Gallipoli (49 page)

But the clearest picture of Gallipoli at this time is not given by the newspapers, nor by the generals’ dispatches, nor even by the letters and diaries of the veterans who had been there
for months: it comes from the young soldiers who were still being sent out as replacements or reinforcements. Many of them had never been abroad before, and they saw it all with the dear and
frightened eye of the child who for the first time in his life leaves his family and sets off alone for school. He might have been told all about Gallipoli just as once he was told all about the
school to which he was being sent, but it remained terrible to him because he had never seen himself in that context before. He did not know whether or not he would have the courage of the others,
and the absence of the unknown in the adventure—the fact that tens of thousands of others had gone to Gallipoli before him—was no real reassurance; it merely emphasized the unknown
within himself.

These no doubt might have been the emotions of any young soldier going to war, but Gallipoli occupied a special place, since it was so far away and already so fixed in a popular myth. No one who
went there ever came back on leave.

But there was at least, at the outset, the excitement and the
respite of the journey. For the English soldier it began at some dim port like Liverpool, often in the rain
and often aboard the
Olympic
or some other transatlantic liner. Here the strings with home and normality still remained, the clean food, the peacetime order on the decks, the uneventful
days. A thousand letters home described the first sight of Gibraltar, the Mediterranean sunshine, the glimpse of Malta and Tunis, the U-boat scare that came to nothing. After a fortnight of this
there was the arrival at Mudros, and Mudros, like every transit camp in every war, was awful: a city of dusty tents, the dreary anonymous hutments on the wharves, the appalling canteen food eaten
among strangers. The spirits of the new arrivals fell sharply at Mudros while they waited for their posting to one of the three fronts on the peninsula. Anzac had the worst reputation for danger
and discomfort, and there was little to choose, it was said, between Suvla and Helles.

As a rule the men revived again once they set off from Mudros and the climax of their adventure lay clear before them. They travelled by night on steamers brought out from the English Channel
(the peacetime notices in French and English still painted on the gangways), and in silence and darkness they stood on deck straining their eyes for a first sight of the fabulous coast. If they
were bound for Helles they saw, away to the starboard, the glare of the enemy searchlights sweeping the Dardanelles, and perhaps a starshell coming up from Asia. Then, as the rotten, sweet smell of
the battlefield came out towards them, a voice, shouting in the darkness, would tell them that they were now within range, that there was to be no smoking, all torches to be extinguished. Two red
lights shone on the masthead, and presently an answering light would come out from the shore. Then, all at once, they were touching something solid in the blackness, a pier or a lighter in the bay,
and a gang of Indian porters, coughing dismally in the bitter cold, would come swarming on to the decks.

Waking next morning, stiff and uncomfortable on the ground, the young soldier found himself looking out on a scene which was probably much less dramatic than he had imagined, at any rate as far
as the general prospect was concerned. He was in the midst of a
vast dishevelled dumping ground, a slum of piled-up boxes and crates, of discoloured tents and dusty carts, of
the debris of broken boats and vehicles that seemed to have been cast up like wreckage by some violent storm in the night. There was a stony football field; a few squalid huts were standing by the
shore, and the legendary
River Clyde
was an old hulk in the bay. Smoke drifted up from cooking fires as from the back streets of an industrial town. Not a green thing grew, and although
all kinds of soldiers were moving about from their holes in the ground and among the tents, they imparted somehow that air of fatigue, of staleness and physical boredom, which overtakes the
homeward-going crowd in a great city railway station at the end of a long Sunday in the summer. Of Troy and the Hellespont, of the raging Turks and the crashing artillery, of death itself, there
was usually nothing to be seen.

But then, as the recruit waited to be told what to do, like a boy in the quadrangle on his first morning at school, the others ignoring him as they went by on their own mysterious and definite
occupations, the morning shelling would begin, the long scream, the shuddering crump in the ground, and at once he would discover a sense of identity; his nerves touched the hidden current by
which, under an air of matter-of-factness, they were all animated and controlled, and there was a sort of reassurance in this experience. When at last he got his orders to go to this or that sector
in the line, when he found himself actually on the road and marching, as it were, towards a precipice, his fear was often swallowed up in a delirious fatalism, a sort of bated recklessness. Now
finally he was committed, from this moment his past life had gone, and he ran blindly forward or galloped his horse when he was told to hurry across the exposed ground. Obediently he dived down in
the wake of his guide into the gullies and the underground city on the plain, acutely aware of the strange sights about him but in reality seeing nothing but himself. And again at the front, a mile
or two away from the coast, anticlimax intervened. For long periods it was very quiet in the trenches, but there was an uninhibited air, almost a sense of freedom, which was much less constricting
than the atmosphere of the headquarters and the base depots on the beach. Men strolled about in the sunshine, apparently in full view of the Turks. They were incurious but
friendly. ‘Ah yes, we’ve been expecting you. Don’t know where you’re going to sleep. Perhaps over there.’ Over there might be a neolithic hut of stones, a blanket
stretched across a hole in the side of a trench, some blind alley where a group of men were playing cards. They did not move or look up when a machine-gun snapped out somewhere in the open field
ahead, a field like any other field but dry and characterless in the flat sunlight.

Then days would elapse while the new soldier, emerging from his private foreboding, still marvelled at things which had long since ceased to be remarkable to the other men: the way, for
instance, a French soldier would perch on the cliffs and sound a hunting horn as a warning to the soldiers bathing in the sea below that a shell was coming over from Asia. Or it would be some
surprising act of military punctilio, a pipe band parading on the shore, an immaculate colonel, looking like some animated tin soldier from the nursery, raising his hand to salute the flag at
sunset. It was the casual thing done in these bizarre surroundings which was so unexpected, the very fact that they could play football at all, that the men could abandon themselves to the simplest
pastimes, that they could sit, as some of them did, for hours on end oblivious of the world, happily shooting with a catapult at sparrows coming across from the Turkish lines. And always to the
fresh eye there were recurring moments of release and wonder at the slanting luminous light in the early mornings and the evenings, in the marvellous colour of the sea.

But in the end, inevitably, these things ceased to be remarkable any more, they became part of an accepted background, and soon the new soldier would be filling his diary with jottings about
food, about the latest parcel from home, about the hour at which he went to sleep on the previous night, about food again.

It was many months now since any of the older soldiers had seen a woman, and although the usual kind of story went around—the Turks had women in
their
trenches, B Company had
quite
definitely heard them squealing last night—sex was not a subject that generally obsessed them. It was very secondary to food. In a book called
Letters from
Helles
, which a Colonel Darlington published long after the war, there is recorded an incident which reveals a not too painful detachment, almost a Robinson Crusoe submission to the
inevitable, which was probably the general thing.

An orderly announced in an awed voice one day, ‘There’s women in that boat, Colonel.’ The Colonel ‘went out and sure enough there was a party of Australian nurses being
shown around the shore to see how the wild soldier lives and sleeps. I got my glasses to see the unusual sight and much to all our Tommies’ annoyance a young nut of a staff officer with much
ostentation put his arm round one of the nurses’ waists, struck an attitude and waved his hand to us. We all shook our fists at him, which caused great amusement on the launch.’

Up to the end of November there was very little talk of evacuation. It was discussed in the trenches like any other possibility, but in a detached way, and few of the men really believed that it
could happen. The physical presence of the Army, its air of permanence, was all around them; too much had been committed here, too many were dead, to make it possible for them to go away. And in
any case there was at this stage no plan for withdrawing from Helles at all.

At the beginning of December, however, the men at Anzac and Suvla began to notice that something unusual was going on. Soldiers who reported sick with some minor ailment were not treated at the
hospitals on the bridgehead but were at once sent off to the islands and were seen no more. In increasing numbers companies and battalions were taken off
en bloc
, and those who remained
behind did not altogether believe the official explanation that this was part of the new ‘winter policy of thinning out the bridgehead’. They thought for the most part that a new
landing was to be made.

The problem was one of frightful complexity. There were some 83,000 men in the Suvla-Anzac bridgehead, and to these were
added 5,000 animals, 2,000 vehicles, nearly 200
guns and vast quantities of stores. It was quite impractical to think of getting the whole of this army off in a single night, since there was neither room for them on the beaches nor sufficient
boats to get them across to the islands. Equally a fighting withdrawal was out of the question: in a moment the enemy guns firing from the hills above would have wrecked all hope of
embarkation.

The plan that was finally adopted was very largely the work of Colonel Aspinall, who was now serving as a brigadier-general on Birdwood’s staff, and of Lieut.-Colonel White, an Australian
at Anzac. They proposed a gradual and secret withdrawal which was to take place during successive nights until at last only a small garrison was left; and these last, the ‘bravest and the
steadiest men’, were then to take their chance on getting away before the Turks discovered what was happening. This meant that the operation would rise to an acute point of tension during the
last hours—a rough sea would ruin all, a Turkish attack would expose them to a slaughter—but still there seemed no other way.

There now began a period of intensive preparation. Once again a fleet of small boats was assembled in the islands. Twelve thousand hospital beds were got ready in Egypt, and fifty-six temporary
hospital ships were ordered to stand ready to take the wounded off the beaches—the larger liners, the
Mauretania
, the
Aquitania
and the
Britannic
, to sail directly
to England. Gangs of engineers were put to work to repair the piers destroyed in the November storms,
³⁶
and an elaborate time-table was worked out so that
every man would know precisely what he had to do.

Clearly everything would depend on secrecy and the weather. Secrecy was even more vital now than it had been in the days before the landings, and it was a constant anxiety in Birdwood’s
headquarters that some soldier, wittingly or unwittingly, might give the plans away. A naval patrol sealed off the islands from Greek caiques trading with the mainland, and
on Imbros a cordon was placed round the civilian village on the pretext that an outbreak of smallpox was suspected there.

In the midst of these arrangements Lord Milner and others chose to discuss openly the whole question of evacuation in the House of Lords in London. It was common knowledge, Lord Milner said,
that General Monro had recommended evacuation. Had Kitchener gone out to the Dardanelles to give a second opinion? Or was Kitchener himself to command the operation? It was part of the old zany
carelessness which had led people to address letters to ‘The Constantinople Force’ when Hamilton was first assembling the Army in Egypt, and on Imbros Birdwood’s planning staff
could do nothing but listen in despair. Fortunately, however, the Turks and the Germans simply could not bring themselves to believe that the British would give away their plans in this casual way;
they revealed later that they regarded the debate in the House of Lords as propaganda.

Over the weather there could be even less control; the meteorologists said that it ought to hold until the end of the year, and one could only pray that they were right. One good southerly blow
on the final night would wreck the whole adventure.

There remained one other imponderable, and that was the behaviour of the Army itself. On December 12 the soldiers at Suvla and Anzac were told for the first time that they were to be taken off,
that this for them was the end of the campaign. There seems to have been a moment of stupefaction. Even those who had guessed that something of the sort was about to happen were astonished, and
perhaps it was something more than astonishment, a dull awe, a feeling that this was a shaming and unnatural reversal of the order of things. Among the majority, no doubt, these thoughts were soon
overtaken by a sense of relief, and they were content simply to accept instructions and to get away. Others, and there were very many of them, remained indignant. They, too, like Rupert Brooke, had
seen a vision of Constantinople and had perhaps
exclaimed, as he had, when they had first set out from Egypt only eight months before, ‘Oh God! I’ve never been
quite so happy before.’ All this was now an embarrassment to remember, an absurd and childish excitement, and it was made more bitter by the endless disappointments, the death and the wastage
that had intervened.