There was a simple and immediate reaction, and possibly it was a desire to remove the stigma of defeat, to create artificially a chance of heroism since the plan provided none: the men came to their officers in hundreds and asked to be the last to leave the shore. It was nothing more than a gesture, something for the pride to feed on, a kind of tribute to their friends who were already dead, but they were intensely serious about it. The veterans argued that they had earned this right, the newer arrivals insisted that they should be given this one last opportunity of distinguishing themselves. And so there was no need to call for volunteers to man the trenches at the end; it was a matter of selection.
But for the moment there was more need of cunning and discipline than heroism. In the second week of December the first stage of the evacuation began. Each evening after dusk flotillas of barges and small boats crept into Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay and there was a fever of activity all night as troops and animals and guns were got on board. The sick and wounded came first, the prisoners-of-war, and then, in increasing numbers, the infantry. The men walked silently down from the trenches, their boots wrapped in sacking, their footfall deadened by layers of blankets laid along the piers. In the morning the little fleet had vanished and all was normal again. Men and stores were being disembarked in the usual way, the same mule teams laden with boxes were toiling up to the front from the beaches, and there was no way for the Turks to know that the boxes on the mules were empty or that the disembarking men were a special group whose job was to go aboard the boats each night in the darkness and then return ostentatiously to the shore in the morning. Another deception was carried out with the guns. They ceased to fire soon after dark each night, so that the Turks should grow accustomed to silence and should not guess that anything was amiss on the final night when the last men were leaving the trenches. In the same way the infantry were ordered to hold back their rifle and machine-gun fire.
By the end of the second week of December these preliminary stages of the evacuation were well advanced. The weather held. The Turks apparently still suspected nothing and made no attempt to attack. But the British ranks were becoming very thin, and in order to keep up the deception it was necessary to march columns of men and animals like a stage army round and round the dusty tracks along the shore. No tents were struck, the gunners that remained fired twice as many rounds and kept moving their batteries from place to place; and thousands of extra cooking fires were lit in the morning and the evening. Throughout the daylight hours Allied aircraft flew along the coast in readiness to drive back any German aircraft that came out on reconnaissance.
On December 15 an acceleration of the programme began. All through the night channel steamers and barges shuttled back and forth between the islands and the coast, and even a battleship was called in to act as a transport. On the beaches huge piles of clothing, blankets, boots, water bottles, woollen gloves, tarpaulin sheets, motor cycles, tinned food and ammunition were made ready to be destroyed. Acid was poured over hundreds of unwanted sacks of flour, and, as a precaution against drunkenness, the commanders of units poured their stores of liquor into the sea.
By the morning of December 18 the beachmasters were able to report that half the force in the bridgehead, some 40,000 men, and most of their equipment had been taken off. Both Anzac and Suvla now were honeycombs of silent, half-deserted trenches, and the men that remained in them were utterly exposed to enemy attack. ‘It’s getting terribly lonely at night,’ one of the English soldiers wrote in his diary. ‘Not a soul about. Only the excitement keeps us from getting tired.’
All was now ready for the final stage. Twenty thousand men were to be taken off on the night of Saturday, December 19, and on Sunday — known as ‘Z’ night in the plan — the last 20,000 were to go. There was one thought in everybody’s mind: ‘If only the weather holds.’ Through all this period the soldiers in the Cape Helles bridgehead, only thirteen miles away, knew nothing of what was going on.
Saturday morning broke with a mild breeze and a flat calm on the sea. There had been a short alarm at Anzac during the night when one of the storage dumps on the shore accidentally took fire, and everywhere the embarking men stood stock-still waiting to see if they were discovered at last. But nothing happened.
Through the long day the men went silently about their final preparations. A ton of high explosive was placed in a tunnel under the Turkish lines on the foothills of Chunuk Bair and made ready for detonation. Mines and booby traps were hidden in the soil, and to make certain that the troops avoided them on the final night long white lines of flour and salt and sugar were laid down from the trenches to the beach. The hard floor of the trenches themselves was dug up with picks to soften the noise of the final departure, and at places nearest the Turkish line torn blankets were laid on the ground.
Anzac posed a fantastic problem. At some places the British trenches were no more than ten yards from the Turks. Yet somehow the men had to be got out of them and down to the shore without the enemy knowing anything about it. They hit upon the device of the self-firing rifle. This was a contraption that involved the use of two kerosene tins. The upper tin was filled with water which dripped through a hole in the bottom into the empty tin below. Directly the lower tin became sufficiently weighted with water it over-balanced and fired a rifle by pulling a string attached to the trigger. There were several versions of this gadget: in place of water some men preferred to use fuses and candles that would burn through the string and release a weight on the rifle trigger, but the principle remained the same, and it was hoped that spasmodic shots would still be sounding along the line for half an hour or more after the last troops had gone. Thus it was believed that all might have at least a chance of getting away. Saturday went by in perfecting these arrangements. That night another 20,000 men crept down to the beaches at Suvla and Anzac and got away.
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.