Gallipoli (47 page)

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 At the Dardanelles de Robeck was getting ready to pack his bags, believing that he was about to be superseded by Wemyss; and Monro, who had been on a trip to Egypt, was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.