipoli (51 page)

Liman’s first reaction was the obvious one: he immediately set about gathering up his best divisions—there were now twenty-one under his command—and marching them south for an
assault on the last remaining British bridgehead at Cape Helles. ‘It was thought possible,’ he says, ‘that the enemy might hang on there for some time. That could not be
permitted.’ While his preparations for the attack were going forward patrols were sent out into no-man’s-land each night, and the Turkish commanders at the front were ordered to keep a
constant watch on every movement in the British lines.

It was an impossible position for the British. They had four divisions in Cape Helles. If they stayed they knew it could not be long before the Turks mounted a major attack against them; if they
attempted to go they were hardly likely to outwit the Turks a second time. Monro as ever was in no doubt at all as to what should be done. Directly the Anzac-Suvla evacuation was completed he sent
a message to London urging that Helles should be given up as well; and this time he found an ally in Admiral Wemyss. Birdwood too was eager to be off. And eventually on December 27 the cabinet
agreed.

There followed a rapid series of changes in the high command. On December 22 de Robeck came back from London to resume control of the Fleet and Wemyss was posted off to the East Indies. A few
days later Monro himself was gone; a signal arrived appointing him to the command of the First Army in France, the place where in all the world he most wished to be. On New Year’s Day he
sailed for Egypt and Gallipoli saw him no more. Now everyone was averting their eyes from this graveyard of men and their reputations, and this last act seemed likely to be the most painful of all.
It was left to Birdwood, de Robeck and Keyes, the three men who had been there from the beginning, to clean up the mess.

There was not much time. With every day the weather grew more threatening and the Turks more likely to attack; they were
shelling now with terrible accuracy with their new
German guns and ammunition. There were 35,000 men in the Helles bridgehead, nearly 4,000 animals and almost as many guns and stores as there had been at Suvla and Anzac. Once again it was decided
that half the garrison should be evacuated secretly over a series of nights. General Davies, the corps commander, insisted that on January 9, the final night, he should be left with sufficient men
to hold off the Turks for a week in case, at the last moment, he was cut off by foul weather. He fixed on the total of 17,000 as the minimum number of soldiers required for this rearguard, and this
also happened to be the maximum number that the Navy could take off in a single night. By January 1, 1916, all was agreed and the movement began.

The French were the first to go, and they left such a yawning gap in the line that there was nothing for it but to bring back the British 29th Division, to take their places. There was not much
left of the 29th. The division had been badly cut up in the August battles and when they were evacuated from Suvla they were down to less than half their strength. One thing however remained to
them, and that was a reputation of great bravery and steadiness; so now, after a few brief days’ respite in the islands, they found themselves landing again beside the
River Clyde
and marching back to the trenches which they had first occupied eight months before. Among so many anti-climaxes this, perhaps, was the hardest of all.

There was a constricting feeling in the British trenches at Cape Helles at this time. At first the soldiers had no idea that the bridgehead was to be evacuated—indeed they were given a
printed order of the day specifically saying that they were to remain. They hated this prospect, and in particular they feared that they might become prisoners of war—a fear that was all the
more lurid because a rumour got about that the Turks would castrate them.

About five days before the final night it became generally known that the bridgehead was to be evacuated, and then the period of real tension began. But still excitement was the drug and a
fatalism intervened. Four divisions against twenty-one was a
monstrosity even on such a narrow front as this, but there was nothing that anyone could do about it. And so they
played football, they waited, they made a kind of security out of the accustomed routine in the trenches, and they saw no further than the day ahead. Night by night the battalions went away and no
one questioned the order of withdrawal; one simply waited for the summons and it was absurdly like the atmosphere of a dentist’s waiting room. ‘You’re next,’ and another
regiment vanished. The others, feeling neither lucky nor unlucky, but fixed simply in an unalterable succession of events, remained behind and waited as the last patients wait, amid vague smells of
carbolic and grisly secret apprehensions, in the silence of an emptying room.

There were a number of alarms and misadventures. High winds blew up, and they had to throw in cases of bully beef and other stores to repair the breaches in the causeway at Sedd-el-Bahr. Once
when a sailor flashed a torch on a lighter full of mules there was a stampede, and for a long time the animals were snorting and screaming in the sea. Another night the French battleship
Suffren
ran down a large transport and sent her to the bottom. The U-boat scare began again. Yet by January 7 they had got the garrison down to 19,000; and now at last, at this instant of
greatest danger for the British, Liman von Sanders delivered his attack.

He had been much delayed. All had been ready forty-eight hours before, but Enver had chosen that moment to send a message from Constantinople ordering nine of the Gallipoli divisions to Thrace.
It was Enver’s last gesture in the campaign, and Liman countered it in the usual way; he sent in his resignation. In the usual way, too, Enver backed down. The order was countermanded and
now, in the early afternoon on January 7, the Turks came in for the kill. They were equipped with wooden ramps to throw across the British trenches, and special squads carried inflammable materials
with which they were to burn the British boats on the shore. This was to be the final coup.

The attack began with the heaviest artillery bombardment of the campaign, and it went on steadily for four and a half hours. There was a lull for a few minutes and then it recommenced.
In the British trenches the Soldiers waited for the inevitable rush that would follow the bombardment; and in the early evening it began. The Turkish infantry had a hundred yards or
more to go before they reached the first British trenches, and they jumped up with their old cries of
Allah
,
Allah
, and
Voor
,
Voor
—strike, strike. Perhaps
there was something of desperation in the answering fire of the British defence. It was so murderous, so concentrated and steady, that when only a few minutes had gone by the soldiers saw a thing
which had scarcely ever happened before—the Turkish infantry were refusing to charge. Their officers could be seen shouting and striking at the men, urging them up and out into the open where
so many were already dead. But the men would not move. By nightfall it was all over. Not a single enemy soldier had broken into the British lines.

Liman admits that this disastrous attack convinced him that the British were not going to evacuate Cape Helles after all, and nothing further was done to molest them all through that night and
the following day.

There were now just 17,000 men left, and January 8 was another calm spring-like day. Once again as at Suvla and Anzac great piles of stores and ammunition were got ready for destruction.
Landmines were laid, and the self-firing rifles set in position in the trenches. Once again the sad mules lay dead in rows.

During the day the wind shifted round to the south-west and freshened a little, but it was still calm when at dusk the long lines of boats and warships set out for the peninsula for the last
time. From Clapham Junction, from the Vineyard and
Le Haricot
, and the other famous places which soon would not even be mentioned on the maps, the men came marching to the sea, a distance
of three miles or so.

The thing that the soldiers afterwards remembered with particular vividness was the curious alternation of silence and of deafening noise that went on through the day. At Sedd-el-Bahr they
crouched under the comer of the battered fort waiting for their turn to embark, and in the overwhelming stillness of their private fear they heard nothing but the footfall of the men who had
gone ahead; the clop, clop, clop of their boots as they ran across the pontoons to the
River Clyde
where lighters were waiting to embark them. Then, in an instant,
all was dissolved in the shattering explosion of enemy shells erupting in the sea. Then again the clop, clop, clop of the boots as the line of running men took up its course again. To see safety so
near and to know that with every second it might be lost—this was the hardest trial of all to bear, and it crushed the waiting soldier with nightmares of loneliness.

Apart from the spasmodic shelling there was no movement in the Turkish lines, and as the night advanced the Turks very largely ceased to count; it was the weather which engrossed
everybody’s mind. By 8 p.m. the glass was falling, and at nine when the waning moon went down the wind had risen to thirty-five miles an hour. The
River Clyde
held firmly
enough—all through these nights the men had been passing under her lee to the boats—but the crazy piers in the bay strained and groaned as heavy seas came smashing up against them. Soon
an alarm went up. Two lighters broke adrift and crashed through the flimsy timber. All further embarkation then was stopped while a gang of engineers, working in the black and icy sea, put things
to rights again. Then when another 3,000 men had been got off the pier collapsed once more, and again there was another hour’s delay.

By midnight when the last troops began to leave the trenches on their long walk to the shore the wind was rising with every minute that went by, and in the starlight there was nothing to be seen
at sea but a waste of racing water. Two white rockets went up from the battleship
Prince George
—the signal that she was being attacked by a submarine. Two thousand men had just got
aboard the ship, and de Robeck and Keyes in the
Chatham
rushed towards her. But it was nothing—the vessel had merely bumped some wreckage in the water.

Now everything depended upon the speed with which the last men could be got away. At 2 a.m. 3,200 still remained. Through the next hour most of them managed to reach the boats, and barely 200
were then waiting to be embarked. These, however, were in a critical situation. Under the charge of General Maude,
the commander of the 13th Division who had insisted on
being among the last to leave, they had made their way to Gully Beach, an isolated landing place on the west coast, only to find that the lighter which was to take them off had run aground. By now
the trenches had been empty for two and a half hours, and it was apparent that they could not stay where they were. One hope remained: to march on another two miles to ‘W’ beach at the
tip of the peninsula on the chance that they might still be in time to find another boat. They set off soon after 2 a.m. and had been on the road for some ten minutes when the General discovered
with consternation that his valise had been left behind on the stranded lighter. Nothing, he announced, would induce him to leave without it, and so while the rest of the column went on he turned
back with another officer to Gully Beach. Here they retrieved the lost valise, and placing it on a wheeled stretcher set off once more along the deserted shore. Meanwhile the others had reached
‘W’ beach, where the last barge was waiting to push off. They felt, however, that they could not leave until the General arrived—a decision which required some courage, for the
storm had now risen to half a gale, and the main ammunition dump, the fuse of which had already been lighted, was due to explode in under half an hour.
³⁷
After twenty minutes the commander of the boat announced that he could wait no more; in another five minutes all further embarkation would become impossible. It was at this moment that the General
emerged from the darkness with his companion and came trundling his valise down the pier.

It was just a quarter to four in the morning when they pushed off, and ten minutes later the first of the ammunition dumps went up with a colossal roar. As the soldiers
and sailors in the last boats looked back towards the shore they saw hundreds of red rockets going up from Achi Baba and the cliffs in Asia, and immediately afterwards Turkish shells began to burst
and crash along the beach. The fire in the burning dumps of stores took a stronger hold, and presently all the sky to the north was reddened with a false dawn. Not a man had been left behind.

It had been a fantastic, an unbelievable success, a victory of a sort at a moment when hope itself had almost gone. Decorations were awarded to General Monro and his chief-of-staff who had so
firmly insisted upon the evacuation.

No special medal, however, was given to the soldiers who fought in the Gallipoli campaign.

T
HE
war never returned to Gallipoli. Soon after the campaign most of the Turkish soldiers were removed to other fronts, and within a few years nearly
all the debris of the battlefield had been taken away.
³⁸
In successive winter storms the remnants of the wharves and jetties were destroyed, and the
trenches in the hills above fell in upon themselves and lost all pattern. Already by 1918 a thick growth of camel thorn and wild thyme, of saltbush and myrtle, had covered the scarred ground where
for nine months there had been nothing but dust or mud.