EVACUATION

There will be a leavening of Egyptian in the Australian vernacular after peace has broken out. It will persist, and perhaps have a weighty etymological influence—at any rate on the colloquial vocabulary. "Baksheesh" will be a universal term, not confined to sketches of Oriental travel. "Baksheesh" is merely one of the many grafted Arabic terms, but it will be predominant. "Sae'eda" will be the street greeting (varied by the Sikh "Salaam, sahib"). "Feloose kiteer," "mafish," "min fadlak," "taali hina," "etla," and the rest of them, will be household words. Other phrases, not remarkable for delicacy, will prevail in pot-houses and stable talk. Forcible ejection from a company and polite leave-taking will both be covered by an "imshee"; there will be "classy" "imshees" and "imshees" that are undignified.

Such an evacuation as was effected at Anzac was distinctly "classy." When first the notion of evacuation was mooted there was misgiving. We were with our back (so to speak) to the sea, hemmed in in a narrow sector of coast, with no ground whatever to fall back upon. There was no one who did not expect disaster in evacuating a position such as that; the only debate was as to degree. What would it cost us in lives and money? And there was a greater fear unspoken—the hideous reflection that an evacuation would make almost vain the heavy losses of eight months' fighting. Everyone hoped against a giving-up. But soon there was no mistaking the signs of the times—the easing off in the landing of supplies, the preliminary and experimental three days' restraint from fire all along the line, the added restriction upon correspondence—in especial the order to refrain from any reference to the movements of troops either present or prophetic, and either known or surmised; the detailing of inordinately large fatigues to set in order once more the last line of defence.

The most obtuse soon saw his worst fears realised. Notice to quit was, in general, short. On Sunday afternoon, the 12th, the O.C. came panting up the gully. "Fall in the unit at once." They were given an hour and a half's notice to have all ready for transport to the pier. Notice was in many cases far shorter, resolving itself into minutes. But an hour and a half is brief enough. Then there was bustle and feverish stuffing of kit-bags. The dug-out which had been as a home for four months was dismantled and left in dishevelment in a half-hour. It's hard to leave a dug-out—your shelter from shrapnel and the snowy blast and the bitter Turkish frost. It's here that you have smoked the consolatory pipe for so many months—consumed the baksheesh steak and marmalade, read the home letters and the local sheet of home from Australia, played nocturnal poker, yarned with a fellow-townsman, and spread the frugal late supper. It has been home in a sense other than that you ate and slept there; it was home indirectly—by virtue of home mails, home talk, home memories, visualisations nurtured under its shelter in the night watches. Home because it was in Turkey, and that way duty lay.

Now, in a few desecratory minutes, it was rudely stripped, bunks overturned, the larder ratted, the favourite prints brushed from the hessian in the bustle. The vultures from neighbouring dug-outs flocked round for the spoil; the men who yet had no notice to evacuate came for baksheesh. With a swelling heart you disgorged your little stock of luxuries, that you would have taken but had no room for. It breaks your heart to give over to the hands of strangers your meagre library amassed during a quarter's residence, your little table, your baksheesh butter and strawberry jam, potatoes and oatmeal, surplus luxuries in clothing, the vital parts of your bunk, the odds and ends of private cooking utensils that have endeared themselves by long and frequent service at the rising of the sun and at the going down of the same, and late at night. Though the life of a soldier is checkered, without any abiding city, shot with hurried moves by flood and field, yet we had had so many months in Anzac, in the one spot, that we had broken with tradition and had made a sort of home in a sort of settled community. And this was the rude end of all.

We took a hurried snack as the mule-carts were loaded. The cooks made merry (cooks, somehow, always contrive to have a convivial spirit at hand), calling on all and sundry to drink a farewell with them while they scraped and packed their half-cold dixies. Nevertheless—for reasons explicit and subconscious—it was a melancholy toast. We followed the transport to Walker's Pier—taking the sap, though, without exception. This thought was uppermost; "What if Beachy Bill should get us now?" To a man we took all the cover there was. No one, at such close prospect of deliverance for ever from that shell-swept beach, neglected precautions.

Round at Walker's the beach was thickly peopled with units awaiting embarkation. The bustle and shouting were almost stupefying. The unit "pack up" had been this in a small degree. That was bad enough. Here our own little preparation was both magnified and intensified. It was growing dusk. A whole brigade was waiting with all its CÆsarian impedimenta. Impromptu piers had been run out, and were lighted by smoking flares. Pinnaces and barges moved noisily between them. Military landing-officers and naval transport-officers, and middies and skippers of trawlers, bawled orders and queries and responses. On the beach the men lay about on their baggage. Non-commissioned officers marshalled and moved them off. Mule transports threaded a way amongst the litter of men and kit-bags. Officers who knew their time was not yet stood in groups chatting and joking. The men, always free from responsibility, played cards and formed schools of two-up, dipped into their haversacks, and munched and raised to their lips vessels which were not always mess-tins, and did not always contain cold tea only—or even cold tea at all.

We waited. The hour of embarkation was postponed from six to nine. At nine most of the excitement had subsided, and the men lay quiet—except where they revived themselves with a dark issue-liquid. There was melancholy abroad—more than that of weariness in physical exertion. As the hour of embarkation drew on (it was now postponed to ten) its significance came home to their bosoms. The rifles cracked on the ridges, the howitzers spoke, the din of bombs came down the ravine. There were those fellows in the trenches being left to see the last of it, and to get off if they could. Not the most resolute optimist could look towards the bloodless evacuation which the event has shown to an astonished world. Every flash of the guns in the half-moonlight, every rifle fusillade, called up the vision of a last party attempting to leave, and perhaps failing fatally to its last number. "If I could get drunk," said a man wearing his equipment, "I would—blue-blind paralytic. I never felt so like it in my life."

We lay about another hour and a half. Then the order came suddenly to go aboard—so suddenly that the half of the equipment had to be left. The first load was got down; a return was being made for another. "Can't wait," roared the N.T.O.; "leave your stuff or get left. The barge is leaving now. Cast off, for'ard. Go ahead, cox'n." This was not bluff. There was a scramble for the barge. There up in the sap lay the cooks' gear, and half the private kit, to be despoiled (so we said) by some barbarous Turk. "Put that match out. No talking." We puffed out otherwise in silence, into the Ægean darkness. Liberty to talk, to smoke, would have been a boon. There was talking in whispers—worse than nothing. Cigarettes were quenched—and the spirits of that unhappy, close-packed, silent load of silent men. The spent bullets sang overhead in a kind of derision, getting lower and more intimate as we moved on. Soon they were spitting about us and tapping the barge, coming unreasonably near to tapping skulls and chests.

But we got to the side of the darkened transport untouched, after long wandering and hailing of many ships in the darkness. There was complete exhaustion at the end. The men dropped down against their kits and slept fitfully (it was bitterly cold) till the dawn. This was the last look on Gallipoli; it had been a penultimate sight we had of it in the dusk of the previous Sabbath evening, though we knew it not. For a time we could only see the great grey mass flecked with an occasional spurt of flame, where the guns were still belching. Then the glorious sun slowly uprose, and threw up the detail. There were the old and well-remembered and well-trodden heights of Anzac, and lower down we came abreast of all the positions we had known, afar off, and now saw more clearly than ever before. We looked along the deadly Olive Grove. There lay the Beachy Bill battery, which every day had rained screaming hell over the Anzac Beach, and was even now speaking sullenly in the early morning glow.

Achi Baba rose up to the south in a sort of soft splendour; how different from the reality! That rosy tipped mountain, could we have seen its detail, would show looming bastions, high forbidding ridges, and galleries of guns, and rugged ravines that had well-nigh flowed with the blood of our storming parties. Now it stood there, sloping gently down towards Helles, behind the high, quiet headlands and the bays of the coast. Soon we were abreast of Helles, then of the multitude of shipping in the Straits mouth, and so on down behind Imbros and under Tenedos, and away over the freshening sea to Lemnos, a pale cloud, bigger than a man's hand on the starboard bow. And by mid-day we lay in the quiet waters of Mudros Bay, looking over the canvas-clad slopes.