The Return to Anzac.
Three years in succession the valleys of Anzac were flooded with the crimson poppies of the Aegean Spring. During these three years the New Zealanders in France and Palestine shared in the vicissitudes and the dearly-bought victories of the Allied Armies.
The Great Turkish Victory Monument on the Nek.
While the soldiers were fighting, some of the politicians of England—a few of whom had been prominent in reducing Army and Navy expenditure before the war—enquired with great deliberation into the rights and wrongs of the Gallipoli campaign. Money that would have been better spent in hand grenades in 1915 was lavishly poured out in trying to discover who was to blame for this and who should be censured for that. It may be said with pride that the people of New Zealand—and the people of Australia, too—did not indulge in recrimination. They knew that the armies were not to blame, and were content to leave it at that.
While commissions investigated ancient history the triumphant Turks erected great monuments on the Peninsula—monuments to commemorate the defeat of the infidels.
But the months slipped by, and nearer and nearer crept the forces enveloping the Central Powers. The Bulgars felt the pressure first. When they finally broke and fled up the Seres Road, our airmen bombed them unmercifully. Caught in their mountain passes, they were killed in thousands by our low-flying planes. So was Bulgaria finally bombed out of the war by British airmen.
On October 26, 1918, British cavalry and armoured cars entered Aleppo and cut the Constantinople-Baghdad railway. On October 29, General Marshall's forces on the Tigris severed the Turkish communications at Mosul. The Turkish armies were everywhere helpless.
One day at the end of October a little launch with General Townshend on board slipped out from Chios down near Smyrna, carrying a white flag. A representative of Vice-Admiral Calthorpe, the British naval commander in the Aegean, conducted the liberated hero of Kut-el-Amara and the fully-accredited representatives of the Turkish Government to Mudros—the Mudros of our rendezvous and of our Rest Camp—where the Turkish representatives signed the Armistice terms, preparatory to an unconditional surrender. This was on the evening of October 30. The Armistice came into effect at noon on the following day.