Gallipoli (93 page)

Another real problem now beckons for Brudenell White – the tightly coiled spring, driving the clockwork operations all around – who is still ensconced in Anzac HQ, just back from the beach, sleeping very little and sending out a constant stream of precise instructions.

He must decide just who is going to man the trenches to the last – the most precarious position of the lot – when those remaining have every chance of being wiped out by overwhelming numbers of Turks flooding down the hills against all but no resistance.

The problem is not that no one wants to do it. It is that nigh everyone does. Though swamped by volunteers, Brudenell White proceeds by a simple rule: he wants the best, most capable men to be last off, the ones deemed most likely to perform well in a rear-guard action, remain calm and deadly, and allow as many of their comrades to get away as possible. It will be the responsibility of each Company commander to select those men – a skeleton crew of perhaps as few as six soldiers holding the line where 100 once stood, but maintaining the same responsibilities and using the same structures of command and communications as previously.

With those Die Hards, Brudenell White decides to leave a strong representation of stretcher-bearers and medical staff. If fighting does break out – which is, after all, likely – they will be needed in numbers.

With the 1st Field Ambulance, Charles Bingham is not positive he wants that honour. ‘We are it seems to be left to the last,' he writes in his diary, ‘and I don't suppose any of us will get off as we will be all blown to pieces by the howitzers and shrapnel shells. It's awful but we must do our duty.'
¹⁷

In the meantime, the key remains to maximise visibility, to make it
appear
as though the Allies are still 40,000 strong.

With this in mind, Brudenell White sends out orders that each remaining Battalion must be as visibly active as possible and interpret these orders as they see fit.

Many choose to have men loitering about, gazing at the sky. Some men have different ideas. Why not a cricket game? If you could ignore the mortar shells and rifle fire from the Turks, it might jolly well be possible. And so they do.

In mid-afternoon on 17 December, it is a tentative group that sets up stumps on the pockmarked patch of ground known as Shell Green. Now, just what the Turks in the trenches above make of the strange spectacle is unclear – grenade-throwing practice perhaps? – but from the point of view of the men of the Light Horse, the main thing is that for the moment the Turks hold their fire and simply watch. Still, after three hours the Turks have had enough and start to send down some mortar fire to clear the Australians out. Whatever strange thing they are doing must be stopped!

Does the mortar fire stop the cricket cold? Not on your nelly. As recorded by Brigadier-General Granville Ryrie, ‘The game continued anyway, just to let them see we were quite unconcerned … and when the shells whistled by we pretended to field them. The men were wonderfully cheerful and seemed to take the whole thing as a huge joke.'
¹⁸

Charles Bean, watching closely, is particularly impressed, not simply with Major George Macarthur Onslow's batting under some pressure – less from the bowling than the mortars – but with the overall cool of the cricketers.

The Turks, however, decide they are less than impressed by the invaders' insistence on continuing this strange practice and unleash doubly heavy salvos of mortar fire.

The game is reluctantly called off. A draw? Happily, there is no record of any player having to
retire hurt
or worse.

That happiness over, tension returns. Tomorrow, everyone now knows, the final stage of the evacuation will begin, with all of the remaining soldiers – some 20,000 at Anzac, with the same number at Suvla – due to be taken off in just two nights.

The night of 17 December is perfect – calm and misty – and the lighters continue to go back and forth, taking men away. Bean stays up until 1 am, going over the timetable for the following day's events that Brudenell White has very kindly allowed him to be privy to before dropping off to sleep.

Just after 2.30, however, he awakens once more. Something is happening.
What is it?

Voices. Whose?

English. Provincial.

‘
Coom
along an' help General Lesslie, boys,' a voice is saying over the ongoing pounding of Beachy Bill to the south. ‘An' doan' tarry now.'
¹⁹

But it is not just that. There is a strange glow filling the sky from the direction of North Beach. There is an enormous fire in their lines – a real worry, as that is out of the ordinary and therefore suspicious. Ever the chronicler, Bean rises to record the event, taking his camera to the spot where an enormous dump of tinned beef ration and oil has been set alight by person or persons unknown. All around it, men are furiously trying to put the fire out, the glare of the flames illuminating their desperate faces and the silhouette of the hills behind. Others are wetting down adjacent stacks, trying to prevent them from going up, too.

‘Oil drums burst with terrific force,' Trooper Bluegum records.
²⁰

With each explosion, the men glance nervously to the brooding hills. It is staggering that the Turks have not been alerted that things are out of the ordinary. In the distance, the voices of British sailors can be heard bawling orders to soldiers embarking on the piers.

‘God,' Bean would note in his diary, ‘has blessed the British navy with much courage and little brains.'
²¹

Mercifully, the fire is broadly under control within an hour and, somehow, the Turks
still
have not twigged.

In his own dugout, Private Charles Bingham is feeling dreadful. Along with his mates who have also been selected to stay behind to help deal with the likely carnage, the best they can hope for is to be captured and hopefully survive the rest of the war as prisoners.

‘This suspense is awful,' he confides to his diary. ‘I suppose that we will all be in Constantinople soon, if the shells don't get us. I am going to try and be brave but it's hard to be left.'
²²

18 DECEMBER 1915, ANZAC COVE, THE END OF THE BEGINNING, AND THE BEGINNING OF THE END

On this, the day when the final part of the evacuation is due to begin, General Birdwood decides to put out a Special Army Order to his men:

Among the first to leave at his scheduled time is Charles Bean, who walks with heavy heart amid the cold and clinging mist that lies upon the pier, and climbs onto the beetle that is to take him to the cruiser
Grafton
.

He has been here from the first, seen such courage, so many deaths, so much pain, such sorrow, such staggering heroism.

And now, after a long battle that, in his eyes, had so completely absorbed ‘the people's energies, so completely concentrated and unified their effort, that … in those days Australia became fully conscious of itself as a nation …'
²⁴
they are leaving? It simply does not seem
right
.

And he means it. It will ever after be his proclaimed view that, ‘In no unreal sense it was on the 25th of April, 1915, that the consciousness of Australian nationhood was born.'
²⁵

He gazes back at that receding shore now with great emotion.

‘So I have left old Anzac,' he writes in his diary. ‘In a way I was really fond of the place.'
²⁶

His emotion aside, Anzac Cove looks completely normal, ‘with incinerator first going dreamily and the big fire still smoking'.
²⁷
Amazingly, it seems the Turks
still
don't know that half of the Anzacs have now gone, just as has happened at Suvla Bay. And the second half should be off in the next two days.

Aboard the ship, Bean chats to the captain of
Grafton
, who proves to be the son of the great English cricketer W. G. Grace, meaning he is the very chap whose brother had once beaten Bean out for a spot in the 1st XI at good old Clifton College in England. Of course, to the sound of Beachy Bill still giving old Harry to those at Anzac, they chat cricket over a cup of tea …

NIGHT, 18 DECEMBER 1915, ANZAC, DRAWING THE CURTAIN

Now, following Brudenell White's minutely calibrated plan, landmines have been buried just below the surface along the most obvious paths for any pursuing flood of Turks. For the Anzacs themselves, long trails of sugar and flour show retreating troops the zigzagging route they must follow to avoid detonating those mines.

To the soldiers' amazement, when they get to the beach, instead of the rickety piers that have long been there, somehow, magically, in just the last few days, solid new piers have been built to enable them to embark quickly on the lighters. ‘No sooner had each party arrived on the beach,' one soldier would recount to his parents, ‘than they were aboard the steam and motor lighters and away to the troop ships which were lying close and handy.'
²⁸

Out on the
Grafton
, Charles Bean keeps glancing nervously towards the beaches, half-expecting to see huge explosions and hear the shattering roar of a full-blown Turkish attack, but there is nothing, absolutely nothing. All is as it ever was.

‘The rattle from Anzac is like a low crackling fire. That at Suvla like a kettle of water boiling.'
²⁹

Dotted in the darkness, to the fore of the hills, lightly silhouetted by the rising moon, Bean can see through his binoculars the odd pinprick of cooking fires – the majority of which, he knows, have no one sitting around them.

Movement to his right – it is an unlit destroyer, stealthily gliding towards the shore, ready to load yet more soldiers from the endless lighters.

All seems to be going according to plan.

After asking that he be woken if such an attack eventuates – the ship is going to stay close to Anzac Cove – Bean goes to bed and is relieved to wake the following morning, knowing that his uninterrupted sleep means that all must have gone well.

Better still, this Sunday morning has dawned sparkling and clear. To this point, the weather has been extraordinarily kind, and yet the men have remained conscious that if the storms they experienced in November return, the weather will be a more fearful opponent than the Turks. But can it hold for another 24 hours? And can they get through this day with the Turks none the wiser before the last 10,000 soldiers – holding Anzac from Hill 60 in the north to the Second Ridge in the south – evacuate that night?

19 DECEMBER 1915, ALL ABOARD!

At Anzac Cove, there is great tension in the air among the Die Hards, but so too is there an overwhelming sense of sadness. As the day warms to get
well
above freezing point, many of the soldiers are seen to visit the graveyards that abound all around Anzac. Quietly, intently, they tidy up the plots by neatly arranging stones; they replace the old biscuit box crosses with constructions of solid wood, carefully carving names that will last the years; they plant sprigs of wattle that will bloom into life next spring. Finally, they bow their heads and say their prayers for the departed souls of loved mates gone to God.

And here is General Birdwood, on this last bright morning of the Gallipoli campaign, landing on the pier for a final look around – no matter that the pier is then and there under rifle fire from the enemy. When he had taken leave of his family nearly a year before to take command of Anzac, his four-year-old daughter had kissed him goodbye and asked, ‘Do you think Daddy, they will kill you at the war?'
³⁰
and he had always laughed about it, feeling sure that he would survive to kiss her again. He confidently sets foot on the pier and … immediately goes down!

His staff rush over, only to find he is dead … relieved to be entirely okay.

‘Matting,' he would later explain, ‘had been laid on the landing-stage to ensure silence, when the men embarked, and as I stepped ashore I caught my foot in this and fell flat …'
³¹

He quickly heads ashore to less exposed positions, doing everything he can to ensure that all is in order and nothing more can be done.

‘I was sad,' he would recall, ‘but I had pride in the knowledge of the fine deeds that my men had done [here].'
³²

As he passes a cemetery, an Australian soldier salutes him and says, ‘I hope they won't hear us going down to the beaches.'
³³

Brudenell White has, effectively, thought of that too.

Remaining troops on the frontlines ensure that the floors of their trenches are ripped up to be as soft as a freshly ploughed field so that when they leave, the noise of their boots – which are in turn wrapped ‘with bed-socks, bags, shirts, sleeves, anything at all, to hush the sound of the marching to the beach'
³⁴
– will be absorbed.