Liman von Sanders says too that he was planning a major attack on the Suvla and Anzac positions when he was forestalled by the evacuation, and he admits that right up to the early hours of Monday, December 20, he had no notion of what was happening at the front. Confusing reports came to him at his headquarters through the night, and these were made still more confusing by sea mist. At 4 a.m., however, he ordered a general alarm. Yet there were still delays. The Turkish soldiers advanced very gingerly into the foremost trenches where there had only been instant death for so many months before. After a little while they paused, fearing that some trick was being played, and an hour or more went by before their commanders, woken from their sleep, came up to the front and told them to go on again. Even the final advance to the beaches was very slow, because the troops were held up by barbed wire and booby traps; and on the shore itself they were shelled from the sea. And so an army slipped away.
Liman’s first reaction was the obvious one: he immediately set about gathering up his best divisions — there were now twenty-one under his command — and marching them south for an assault on the last remaining British bridgehead at Cape Helles. ‘It was thought possible,’ he says, ‘that the enemy might hang on there for some time. That could not be permitted.’ While his preparations for the attack were going forward patrols were sent out into no-man’s-land each night, and the Turkish commanders at the front were ordered to keep a constant watch on every movement in the British lines.
It was an impossible position for the British. They had four divisions in Cape Helles. If they stayed they knew it could not be long before the Turks mounted a major attack against them; if they attempted to go they were hardly likely to outwit the Turks a second time. Monro as ever was in no doubt at all as to what should be done. Directly the Anzac-Suvla evacuation was completed he sent a message to London urging that Helles should be given up as well; and this time he found an ally in Admiral Wemyss. Birdwood too was eager to be off. And eventually on December 27 the cabinet agreed.
There followed a rapid series of changes in the high command. On December 22 de Robeck came back from London to resume control of the Fleet and Wemyss was posted off to the East Indies. A few days later Monro himself was gone; a signal arrived appointing him to the command of the First Army in France, the place where in all the world he most wished to be. On New Year’s Day he sailed for Egypt and Gallipoli saw him no more. Now everyone was averting their eyes from this graveyard of men and their reputations, and this last act seemed likely to be the most painful of all. It was left to Birdwood, de Robeck and Keyes, the three men who had been there from the beginning, to clean up the mess.
There was not much time. With every day the weather grew more threatening and the Turks more likely to attack; they were shelling now with terrible accuracy with their new German guns and ammunition. There were 35,000 men in the Helles bridgehead, nearly 4,000 animals and almost as many guns and stores as there had been at Suvla and Anzac. Once again it was decided that half the garrison should be evacuated secretly over a series of nights. General Davies, the corps commander, insisted that on January 9, the final night, he should be left with sufficient men to hold off the Turks for a week in case, at the last moment, he was cut off by foul weather. He fixed on the total of 17,000 as the minimum number of soldiers required for this rearguard, and this also happened to be the maximum number that the Navy could take off in a single night. By January 1, 1916, all was agreed and the movement began.
The French were the first to go, and they left such a yawning gap in the line that there was nothing for it but to bring back the British 29th Division, to take their places. There was not much left of the 29th. The division had been badly cut up in the August battles and when they were evacuated from Suvla they were down to less than half their strength. One thing however remained to them, and that was a reputation of great bravery and steadiness; so now, after a few brief days’ respite in the islands, they found themselves landing again beside the River Clyde and marching back to the trenches which they had first occupied eight months before. Among so many anti-climaxes this, perhaps, was the hardest of all.
There was a constricting feeling in the British trenches at Cape Helles at this time. At first the soldiers had no idea that the bridgehead was to be evacuated — indeed they were given a printed order of the day specifically saying that they were to remain. They hated this prospect, and in particular they feared that they might become prisoners of war — a fear that was all the more lurid because a rumour got about that the Turks would castrate them.
About five days before the final night it became generally known that the bridgehead was to be evacuated, and then the period of real tension began. But still excitement was the drug and a fatalism intervened. Four divisions against twenty-one was a monstrosity even on such a narrow front as this, but there was nothing that anyone could do about it. And so they played football, they waited, they made a kind of security out of the accustomed routine in the trenches, and they saw no further than the day ahead. Night by night the battalions went away and no one questioned the order of withdrawal; one simply waited for the summons and it was absurdly like the atmosphere of a dentist’s waiting room. ‘You’re next,’ and another regiment vanished. The others, feeling neither lucky nor unlucky, but fixed simply in an unalterable succession of events, remained behind and waited as the last patients wait, amid vague smells of carbolic and grisly secret apprehensions, in the silence of an emptying room.
There were a number of alarms and misadventures. High winds blew up, and they had to throw in cases of bully beef and other stores to repair the breaches in the causeway at Sedd-el-Bahr. Once when a sailor flashed a torch on a lighter full of mules there was a stampede, and for a long time the animals were snorting and screaming in the sea. Another night the French battleship Suffren ran down a large transport and sent her to the bottom. The U-boat scare began again. Yet by January 7 they had got the garrison down to 19,000; and now at last, at this instant of greatest danger for the British, Liman von Sanders delivered his attack.
He had been much delayed. All had been ready forty-eight hours before, but Enver had chosen that moment to send a message from Constantinople ordering nine of the Gallipoli divisions to Thrace. It was Enver’s last gesture in the campaign, and Liman countered it in the usual way; he sent in his resignation. In the usual way, too, Enver backed down. The order was countermanded and now, in the early afternoon on January 7, the Turks came in for the kill. They were equipped with wooden ramps to throw across the British trenches, and special squads carried inflammable materials with which they were to burn the British boats on the shore. This was to be the final coup.
The attack began with the heaviest artillery bombardment of the campaign, and it went on steadily for four and a half hours. There was a lull for a few minutes and then it recommenced. In the British trenches the Soldiers waited for the inevitable rush that would follow the bombardment; and in the early evening it began. The Turkish infantry had a hundred yards or more to go before they reached the first British trenches, and they jumped up with their old cries of Allah, Allah, and Voor, Voor—strike, strike. Perhaps there was something of desperation in the answering fire of the British defence. It was so murderous, so concentrated and steady, that when only a few minutes had gone by the soldiers saw a thing which had scarcely ever happened before — the Turkish infantry were refusing to charge. Their officers could be seen shouting and striking at the men, urging them up and out into the open where so many were already dead. But the men would not move. By nightfall it was all over. Not a single enemy soldier had broken into the British lines.