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.

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.