scrub, were peopled by crowds. On all the roads, on the plain, which lay
white like salt in the glare, and on the sides of the gullies, strange,
sunburned, half-naked men moved at their work with the bronze bodies of
gods. Like Egyptians building a city they passed and repassed with boxes
from the walls of stores built on the beach. Dust had toned their
uniforms even with the land. Their half-nakedness made them more grand
than clad men. Very few of them were less than beautiful; whole
battalions were magnificent, the very flower of the world's men. They
had a look in their eyes which those who saw them will never forget.
Sometimes as one watched, one heard a noise of cheering from the ships,
and this, the herald of good news, passed inland, till men would rise
from sleep in their dugouts, come to the door, blinking in the sun, to
pass on the cheer. In some strange way the news, the cause of the
cheering, passed inland with the cheer; a submarine had sunk a transport
off Constantinople, or an aeroplane had bombed a powder factory. One
heard the news pass on and on, till it rang from the front trenches ten
yards from the Turk line. Sometimes the cheering was very loud, mingled
with singing; then it was a new battalion, coming from England, giving
thanks that they were there, after their months of training, to help the
fleet through. Men who heard those battalions singing will never hear
those songs of "Tipperary," "Let's all go down the Strand," or "We'll
all go the same way home," without a quickening at the heart.
Everywhere in the three positions there were the homes of men. In gashes
or clefts of the earth were long lines of mules or horses with Indian
grooms. On the beaches were offices, with typewriters clicking and
telephone bells ringing. Stacked on one side were ammunition carts so
covered with bushes that they looked like the scrub they stood on. Here
and there were strangely painted guns, and everywhere the work of men,
armourer's forges, farrier's anvils, the noise and clink and bustle of a
multitude. Everywhere, too, but especially in the gullies were the
cave-dwellings of the dugouts, which so dotted the cliffs with their
doors, that one seemed put back to Cro-Magnon or Tampa, into some
swarming tribe of cave-dwellers. All the dugouts were different, though
all were built upon the same principle, first a scooping in the earth,
then a raised earth ledge for a bed, then (if one were lucky) a
corrugated-iron roof propped by balks, lastly a topping of sandbags
strewn with scrub. For doors, if one had a door or sunshade, men used
sacking, burlap, a bit of canvas, or a blanket. Then, when the work was
finished, the builder entered in, to bathe in his quarter of a pint of
water, smoke his pipe, greet his comrades, and think foul scorn of the
Turk, whose bullets piped and droned overhead, all day and night, like
the little finches of home. Looking out from the upper dugouts one saw
the dusty, swarming warren of men, going and coming, with a kind of
swift slouch, carrying boxes from the beach. Mules and men passed, songs
went up and down the gullies, and were taken up by those at rest, men
washed and mended clothes, or wandered naked and sun reddened along the
beach, bathing among dropping bullets. Wounded men came down on
stretchers, sick men babbled in pain or cursed the flies, the forges
clinked, the pile drivers beat in the balks of the piers, the bullets
droned and piped, or rushed savagely, or popped into a sandbag. Up in
the trenches the rifles made the irregular snaps of fire-crackers,
sometimes almost ceasing, then popping, then running along a section in
a rattle, then quickening down the line and drawing the enemy, then
pausing and slowly ceasing and beginning again. From time to time, with
a whistle and a wailing, some Asian shell came over and dropped and
seemed to multiply, and gathered to herself the shriek of all the devils
of hell, and burst like a devil and filled a great space with blackness
and dust and falling fragments. Then another and another came, almost in
the same place, till the gunners had had enough. Then the dust settled,
the ruin was made good, and all went on as before, men carrying and
toiling and singing, bullets piping, and the flies settling and swarming
on whatever was obscene in what the shell had scattered.
Everywhere in those positions there was gaiety and courage and devoted
brotherhood, but there was also another thing, which brooded over all,
and struck right home to the heart. It was a tragical feeling, a taint
or flavour in the mind, such as men often feel in hospitals when many
are dying, the sense that Death was at work there, that Death lived
there, that Death wandered up and down there and fed on Life.
[Illustration: An Australian bringing in a wounded comrade to hospital]
Since the main object of the campaign, to help the fleet through the
Narrows, had been abandoned (in mid-August), and no further thrust was
to be made against the Turks, the questions "Were our 100,000 men in
Gallipoli containing a sufficiently large army of Turks to justify their
continuance on the Peninsula?" and "Could they be more profitably used
elsewhere?" arose in the minds of the High Direction from week to week
as the war changed.
In the early autumn, when the Central Powers combined with Bulgaria to
crush Serbia and open a road to Constantinople, these questions became
acute. During October owing to the radical change in the Balkan
situation which was produced by the treachery of Bulgaria and the
bewildering indecision of Greece the advantage of our continuing the
campaign became more and more doubtful and in November, after full
consideration, it was decided to evacuate the Peninsula. Preparations
were made and the work begun.
Late in November, something happened which had perhaps some influence in
hurrying on the date of the evacuation. This was the blizzard of the
26th-28th, which lost us about a tenth of our whole army from cold,
frostbite, exposure, and the sicknesses which follow them. The 26th
began as a cold, dour Gallipoli day with a bitter northeasterly wind,
which increased in the afternoon to a fresh gale, with sleet. Later, it
increased still more, and blew hard, with thunder; and with the thunder
came a rain more violent than any man of our army had ever seen. Water
pours off very quickly from that land of abrupt slopes. In a few minutes
every gully was a raging torrent, and every trench a river. By an
ill-chance this storm fell with cruel violence upon the ever famous 29th
Division then holding trenches at Suvla. The water poured down into
their trenches, as though it were a tidal wave. It came in with a rush,
with a head upon it like the tide advancing, so quickly that men were
one minute dry and the next moment drowned at their posts. They were
caught so suddenly that those who escaped had to leap from their
trenches for dear life, leaving coats, haversacks, food and sometimes
even their rifles, behind them.
Our trenches were in nearly every case below those of the Turks, who
therefore suffered from the water far less than our men did. The Turks
saw our men leaping from their trenches, and either guessing the reason
or fearing an attack, opened a very heavy rifle and shrapnel fire upon
them. Our men had to shelter behind the parados of their trenches, where
they scraped themselves shallow pans in the mud under a heavy fire. At
dark the sleet increased, the mud froze, and there our men lay, most of
them without overcoats, and many of them without food. In one trench
when the flood rose, a pony, a mule, a pig, and two dead Turks were
washed over a barricade together.
Before the night fell, many of our men were frost-bitten and started
limping to the ambulances, under continual shrapnel fire and in blinding
sleet. A good many fell down by the way and were frozen to death. The
gale increased slowly all through the night, blowing hard and steadily
from the north, making a great sea upon the coast, and driving the spray
far inland. At dawn it grew colder, and the sleet hardened into snow,
with an ever-increasing wind, which struck through our men to the
marrow. "They fell ill," said one who was there, "in heaps." The water
from the flood had fallen in the night, but it was still four feet deep
in many of the trenches, and our men passed the morning under fire in
their shelter pans, fishing for food and rifles in their drowned lines.
All through the day the wind gathered, till it was blowing a full gale,
vicious and bitter cold; and on the 28th it reached its worst. The 28th
was spoken of afterwards as "Frozen Foot Day;" it was a day more
terrible than any battle; but now it was taking toll of the Turks, and
the fire slackened. Probably either side could have had the other's
position for the taking on the 28th, had there been enough unfrosted
feet to advance. It was a day so blind with snow and driving storm that
neither side could see to fire, and this brought the advantage, that our
men hopping to the ambulances had not to go through a pelt of shrapnel
bullets. On the 29th, the limits of human strength were reached. Some of
those frozen three days before were able to return to duty, and "a great
number of officers and men who had done their best to stick it out were
forced to go to hospital." The water fell during this day, but it left
on an average 2-1/2 feet of thick, slushy mud, into which many trenches
collapsed. After this the weather was fine and warm.
At Helles and Anzac the fall of the ground gave some protection from
this gale, but at Suvla there was none. When the weather cleared, the
beaches were heaped with the wreck of piers, piles, boats and lighters,
all broken and jammed together. But great as this wreck was the wreck of
men was even greater. The 29th Division had lost two-thirds of its
strength. In the three sectors over 200 men were dead, over 10,000 were
unfit for further service and not less than 30,000 others were sickened
and made old by it.
The Turk loss was much more serious even than this, for though they
suffered less from the wet, they suffered more from the cold, through
being on the higher ground. The snow lay upon their trenches long after
it had gone from ours, and the Turk equipment though very good as far as
it went, was only good for the summer. Their men wore thin clothes, and
many of them had neither overcoat nor blanket. The blizzard which was a
discouragement to us, took nearly all the heart out of the Turks; and
this fact must be borne in mind in the reading of the next few pages.
The gale had one good effect. Either the cold or the rain destroyed or
removed the cause of the dysentery, which had taken nearly a thousand
victims a day for some months. The disease stopped at once and no more
fresh cases were reported.
This storm made any attempt to land or to leave the land impossible for
four days together. Coming, as it did, upon the decision to evacuate, it
gave the prompting, that the evacuation should be hurried, lest such
weather should prevent it. On the 8th of December, the evacuation of
Anzac and Suvla was ordered to begin.
It was not an easy task to remove large numbers of men, guns and animals
from positions commanded by the Turk observers and open to every
cruising aeroplane. But by ruse and skill, and the use of the dark,
favoured by fine weather, the work was done, almost without loss, and,
as far as one could judge, unsuspected.
German agents, eager to discredit those whom they could not defeat, have
said, "that we bribed the Turks to let us go;" next year perhaps they
will say "that the Turks bribed us to go;" the year after that perhaps,
they will invent something equally false and even sillier. But putting
aside the foulness and the folly of this bribery lie, it is interesting
to enquire how it happened that the Turks did not attack our men while
they were embarking.
The Turks were very good fighters, furious in attack and resolute in
defence, but among their qualities of mind were some which greatly
puzzled our commanders. Their minds would sometimes work in ways very
strange to Europeans. They did, or refrained from doing, certain things
in ways for which neither we nor our Allies could account. Some day,
long hence, when the war is over, the Turk story of our withdrawal will
be made known. Until then, we can only guess, why it was that the
embarkation, which many had thought would lose us half our army, was
made good from Anzac and Suvla with the loss of only four or five men
(or less than the normal loss of a night in the trenches). Only two
explanations are possible. Either (1) the Turks knew that we were going
and wanted to be rid of us, or (2) they did not know that we were going
and were entirely deceived by our ruses.
Had they known that we were going from Anzac and Suvla, it is at least
likely that they would have hastened our going, partly that they might
win some booty, which they much needed, or take a large number of
prisoners, whose appearance would have greatly cheered the citizens of
Constantinople. But nearly all those of our army who were there, felt,
both from observation and intelligence, that the Turks did not know that
we were going. As far as men on one side in a war can judge of their
enemies they felt that the Turks were deceived, completely deceived, by
the ruses employed by us, and that they believed that we were being
strongly reinforced for a new attack. Our soldiers took great pains to
make them believe this. Looking down upon us from their heights, the
Turks saw boats leaving the shore apparently empty, and returning,
apparently, full of soldiers. Looking up at them, from our position our
men saw how the sight affected them. For the twelve days during which
the evacuation was in progress at Anzac and Suvla, the Turks were
plainly to be seen, digging everywhere to secure themselves from the
feared attack. They dug new lines, they brought up new guns, they made
ready for us in every way. On the night of the 19th-20th December, in
hazy weather, at full moon, our men left Suvla and Anzac, unmolested.
It was said by Dr. Johnson that "no man does anything, consciously for
the last time, without a feeling of sadness." No man of all that force
passed down those trenches, the scenes of so much misery and pain and
joy and valour and devoted brotherhood, without a deep feeling of
sadness. Even those who had been loudest in their joy at going were sad.
Many there did not want to go; but felt that it was better to stay, and
that then, with another fifty thousand men, the task could be done, and
their bodies and their blood buy victory for us. This was the feeling
even at Suvla, where the men were shaken and sick still from the storm;
but at Anzac, the friendly little kindly city, which had been won at
such cost in the ever-glorious charge of the 28th, and held since with
such pain, and built with such sweat and toil and anguish, in thirst,
and weakness and bodily suffering, which had seen the thousands of the
13th Division land in the dark and hide, and had seen them fall in with
the others to go to Chunuk, and had known all the hope and fervour, all
the glorious resolve, and all the bitterness and disappointment of the
unhelped attempt, the feeling was far deeper. Officers and men went up
and down the well-known gullies moved almost to tears by the thought
that the next day those narrow acres so hardly won and all those graves
of our people so long defended would be in Turk hands.
For some weeks, our men had accustomed the Turks to sudden cessations of
fire for half-an-hour or more. At first, the Turks had been made
suspicious by these silences, but they were now used to them, and
perhaps glad of them. They were not made suspicious by the slackening of
the fire on the night of the withdrawal. The mules and guns had all gone
from Suvla. A few mules and a few destroyed guns were left at Anzac; in
both places a pile of stores was left, all soaked in oil and ready for
firing. The ships of war drew near to the coast, and trained their guns
on the hills. In the haze of the full moon the men filed off from the
trenches down to the beaches and passed away from Gallipoli, from the
unhelped attempt which they had given their bodies and their blood to
make. They had lost no honour. They were not to blame, that they were
creeping off in the dark, like thieves in the night. Had others (not of
their profession) many hundreds of miles away, but seen as they, as
generous, as wise, as forseeing, as full of sacrifice, those thinned
companies with the looks of pain in their faces, and the mud of the
hills thick upon their bodies, would have given thanks in Santa Sophia
three months before. They had failed to take Gallipoli, and the mine
fields still barred the Hellespont, but they had fought a battle such as
has never been seen upon this earth. What they had done will become a
glory forever, wherever the deeds of heroic unhelped men are honoured
and pitied and understood. They went up at the call of duty, with a
bright banner of a battle-cry, against an impregnable fort. Without
guns, without munitions, without help and without drink they climbed the
scarp and held it by their own glorious manhood, quickened by a word
from their chief. Now they were giving back the scarp and going out into
new adventures, wherever the war might turn.
Those going down to the beaches wondered in a kind of awe whether the
Turks would discover them and attack. The minutes passed, and boat after
boat left the shore, but no attack came. The arranged rifles fired
mechanically in the outer trenches at long intervals, and the crackle of
the Turk reply followed. At Anzac, a rearguard of honour had been
formed. The last two hundred men to leave Anzac were survivors of those
who had landed in the first charge, so glorious and so full of hope on
the 25th of April. They had fought through the whole campaign from the
very beginning; they had seen it all. It was only just that they should
be the last to leave. As they, too, moved down, one of their number saw
a solitary Turk, black against the sky, hard at work upon his trench.
That was the last enemy to be seen from Anzac.
At half-past five in the winter morning of the 20th December the last
boat pushed off; and the last of our men had gone from Suvla and Anzac.
Those who had been there from the first were deeply touched. There was a
longing that it might be to do again, with the same comrades, under the
same chiefs but with better luck and better backing. Some distance from
the shore the boats paused to watch the last act in the withdrawal. It
was dead calm weather, with just that ruffle of wind which comes before
the morning. The Turk fire crackled along the lines as usual, but the
withdrawal was still not suspected. Then from the beaches within the
stacks of abandoned stores came the noise of explosion, the charges had
been fired, and soon immense flames were licking up those boxes and
reddening the hills. As the flames grew, there came a stir in the Turk
lines, and then every Turk gun that could be brought to bear opened with
shrapnel and high explosive on the area of the bonfires. It was plain
that the Turks misread the signs. They thought that some lucky shell had
fired our stores and that they could stop us from putting out the
flames. Helped by the blasts of many shells the burning rose like
balefire, crowned by wreaths and streaks and spouts of flame. The stores
were either ashes, or in a blaze which none could quench before the
Turks guessed the meaning of that burning. Long before the fires had
died and before the Turks were wandering in joy among our trenches, our
men were aboard their ships standing over to Mudros.
Some have said, "Even if the Turks were deceived at Anzac and Suvla,
they must have known that you were leaving Cape Helles. Why did they not
attack you while you were embarking there?" I do not know the answer to
this question. But it is possible that they did not know that we were
leaving. It is possible that they believed that we should hold Cape
Helles like an Eastern Gibraltar. It is possible, on the other hand,
that they were deceived again by our ruses. It is however, certain that
they watched us far more narrowly at Cape Helles after the Anzac
evacuation. Aeroplanes cruised over our position frequently, and
shell-fire increased and became very heavy. Still, when the time came,
the burning of our stores, after our men had embarked, seemed to be the
first warning that the Turks had that we were going.
This was a mystery to our soldiers at the time and seems strange now. It
is possible that at Cape Helles, the Turks' shaken, frozen and
out-of-heart soldiers may have known that we were going yet had no life
left in them for an attack. Many things are possible in this world, and
the darkness is strange and the heart of a fellow-man is darkness to us.
There were things in the Turk heart very dark indeed to those who tried
to read it. The storm had dealt with them cruelly, that is all that we
know. Let us wait till we know their story.
The Cape Helles position was held for twenty days, after we had left
Anzac and Suvla. On the 8th-9th of January in the present year, it was
abandoned, with slight loss, though in breaking weather. By 4 o'clock on
the morning of the 9th of January, the last man had passed the graves of
those who had won the beaches. They climbed on board their boats and
pushed off. They had said good-bye to the English dead, whose blood had
given them those acres, now being given back. Some felt, as they passed
those graves, that the stones were living men, who cast a long look
after them when they had passed, and sighed, and turned landward as they
had turned of old. Then in a rising sea, whipped with spray, among the
noise of ships weltering to the rails, the battalions left Cape Helles;
the _River Clyde_ dimmed into the gale and became a memory, and the
Gallipoli campaign was over.
Many people have asked me, what the campaign achieved? It achieved much.
It destroyed and put out of action many more of the enemy than of our
own men. Our own losses in killed, wounded and missing were, roughly
speaking, one hundred and fifteen thousand men, and the sick about one
hundred thousand more, or (in all) more than two and one-half times as
many as the army which made the landing. The Turk losses from all causes
were far greater; they had men to waste and wasted them, like water, at
Cape Helles, Lone Pine and Chunuk. The real Turk losses will never be
tabled and published, but at the five battles of The Landings, the 6th
May, the 4th June, the 28th of June, and the 6th-10th August, they lost
in counted killed alone, very nearly as many as were killed on our side
in the whole campaign. Then, though we did not do what we hoped to do,
our presence in Gallipoli contained large armies of Turks in and near
the Peninsula. They had always from 15 to 20,000 more men than we had,
on the Peninsula itself, and at least as many more, ready to move, on
the Asian shore and at Rodosto. In all, we disabled, or held from action
elsewhere, not less than 400,000 Turks, that is, a very large army of
men who might have been used elsewhere, with disastrous advantage, in
the Caucasus, when Russia was hard pressed, or, as they were used later,
in Mesopotamia.
So much for the soldiers' side; but politically, the campaign achieved
much. In the beginning, it had a profound effect upon Italy; it was,
perhaps, one of the causes which brought Italy into her war with
Austria. In the beginning, too, it had a profound effect upon the Balkan
States. Bulgaria made no move against us until five months after our
landings. Had we not gone to Gallipoli she would have joined our enemies
in the late spring instead of in the middle autumn.