Authors: Alan Moorehead
There was a simple and immediate reaction, and possibly it was a desire to remove the stigma of defeat, to create artificially a chance of heroism since the plan provided none: the men came to
their officers in hundreds and asked to be the last to leave the shore. It was nothing more than a gesture, something for the pride to feed on, a kind of tribute to their friends who were already
dead, but they were intensely serious about it. The veterans argued that they had earned this right, the newer arrivals insisted that they should be given this one last opportunity of
distinguishing themselves. And so there was no need to call for volunteers to man the trenches at the end; it was a matter of selection.
But for the moment there was more need of cunning and discipline than heroism. In the second week of December the first stage of the evacuation began. Each evening after dusk flotillas of barges
and small boats crept into Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay and there was a fever of activity all night as troops and animals and guns were got on board. The sick and wounded came first, the
prisoners-of-war, and then, in increasing numbers, the infantry. The men walked silently down from the trenches, their boots wrapped in sacking, their footfall deadened by layers of blankets laid
along the piers. In the morning the little fleet had vanished and all was normal again. Men and stores were being disembarked in the usual way, the same mule teams laden with boxes were toiling up
to the front from the beaches, and there was no way for the Turks to know that the boxes on the mules were empty or that the disembarking men were a special group whose job was to go aboard the
boats each night in the darkness and then return ostentatiously to the shore in the morning. Another deception was carried out with the guns. They ceased to fire soon after dark each night, so that
the Turks should grow accustomed to silence and
should not guess that anything was amiss on the final night when the last men were leaving the trenches. In the same way the
infantry were ordered to hold back their rifle and machine-gun fire.
By the end of the second week of December these preliminary stages of the evacuation were well advanced. The weather held. The Turks apparently still suspected nothing and made no attempt to
attack. But the British ranks were becoming very thin, and in order to keep up the deception it was necessary to march columns of men and animals like a stage army round and round the dusty tracks
along the shore. No tents were struck, the gunners that remained fired twice as many rounds and kept moving their batteries from place to place; and thousands of extra cooking fires were lit in the
morning and the evening. Throughout the daylight hours Allied aircraft flew along the coast in readiness to drive back any German aircraft that came out on reconnaissance.
On December 15 an acceleration of the programme began. All through the night channel steamers and barges shuttled back and forth between the islands and the coast, and even a battleship was
called in to act as a transport. On the beaches huge piles of clothing, blankets, boots, water bottles, woollen gloves, tarpaulin sheets, motor cycles, tinned food and ammunition were made ready to
be destroyed. Acid was poured over hundreds of unwanted sacks of flour, and, as a precaution against drunkenness, the commanders of units poured their stores of liquor into the sea.
By the morning of December 18 the beachmasters were able to report that half the force in the bridgehead, some 40,000 men, and most of their equipment had been taken off. Both Anzac and Suvla
now were honeycombs of silent, half-deserted trenches, and the men that remained in them were utterly exposed to enemy attack. ‘It’s getting terribly lonely at night,’ one of the
English soldiers wrote in his diary. ‘Not a soul about. Only the excitement keeps us from getting tired.’
All was now ready for the final stage. Twenty thousand men were to be taken off on the night of Saturday, December 19, and on Sunday—known as ‘Z’ night in the plan—the
last 20,000 were to go. There was one thought in everybody’s mind: ‘If only the
weather holds.’ Through all this period the soldiers in the Cape Helles
bridgehead, only thirteen miles away, knew nothing of what was going on.
Saturday morning broke with a mild breeze and a flat calm on the sea. There had been a short alarm at Anzac during the night when one of the storage dumps on the shore accidentally took fire,
and everywhere the embarking men stood stock-still waiting to see if they were discovered at last. But nothing happened.
Through the long day the men went silently about their final preparations. A ton of high explosive was placed in a tunnel under the Turkish lines on the foothills of Chunuk Bair and made ready
for detonation. Mines and booby traps were hidden in the soil, and to make certain that the troops avoided them on the final night long white lines of flour and salt and sugar were laid down from
the trenches to the beach. The hard floor of the trenches themselves was dug up with picks to soften the noise of the final departure, and at places nearest the Turkish line torn blankets were laid
on the ground.
Anzac posed a fantastic problem. At some places the British trenches were no more than ten yards from the Turks. Yet somehow the men had to be got out of them and down to the shore without the
enemy knowing anything about it. They hit upon the device of the self-firing rifle. This was a contraption that involved the use of two kerosene tins. The upper tin was filled with water which
dripped through a hole in the bottom into the empty tin below. Directly the lower tin became sufficiently weighted with water it over-balanced and fired a rifle by pulling a string attached to the
trigger. There were several versions of this gadget: in place of water some men preferred to use fuses and candles that would burn through the string and release a weight on the rifle trigger, but
the principle remained the same, and it was hoped that spasmodic shots would still be sounding along the line for half an hour or more after the last troops had gone. Thus it was believed that all
might have at least a chance of getting away. Saturday went by in perfecting these arrangements. That night another 20,000 men crept down to the beaches at Suvla and Anzac and got away.
On Sunday morning the Turks shelled the coast rather more heavily than usual, and with new shells which evidently had been brought through Bulgaria from Germany. The Navy
and such of the British guns as were left on shore replied. It was an intolerable strain, and the tension increased as the day went on. Now finally these last 20,000 men had returned to the
conditions of the first landings in April. There was nothing more that the generals or the admirals could do to help them; as on the first day they were on their own in a limbo where no one knew
what was going to happen, where only the individual will of the soldier could ruin or save them all. They waited very quietly. Many went for the last time to the graves of their friends and erected
new crosses there; made little lines of stones and tidied up the ground; this apparently they minded more than anything, this leaving of their friends behind, and it was something better than
sentimentality that made one soldier say to his officer, ‘I hope
they
won’t hear us going down to the beaches.’
On the shore the medical staff waited. They were to remain behind with the seriously wounded, and they had a letter written in French and addressed to the enemy commander-in-chief requesting
that a British hospital ship be allowed to embark them on the following day. Still, no one could be sure how this would be received, or indeed be sure of anything. They were on their own.
In the afternoon some went down to the horse lines and cut the throats of the animals which they knew could not be got away. Others threw five million rounds of rifle ammunition into the sea,
together with twenty thousand rations in wooden cases. Others again kept up the pretence that the Army was still there in its tens of thousands by driving about in carts, a last surrealist ride in
a vacuum. Birdwood and Keyes came ashore for the last time and went away again. Up at the front the remaining men who held the line—at some places no more than ten against a thousand
Turks—went from one loophole to another firing their rifles, filling up the kerosene tins with water, making as much of a show as they could. It amused some of them to lay out a meal in their
dugouts in readiness for the Turks when they came. But most preferred to
wreck the places which they had dug and furnished with so much care.
At last at five the day ended and a wet moon came up, misted over with clouds and drifting fog. There was a slight drizzle of rain. Except for the occasional crack of a rifle shot and the
distant rumble of the guns at Helles an absolute silence fell along the front. The men on the flanks and in the rear were the first to go. Each as he left the trenches fired his rifle for the last
time, fell into line and marched in Indian file down the white lines to the beach. They came down from the hills in batches of four hundred and the boats were waiting. The last act of each man
before he embarked was to take the two hand-grenades he was carrying and cast them silently into the sea.
Within an hour of nightfall both sectors at Anzac and Suvla were contracting rapidly towards their centres, and everywhere, from dozens of little gullies and ravines, like streams pouring softly
down to join a river, men were moving to the shore. No one ran. Not smoking or talking, each group, when it reached the sea, stood quietly waiting for its turn to embark. At Anzac only 5,000 men
were left at 8 p.m. At 10 p.m. the trenches at the front were manned by less than 1,500 men. This was the point of extreme danger; now, more than ever, every rifle shot seemed the beginning of an
enemy attack. For several nights previously a destroyer had shone its searchlight across the southern end of the bridgehead to block the Turks’ vision of the beach, and now again the light
went on. Apart from this and the occasional gleam of the moon through the drifting clouds no other light was showing. Midnight passed and there was still no movement from the enemy. The handful of
soldiers now left at the front moved quietly from loophole to loophole, occasionally firing their rifles, but more often simply standing and waiting until, with excruciating slowness, the moment
came for them to go. The last men began to leave the trenches at 3 a.m. Fifteen minutes later Lone Pine was evacuated, and the men turned their backs on the Turks a dozen yards away. They had a
mile or more to go before they reached the beach. As they went they drew cages of barbed wire
across the paths behind them, and lit the fuses which an hour later would
explode hidden mines beneath the ground. On the beach the hospital staff was told that, since there were no wounded, they too could leave. A private named Pollard who had gone to sleep at the front
and had woken to find himself alone came stumbling nervously down to the shore and was gathered in.
They waited ten more minutes to make sure that none had been left behind. Then at 4 a.m., when the first faint streaks of dawn were beginning, they set fire to the dumps on the shore. On the
hills above they could hear the automatic rifles going off and the noise of the Turks firing back spasmodically at the deserted trenches. At ten past four a sailor gave the final order, ‘Let
go all over—right away’, and the last boat put out to sea. At that instant the mine below Chunuk Bair went off with a tearing, cataclysmic roar, and a huge cloud, lit from beneath with
a red glow, rolled upward over the peninsula. Immediately a hurricane of Turkish rifle fire swept the bay.
At Suvla a similar scene was going on, but it continued a little longer. It was not until ten past five that Commodore Unwin, of the
River Clyde
, pushed off in the last boat. A soldier
fell overboard as they were leaving, and the Commodore dived in and fished him out. ‘You really must do something about Unwin,’ General Byng said to Keyes, who was watching from his own
ship off the shore. ‘You should send him home; we want several little Unwins.’
And now a naval steamboat ran along the coast, an officer on board calling and calling to the shore for stragglers. But there were none. At Suvla every man and animal had been got off. At Anzac
two soldiers were wounded during the night. There were no other casualties. Just before they vanished hull down over the horizon at 7 a.m. the soldiers in the last boats looked back towards the
shore across the oily sea and saw the Turks come out of the foothills and run like madmen along the empty beach. At once the Navy opened fire on them, and a destroyer rushed in to ignite with its
shells the unburnt piles of stores that had remained behind. On board the boats, where generals and privates were packed in
together, a wild hilarity broke out, the men
shaking one another’s hands, shouting and crying. But before they reached the islands most of them had subsided to the deck and were asleep.
That night, sixteen hours after the last man had been taken off, a violent storm blew up with torrents of rain and washed away the piers.
Liman von Sanders says that he found great booty at Suvla and Anzac; five small steamers and sixty boats abandoned on the beaches, dumps of artillery and ammunition, railway lines and whole
cities of standing tents, medicines and instruments of every kind, vast stacks of clothing, bully beef and flour, mountains of timber. And on the shore some hundreds of dead horses lay in rows. The
ragged, hungry Turkish soldiers, who patched their uniforms with sacking and who subsisted on a daily handful of olives and a slice of bread, fell on this treasure like men who had lost their wits.
Sentries were unable to hold them back; the soldiers rushed upon the food, and for weeks afterwards they were to be seen in the strangest uniforms, Australian hats, puttees wound round their
stomachs, breeches cut from flags and tarpaulins, British trench boots of odd sizes on their feet. They carried in their knapsacks the most useless and futile things that they had picked up, but it
was all glorious because it was loot, it was free and it was theirs. And they had won.
Liman von Sanders says too that he was planning a major attack on the Suvla and Anzac positions when he was forestalled by the evacuation, and he admits that right up to the early hours of
Monday, December 20, he had no notion of what was happening at the front. Confusing reports came to him at his headquarters through the night, and these were made still more confusing by sea mist.
At 4 a.m., however, he ordered a general alarm. Yet there were still delays. The Turkish soldiers advanced very gingerly into the foremost trenches where there had only been instant death for so
many months before. After a little while they paused, fearing that some trick was being played, and an hour or more went by before their commanders, woken from their sleep, came up to the front and
told them to go on again. Even the final advance to the
beaches was very slow, because the troops were held up by barbed wire and booby traps; and on the shore itself they
were shelled from the sea. And so an army slipped away.