Gallipoli (48 page)

On November 30, when the wind had blown itself out at last, a reckoning was made, and it was found that the Allied Army had lost one tenth of its strength. Two hundred soldiers had been drowned,
5,000 were suffering from frostbite, and another 5,000 were casualties of one sort or another. It raised once more, and in an ominous way, the whole question of evacuation. Many of those who before
had wanted to remain could now think of nothing but of getting away from the accursed place. But could they get off? Were they not now bound to stay and fight it out? Keyes thought so. He was not
nearly defeated yet.

Directly de Robeck had gone he and Wemyss returned to the naval plan, and another cable was sent to the Admiralty urging its adoption. Then they tackled Monro directly. Monro was patient and
polite, but no argument could shake his overriding conviction that the war must be fought in France. ‘Well,’ he said in the course of one of his long discussions with Keyes, ‘if
all
succeeds, you go through the straits into the Marmara and we occupy Constantinople, what good is it going to do? What then? It won’t help us win the war; France is
the only place in which Germany can be beaten. Every man not employed in killing Germans in France and Flanders is wasted.’

Keyes reminded him that if the Gallipoli Army was to be evacuated it would not go to Germany but to Egypt. Monro said he did not believe that Egypt was in any danger. No more do I, Keyes
replied, yet the Government would be bound to send the Army there.

After his one brief visit Monro had not returned to the peninsula, and his chief-of-staff never set foot on the beaches at all. Yet they held strong views on the tactical situation there. The
Allies’ position lacked depth, they said. Keyes answered that the sea was very deep; where else could they use the Navy to deploy their men so secretly and rapidly? Even so, Monro said, it
was now too late to think of attacking. It would not have been too late, Keyes replied, if Monro had acted when he had first arrived a month ago; and it was still not too late.

And so it went round and round, and no one was persuaded. After one of his outbursts Keyes attempted to relieve the tension by asking after the General’s foot. ‘It will be well
enough soon,’ Monro said, ‘to get up and kick somebody’s——stern.’ He meant the Turks of course, Keyes said. But Monro did not mean the Turks.

Having failed at G.H.Q. Wemyss and Keyes tried their hands again with Birdwood and the subordinate generals. Here they were more successful, for the soldiers had been badly shaken by the storm
and were coming round to the idea that the risks of going were greater than the risks of staying. Moreover, many deserters were coming in from the Turkish lines, and it was obvious that the
enemy’s morale had fallen very low.

At a conference at Imbros several of the commanders said they were prepared to reconsider their ideas about withdrawal. Monro retaliated to these manœuvres by forbidding Birdwood and the
other generals to hold any further discussion with Wemyss and Keyes without his knowledge.

But it was in London that the two sailors found their real allies. Lord Curzon, who was a member of the Dardanelles Committee (now renamed once more the War Committee),
had suddenly become very active. He was appalled at the prospect of the casualties in an evacuation, and in a forceful paper he reminded the cabinet that there was no real agreement among the
generals at Gallipoli. Monro was firm, Curzon said, but he had made up his mind within forty-eight hours of his arrival, after a cursory inspection of the front. The other generals had changed
their opinion more than once and might do so again.

This was buttressed by a second paper from Hankey, who was now back at his post as Secretary of the War Committee. If they withdrew, Hankey argued, Turkey was free to turn all her forces on to
Russia and the British possessions in the Near East. There was even a danger that Russia might sign a separate peace. He urged that since the Salonika landing had failed, the fresh divisions which
had been sent out to reinforce it should be diverted instead to Gallipoli. It was an idea that appealed to Kitchener; even at this eleventh hour he too was prepared to change once more, and cables
were sent out to Wemyss asking him if he could transport the troops from Salonika to Gallipoli. Keyes hurried to Salonika to make the arrangements.

Bluntly Monro held on. No, he said, he still could not attack. Even if he was given these reinforcements he could not employ them. Nevertheless, for the first time he was shaken, and in an
unguarded moment Lynden-Bell said to Keyes, ‘Well, we are in for it—we are going to do it; you have got your way.’ This was on December 4, and for a little longer the agony was to
be maintained, while still in London the cabinet hesitated and waited for a lead.

It was the French and the Russians who cast the deciding vote at last; they informed the British that Salonika could not be abandoned, and on December 7 the cabinet decided definitely to
‘shorten the front by evacuating Anzac and Suvla’. Wemyss was astonished when he heard the news. He sent off a battery of cables to London saying that if necessary the Fleet was now
prepared to
‘go it alone’. ‘What is offered the Army, therefore,’ he wrote, ‘is the practical complete severance of the Turkish lines of
communication accomplished by the destruction of the large supply depots on the shore of the Dardanelles.’ The idea of evacuation, he told Balfour, was now being ridiculed by the soldiers at
Gallipoli, especially at Anzac. Birdwood ought to be consulted.

But it was too late. The Admiralty was not prepared to act alone, especially as de Robeck was now in London and giving his advice against it. On December 10 Wemyss was turned down once more; and
although he continued to argue for several days in effect he was beaten and Monro had won. Depressed and uncertain, the soldiers and the sailors turned together to the plans for their retreat.

Except for Birdwood, Keyes and one or two others nearly all the pioneers had now gone. Hamilton and de Robeck were in England, Kitchener was no longer the leader he had been at the time of the
April landings, and it was becoming clear to his opponents that, with the failure of the Dardanelles, they could bring him down at last. Churchill, his reputation at the lowest ebb ever touched in
his career, was bundled into retirement in the wake of Fisher and with even less regret. During these final negotiations over Gallipoli Asquith reformed the War Committee, and there was no place on
it for the man who, at that moment, seemed most responsible for the tragedy they were about to face. Churchill made a last speech in the House in November, and then went off to France to fight in
the trenches.

On the Turkish side Liman remained but Kemal had gone. After the August battles Kemal had been made a Pasha, and he had continued to lead a charmed life at the front. He was convinced that he
would never be hit, and it did indeed appear that nothing could destroy him. While other men died he walked casually among the bullets. Samson very nearly killed him one day. Flying low behind the
Turkish lines, the air commodore saw a staff car with three people inside, one of whom at least seemed to be a general (it was in fact Kemal). Samson dived and launched two bombs. At once the car
stopped and the three men inside
got out and ran to a ditch. Samson then drew off and cruised about for twenty minutes until he saw the Turks return to the car. Then again he
dived, and actually succeeded in splintering the windscreen. But it was the chauffeur who was hit: Kemal remained untouched. Soon afterwards, however, his health broke down through exhaustion and
nervous strain, and no amount of pills or injections could revive him. Early in December he was evacuated from the peninsula.

There was another casualty which was even closer to the nemesis of the Dardanelles. Wangenheim—Churchill’s ultimate rival, the man who had begun it all by getting the
Goeben
into the Sea of Marmara—was dead. His health had been failing all through the early summer and in July he went back to Germany on leave. When he returned to Constantinople in October his face
was twitching, one of his eyes was covered with a black patch, and he was nervous and depressed. He came to the American Embassy, and Morgenthau describes the end of this, their last meeting:
‘Wangenheim rose to leave. As he did so he gave a gasp and his legs shot from under him. I jumped and caught him just as he was falling.’ Morgenthau helped him out to his car. Two days
later Wangenheim had a stroke at the dinner table, and never again regained consciousness. He died on October 24, and was buried in the park of the German summer embassy at Therapia, that same nook
on the Bosphorus where in the old days the ambassador, his telegrams in his hand, had so often bobbed in and out of view according to the changes in the German political weather.

Enver remained, with his pert confident air, but he was in secret no longer confident. Through these last days of November and early December he more than once came to Morgenthau asking him to
appeal to President Wilson to use his influence to end the war. He admitted that Turkey had drifted into a critical state at the end of this first twelve months of hostilities, its farms
uncultivated, its business at a standstill. The campaign at Gallipoli was swallowing them all. At this time neither Enver nor Liman nor anyone else had any notion of what was afoot in the British
camp. They saw nothing ahead but limitless war, and the withdrawal of the Allies from the peninsula never entered their minds.

For the Allies at Gallipoli there was at least one small particle of relief in the hateful situation. They had definite orders at last; in place of demoralizing delay they now had something
practical to do, even if it was nothing more than to arrange a humiliating retreat.

Yet there remained the overwhelming question of the casualties. What were they going to be? Kitchener had taken up a surprising line. Just as he was about to leave Gallipoli to return to England
he had turned suddenly to Colonel Aspinall and had said, ‘I don’t believe a word about those 25,000 casualties (this was the latest estimate of the staff) . . . you’ll just step
off without losing a man, and without the Turks knowing anything about it.’ It was another of his impulsive, inspirational flashes, and it was based on nothing definite: a guess, in fact, in
the blue.

Lord Curzon in his paper to the cabinet saw the evacuation in another light. ‘I wish to draw it in no impressionist colours,’ he said, ‘but as it must in all probability arise.
The evacuation and the final scenes will be enacted at night. Our guns will continue firing until the last moment . . . but the trenches will have been taken one by one, and a moment must come when
a final
sauve qui peut
takes place, and when a disorganized crowd will press in despairing tumult on to the shore and into the boats. Shells will be falling and bullets ploughing their way
into the mass of retreating humanity. . . . Conceive the crowding into the boats of thousands of half-crazy men, the swamping of craft, the nocturnal panic, the agony of the wounded, the hecatombs
of slain. It requires no imagination to create a scene that, when it is told, will be burned into the hearts and consciences of the British people for generations to come.’

Between these two, the wishful guess and the fearful nightmare, there were a dozen other conjectures, all equally guesses, all equally at the mercy of luck and the weather.

They were to depart, in fact, in the same way as they had arrived: as adventurers into the unknown.

T
HE
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.