Then days would elapse while the new soldier, emerging from his private foreboding, still marvelled at things which had long since ceased to be remarkable to the other men: the way, for instance, a French soldier would perch on the cliffs and sound a hunting horn as a warning to the soldiers bathing in the sea below that a shell was coming over from Asia. Or it would be some surprising act of military punctilio, a pipe band parading on the shore, an immaculate colonel, looking like some animated tin soldier from the nursery, raising his hand to salute the flag at sunset. It was the casual thing done in these bizarre surroundings which was so unexpected, the very fact that they could play football at all, that the men could abandon themselves to the simplest pastimes, that they could sit, as some of them did, for hours on end oblivious of the world, happily shooting with a catapult at sparrows coming across from the Turkish lines. And always to the fresh eye there were recurring moments of release and wonder at the slanting luminous light in the early mornings and the evenings, in the marvellous colour of the sea.

But in the end, inevitably, these things ceased to be remarkable any more, they became part of an accepted background, and soon the new soldier would be filling his diary with jottings about food, about the latest parcel from home, about the hour at which he went to sleep on the previous night, about food again.

It was many months now since any of the older soldiers had seen a woman, and although the usual kind of story went around — the Turks had women in their trenches, B Company had quite definitely heard them squealing last night — sex was not a subject that generally obsessed them. It was very secondary to food. In a book called Letters from Helles, which a Colonel Darlington published long after the war, there is recorded an incident which reveals a not too painful detachment, almost a Robinson Crusoe submission to the inevitable, which was probably the general thing.

An orderly announced in an awed voice one day, ‘There’s women in that boat, Colonel.’ The Colonel ‘went out and sure enough there was a party of Australian nurses being shown around the shore to see how the wild soldier lives and sleeps. I got my glasses to see the unusual sight and much to all our Tommies’ annoyance a young nut of a staff officer with much ostentation put his arm round one of the nurses’ waists, struck an attitude and waved his hand to us. We all shook our fists at him, which caused great amusement on the launch.’

Up to the end of November there was very little talk of evacuation. It was discussed in the trenches like any other possibility, but in a detached way, and few of the men really believed that it could happen. The physical presence of the Army, its air of permanence, was all around them; too much had been committed here, too many were dead, to make it possible for them to go away. And in any case there was at this stage no plan for withdrawing from Helles at all.

At the beginning of December, however, the men at Anzac and Suvla began to notice that something unusual was going on. Soldiers who reported sick with some minor ailment were not treated at the hospitals on the bridgehead but were at once sent off to the islands and were seen no more. In increasing numbers companies and battalions were taken off en bloc, and those who remained behind did not altogether believe the official explanation that this was part of the new ‘winter policy of thinning out the bridgehead’. They thought for the most part that a new landing was to be made.

The problem was one of frightful complexity. There were some 83,000 men in the Suvla-Anzac bridgehead, and to these were added 5,000 animals, 2,000 vehicles, nearly 200 guns and vast quantities of stores. It was quite impractical to think of getting the whole of this army off in a single night, since there was neither room for them on the beaches nor sufficient boats to get them across to the islands. Equally a fighting withdrawal was out of the question: in a moment the enemy guns firing from the hills above would have wrecked all hope of embarkation.

The plan that was finally adopted was very largely the work of Colonel Aspinall, who was now serving as a brigadier-general on Birdwood’s staff, and of Lieut.-Colonel White, an Australian at Anzac. They proposed a gradual and secret withdrawal which was to take place during successive nights until at last only a small garrison was left; and these last, the ‘bravest and the steadiest men’, were then to take their chance on getting away before the Turks discovered what was happening. This meant that the operation would rise to an acute point of tension during the last hours — a rough sea would ruin all, a Turkish attack would expose them to a slaughter — but still there seemed no other way.

There now began a period of intensive preparation. Once again a fleet of small boats was assembled in the islands. Twelve thousand hospital beds were got ready in Egypt, and fifty-six temporary hospital ships were ordered to stand ready to take the wounded off the beaches — the larger liners, the Mauretania, the Aquitania and the Britannic, to sail directly to England. Gangs of engineers were put to work to repair the piers destroyed in the November storms,[36] and an elaborate time-table was worked out so that every man would know precisely what he had to do.

Clearly everything would depend on secrecy and the weather. Secrecy was even more vital now than it had been in the days before the landings, and it was a constant anxiety in Birdwood’s headquarters that some soldier, wittingly or unwittingly, might give the plans away. A naval patrol sealed off the islands from Greek caiques trading with the mainland, and on Imbros a cordon was placed round the civilian village on the pretext that an outbreak of smallpox was suspected there.

In the midst of these arrangements Lord Milner and others chose to discuss openly the whole question of evacuation in the House of Lords in London. It was common knowledge, Lord Milner said, that General Monro had recommended evacuation. Had Kitchener gone out to the Dardanelles to give a second opinion? Or was Kitchener himself to command the operation? It was part of the old zany carelessness which had led people to address letters to ‘The Constantinople Force’ when Hamilton was first assembling the Army in Egypt, and on Imbros Birdwood’s planning staff could do nothing but listen in despair. Fortunately, however, the Turks and the Germans simply could not bring themselves to believe that the British would give away their plans in this casual way; they revealed later that they regarded the debate in the House of Lords as propaganda.

Over the weather there could be even less control; the meteorologists said that it ought to hold until the end of the year, and one could only pray that they were right. One good southerly blow on the final night would wreck the whole adventure.

There remained one other imponderable, and that was the behaviour of the Army itself. On December 12 the soldiers at Suvla and Anzac were told for the first time that they were to be taken off, that this for them was the end of the campaign. There seems to have been a moment of stupefaction. Even those who had guessed that something of the sort was about to happen were astonished, and perhaps it was something more than astonishment, a dull awe, a feeling that this was a shaming and unnatural reversal of the order of things. Among the majority, no doubt, these thoughts were soon overtaken by a sense of relief, and they were content simply to accept instructions and to get away. Others, and there were very many of them, remained indignant. They, too, like Rupert Brooke, had seen a vision of Constantinople and had perhaps exclaimed, as he had, when they had first set out from Egypt only eight months before, ‘Oh God! I’ve never been quite so happy before.’ All this was now an embarrassment to remember, an absurd and childish excitement, and it was made more bitter by the endless disappointments, the death and the wastage that had intervened.