On Sunday morning the Turks shelled the coast rather more heavily than usual, and with new shells which evidently had been brought through Bulgaria from Germany. The Navy and such of the British guns as were left on shore replied. It was an intolerable strain, and the tension increased as the day went on. Now finally these last 20,000 men had returned to the conditions of the first landings in April. There was nothing more that the generals or the admirals could do to help them; as on the first day they were on their own in a limbo where no one knew what was going to happen, where only the individual will of the soldier could ruin or save them all. They waited very quietly. Many went for the last time to the graves of their friends and erected new crosses there; made little lines of stones and tidied up the ground; this apparently they minded more than anything, this leaving of their friends behind, and it was something better than sentimentality that made one soldier say to his officer, ‘I hope they won’t hear us going down to the beaches.’
On the shore the medical staff waited. They were to remain behind with the seriously wounded, and they had a letter written in French and addressed to the enemy commander-in-chief requesting that a British hospital ship be allowed to embark them on the following day. Still, no one could be sure how this would be received, or indeed be sure of anything. They were on their own.
In the afternoon some went down to the horse lines and cut the throats of the animals which they knew could not be got away. Others threw five million rounds of rifle ammunition into the sea, together with twenty thousand rations in wooden cases. Others again kept up the pretence that the Army was still there in its tens of thousands by driving about in carts, a last surrealist ride in a vacuum. Birdwood and Keyes came ashore for the last time and went away again. Up at the front the remaining men who held the line — at some places no more than ten against a thousand Turks — went from one loophole to another firing their rifles, filling up the kerosene tins with water, making as much of a show as they could. It amused some of them to lay out a meal in their dugouts in readiness for the Turks when they came. But most preferred to wreck the places which they had dug and furnished with so much care.
At last at five the day ended and a wet moon came up, misted over with clouds and drifting fog. There was a slight drizzle of rain. Except for the occasional crack of a rifle shot and the distant rumble of the guns at Helles an absolute silence fell along the front. The men on the flanks and in the rear were the first to go. Each as he left the trenches fired his rifle for the last time, fell into line and marched in Indian file down the white lines to the beach. They came down from the hills in batches of four hundred and the boats were waiting. The last act of each man before he embarked was to take the two hand-grenades he was carrying and cast them silently into the sea.
Within an hour of nightfall both sectors at Anzac and Suvla were contracting rapidly towards their centres, and everywhere, from dozens of little gullies and ravines, like streams pouring softly down to join a river, men were moving to the shore. No one ran. Not smoking or talking, each group, when it reached the sea, stood quietly waiting for its turn to embark. At Anzac only 5,000 men were left at 8 p.m. At 10 p.m. the trenches at the front were manned by less than 1,500 men. This was the point of extreme danger; now, more than ever, every rifle shot seemed the beginning of an enemy attack. For several nights previously a destroyer had shone its searchlight across the southern end of the bridgehead to block the Turks’ vision of the beach, and now again the light went on. Apart from this and the occasional gleam of the moon through the drifting clouds no other light was showing. Midnight passed and there was still no movement from the enemy. The handful of soldiers now left at the front moved quietly from loophole to loophole, occasionally firing their rifles, but more often simply standing and waiting until, with excruciating slowness, the moment came for them to go. The last men began to leave the trenches at 3 a.m. Fifteen minutes later Lone Pine was evacuated, and the men turned their backs on the Turks a dozen yards away. They had a mile or more to go before they reached the beach. As they went they drew cages of barbed wire across the paths behind them, and lit the fuses which an hour later would explode hidden mines beneath the ground. On the beach the hospital staff was told that, since there were no wounded, they too could leave. A private named Pollard who had gone to sleep at the front and had woken to find himself alone came stumbling nervously down to the shore and was gathered in.
They waited ten more minutes to make sure that none had been left behind. Then at 4 a.m., when the first faint streaks of dawn were beginning, they set fire to the dumps on the shore. On the hills above they could hear the automatic rifles going off and the noise of the Turks firing back spasmodically at the deserted trenches. At ten past four a sailor gave the final order, ‘Let go all over — right away’, and the last boat put out to sea. At that instant the mine below Chunuk Bair went off with a tearing, cataclysmic roar, and a huge cloud, lit from beneath with a red glow, rolled upward over the peninsula. Immediately a hurricane of Turkish rifle fire swept the bay.
At Suvla a similar scene was going on, but it continued a little longer. It was not until ten past five that Commodore Unwin, of the River Clyde, pushed off in the last boat. A soldier fell overboard as they were leaving, and the Commodore dived in and fished him out. ‘You really must do something about Unwin,’ General Byng said to Keyes, who was watching from his own ship off the shore. ‘You should send him home; we want several little Unwins.’
And now a naval steamboat ran along the coast, an officer on board calling and calling to the shore for stragglers. But there were none. At Suvla every man and animal had been got off. At Anzac two soldiers were wounded during the night. There were no other casualties. Just before they vanished hull down over the horizon at 7 a.m. the soldiers in the last boats looked back towards the shore across the oily sea and saw the Turks come out of the foothills and run like madmen along the empty beach. At once the Navy opened fire on them, and a destroyer rushed in to ignite with its shells the unburnt piles of stores that had remained behind. On board the boats, where generals and privates were packed in together, a wild hilarity broke out, the men shaking one another’s hands, shouting and crying. But before they reached the islands most of them had subsided to the deck and were asleep.
That night, sixteen hours after the last man had been taken off, a violent storm blew up with torrents of rain and washed away the piers.
Liman von Sanders says that he found great booty at Suvla and Anzac; five small steamers and sixty boats abandoned on the beaches, dumps of artillery and ammunition, railway lines and whole cities of standing tents, medicines and instruments of every kind, vast stacks of clothing, bully beef and flour, mountains of timber. And on the shore some hundreds of dead horses lay in rows. The ragged, hungry Turkish soldiers, who patched their uniforms with sacking and who subsisted on a daily handful of olives and a slice of bread, fell on this treasure like men who had lost their wits. Sentries were unable to hold them back; the soldiers rushed upon the food, and for weeks afterwards they were to be seen in the strangest uniforms, Australian hats, puttees wound round their stomachs, breeches cut from flags and tarpaulins, British trench boots of odd sizes on their feet. They carried in their knapsacks the most useless and futile things that they had picked up, but it was all glorious because it was loot, it was free and it was theirs. And they had won.