As the 29th Brigade filed down the long sap to Anzac in the darkness, as the 30th and 31st Brigades retraced their steps past Lala Baba and over the beaches at Suvla, it was impossible to avoid retrospect. We had passed that way less than two months before, but going in the opposite direction full of high hopes. Now we were leaving the Peninsula again, our work unfinished and the Turks still in possession of the Narrows. Nor was it possible to help thinking of the friends lying in narrow graves on the scrub-covered hillside or covered by the débris of filled-in trenches, whom we seemed to be abandoning. Yet though there was sorrow at departing there was no despondency. We had the memory of strenuous effort and achievement to inspire us, and the bond of friendship among the few officers who survived had been knit closer than it had ever been before. The men, too, felt a new spirit towards their officers, and the hard times they had shared together had cemented the feeling of comradeship which had always existed. They knew now that whatever the danger might be their officers would be the first to face it, and the officers had proved that their men would follow them anywhere. Once that sentiment exists in a battalion it is impossible to break its spirit.

The 29th Brigade reached Mudros at dawn on September 30th and went under canvas in the Mudros East area, which was on the opposite side of the harbour to the bivouac they had previously occupied. The remainder of the Division followed them thither in the course of the week. There was unfortunately not many of the original Division left.

Though the Divisional Staff had not greatly changed, only one brigadier still held his original command. This was Brigadier-General Nicol, who had won the admiration and affection of the 30th Brigade by his unfailing courage and tenacity. He was not a young man, but in spite of the sickness which afflicted everyone in Gallipoli he resolutely refused to go to hospital, and by his example encouraged many younger officers to “stick it out.” Of the original Brigade Staffs only one Brigade-Major, Captain Cooke-Collis, and one Staff Captain, Captain Goodland, survived, and sickness and wounds had so thinned the ranks of the commanding officers that only Lieutenant-Colonel Jourdain of the Connaught Rangers, Lieutenant-Colonel Cox of the 6th Royal Dublin Fusiliers, Lieutenant-Colonel Pike of the 5th Royal Irish Fusiliers, and Lieutenant-Colonel Lord Granard of the Royal Irish Regiment, were still with their units. One Lieutenant-Colonel, Vanrenen, of the 5th Inniskillings, had fallen, and the other eight were wounded or sick. The battalions, too, had suffered terribly, and it was an exceptional unit that possessed more than half-a-dozen of its original officers and 200 of the men who had gone with it to the Peninsula at the beginning of August. Even of these a fair proportion had spent part of the time in hospital and rejoined; those who had seen the campaign through from start to finish were rare.

There was, however, little time to think of these matters. The concentration of the Division was not completed till October 3rd and on October 4th its first two battalions sailed for another theatre of war.

CHAPTER X
RETROSPECT

“So awakened in their hearts the strongest of all fellowships, the fellowship of the sword.”—W. B. Yeats.

What does one recollect most clearly when one looks back at Gallipoli?

A multitude of memories cluster together: dry, sand-floored gullies, thirsty men crowded round a well, Indians grooming their mules, lithe, half-naked Australians, parched, sun-dried scrub, but above and beyond all these one remembers the graves. Not a man came back from the Peninsula without leaving some friend behind there, and it is bitter to think that the last resting-place of those we loved is in the hands of our enemy. Not all the dead of Gallipoli lie in the Peninsula itself. There are crowded cemeteries at Malta and Alexandria, and many a brave body has been lowered over the side of a hospital ship into the Aegean to mingle his bones with those of Argonauts and Crusaders and all the heroes of a bygone age. Nevertheless, when one thinks of Gallipoli one thinks first of graves.