Gallipoli

‘Look out, Lynden-Bell,’ Monro said. ‘The Commodore is going to attack us. I can’t get up.’

With a rather heavy reference to the General’s ‘cold feet’ Keyes got up and left.

But he had gained nothing. Kitchener, who had been off to Athens to placate the King of Greece, returned to Mudros that day, and he had found no arguments with which to withstand Monro while he had been away. Birdwood and the others were quickly overborne. On November 22 Kitchener cabled London recommending that Suvla and Anzac should be evacuated while Cape Helles should be held ‘for the time being’. Monro was to remain at Lemnos as Commander-in-Chief of both Gallipoli and Salonika. Birdwood was to take charge of the withdrawal. De Robeck was to go home on sick leave, and Wemyss was to take his place. On November 24 Kitchener sailed for England, and on the following day de Robeck too was gone.

‘Thus,’ says Keyes, ‘the Admiral and the General who were really entirely responsible for the lamentable policy of evacuation left the execution of this unpleasant task to an Admiral and a General who were strongly opposed to it.’

Yet it was still not the end — not at any rate so far as Keyes and Wemyss were concerned — for now suddenly at the end of November the weather intervened. There had been ample warning of the winter. Twice the piers had been washed away in gales. For the past few days flocks of ducks and other birds migrating south from Russia had been passing over the peninsula, and although both armies, first the Turks and then the Allies, had enjoyed themselves blazing away with their rifles into the sky,[34] it was clear that cold weather was soon coming. Yet no one — and certainly not the meteorologists who had been saying that November was the best month of the year — could have anticipated the horror and severity of the blizzard that swept down on the Dardanelles on November 27. Nothing like it had been known there for forty years.

For the first twenty-four hours rain poured down and violent thunderstorms raged over the peninsula. Then, as the wind veered round to the north and rose to hurricane force there followed two days of snow and icy sleet. After this there were two nights of frost.

At Anzac and Cape Helles the soldiers were well dug in, and there was some small protection from the surrounding hills, but at Suvla the men were defenceless. The earth there was so stony that in place of trenches stone parapets had been built above the ground. These burst open in the first deluge, and a torrent came rushing down to the Salt Lake carrying with it the bodies of Turks who had been drowned in the hills. Soon the lake was four feet deep, and on both sides the war was forgotten. Turks and British alike jumped up on what was left of the parapets in full view of one another, and there they perched, numb and shivering, while the flood went by. Then, overnight, when the landscape turned to a universal white, dysentery vanished along with the flies and the dust, but the cold was past all bearing. At Anzac, where many of the Australians and Indians were seeing snow for the first time, the dugouts were knee-deep in slush, and the soldiers, still without winter kit,[35] wrapped themselves in their sodden blankets. The freeze that followed was worse than any shelling. Triggers were jammed and rifles refused to fire. At Helles sentries were found in the morning still standing, their rifles in their hands, but they were frozen to death. Blankets and bedding were so congealed with cold they could be stood on end. Everywhere mud had turned to ice and the roofs of the dugouts were lined with icicles as hard as iron. A tacit truce prevailed along the front while the men gave themselves up to the simple struggle of finding enough warmth to remain alive. Nevinson, the war correspondent, describes how he saw men staggering down to the beaches from the trenches: ‘They could neither hear nor speak, but stared about them like bewildered bullocks.’ It was rather worse for the Allies than for the Turks, since for three days no boat could approach the shore, and the beaches were strewn with wreckage of every kind. At Imbros where three steamers had been sunk as a breakwater the raging sea broke through, and smashed most of the small craft in the harbour. Even a submarine went down to the shallow bottom, and the only sign that life remained within her was the shifting of the periscope from time to time.

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.

34

Thousands of ducks were shot down, and it was said after the campaign was over, with how much truth one ca

35

A certain amount of winter clothing had been landed on the peninsula but it had been taken off again in view of the plans for evacuation.