Part 11

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.

Some of our enemies have said that "the campaign was a defeat for the British Navy." It is true that we lost two capital ships, from mines, in the early part of the campaign, and I think, in all, two others, from torpedoes, during the campaign. Such loss is not very serious in eleven months of naval war. For the campaign was a naval war, it depended utterly and solely upon the power of the Navy. By our Navy we went there and were kept there, and by our Navy we came away. During the nine months of our hold on the Peninsula over three hundred thousand men were brought by the Navy from places three, four, or even six thousand miles away. During the operations some half of these were removed by our Navy, as sick and wounded, to ports from eight hundred to three thousand miles away. Every day, for eleven months, ships of our Navy moved up and down the Gallipoli coast bombarding the Turk positions. Every day during the operations our Navy kept our armies in food, drink and supplies. Every day, in all that time, if weather permitted, ships of our Navy cruised in the Narrows and off Constantinople, and the seaplanes of our Navy raided and scouted within the Turk lines. If there had been, I will not say, any defeat of, but any check to the Navy, we could not have begun the campaign or continued it. Every moment of those eleven months of war was an illustration of the silent and unceasing victory of our Navy's power. As Sir Ian Hamilton has put it "the Navy was our father and our mother."

"Still," our enemies say, "you did not win the Peninsula." We did not; and some day, when truth will walk clear-eyed, it will be known why we did not. Until then, let our enemies say this: "They did not win, but they came across three thousand miles of sea, a little army without reserves and short of munitions, a band of brothers, not half of them half-trained, and nearly all of them new to war. They came to what we said was an impregnable fort on which our veterans of war and massacre had laboured for two months, and by sheer naked manhood they beat us, and drove us out of it. Then rallying, but without reserves, they beat us again and drove us further. Then rallying once more, but still without reserves, they beat us again, this time to our knees. Then, had they had reserves, they would have conquered, but by God's pity they had none. Then, after a lapse of time, when we were men again, they had reserves, and they hit us a staggering blow, which needed but a push to end us, but God again had pity. After that our God was indeed pitiful, for England made no further thrust, and they went away."

Even so was wisdom proven blind, So courage failed, so strength was chained, Even so the gods, whose seeing mind Is not as ours, ordained.

Lollingdon, June 29, 1916.

THE END

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