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.
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.