Gallipoli

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

LIEUT.-GENERAL SIR CHARLES MONRO had already achieved something of a reputation as a cool and determined commander on the western front when he went out to Gallipoli. He was fifty-five, a methodical and authoritative man, one of the kind who accepts the rules and excels in them. There was nothing speculative about him, nothing amateur. Of all the generals who served at Gallipoli one is most tempted to compare him with Liman von Sanders, for he had the same dispassionate and professional air, the same aura of calm responsibility. ‘He was born,’ Hamilton wrote, ‘with another sort of mind from me.’

Monro had quite made up his mind about the general strategy of the war. It could be won, he believed, on the western front, and nowhere else, and any other campaign could only be justified provided that it did not divert men or materials from France. To kill Germans had become with him an act of faith: Turks did not count.

It was apparent then — or rather it should have been apparent — that some unusually bright prospect of success would have to be demonstrated to him at Gallipoli if he was to recommend that the campaign should go on. The terms of his appointment were very clear: he was to advise on whether or not the Army was to be evacuated; and if it was not, he was to estimate what reinforcements were required to carry the peninsula, to keep the straits open and to capture Constantinople.

The new commander did not hurry to the Dardanelles. He spent several days in London studying the problem at the War Office, and it was not until October 28—ten days after Hamilton’s departure — that he arrived on Imbros with his chief of staff Major-General Lynden-Bell.[31] He was met by Birdwood and the three officers who had recently been promoted to the command of the three corps at the front: Byng at Suvla, Godley at Anzac, and Lieut.-General Sir Francis Davies at Cape Helles.

Churchill in his account of the campaign says that Monro was ‘an officer of quick decision. He came, he saw, he capitulated’. But this is not entirely fair, for Kitchener was impatiently pressing for a decision. ‘Please send me as soon as possible,’ he cabled, ‘your report on the main issue, namely, leaving or staying.’ Monro got this message at Imbros within twenty-four hours of his arrival and on October 30 he set out for the peninsula. Lynden-Bell complained of a sprained knee, and his place on the trip was taken by Colonel Aspinall.

No commander as yet had succeeded in visiting Suvla, Anzac and Cape Helles in a single day, but Monro achieved this feat in a destroyer in a matter of six hours. At each of the three bridgeheads the divisional generals met him on the beach, and he put to each of them in turn an identical set of questions: could their men attack and capture the Turkish positions? If the Turks were reinforced with heavy guns could they hold out through the winter?

The British guns at this time were down to a ration of two shells a day, no winter clothing had arrived, and during the stalemate of the past two months many units had dwindled to half their strength. Yet there had been no thought of evacuation among the troops. Evacuation was a kind of death, and no one imagined that Monro had come to Gallipoli to discuss it. He had arrived like some eminent specialist called down to the country from London when the local doctors had failed, and it was thought that he would suggest new remedies and ways of treatment, perhaps even some bold act of surgery which would make all well again. But there was no hint of this in his questions. No mention was made of any reinforcements being sent to the peninsula. It was very depressing. The generals replied that the men might keep up an attack for twenty-four hours, but if the Turks made a counteroffensive with unlimited shells and fresh troops — well then they could only do their best. They could say no more.

But Monro hardly needed to hear the generals’ replies. One glance at the beaches had been enough: the ramshackle piers, the spiritless gangs of men hanging about with their carts and donkeys, the shanty-town dug-outs in the cliffs, the untidiness of it all. At Anzac the General glanced at Aspinall with a specialist’s rueful smile. ‘Like Alice in Wonderland,’ he said. ‘Curiouser and curiouser.’

On the following day he sent Kitchener a message recommending the evacuation of the peninsula. Only the Anzac Corps, he said, was in a fit condition to carry on. What the men needed was rest, re-organization and training. The best thing to do was to get as many as possible back to Egypt where after a few months they might be ready for action again. He followed this with a second message saying that he estimated the losses in an evacuation at between thirty and forty per cent: in other words some 40,000 men.

Here it was then in black and white: the end of the campaign. So many dead and all for nothing, and another 40,000 men to be lost. For the cabinet in London who had to take the final decision it posed an intolerable dilemma, and even those who had been advocating the Salonika adventure were sobered by it. They had asked the professional expert for his opinion, and now they had got it: and it was unthinkable. They hesitated. And while they hesitated the thing they most wished for happened: a new factor came into the scene.

Roger Keyes was still a small man in these affairs. He was no more than a young commodore, his admiral was against him, and for the past eight months he had been isolated from the great political and military issues of the west. But he had one advantage. When nearly everyone was wavering and hesitating about the Dardanelles his views had the clarity that comes from a long pent-up exasperation. His blood was up, he knew what he wanted, and he was every bit as determined as General Monro to whom he was implacably opposed. There is a remarkable counterpoise in the movements of the two men during these few days.

On October 28, when Monro arrived at Imbros, Keyes reached London. Although it was nine o’clock at night he went straight to the Admiralty hoping to get in to see the admirals then and there, but they put him off until the following morning. At 10.30 a.m. on October 29, when Monro was examining the problems of evacuation at Imbros, Keyes had his plan in the hands of Admiral Oliver, the chief of the War Staff, and from there he went on to Sir Henry Jackson, the First Sea Lord. Soon the other admirals were brought in, and at five in the evening he went off to see the First Lord, Arthur Balfour. Next day, when Monro was preparing his evacuation report after his visit to the beaches, Keyes had a second interview with Balfour. They continued for two hours, Balfour lying back full-length in his armchair listening, Keyes talking resolutely on. At a quarter to five in the afternoon Balfour sustained himself with a cup of tea, and at twenty past five he rose and said, ‘It is not often that when one examines a hazardous enterprise — and you will admit it has its hazards — the more one considers it the better one likes it.’ He sent Keyes back to talk to the admirals again.

There was a break then when Keyes went off to see his wife and children in the country. But he was back in the Admiralty on November 2. The next morning he was with Churchill, and in the afternoon he found himself with Kitchener at last.

The plan which Keyes was propounding was quite simply a headlong assault on the Narrows with the battleships and cruisers which had been lying in harbour in the Ægean Islands since May. The attacking fleet was to be divided into two main squadrons. The first of these, with minesweepers and destroyers in the van, was to steam straight at the Narrows just before dawn under the cover of a smoke screen; and come what might, whether the Turkish guns were silenced or not, whether or not all the mines were swept, they were to keep on until some, at least, of the ships got through. Keyes asked for permission to lead this squadron himself. The other squadron, meanwhile — and it was to consist of the monitors and the newer battleships — was to pin down the Turkish shore batteries with a furious bombardment from the mouth of the straits. Once in the Marmara the surviving vessels were to steam directly to the Bulair Isthmus, where they were to cut the single road which was supplying the twenty Turkish divisions now stationed in the peninsula.

Keyes had effective arguments to support his plan. Many of the enemy guns on the straits, he said, had been taken away by the Turkish Army, and a naval attack was not expected. The minefields had now been fully reconnoitred. In every respect, and especially in the support it would get from the new seaplane carriers, the Fleet had been immeasurably improved since March, and the Allied Army was now ashore to do its part in distracting the enemy fire. Already the Turks were finding difficulty in supplying their large Army on a single road — and he pointed to the success of the Allied submarines, three of which were in the Sea of Marmara and dominating it at that moment. Cut the neck at Bulair and the Turks were lost. The French, he added, were all for the new attempt and had offered new warships to take part in it.[32] It was true that Admiral de Robeck was still against the idea, but Admiral Wemyss, who was senior to de Robeck and who had been all this time at Mudros, was not. He was very much for it. He should be given the command to carry it through.

Finally, what was the sane and rational decision to take? To risk a few old battleships with a chance of winning the campaign? Or to evacuate, to give up everything with the loss of 40,000 men?

By November 3 Keyes had made headway with these arguments. Jackson, the First Sea Lord, had said he was in favour provided that the Army attacked at the same time. Balfour had all but committed himself. Churchill had needed no persuading. ‘I believe,’ he had written in a recent cabinet paper urging a new attempt, ‘we have been all these months in the position of the Spanish prisoner who languished for twenty years in a dungeon until one morning the idea struck him to push the door which had been open all the time.’ And now Keyes found himself with Kitchener.

Kitchener had been appalled by Monro’s message. He could not bring himself to believe, he said, that a responsible officer could have recommended to the Government so drastic a course as evacuation. He had replied curtly by asking Monro for the opinion of the corps commanders, and Monro had answered that both Davies and Byng were for evacuation, while Birdwood was against it (but only because he feared the loss of prestige in the East). And then there had been this devastating estimate of the loss in cold blood of 40,000 men. Angrily, resentfully, realizing at last how much he was committed to the Dardanelles, Kitchener had been passing between the War Office and the cabinet room saying that he himself would never sign the evacuation order, and that if the Government insisted on it he himself would go out and take command, and that he would be the last man off. Keyes came in like a fresh wind at this moment, and Kitchener seized upon his plan. He told Keyes to return to the Admiralty and get some sort of a definite undertaking from them.

Keyes now was hot on the trail. He was back with Kitchener after dinner with the news that the First Sea Lord had given at least a partial promise: if the Army would attack, then the Navy would probably agree to force the straits at the same time.

While Keyes had been away Kitchener himself had taken a drastic decision which committed him more deeply than ever to the Dardanelles. It was a thunderblast in the old Olympian manner, impulsive, imperious, and absolute. He sent the following message to Birdwood, his follower of former days:

‘Most secret. Decipher yourself. Tell no one. You know Monro’s report. I leave here tomorrow night to come out to you. Have seen Commodore Keyes, and the Admiralty will, I believe, agree naval attempt to force straits. We must do what we can to assist them, and I think as soon as ships are in the Marmara we should seize and hold the isthmus (i.e. Bulair) so as to supply them if Turks hold out. Examine very carefully best position for landing near marsh at head of Gulf of Xeros, so that we could get a line across at isthmus with ships on both sides. To find troops for this purpose we should have to reduce to lowest possible numbers the men in all the trenches, and perhaps evacuate positions at Suvla. All the best fighting men that could be spared, including your boys from Anzac and reinforcements I can sweep up in Egypt, might be concentrated at Mudros ready for this enterprise. The admiral will probably be changed and Wemyss given command to carry through the naval part of the work. As regards command you would have the whole force and should carefully select your commanders and troops. I would suggest Maude, Fanshawe, Marshall, Peyton (all new commanders recently sent out from England), Godley and Cox, leaving others to hold the lines. Work out plans for this or alternate plans as you think best. We must do it right this time. I absolutely refuse to sign order for evacuation, which I think would be the greatest disaster and would condemn a large percentage of our men to death or imprisonment. Monro will be appointed to command the Salonika force.’[33]

This was followed by a War Office signal officially appointing Birdwood to the command of the Expedition and directing Monro to Salonika.

The Field Marshal was up till midnight with Keyes making his plans, and it was arranged that he was to leave for the Dardanelles on the following day. Keyes was to go with him provided that first he got the guarantee of certain naval reinforcements for his attempt on the Narrows.

This was on November 3. November 4 was a still more agitated day. In the morning Keyes got his reinforcements. Four battleships, Hibernia, Zealandia, Albemarle and Russell, 4 destroyers and 24 more trawlers were ordered to the Dardanelles. In the afternoon Balfour sent off a tactful message to de Robeck saying that he had heard that he was not well and in need of a rest; he must come home on leave. ‘In making arrangements for your substitute during your absence,’ the message went on, ‘please bear in mind the possibility that an urgent appeal from the Army to co-operate with them in a great effort may make it necessary for the Fleet to attempt to force the straits. The admiral left in charge should therefore be capable of organizing this critical operation and should be in full agreement with the policy.’

Then in the evening there was a setback. At a farewell meeting with the cabinet Kitchener found the other Ministers still divided between Gallipoli and Salonika. Bonar Law was actually threatening resignation unless the peninsula was evacuated, and Balfour made it absolutely clear that the Navy would do nothing at the Dardanelles unless the Army also attacked. Could the Army attack? Kitchener was forced to say he did not know. After the meeting he sent off a gloomy cable to Birdwood cancelling his previous message. ‘I fear,’ he said, ‘the Navy may not play up… The more I look at the problem the less I see my way through, so you had better very quietly and very secretly work out any scheme for getting the troops off.’

Then he set off, taking the overland route through France to Marseilles, where the Dartmouth was waiting to transport him to the Dardanelles. However, there was better news waiting for the Field Marshal in Paris, where he stopped that night to consult with the French government; the French told him that they were opposed to evacuation. On hearing this, Kitchener cabled Birdwood once again saying that he yet might be reinforced, and another message was despatched to Keyes in London telling him to proceed at once to Marseilles to join the Dartmouth so that they could discuss the joint naval and Army attack on their voyage to Gallipoli.

Keyes never got this message. It arrived at the Admiralty in London, but the officer on duty there decided (quite erroneously) that there was no point in sending it on to the Commodore since he had no hope of getting to Marseilles before the Dartmouth sailed.

Now they were all at sixes and sevens. When Keyes failed to turn up at Marseilles Kitchener concluded that the naval plan must have fallen through, and he sailed despondently without him. Keyes meanwhile, knowing nothing about all this, was jubilant. He went across to Paris, got a promise of six more warships from the French Minister of Marine, and hurried off after Kitchener, confident that all was well. At the Dardanelles de Robeck was getting ready to pack his bags, believing that he was about to be superseded by Wemyss; and Monro, who had been on a trip to Egypt, was confronted with the baffling news that Kitchener had been secretly arranging for his removal to Salonika. Birdwood perhaps was the most perplexed man of all. Kitchener was thrusting greatness upon him, and he was not at all sure that he wanted it. He did not believe that the Army would have a ghost of a chance in making a fresh landing in the vicinity of the Bulair isthmus, and he had no wish to become Commander-in-Chief. He suppressed the War Office cable announcing his appointment, and cabled Kitchener saying that he hoped Monro would remain in command.

And still in London the tug of war between Gallipoli and Salonika went on among the politicians.

But it was the uncertainty of Kitchener’s own position which was the most unsettling aspect of these confused events. Outwardly his prestige remained untouched, the generals and the politicians still revolved around him; yet it was becoming every day more apparent that his former steadiness was deserting him, that he too was being sucked into the fatal limbo of the Dardanelles. As the commanders at Gallipoli and the cabinet Ministers in London were pulled first in one way and then in another, he drifted with the rest and it began to seem that he was no more capable of finding a solution than anybody else. And in fact by the beginning of November only two men appeared to be standing on firm ground. One was Keyes and the other Monro, and the real issue — whether to stay or to go, to attack or retreat — was bound to be decided between them. These too were the champions of the two great opposing camps, and it was simply a question of which was going to be more successful in imposing his will. Kitchener, in other words, was going to Gallipoli not as a leader but as an umpire, and it was a game in which there were no precedents at all.

At first Keyes did not stand a chance. He was still far away on his outward journey to the Dardanelles when Kitchener arrived at Lemnos. The Field Marshal was met by Monro, de Robeck, Birdwood, General Maxwell, the Commander-in-Chief in Egypt, and Sir Henry MacMahon, the Egyptian High Commissioner. Maxwell and MacMahon had come over to express their fears about the safety of Egypt in the event of the Gallipoli evacuation taking place, and in the course of their journey they had reached an agreement with Monro. They were prepared to back an evacuation, they told him, provided he made a new landing on the Asiatic coast of Turkey at Ayas Bay in the Gulf of Iskanderun. This was to prevent the Turks from advancing on the Suez Canal. Monro did not think much of the plan, but he was ready to fall in with it provided he got the troops out of Gallipoli. These three, then, formed a solid block. De Robeck concerned himself chiefly with the technical problems of the Navy. He could get the troops off Suvla and Anzac, he said, but he wanted Cape Helles retained as a base to assist him in blockading the Dardanelles. Birdwood too was coming round to the idea of evacuation, but was absolutely opposed to the Ayas Bay scheme. No one spoke in favour of the Navy making a new attempt on the Narrows — de Robeck indeed expressly repeated that he regarded it as folly.

So now they were all evacuators, all eager to find some way of getting out without losing too much face, and the safety of Egypt had become more important than the capture of Constantinople.

But Kitchener was still not persuaded. He liked the Ayas Bay idea, and sent off a cable to London saying so; but he held his hand about evacuation. After two days of argument on Imbros he went off to the peninsula and methodically inspected the three bridgeheads, giving a full day to each one.

Like Monro he was depressed by the difficulties of the country, and the precarious hold of the Army on the beaches. But he was not quite so hopeless; he believed they might hold on through the winter, and that, if forced to evacuate, they might get out with fewer casualties than had been anticipated, perhaps no more than 25,000 men. He said all this in a cable to London on his return to Imbros on November 15, but still made no recommendation one way or another as to what should be done. By now a week had gone by.

It was the General Staff at the War Office in London which brought a note of reality into this drifting scene. The Ayas Bay scheme they turned down flat, pointing out that with two fronts already on their hands at Salonika and Gallipoli it was unwise to add a third, and that if the Turks were going to attack Egypt it was much better to meet them after they had crossed the desert than at the outset of their journey. The French in any case hated the idea, since they regarded Ayas Bay and the Alexandretta area as their own sphere of influence. It was many months since anyone, least of all the General Staff, had rejected Kitchener’s advice in such terms as these.

And now more troubles arose. The Salonika force had accomplished nothing in Bulgaria — it had not even made contact with the Serbs — and was now about to fall back into Greece. King Constantine spoke of disarming the troops as they crossed the border. In haste Kitchener set off with Monro on November 16 for Salonika to see what could be done; and it was there at last on the following day that Keyes caught up with him. They met aboard the Dartmouth.

‘Well, I have seen the place,’ Kitchener began. ‘It is an awful place and you will never get through.’ Keyes attacked this at once. What had happened to change Lord Kitchener’s mind? Why had he dropped his support of the naval plan? Nothing had altered since they had left London; if anything the position was even better than it was before. The naval reinforcements were arriving. It was agreed that de Robeck, who was a sick man, should go home and that Wemyss should take his place. As for the Dardanelles being such an awful place, Kitchener had had no opportunity of studying it. He, Keyes, had been there eight months. He knew the possibilities intimately and he knew they could get through. All the Navy needed was the word to go ahead.

To Kitchener, who wanted to believe it, yet saw no escape from his ever-increasing difficulties, this was a siren’s song and scarcely bearable. He got up and walked into his sleeping cabin, closing the door behind him. ‘I could not help feeling sorry for him,’ Keyes wrote that night in his diary. ‘He looked so terribly weary and harassed.’

That night they steamed back to Mudros to take up the argument all over again. Keyes lost no time in heartening the reluctant generals. Any argument served: on November 17 a heavy southerly gale had again wrecked the piers at Cape Helles, and he pointed out to General Davies that evacuation had become too dangerous. To MacMahon, the Egyptian High Commissioner, he said, ‘If we fight the Turk and beat him in Gallipoli isn’t that the best way to defend Egypt?’ MacMahon was forced to agree, and said he would approach Kitchener again. A General Horne had been brought out by Kitchener as an adviser, and Keyes tackled him with, ‘If you western-front generals don’t like the idea of attacking, at least be ready to take advantage of our naval attack when we deliver it.’ Horne, according to Keyes, was ‘enthusiastic before I finished’. Then there was Birdwood. Keyes braced him with a preliminary harangue, and then left it to Admiral Wemyss to continue the argument. By November 21, when the generals assembled again at Mudros for a final conference, Birdwood had been brought round. He was reassured, no doubt, by the fact that his own officers at Anzac had now come out definitely against evacuation, while at Cape Helles a new Turkish attack had collapsed. It collapsed because the Turkish soldiers, having jumped up from their trenches, absolutely refused to go forward against the British fire. They fell back with heavy loss. Keyes began to feel that he had recovered all his lost ground at last.

Yet the truth was that Monro with his slow persistence had by now begun to dominate them all. The subordinate generals might privately agree with Keyes, but they were still unable to stand up to Monro — and it was to Monro and not Kitchener that they were turning for the last word. Birdwood was perfectly clear about this. He said to Keyes, ‘Everything depends upon Monro.’ It was time now for the two adversaries to meet.

Monro had broken his ankle getting into a boat at Salonika and Keyes found him lying on a sofa aboard the Chatham. Lynden-Bell was with him. The argument began quite pleasantly and it was not until the end that Keyes burst out with, ‘If you don’t want to share in the glory, then there are some soldiers who will.’

‘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.

This was buttressed by a second paper from Hankey, who was now back at his post as Secretary of the War Committee. If they withdrew, Hankey argued, Turkey was free to turn all her forces on to Russia and the British possessions in the Near East. There was even a danger that Russia might sign a separate peace. He urged that since the Salonika landing had failed, the fresh divisions which had been sent out to reinforce it should be diverted instead to Gallipoli. It was an idea that appealed to Kitchener; even at this eleventh hour he too was prepared to change once more, and cables were sent out to Wemyss asking him if he could transport the troops from Salonika to Gallipoli. Keyes hurried to Salonika to make the arrangements.

Bluntly Monro held on. No, he said, he still could not attack. Even if he was given these reinforcements he could not employ them. Nevertheless, for the first time he was shaken, and in an unguarded moment Lynden-Bell said to Keyes, ‘Well, we are in for it — we are going to do it; you have got your way.’ This was on December 4, and for a little longer the agony was to be maintained, while still in London the cabinet hesitated and waited for a lead.

It was the French and the Russians who cast the deciding vote at last; they informed the British that Salonika could not be abandoned, and on December 7 the cabinet decided definitely to ‘shorten the front by evacuating Anzac and Suvla’. Wemyss was astonished when he heard the news. He sent off a battery of cables to London saying that if necessary the Fleet was now prepared to ‘go it alone’. ‘What is offered the Army, therefore,’ he wrote, ‘is the practical complete severance of the Turkish lines of communication accomplished by the destruction of the large supply depots on the shore of the Dardanelles.’ The idea of evacuation, he told Balfour, was now being ridiculed by the soldiers at Gallipoli, especially at Anzac. Birdwood ought to be consulted.

But it was too late. The Admiralty was not prepared to act alone, especially as de Robeck was now in London and giving his advice against it. On December 10 Wemyss was turned down once more; and although he continued to argue for several days in effect he was beaten and Monro had won. Depressed and uncertain, the soldiers and the sailors turned together to the plans for their retreat.

Except for Birdwood, Keyes and one or two others nearly all the pioneers had now gone. Hamilton and de Robeck were in England, Kitchener was no longer the leader he had been at the time of the April landings, and it was becoming clear to his opponents that, with the failure of the Dardanelles, they could bring him down at last. Churchill, his reputation at the lowest ebb ever touched in his career, was bundled into retirement in the wake of Fisher and with even less regret. During these final negotiations over Gallipoli Asquith reformed the War Committee, and there was no place on it for the man who, at that moment, seemed most responsible for the tragedy they were about to face. Churchill made a last speech in the House in November, and then went off to France to fight in the trenches.

On the Turkish side Liman remained but Kemal had gone. After the August battles Kemal had been made a Pasha, and he had continued to lead a charmed life at the front. He was convinced that he would never be hit, and it did indeed appear that nothing could destroy him. While other men died he walked casually among the bullets. Samson very nearly killed him one day. Flying low behind the Turkish lines, the air commodore saw a staff car with three people inside, one of whom at least seemed to be a general (it was in fact Kemal). Samson dived and launched two bombs. At once the car stopped and the three men inside got out and ran to a ditch. Samson then drew off and cruised about for twenty minutes until he saw the Turks return to the car. Then again he dived, and actually succeeded in splintering the windscreen. But it was the chauffeur who was hit: Kemal remained untouched. Soon afterwards, however, his health broke down through exhaustion and nervous strain, and no amount of pills or injections could revive him. Early in December he was evacuated from the peninsula.

There was another casualty which was even closer to the nemesis of the Dardanelles. Wangenheim — Churchill’s ultimate rival, the man who had begun it all by getting the Goeben into the Sea of Marmara — was dead. His health had been failing all through the early summer and in July he went back to Germany on leave. When he returned to Constantinople in October his face was twitching, one of his eyes was covered with a black patch, and he was nervous and depressed. He came to the American Embassy, and Morgenthau describes the end of this, their last meeting: ‘Wangenheim rose to leave. As he did so he gave a gasp and his legs shot from under him. I jumped and caught him just as he was falling.’ Morgenthau helped him out to his car. Two days later Wangenheim had a stroke at the dinner table, and never again regained consciousness. He died on October 24, and was buried in the park of the German summer embassy at Therapia, that same nook on the Bosphorus where in the old days the ambassador, his telegrams in his hand, had so often bobbed in and out of view according to the changes in the German political weather.

Enver remained, with his pert confident air, but he was in secret no longer confident. Through these last days of November and early December he more than once came to Morgenthau asking him to appeal to President Wilson to use his influence to end the war. He admitted that Turkey had drifted into a critical state at the end of this first twelve months of hostilities, its farms uncultivated, its business at a standstill. The campaign at Gallipoli was swallowing them all. At this time neither Enver nor Liman nor anyone else had any notion of what was afoot in the British camp. They saw nothing ahead but limitless war, and the withdrawal of the Allies from the peninsula never entered their minds.

For the Allies at Gallipoli there was at least one small particle of relief in the hateful situation. They had definite orders at last; in place of demoralizing delay they now had something practical to do, even if it was nothing more than to arrange a humiliating retreat.

Yet there remained the overwhelming question of the casualties. What were they going to be? Kitchener had taken up a surprising line. Just as he was about to leave Gallipoli to return to England he had turned suddenly to Colonel Aspinall and had said, ‘I don’t believe a word about those 25,000 casualties (this was the latest estimate of the staff)… you’ll just step off without losing a man, and without the Turks knowing anything about it.’ It was another of his impulsive, inspirational flashes, and it was based on nothing definite: a guess, in fact, in the blue.

Lord Curzon in his paper to the cabinet saw the evacuation in another light. ‘I wish to draw it in no impressionist colours,’ he said, ‘but as it must in all probability arise. The evacuation and the final scenes will be enacted at night. Our guns will continue firing until the last moment… but the trenches will have been taken one by one, and a moment must come when a final sauve qui peut takes place, and when a disorganized crowd will press in despairing tumult on to the shore and into the boats. Shells will be falling and bullets ploughing their way into the mass of retreating humanity… Conceive the crowding into the boats of thousands of half-crazy men, the swamping of craft, the nocturnal panic, the agony of the wounded, the hecatombs of slain. It requires no imagination to create a scene that, when it is told, will be burned into the hearts and consciences of the British people for generations to come.’

Between these two, the wishful guess and the fearful nightmare, there were a dozen other conjectures, all equally guesses, all equally at the mercy of luck and the weather.

They were to depart, in fact, in the same way as they had arrived: as adventurers into the unknown.