Directly de Robeck had gone he and Wemyss returned to the naval plan, and another cable was sent to the Admiralty urging its adoption. Then they tackled Monro directly. Monro was patient and polite, but no argument could shake his overriding conviction that the war must be fought in France. ‘Well,’ he said in the course of one of his long discussions with Keyes, ‘if all succeeds, you go through the straits into the Marmara and we occupy Constantinople, what good is it going to do? What then? It won’t help us win the war; France is the only place in which Germany can be beaten. Every man not employed in killing Germans in France and Flanders is wasted.’
Keyes reminded him that if the Gallipoli Army was to be evacuated it would not go to Germany but to Egypt. Monro said he did not believe that Egypt was in any danger. No more do I, Keyes replied, yet the Government would be bound to send the Army there.
After his one brief visit Monro had not returned to the peninsula, and his chief-of-staff never set foot on the beaches at all. Yet they held strong views on the tactical situation there. The Allies’ position lacked depth, they said. Keyes answered that the sea was very deep; where else could they use the Navy to deploy their men so secretly and rapidly? Even so, Monro said, it was now too late to think of attacking. It would not have been too late, Keyes replied, if Monro had acted when he had first arrived a month ago; and it was still not too late.
And so it went round and round, and no one was persuaded. After one of his outbursts Keyes attempted to relieve the tension by asking after the General’s foot. ‘It will be well enough soon,’ Monro said, ‘to get up and kick somebody’s — stern.’ He meant the Turks of course, Keyes said. But Monro did not mean the Turks.
Having failed at G.H.Q. Wemyss and Keyes tried their hands again with Birdwood and the subordinate generals. Here they were more successful, for the soldiers had been badly shaken by the storm and were coming round to the idea that the risks of going were greater than the risks of staying. Moreover, many deserters were coming in from the Turkish lines, and it was obvious that the enemy’s morale had fallen very low.
At a conference at Imbros several of the commanders said they were prepared to reconsider their ideas about withdrawal. Monro retaliated to these manœuvres by forbidding Birdwood and the other generals to hold any further discussion with Wemyss and Keyes without his knowledge.
But it was in London that the two sailors found their real allies. Lord Curzon, who was a member of the Dardanelles Committee (now renamed once more the War Committee), had suddenly become very active. He was appalled at the prospect of the casualties in an evacuation, and in a forceful paper he reminded the cabinet that there was no real agreement among the generals at Gallipoli. Monro was firm, Curzon said, but he had made up his mind within forty-eight hours of his arrival, after a cursory inspection of the front. The other generals had changed their opinion more than once and might do so again.
This was buttressed by a second paper from Hankey, who was now back at his post as Secretary of the War Committee. If they withdrew, Hankey argued, Turkey was free to turn all her forces on to Russia and the British possessions in the Near East. There was even a danger that Russia might sign a separate peace. He urged that since the Salonika landing had failed, the fresh divisions which had been sent out to reinforce it should be diverted instead to Gallipoli. It was an idea that appealed to Kitchener; even at this eleventh hour he too was prepared to change once more, and cables were sent out to Wemyss asking him if he could transport the troops from Salonika to Gallipoli. Keyes hurried to Salonika to make the arrangements.
Bluntly Monro held on. No, he said, he still could not attack. Even if he was given these reinforcements he could not employ them. Nevertheless, for the first time he was shaken, and in an unguarded moment Lynden-Bell said to Keyes, ‘Well, we are in for it — we are going to do it; you have got your way.’ This was on December 4, and for a little longer the agony was to be maintained, while still in London the cabinet hesitated and waited for a lead.
It was the French and the Russians who cast the deciding vote at last; they informed the British that Salonika could not be abandoned, and on December 7 the cabinet decided definitely to ‘shorten the front by evacuating Anzac and Suvla’. Wemyss was astonished when he heard the news. He sent off a battery of cables to London saying that if necessary the Fleet was now prepared to ‘go it alone’. ‘What is offered the Army, therefore,’ he wrote, ‘is the practical complete severance of the Turkish lines of communication accomplished by the destruction of the large supply depots on the shore of the Dardanelles.’ The idea of evacuation, he told Balfour, was now being ridiculed by the soldiers at Gallipoli, especially at Anzac. Birdwood ought to be consulted.
But it was too late. The Admiralty was not prepared to act alone, especially as de Robeck was now in London and giving his advice against it. On December 10 Wemyss was turned down once more; and although he continued to argue for several days in effect he was beaten and Monro had won. Depressed and uncertain, the soldiers and the sailors turned together to the plans for their retreat.
Except for Birdwood, Keyes and one or two others nearly all the pioneers had now gone. Hamilton and de Robeck were in England, Kitchener was no longer the leader he had been at the time of the April landings, and it was becoming clear to his opponents that, with the failure of the Dardanelles, they could bring him down at last. Churchill, his reputation at the lowest ebb ever touched in his career, was bundled into retirement in the wake of Fisher and with even less regret. During these final negotiations over Gallipoli Asquith reformed the War Committee, and there was no place on it for the man who, at that moment, seemed most responsible for the tragedy they were about to face. Churchill made a last speech in the House in November, and then went off to France to fight in the trenches.
On the Turkish side Liman remained but Kemal had gone. After the August battles Kemal had been made a Pasha, and he had continued to lead a charmed life at the front. He was convinced that he would never be hit, and it did indeed appear that nothing could destroy him. While other men died he walked casually among the bullets. Samson very nearly killed him one day. Flying low behind the Turkish lines, the air commodore saw a staff car with three people inside, one of whom at least seemed to be a general (it was in fact Kemal). Samson dived and launched two bombs. At once the car stopped and the three men inside got out and ran to a ditch. Samson then drew off and cruised about for twenty minutes until he saw the Turks return to the car. Then again he dived, and actually succeeded in splintering the windscreen. But it was the chauffeur who was hit: Kemal remained untouched. Soon afterwards, however, his health broke down through exhaustion and nervous strain, and no amount of pills or injections could revive him. Early in December he was evacuated from the peninsula.
There was another casualty which was even closer to the nemesis of the Dardanelles. Wangenheim — Churchill’s ultimate rival, the man who had begun it all by getting the Goeben into the Sea of Marmara — was dead. His health had been failing all through the early summer and in July he went back to Germany on leave. When he returned to Constantinople in October his face was twitching, one of his eyes was covered with a black patch, and he was nervous and depressed. He came to the American Embassy, and Morgenthau describes the end of this, their last meeting: ‘Wangenheim rose to leave. As he did so he gave a gasp and his legs shot from under him. I jumped and caught him just as he was falling.’ Morgenthau helped him out to his car. Two days later Wangenheim had a stroke at the dinner table, and never again regained consciousness. He died on October 24, and was buried in the park of the German summer embassy at Therapia, that same nook on the Bosphorus where in the old days the ambassador, his telegrams in his hand, had so often bobbed in and out of view according to the changes in the German political weather.