Enver remained, with his pert confident air, but he was in secret no longer confident. Through these last days of November and early December he more than once came to Morgenthau asking him to appeal to President Wilson to use his influence to end the war. He admitted that Turkey had drifted into a critical state at the end of this first twelve months of hostilities, its farms uncultivated, its business at a standstill. The campaign at Gallipoli was swallowing them all. At this time neither Enver nor Liman nor anyone else had any notion of what was afoot in the British camp. They saw nothing ahead but limitless war, and the withdrawal of the Allies from the peninsula never entered their minds.
For the Allies at Gallipoli there was at least one small particle of relief in the hateful situation. They had definite orders at last; in place of demoralizing delay they now had something practical to do, even if it was nothing more than to arrange a humiliating retreat.
Yet there remained the overwhelming question of the casualties. What were they going to be? Kitchener had taken up a surprising line. Just as he was about to leave Gallipoli to return to England he had turned suddenly to Colonel Aspinall and had said, ‘I don’t believe a word about those 25,000 casualties (this was the latest estimate of the staff)… you’ll just step off without losing a man, and without the Turks knowing anything about it.’ It was another of his impulsive, inspirational flashes, and it was based on nothing definite: a guess, in fact, in the blue.
Lord Curzon in his paper to the cabinet saw the evacuation in another light. ‘I wish to draw it in no impressionist colours,’ he said, ‘but as it must in all probability arise. The evacuation and the final scenes will be enacted at night. Our guns will continue firing until the last moment… but the trenches will have been taken one by one, and a moment must come when a final sauve qui peut takes place, and when a disorganized crowd will press in despairing tumult on to the shore and into the boats. Shells will be falling and bullets ploughing their way into the mass of retreating humanity… Conceive the crowding into the boats of thousands of half-crazy men, the swamping of craft, the nocturnal panic, the agony of the wounded, the hecatombs of slain. It requires no imagination to create a scene that, when it is told, will be burned into the hearts and consciences of the British people for generations to come.’
Between these two, the wishful guess and the fearful nightmare, there were a dozen other conjectures, all equally guesses, all equally at the mercy of luck and the weather.
They were to depart, in fact, in the same way as they had arrived: as adventurers into the unknown.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE weather was superb. For three weeks after the storm the sun rose on a placid, gently-moving sea and went down again at five in the evening in a red blaze behind Mount Athos and Samothrace. Through the long night the men slept in relative peace. There might be sudden alarms in the starlight, a mine exploding, an outburst of small-arms fire, and by day a desultory shelling; but neither side made any attempt to take the offensive.
With the cooler weather the soldiers’ health grew better. There was enough water at last and the food improved; a bakery was set up on Imbros and occasionally they saw fresh bread. Sometimes for brief intervals a canteen appeared, and the men tried to squander their months of unspent pay before its supplies gave out. Blankets, trench boots, and even oil stoves were issued to the units, and there was a fever of preparation for the winter. Like hibernating animals they went underground, roofing over their dugouts with timber and galvanized iron, digging deeper and deeper into the rocks. There was an air of permanence in the traffic that flowed back and forth between the wharves and the network of trenches at the front. Each day at the same hour the mule carts passed by, the sentries were posted, the fatigue parties made their way to the shore and those who were being sent off on leave to the islands waited for the evening ferry to arrive from Imbros. Each day, with the regularity of dockers and miners taking over a shift, gangs of men went to work on the wharves and underground entrenchments. It was a waiting game, and there was a sense of security in these repeated habits, in building things rather than destroying them.
By now Gallipoli had an established reputation in the outside world. It had ceased to be the Constantinople Expedition or even an expedition at all; it was Gallipoli, a name repeated over and over again in the newspapers. A picture had been built up in people’s minds at home just as once perhaps they built up pictures of the garrisons on the north-west frontier of India, of Kitchener and Gordon in the Sudan, of the African veldt in the Boer War. They saw, or thought they saw, the trenches in the cliffs and the blue Mediterranean below, the lurid turbanned Turks — hardly very different surely from the Pathans, the Fuzzy-wuzzies, the ‘natives’—and they knew the names of all the generals and the admirals. They knew, too, that things had ‘gone wrong’ at Gallipoli, that something would have to be done about it, and although the battlefield was so unlike any other in the war it had an agonizing reality for every family that awaited a letter from the front.
But the clearest picture of Gallipoli at this time is not given by the newspapers, nor by the generals’ dispatches, nor even by the letters and diaries of the veterans who had been there for months: it comes from the young soldiers who were still being sent out as replacements or reinforcements. Many of them had never been abroad before, and they saw it all with the dear and frightened eye of the child who for the first time in his life leaves his family and sets off alone for school. He might have been told all about Gallipoli just as once he was told all about the school to which he was being sent, but it remained terrible to him because he had never seen himself in that context before. He did not know whether or not he would have the courage of the others, and the absence of the unknown in the adventure — the fact that tens of thousands of others had gone to Gallipoli before him — was no real reassurance; it merely emphasized the unknown within himself.
These no doubt might have been the emotions of any young soldier going to war, but Gallipoli occupied a special place, since it was so far away and already so fixed in a popular myth. No one who went there ever came back on leave.
But there was at least, at the outset, the excitement and the respite of the journey. For the English soldier it began at some dim port like Liverpool, often in the rain and often aboard the Olympic or some other transatlantic liner. Here the strings with home and normality still remained, the clean food, the peacetime order on the decks, the uneventful days. A thousand letters home described the first sight of Gibraltar, the Mediterranean sunshine, the glimpse of Malta and Tunis, the U-boat scare that came to nothing. After a fortnight of this there was the arrival at Mudros, and Mudros, like every transit camp in every war, was awfuclass="underline" a city of dusty tents, the dreary anonymous hutments on the wharves, the appalling canteen food eaten among strangers. The spirits of the new arrivals fell sharply at Mudros while they waited for their posting to one of the three fronts on the peninsula. Anzac had the worst reputation for danger and discomfort, and there was little to choose, it was said, between Suvla and Helles.