Then in the evening there was a setback. At a farewell meeting with the cabinet Kitchener found the other Ministers still divided between Gallipoli and Salonika. Bonar Law was actually threatening resignation unless the peninsula was evacuated, and Balfour made it absolutely clear that the Navy would do nothing at the Dardanelles unless the Army also attacked. Could the Army attack? Kitchener was forced to say he did not know. After the meeting he sent off a gloomy cable to Birdwood cancelling his previous message. ‘I fear,’ he said, ‘the Navy may not play up… The more I look at the problem the less I see my way through, so you had better very quietly and very secretly work out any scheme for getting the troops off.’
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 At the Dardanelles de Robeck was getting ready to pack his bags, believing that he was about to be superseded by Wemyss; and Monro, who had been on a trip to Egypt, was confronted with the baffling news that Kitchener had been secretly arranging for his removal to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.