‘Well, I have seen the place,’ Kitchener began. ‘It is an awful place and you will never get through.’ Keyes attacked this at once. What had happened to change Lord Kitchener’s mind? Why had he dropped his support of the naval plan? Nothing had altered since they had left London; if anything the position was even better than it was before. The naval reinforcements were arriving. It was agreed that de Robeck, who was a sick man, should go home and that Wemyss should take his place. As for the Dardanelles being such an awful place, Kitchener had had no opportunity of studying it. He, Keyes, had been there eight months. He knew the possibilities intimately and he knew they could get through. All the Navy needed was the word to go ahead.
To Kitchener, who wanted to believe it, yet saw no escape from his ever-increasing difficulties, this was a siren’s song and scarcely bearable. He got up and walked into his sleeping cabin, closing the door behind him. ‘I could not help feeling sorry for him,’ Keyes wrote that night in his diary. ‘He looked so terribly weary and harassed.’
That night they steamed back to Mudros to take up the argument all over again. Keyes lost no time in heartening the reluctant generals. Any argument served: on November 17 a heavy southerly gale had again wrecked the piers at Cape Helles, and he pointed out to General Davies that evacuation had become too dangerous. To MacMahon, the Egyptian High Commissioner, he said, ‘If we fight the Turk and beat him in Gallipoli isn’t that the best way to defend Egypt?’ MacMahon was forced to agree, and said he would approach Kitchener again. A General Horne had been brought out by Kitchener as an adviser, and Keyes tackled him with, ‘If you western-front generals don’t like the idea of attacking, at least be ready to take advantage of our naval attack when we deliver it.’ Horne, according to Keyes, was ‘enthusiastic before I finished’. Then there was Birdwood. Keyes braced him with a preliminary harangue, and then left it to Admiral Wemyss to continue the argument. By November 21, when the generals assembled again at Mudros for a final conference, Birdwood had been brought round. He was reassured, no doubt, by the fact that his own officers at Anzac had now come out definitely against evacuation, while at Cape Helles a new Turkish attack had collapsed. It collapsed because the Turkish soldiers, having jumped up from their trenches, absolutely refused to go forward against the British fire. They fell back with heavy loss. Keyes began to feel that he had recovered all his lost ground at last.
Yet the truth was that Monro with his slow persistence had by now begun to dominate them all. The subordinate generals might privately agree with Keyes, but they were still unable to stand up to Monro — and it was to Monro and not Kitchener that they were turning for the last word. Birdwood was perfectly clear about this. He said to Keyes, ‘Everything depends upon Monro.’ It was time now for the two adversaries to meet.
Monro had broken his ankle getting into a boat at Salonika and Keyes found him lying on a sofa aboard the Chatham. Lynden-Bell was with him. The argument began quite pleasantly and it was not until the end that Keyes burst out with, ‘If you don’t want to share in the glory, then there are some soldiers who will.’
‘Look out, Lynden-Bell,’ Monro said. ‘The Commodore is going to attack us. I can’t get up.’
With a rather heavy reference to the General’s ‘cold feet’ Keyes got up and left.
But he had gained nothing. Kitchener, who had been off to Athens to placate the King of Greece, returned to Mudros that day, and he had found no arguments with which to withstand Monro while he had been away. Birdwood and the others were quickly overborne. On November 22 Kitchener cabled London recommending that Suvla and Anzac should be evacuated while Cape Helles should be held ‘for the time being’. Monro was to remain at Lemnos as Commander-in-Chief of both Gallipoli and Salonika. Birdwood was to take charge of the withdrawal. De Robeck was to go home on sick leave, and Wemyss was to take his place. On November 24 Kitchener sailed for England, and on the following day de Robeck too was gone.
‘Thus,’ says Keyes, ‘the Admiral and the General who were really entirely responsible for the lamentable policy of evacuation left the execution of this unpleasant task to an Admiral and a General who were strongly opposed to it.’
Yet it was still not the end — not at any rate so far as Keyes and Wemyss were concerned — for now suddenly at the end of November the weather intervened. There had been ample warning of the winter. Twice the piers had been washed away in gales. For the past few days flocks of ducks and other birds migrating south from Russia had been passing over the peninsula, and although both armies, first the Turks and then the Allies, had enjoyed themselves blazing away with their rifles into the sky,[34] it was clear that cold weather was soon coming. Yet no one — and certainly not the meteorologists who had been saying that November was the best month of the year — could have anticipated the horror and severity of the blizzard that swept down on the Dardanelles on November 27. Nothing like it had been known there for forty years.
For the first twenty-four hours rain poured down and violent thunderstorms raged over the peninsula. Then, as the wind veered round to the north and rose to hurricane force there followed two days of snow and icy sleet. After this there were two nights of frost.
At Anzac and Cape Helles the soldiers were well dug in, and there was some small protection from the surrounding hills, but at Suvla the men were defenceless. The earth there was so stony that in place of trenches stone parapets had been built above the ground. These burst open in the first deluge, and a torrent came rushing down to the Salt Lake carrying with it the bodies of Turks who had been drowned in the hills. Soon the lake was four feet deep, and on both sides the war was forgotten. Turks and British alike jumped up on what was left of the parapets in full view of one another, and there they perched, numb and shivering, while the flood went by. Then, overnight, when the landscape turned to a universal white, dysentery vanished along with the flies and the dust, but the cold was past all bearing. At Anzac, where many of the Australians and Indians were seeing snow for the first time, the dugouts were knee-deep in slush, and the soldiers, still without winter kit,[35] wrapped themselves in their sodden blankets. The freeze that followed was worse than any shelling. Triggers were jammed and rifles refused to fire. At Helles sentries were found in the morning still standing, their rifles in their hands, but they were frozen to death. Blankets and bedding were so congealed with cold they could be stood on end. Everywhere mud had turned to ice and the roofs of the dugouts were lined with icicles as hard as iron. A tacit truce prevailed along the front while the men gave themselves up to the simple struggle of finding enough warmth to remain alive. Nevinson, the war correspondent, describes how he saw men staggering down to the beaches from the trenches: ‘They could neither hear nor speak, but stared about them like bewildered bullocks.’ It was rather worse for the Allies than for the Turks, since for three days no boat could approach the shore, and the beaches were strewn with wreckage of every kind. At Imbros where three steamers had been sunk as a breakwater the raging sea broke through, and smashed most of the small craft in the harbour. Even a submarine went down to the shallow bottom, and the only sign that life remained within her was the shifting of the periscope from time to time.
On November 30, when the wind had blown itself out at last, a reckoning was made, and it was found that the Allied Army had lost one tenth of its strength. Two hundred soldiers had been drowned, 5,000 were suffering from frostbite, and another 5,000 were casualties of one sort or another. It raised once more, and in an ominous way, the whole question of evacuation. Many of those who before had wanted to remain could now think of nothing but of getting away from the accursed place. But could they get off? Were they not now bound to stay and fight it out? Keyes thought so. He was not nearly defeated yet.
34
Thousands of ducks were shot down, and it was said after the campaign was over, with how much truth one cannot know, that several years went by before the migrating birds settled again on Gallipoli.
35
A certain amount of winter clothing had been landed on the peninsula but it had been taken off again in view of the plans for evacuation.