General Brûlard, who commands the only remaining French division in Gallipoli, protests against the Kitchener plan.
He rightly points out that the withdrawal of troops from the Suvla sector will allow the Turks to double their numbers in the Cape Hellès region.
The argument, and others of more general interest, carry, as well in London as in Paris, where one understands that it is necessary to choose between leaving or staying.
But the British, masters of the operation, can no longer disperse their forces between the Balkans, Turkey and the Middle East. It will therefore be necessary to leave.
Paradoxically, this retreat will be the only success the Allies will record in this disastrous affair.
However, the task is far from easy. Several tens of thousands of men will have to be embarked at night, leaving as little equipment as possible behind them, without the Turks being able to suspect what is coming.
Winter s is shot all over the front. The swarms of flies and scavengers that fed on the corpses gave way to legions of ferocious rats.
The fighters have reached the limit of their resistance. We will find, one morning, a section of a British regiment frozen in death, just as the cold has seized it.
The Turkish lines are a few tens of meters away and the heights allow them to monitor all the movements of our soldiers. Every sound carries through the icy air. Weapons are jamming and refueling is increasingly difficult.
The hospitals in the rear are full of sick and wounded. Never has Gallipoli justified the name "hell" so well. It is in this tragic atmosphere that the evacuation will be methodically planned.
At first, the general reserves are discreetly cleared towards Lemnos. Between December 13 and 18, each online unit suffers a drain on manpower, while receiving the mission of maintaining apparent activity at the usual level.
Thus, troops are marched from one sector to another, a fictitious movement is maintained in half-bare trenches and, insidiously, the Turks are accustomed to long periods of calm followed by violent sporadic gunfire, at fixed times. This “anesthesia” of the enemy must lead, on the night of December 19 to 20, to a withdrawal of the rear guard “on tiptoe”.
In the meantime, the British who love this kind of ruse evacuate troops at night who embark on barges returning at daybreak, apparently loaded with equipment. All of this giving the illusion that they are getting stronger in order to get through the winter.
In each communication trench, barricades are set up to delay the enemy's march and cover positions are set up from which a few machine guns can deceive until the last moment.
On December 19, 1915, only 3,000 men remained to hold the entire Suvla sector at Ari Burnu! One thousand five hundred of them move continuously to create a false animation on the front lines which the Turks believe are still occupied by large numbers. A continual tension is thus maintained which masks the movements of retreat.
Shortly after sunset on December 19, the guns opened fire for the last time, before being dismantled for boarding or destroyed. At midnight, the fire ceased along the entire line, as every night.
At 1:45 a.m., in the sector held by the New Zealand brigade, a machine gunner fired three bursts:this was the signal that the infantry was waiting for to begin withdrawal operations, starting with the units furthest from the scene. boarding.
When day broke, the 83,000 men who had occupied the coast between Suvla and Ari Burnu had literally evaporated. Only the equipment abandoned in flames on the beaches and the networks of empty trenches still marked the passage of the expeditionary force. The Turks did not realize until much later that they had only a void ahead of them.
As incredible as it may seem, on January 8, 1916, the same operation experienced the same success in the Cape Hellès sector where 35,000 men re-embarked under the nose and beard of their adversaries.
If the Gallipoli operation did not end in disaster, it was at least a bloody failure that we agree to attribute to the lack of seriousness in the preparation and the improvisation in the execution.
All hopes of a rapid end to the war, in turning the central empires, were collapsing and Tsarist Russia could no longer expect effective help from its Western allies.