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Hamilton tried one more amphibious landing at Suvla Bay, once again was smashed off the peaks and back into a shallow beachhead by Mustapha Kemal. Hamilton was relieved of command. Of his successor. General Sir Charles Monro, Churchill wrote witheringly: "He came, he saw, he capitulated." But winter was setting on, and with Bulgaria gone over to the Central Powers, the Dardanelles could at last be munitioned directly from Germany's arms factories. The Allied position became hopeless. Evacuation, once ordered, threatened to be more harrowing even than landing. But this is an art at which the British are masters.
Skeleton battalions of men fired rifles from empty trenches while their comrades, on padded feet, filed by night to the beaches. One dawn, just 259 days after the landing, the Turks found they had no enemy, and half-incredulous went to the beaches to gorge themselves on plum and apple jam left behind by the British. But not before General Sir Fred erick S. Maude remembered he had for gotten his personal valise, and trudged back for his belongings. The British were about to blow up their ammunition dumps, and legend has it that when the belated general finally made his beach, the embarkation officer had the spirit to sing:
Come into the lighter, Maude, For the fuse has long been lit. Hop into the lighter, Maude, And never mind your kit.
As Author Moorehead tells it, the Dardanelles campaign sweeps through its fated course, a somber pageant of military error, a stunning tragedy of human valor. Here were great figures, great schemes. The book is the best account ever written of the action that started on March 18, 1915, even including Winston Churchill's own ringing apologia in The World Crisis. Through all Moorehead's painstaking documentation comes the authentic voice of men in battle, so that after 41 years the reader's heart still catches and he becomes a hopeless partisan in an engagement of which he already knows the outcome.