Gallipoli

There was not much time. With every day the weather grew more threatening and the Turks more likely to attack; they were shelling now with terrible accuracy with their new German guns and ammunition. There were 35,000 men in the Helles bridgehead, nearly 4,000 animals and almost as many guns and stores as there had been at Suvla and Anzac. Once again it was decided that half the garrison should be evacuated secretly over a series of nights. General Davies, the corps commander, insisted that on January 9, the final night, he should be left with sufficient men to hold off the Turks for a week in case, at the last moment, he was cut off by foul weather. He fixed on the total of 17,000 as the minimum number of soldiers required for this rearguard, and this also happened to be the maximum number that the Navy could take off in a single night. By January 1, 1916, all was agreed and the movement began.

The French were the first to go, and they left such a yawning gap in the line that there was nothing for it but to bring back the British 29th Division, to take their places. There was not much left of the 29th. The division had been badly cut up in the August battles and when they were evacuated from Suvla they were down to less than half their strength. One thing however remained to them, and that was a reputation of great bravery and steadiness; so now, after a few brief days’ respite in the islands, they found themselves landing again beside the River Clyde and marching back to the trenches which they had first occupied eight months before. Among so many anti-climaxes this, perhaps, was the hardest of all.

There was a constricting feeling in the British trenches at Cape Helles at this time. At first the soldiers had no idea that the bridgehead was to be evacuated — indeed they were given a printed order of the day specifically saying that they were to remain. They hated this prospect, and in particular they feared that they might become prisoners of war — a fear that was all the more lurid because a rumour got about that the Turks would castrate them.

About five days before the final night it became generally known that the bridgehead was to be evacuated, and then the period of real tension began. But still excitement was the drug and a fatalism intervened. Four divisions against twenty-one was a monstrosity even on such a narrow front as this, but there was nothing that anyone could do about it. And so they played football, they waited, they made a kind of security out of the accustomed routine in the trenches, and they saw no further than the day ahead. Night by night the battalions went away and no one questioned the order of withdrawal; one simply waited for the summons and it was absurdly like the atmosphere of a dentist’s waiting room. ‘You’re next,’ and another regiment vanished. The others, feeling neither lucky nor unlucky, but fixed simply in an unalterable succession of events, remained behind and waited as the last patients wait, amid vague smells of carbolic and grisly secret apprehensions, in the silence of an emptying room.

There were a number of alarms and misadventures. High winds blew up, and they had to throw in cases of bully beef and other stores to repair the breaches in the causeway at Sedd-el-Bahr. Once when a sailor flashed a torch on a lighter full of mules there was a stampede, and for a long time the animals were snorting and screaming in the sea. Another night the French battleship Suffren ran down a large transport and sent her to the bottom. The U-boat scare began again. Yet by January 7 they had got the garrison down to 19,000; and now at last, at this instant of greatest danger for the British, Liman von Sanders delivered his attack.

He had been much delayed. All had been ready forty-eight hours before, but Enver had chosen that moment to send a message from Constantinople ordering nine of the Gallipoli divisions to Thrace. It was Enver’s last gesture in the campaign, and Liman countered it in the usual way; he sent in his resignation. In the usual way, too, Enver backed down. The order was countermanded and now, in the early afternoon on January 7, the Turks came in for the kill. They were equipped with wooden ramps to throw across the British trenches, and special squads carried inflammable materials with which they were to burn the British boats on the shore. This was to be the final coup.

The attack began with the heaviest artillery bombardment of the campaign, and it went on steadily for four and a half hours. There was a lull for a few minutes and then it recommenced. In the British trenches the Soldiers waited for the inevitable rush that would follow the bombardment; and in the early evening it began. The Turkish infantry had a hundred yards or more to go before they reached the first British trenches, and they jumped up with their old cries of Allah, Allah, and Voor, Voor—strike, strike. Perhaps there was something of desperation in the answering fire of the British defence. It was so murderous, so concentrated and steady, that when only a few minutes had gone by the soldiers saw a thing which had scarcely ever happened before — the Turkish infantry were refusing to charge. Their officers could be seen shouting and striking at the men, urging them up and out into the open where so many were already dead. But the men would not move. By nightfall it was all over. Not a single enemy soldier had broken into the British lines.

Liman admits that this disastrous attack convinced him that the British were not going to evacuate Cape Helles after all, and nothing further was done to molest them all through that night and the following day.

There were now just 17,000 men left, and January 8 was another calm spring-like day. Once again as at Suvla and Anzac great piles of stores and ammunition were got ready for destruction. Landmines were laid, and the self-firing rifles set in position in the trenches. Once again the sad mules lay dead in rows.

During the day the wind shifted round to the south-west and freshened a little, but it was still calm when at dusk the long lines of boats and warships set out for the peninsula for the last time. From Clapham Junction, from the Vineyard and Le Haricot, and the other famous places which soon would not even be mentioned on the maps, the men came marching to the sea, a distance of three miles or so.

The thing that the soldiers afterwards remembered with particular vividness was the curious alternation of silence and of deafening noise that went on through the day. At Sedd-el-Bahr they crouched under the comer of the battered fort waiting for their turn to embark, and in the overwhelming stillness of their private fear they heard nothing but the footfall of the men who had gone ahead; the clop, clop, clop of their boots as they ran across the pontoons to the River Clyde where lighters were waiting to embark them. Then, in an instant, all was dissolved in the shattering explosion of enemy shells erupting in the sea. Then again the clop, clop, clop of the boots as the line of ru

Apart from the spasmodic shelling there was no movement in the Turkish lines, and as the night advanced the Turks very largely ceased to count; it was the weather which engrossed everybody’s mind. By 8 p.m. the glass was falling, and at nine when the waning moon went down the wind had risen to thirty-five miles an hour. The River Clyde held firmly enough — all through these nights the men had been passing under her lee to the boats — but the crazy piers in the bay strained and groaned as heavy seas came smashing up against them. Soon an alarm went up. Two lighters broke adrift and crashed through the flimsy timber. All further embarkation then was stopped while a gang of engineers, working in the black and icy sea, put things to rights again. Then when another 3,000 men had been got off the pier collapsed once more, and again there was another hour’s delay.