1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [332]
Everyone but Lord Kitchener was agreed that the evacuation should start without delay. He had an ally in Admiral Keyes who was pressing the merits of a new naval scheme to force the Dardanelles, and Kitchener was tempted. Evacuation would be expensive – Monro had hazarded a likely loss of 30 or 40 per cent – and in the present delicate political climate it would also be seen in the Near East as an ignominious climb-down on the part of the British Empire. ‘I absolutely refuse to sign an order for evacuation,’ Kitchener telegraphed to Lemnos, ‘which I think would be the greatest disaster and would condemn a large percent age of our men to death or imprisonment.’ Lord Kitchener boldly decided to travel to Gallipoli to see for himself, and the Dardanelles Committee decided that the matter should be left in abeyance until his return.
Travelling fast overland to Marseilles and onwards by destroyer, Kitchener reached Mudros on 9 November. Next day it was blowing hard and the destroyer that carried him across the fifteen miles to the peninsula bucked and ploughed through heavy seas and the lighter that carried him to the shore spun like a cork in the whirling currents.
Once ashore, Kitchener did not take long to make up his mind. Standing with General Birdwood at a post high above Anzac he put his hand on the General’s arm and said, Thank God, Birdie, I came to see this for myself. You were quite right. I had no idea of the difficulties you were up against.’ He was as deeply impressed by the spirit of the men as he was appalled by the conditions. ‘I think you have all done wonders,’ he assured General Birdwood as they shook hands in farewell. Kitchener was now on his way to Greece to review the situation at Salonika, and it was 22 November before he cabled his long-expected report to London and the 24th before he finally set sail for England. Pending the final decision of the Cabinet he had already ordered that preliminary preparations for evacuation should begin. Two days after his departure winter roared down the peninsula and made the final crushing decision for them.
The storm struck with the force of a hurricane and it raged on for three days. The wind howled and hammered, sweeping away piers, dashing small vessels into matchwood, uprooting trees, tearing the flimsy roofs from dug-outs, lashing whirlwinds of stinging sand against the bare limbs of the miserable soldiers still clad in thin khaki drill. And then thunder began to roll, out-thundering any bombardment, lightning flashed, and the heavens opened. It poured in sheets for twenty-four hours. Dug-outs soon flooded, stores were washed away, trenches, gullies, dried-up water-courses, turned to raging torrents so deep that many men were drowned. Hundreds more died of exposure.
Spr. J. Johnston.
Our officer, Captain Newton Phillips, seeing the state of the men, said it was a case of every man for himself and God for us all. Well, I and my pal Dai Morris had previously been employed digging a dug-out for the officer in charge of explosives and cartridges and we knew this might be a good place to take over, so we made for this dug-out which was more than half full of boxes of these bombs. There was about two feet of water in the dug-out but we piled some of the boxes at one end to get above it, then we settled down to sleep. About midnight there was a short lull in the storm and another officer, Buck Adams, came round to inspect if the bombs were all right and he shone a torch into the dug-out and ordered us out of there, so we both decided that we should go down to the beach and walk along the sand which would be better than stamping around in the mud and freezing. On our way we came across a big galvanised tank that had been put up on sandbags to hold paraffin oil supplies. The storm had washed away the sandbags under the tank, the tank had then fallen down and all the oil had run out to sea. We thought the empty tank would be a grand shelter from the storm and would be dry inside and a shelter from the wind and the cold. I