They were to depart, in fact, in the same way as they had arrived: as adventurers into the unknown.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
‘. . . But this same day
Must end that work the ides of March begun.’
JULIUS CAESAR, Act V, Scene 1.
THE weather was superb. For three weeks after the storm the sun rose on a placid, gently-moving sea and went down again at five in the evening in a red blaze behind Mount Athos and Samothrace. Through the long night the men slept in relative peace. There might be sudden alarms in the starlight, a mine exploding, an outburst of small-arms fire, and by day a desultory shelling; but neither side made any attempt to take the offensive.
With the cooler weather the soldiers’ health grew better. There was enough water at last and the food improved; a bakery was set up on Imbros and occasionally they saw fresh bread. Sometimes for brief intervals a canteen appeared, and the men tried to squander their months of unspent pay before its supplies gave out. Blankets, trench boots, and even oil stoves were issued to the units, and there was a fever of preparation for the winter. Like hibernating animals they went underground, roofing over their dugouts with timber and galvanized iron, digging deeper and deeper into the rocks. There was an air of permanence in the traffic that flowed back and forth between the wharves and the network of trenches at the front. Each day at the same hour the mule carts passed by, the sentries were posted, the fatigue parties made their way to the shore and those who were being sent off on leave to the islands waited for the evening ferry to arrive from Imbros. Each day, with the regularity of dockers and miners taking over a shift, gangs of men went to work on the wharves and underground entrenchments. It was a waiting game, and there was a sense of security in these repeated habits, in building things rather than destroying them.
By now Gallipoli had an established reputation in the outside world. It had ceased to be the Constantinople Expedition or even an expedition at all; it was Gallipoli, a name repeated over and over again in the newspapers. A picture had been built up in people’s minds at home just as once perhaps they built up pictures of the garrisons on the north-west frontier of India, of Kitchener and Gordon in the Sudan, of the African veldt in the Boer War. They saw, or thought they saw, the trenches in the cliffs and the blue Mediterranean below, the lurid turbanned Turks—hardly very different surely from the Pathans, the Fuzzy-wuzzies, the ‘natives’—and they knew the names of all the generals and the admirals. They knew, too, that things had ‘gone wrong’ at Gallipoli, that something would have to be done about it, and although the battlefield was so unlike any other in the war it had an agonizing reality for every family that awaited a letter from the front.
But the clearest picture of Gallipoli at this time is not given by the newspapers, nor by the generals’ dispatches, nor even by the letters and diaries of the veterans who had been there for months: it comes from the young soldiers who were still being sent out as replacements or reinforcements. Many of them had never been abroad before, and they saw it all with the dear and frightened eye of the child who for the first time in his life leaves his family and sets off alone for school. He might have been told all about Gallipoli just as once he was told all about the school to which he was being sent, but it remained terrible to him because he had never seen himself in that context before. He did not know whether or not he would have the courage of the others, and the absence of the unknown in the adventure—the fact that tens of thousands of others had gone to Gallipoli before him—was no real reassurance; it merely emphasized the unknown within himself.
These no doubt might have been the emotions of any young soldier going to war, but Gallipoli occupied a special place, since it was so far away and already so fixed in a popular myth. No one who went there ever came back on leave.
But there was at least, at the outset, the excitement and the respite of the journey. For the English soldier it began at some dim port like Liverpool, often in the rain and often aboard the Olympic or some other transatlantic liner. Here the strings with home and normality still remained, the clean food, the peacetime order on the decks, the uneventful days. A thousand letters home described the first sight of Gibraltar, the Mediterranean sunshine, the glimpse of Malta and Tunis, the U-boat scare that came to nothing. After a fortnight of this there was the arrival at Mudros, and Mudros, like every transit camp in every war, was awful: a city of dusty tents, the dreary anonymous hutments on the wharves, the appalling canteen food eaten among strangers. The spirits of the new arrivals fell sharply at Mudros while they waited for their posting to one of the three fronts on the peninsula. Anzac had the worst reputation for danger and discomfort, and there was little to choose, it was said, between Suvla and Helles.
As a rule the men revived again once they set off from Mudros and the climax of their adventure lay clear before them. They travelled by night on steamers brought out from the English Channel (the peacetime notices in French and English still painted on the gangways), and in silence and darkness they stood on deck straining their eyes for a first sight of the fabulous coast. If they were bound for Helles they saw, away to the starboard, the glare of the enemy searchlights sweeping the Dardanelles, and perhaps a starshell coming up from Asia. Then, as the rotten, sweet smell of the battlefield came out towards them, a voice, shouting in the darkness, would tell them that they were now within range, that there was to be no smoking, all torches to be extinguished. Two red lights shone on the masthead, and presently an answering light would come out from the shore. Then, all at once, they were touching something solid in the blackness, a pier or a lighter in the bay, and a gang of Indian porters, coughing dismally in the bitter cold, would come swarming on to the decks.
Waking next morning, stiff and uncomfortable on the ground, the young soldier found himself looking out on a scene which was probably much less dramatic than he had imagined, at any rate as far as the general prospect was concerned. He was in the midst of a vast dishevelled dumping ground, a slum of piled-up boxes and crates, of discoloured tents and dusty carts, of the debris of broken boats and vehicles that seemed to have been cast up like wreckage by some violent storm in the night. There was a stony football field; a few squalid huts were standing by the shore, and the legendary River Clyde was an old hulk in the bay. Smoke drifted up from cooking fires as from the back streets of an industrial town. Not a green thing grew, and although all kinds of soldiers were moving about from their holes in the ground and among the tents, they imparted somehow that air of fatigue, of staleness and physical boredom, which overtakes the homeward-going crowd in a great city railway station at the end of a long Sunday in the summer. Of Troy and the Hellespont, of the raging Turks and the crashing artillery, of death itself, there was usually nothing to be seen.
But then, as the recruit waited to be told what to do, like a boy in the quadrangle on his first morning at school, the others ignoring him as they went by on their own mysterious and definite occupations, the morning shelling would begin, the long scream, the shuddering crump in the ground, and at once he would discover a sense of identity; his nerves touched the hidden current by which, under an air of matter-of-factness, they were all animated and controlled, and there was a sort of reassurance in this experience. When at last he got his orders to go to this or that sector in the line, when he found himself actually on the road and marching, as it were, towards a precipice, his fear was often swallowed up in a delirious fatalism, a sort of bated recklessness. Now finally he was committed, from this moment his past life had gone, and he ran blindly forward or galloped his horse when he was told to hurry across the exposed ground. Obediently he dived down in the wake of his guide into the gullies and the underground city on the plain, acutely aware of the strange sights about him but in reality seeing nothing but himself. And again at the front, a mile or two away from the coast, anticlimax intervened. For long periods it was very quiet in the trenches, but there was an uninhibited air, almost a sense of freedom, which was much less constricting th
an the atmosphere of the headquarters and the base depots on the beach. Men strolled about in the sunshine, apparently in full view of the Turks. They were incurious but friendly. ‘Ah yes, we’ve been expecting you. Don’t know where you’re going to sleep. Perhaps over there.’ Over there might be a neolithic hut of stones, a blanket stretched across a hole in the side of a trench, some blind alley where a group of men were playing cards. They did not move or look up when a machine-gun snapped out somewhere in the open field ahead, a field like any other field but dry and characterless in the flat sunlight.
Then days would elapse while the new soldier, emerging from his private foreboding, still marvelled at things which had long since ceased to be remarkable to the other men: the way, for instance, a French soldier would perch on the cliffs and sound a hunting horn as a warning to the soldiers bathing in the sea below that a shell was coming over from Asia. Or it would be some surprising act of military punctilio, a pipe band parading on the shore, an immaculate colonel, looking like some animated tin soldier from the nursery, raising his hand to salute the flag at sunset. It was the casual thing done in these bizarre surroundings which was so unexpected, the very fact that they could play football at all, that the men could abandon themselves to the simplest pastimes, that they could sit, as some of them did, for hours on end oblivious of the world, happily shooting with a catapult at sparrows coming across from the Turkish lines. And always to the fresh eye there were recurring moments of release and wonder at the slanting luminous light in the early mornings and the evenings, in the marvellous colour of the sea.
But in the end, inevitably, these things ceased to be remarkable any more, they became part of an accepted background, and soon the new soldier would be filling his diary with jottings about food, about the latest parcel from home, about the hour at which he went to sleep on the previous night, about food again.
It was many months now since any of the older soldiers had seen a woman, and although the usual kind of story went around—the Turks had women in their trenches, B Company had quite definitely heard them squealing last night—sex was not a subject that generally obsessed them. It was very secondary to food. In a book called Letters from Helles, which a Colonel Darlington published long after the war, there is recorded an incident which reveals a not too painful detachment, almost a Robinson Crusoe submission to the inevitable, which was probably the general thing.
An orderly announced in an awed voice one day, ‘There’s women in that boat, Colonel.’ The Colonel ‘went out and sure enough there was a party of Australian nurses being shown around the shore to see how the wild soldier lives and sleeps. I got my glasses to see the unusual sight and much to all our Tommies’ annoyance a young nut of a staff officer with much ostentation put his arm round one of the nurses’ waists, struck an attitude and waved his hand to us. We all shook our fists at him, which caused great amusement on the launch.’
Up to the end of November there was very little talk of evacuation. It was discussed in the trenches like any other possibility, but in a detached way, and few of the men really believed that it could happen. The physical presence of the Army, its air of permanence, was all around them; too much had been committed here, too many were dead, to make it possible for them to go away. And in any case there was at this stage no plan for withdrawing from Helles at all.
At the beginning of December, however, the men at Anzac and Suvla began to notice that something unusual was going on. Soldiers who reported sick with some minor ailment were not treated at the hospitals on the bridgehead but were at once sent off to the islands and were seen no more. In increasing numbers companies and battalions were taken off en bloc, and those who remained behind did not altogether believe the official explanation that this was part of the new ‘winter policy of thinning out the bridgehead’. They thought for the most part that a new landing was to be made.
The problem was one of frightful complexity. There were some 83,000 men in the Suvla-Anzac bridgehead, and to these were added 5,000 animals, 2,000 vehicles, nearly 200 guns and vast quantities of stores. It was quite impractical to think of getting the whole of this army off in a single night, since there was neither room for them on the beaches nor sufficient boats to get them across to the islands. Equally a fighting withdrawal was out of the question: in a moment the enemy guns firing from the hills above would have wrecked all hope of embarkation.
The plan that was finally adopted was very largely the work of Colonel Aspinall, who was now serving as a brigadier-general on Birdwood’s staff, and of Lieut.-Colonel White, an Australian at Anzac. They proposed a gradual and secret withdrawal which was to take place during successive nights until at last only a small garrison was left; and these last, the ‘bravest and the steadiest men’, were then to take their chance on getting away before the Turks discovered what was happening. This meant that the operation would rise to an acute point of tension during the last hours—a rough sea would ruin all, a Turkish attack would expose them to a slaughter—but still there seemed no other way.
There now began a period of intensive preparation. Once again a fleet of small boats was assembled in the islands. Twelve thousand hospital beds were got ready in Egypt, and fifty-six temporary hospital ships were ordered to stand ready to take the wounded off the beaches—the larger liners, the Mauretania, the Aquitania and the Britannic, to sail directly to England. Gangs of engineers were put to work to repair the piers destroyed in the November storms,36 and an elaborate time-table was worked out so that every man would know precisely what he had to do.
Clearly everything would depend on secrecy and the weather. Secrecy was even more vital now than it had been in the days before the landings, and it was a constant anxiety in Birdwood’s headquarters that some soldier, wittingly or unwittingly, might give the plans away. A naval patrol sealed off the islands from Greek caiques trading with the mainland, and on Imbros a cordon was placed round the civilian village on the pretext that an outbreak of smallpox was suspected there.
In the midst of these arrangements Lord Milner and others chose to discuss openly the whole question of evacuation in the House of Lords in London. It was common knowledge, Lord Milner said, that General Monro had recommended evacuation. Had Kitchener gone out to the Dardanelles to give a second opinion? Or was Kitchener himself to command the operation? It was part of the old zany carelessness which had led people to address letters to ‘The Constantinople Force’ when Hamilton was first assembling the Army in Egypt, and on Imbros Birdwood’s planning staff could do nothing but listen in despair. Fortunately, however, the Turks and the Germans simply could not bring themselves to believe that the British would give away their plans in this casual way; they revealed later that they regarded the debate in the House of Lords as propaganda.
Over the weather there could be even less control; the meteorologists said that it ought to hold until the end of the year, and one could only pray that they were right. One good southerly blow on the final night would wreck the whole adventure.
There remained one other imponderable, and that was the behaviour of the Army itself. On December 12 the soldiers at Suvla and Anzac were told for the first time that they were to be taken off, that this for them was the end of the campaign. There seems to have been a moment of stupefaction. Even those who had guessed that something of the sort was about to happen were astonished, and perhaps it was something more than astonishment, a dull awe, a feeling that this was a shaming and unnatural reversal of the order of things. Among the majority, no doubt, these thoughts were soon overtaken by a sense of relief, and they were content simply to accept instructions and to get away. Others, and there were very many of them, remained indignant. They, too, like Rupert Brooke, had seen a vision of Constantinople and had perhaps exclaimed, as he had, when they had first set out from Egypt only eight months before, ‘Oh God! I’ve never been quite so happy before.’ All this was now an embarrassment to remember, an absurd and childish excitement, and it was made more bitter by the endless
disappointments, the death and the wastage that had intervened.
There was a simple and immediate reaction, and possibly it was a desire to remove the stigma of defeat, to create artificially a chance of heroism since the plan provided none: the men came to their officers in hundreds and asked to be the last to leave the shore. It was nothing more than a gesture, something for the pride to feed on, a kind of tribute to their friends who were already dead, but they were intensely serious about it. The veterans argued that they had earned this right, the newer arrivals insisted that they should be given this one last opportunity of distinguishing themselves. And so there was no need to call for volunteers to man the trenches at the end; it was a matter of selection.
But for the moment there was more need of cunning and discipline than heroism. In the second week of December the first stage of the evacuation began. Each evening after dusk flotillas of barges and small boats crept into Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay and there was a fever of activity all night as troops and animals and guns were got on board. The sick and wounded came first, the prisoners-of-war, and then, in increasing numbers, the infantry. The men walked silently down from the trenches, their boots wrapped in sacking, their footfall deadened by layers of blankets laid along the piers. In the morning the little fleet had vanished and all was normal again. Men and stores were being disembarked in the usual way, the same mule teams laden with boxes were toiling up to the front from the beaches, and there was no way for the Turks to know that the boxes on the mules were empty or that the disembarking men were a special group whose job was to go aboard the boats each night in the darkness and then return ostentatiously to the shore in the morning. Another deception was carried out with the guns. They ceased to fire soon after dark each night, so that the Turks should grow accustomed to silence and should not guess that anything was amiss on the final night when the last men were leaving the trenches. In the same way the infantry were ordered to hold back their rifle and machine-gun fire.
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