At Helles and Anzac the fall of the ground gave some protection from this gale, but at Suvla there was none. When the weather cleared, the beaches were heaped with the wreck of piers, piles, boats and lighters, all broken and jammed together. But great as this wreck was the wreck of men was even greater. The 29th Division had lost two-thirds of its strength. In the three sectors over 200 men were dead, over 10,000 were unfit for further service and not less than 30,000 others were sickened and made old by it.
The Turk loss was much more serious even than this, for though they suffered less from the wet, they suffered more from the cold, through being on the higher ground. The snow lay upon their trenches long after it had gone from ours, and the Turk equipment though very good as far as it went, was only good for the summer. Their men wore thin clothes, and many of them had neither overcoat nor blanket. The blizzard which was a discouragement to us, took nearly all the heart out of the Turks; and this fact must be borne in mind in the reading of the next few pages.
The gale had one good effect. Either the cold or the rain destroyed or removed the cause of the dysentery, which had taken nearly a thousand victims a day for some months. The disease stopped at once and no more fresh cases were reported.
This storm made any attempt to land or to leave the land impossible for four days together. Coming, as it did, upon the decision to evacuate, it gave the prompting, that the evacuation should be hurried, lest such weather should prevent it. On the 8th of December, the evacuation of Anzac and Suvla was ordered to begin.
It was not an easy task to remove large numbers of men, guns and animals from positions commanded by the Turk observers and open to every cruising aeroplane. But by ruse and skill, and the use of the dark, favoured by fine weather, the work was done, almost without loss, and, as far as one could judge, unsuspected.
German agents, eager to discredit those whom they could not defeat, have said, "that we bribed the Turks to let us go;" next year perhaps they will say "that the Turks bribed us to go;" the year after that perhaps, they will invent something equally false and even sillier. But putting aside the foulness and the folly of this bribery lie, it is interesting to enquire how it happened that the Turks did not attack our men while they were embarking.
The Turks were very good fighters, furious in attack and resolute in defence, but among their qualities of mind were some which greatly puzzled our commanders. Their minds would sometimes work in ways very strange to Europeans. They did, or refrained from doing, certain things in ways for which neither we nor our Allies could account. Some day, long hence, when the war is over, the Turk story of our withdrawal will be made known. Until then, we can only guess, why it was that the embarkation, which many had thought would lose us half our army, was made good from Anzac and Suvla with the loss of only four or five men (or less than the normal loss of a night in the trenches). Only two explanations are possible. Either (1) the Turks knew that we were going and wanted to be rid of us, or (2) they did not know that we were going and were entirely deceived by our ruses.
Had they known that we were going from Anzac and Suvla, it is at least likely that they would have hastened our going, partly that they might win some booty, which they much needed, or take a large number of prisoners, whose appearance would have greatly cheered the citizens of Constantinople. But nearly all those of our army who were there, felt, both from observation and intelligence, that the Turks did not know that we were going. As far as men on one side in a war can judge of their enemies they felt that the Turks were deceived, completely deceived, by the ruses employed by us, and that they believed that we were being strongly reinforced for a new attack. Our soldiers took great pains to make them believe this. Looking down upon us from their heights, the Turks saw boats leaving the shore apparently empty, and returning, apparently, full of soldiers. Looking up at them, from our position our men saw how the sight affected them. For the twelve days during which the evacuation was in progress at Anzac and Suvla, the Turks were plainly to be seen, digging everywhere to secure themselves from the feared attack. They dug new lines, they brought up new guns, they made ready for us in every way. On the night of the 19th-20th December, in hazy weather, at full moon, our men left Suvla and Anzac, unmolested.
It was said by Dr. Johnson that "no man does anything, consciously for the last time, without a feeling of sadness." No man of all that force passed down those trenches, the scenes of so much misery and pain and joy and valour and devoted brotherhood, without a deep feeling of sadness. Even those who had been loudest in their joy at going were sad. Many there did not want to go; but felt that it was better to stay, and that then, with another fifty thousand men, the task could be done, and their bodies and their blood buy victory for us. This was the feeling even at Suvla, where the men were shaken and sick still from the storm; but at Anzac, the friendly little kindly city, which had been won at such cost in the ever-glorious charge of the 28th, and held since with such pain, and built with such sweat and toil and anguish, in thirst, and weakness and bodily suffering, which had seen the thousands of the 13th Division land in the dark and hide, and had seen them fall in with the others to go to Chunuk, and had known all the hope and fervour, all the glorious resolve, and all the bitterness and disappointment of the unhelped attempt, the feeling was far deeper. Officers and men went up and down the well-known gullies moved almost to tears by the thought that the next day those narrow acres so hardly won and all those graves of our people so long defended would be in Turk hands.
For some weeks, our men had accustomed the Turks to sudden cessations of fire for half-an-hour or more. At first, the Turks had been made suspicious by these silences, but they were now used to them, and perhaps glad of them. They were not made suspicious by the slackening of the fire on the night of the withdrawal. The mules and guns had all gone from Suvla. A few mules and a few destroyed guns were left at Anzac; in both places a pile of stores was left, all soaked in oil and ready for firing. The ships of war drew near to the coast, and trained their guns on the hills. In the haze of the full moon the men filed off from the trenches down to the beaches and passed away from Gallipoli, from the unhelped attempt which they had given their bodies and their blood to make. They had lost no honour. They were not to blame, that they were creeping off in the dark, like thieves in the night. Had others (not of their profession) many hundreds of miles away, but seen as they, as generous, as wise, as forseeing, as full of sacrifice, those thinned companies with the looks of pain in their faces, and the mud of the hills thick upon their bodies, would have given thanks in Santa Sophia three months before. They had failed to take Gallipoli, and the mine fields still barred the Hellespont, but they had fought a battle such as has never been seen upon this earth. What they had done will become a glory forever, wherever the deeds of heroic unhelped men are honoured and pitied and understood. They went up at the call of duty, with a bright banner of a battle-cry, against an impregnable fort. Without guns, without munitions, without help and without drink they climbed the scarp and held it by their own glorious manhood, quickened by a word from their chief. Now they were giving back the scarp and going out into new adventures, wherever the war might turn.