Soon it was evident that our final objective of capturing the Narrows
could not be accomplished with the forces we had. Directly the winter
gales would arrive and on those exposed beaches no stores could be
landed. We had to leave and leave quickly, or starve to death. So the
evacuation was planned.

No achievement in military history was better conceived or more
faithfully carried out. Here was scope for inventive genius and many
were the devices used to bluff the Turk. We schooled him in getting
used to long periods of silence. At first he was pretty jumpy and
could not understand the change, when the men who had always given him
two for one now received his fire without retaliating. After a while
he decided that as we were quite mad there was no accounting for our
behavior. Then we scared him some more by appearing to land fresh
troops. As a matter of fact, a thousand or so would leave the beach at
night and a few hundred return in the daylight under the eyes of the
Turkish aeroplanes, causing them to report concentration of more
troops. Stores were taken out to the ships by night, and the empty
boxes brought back and stacked on the beaches during the day. It must
have appeared as if we were laying in for the winter.

There were many inventive brains of high quality working at great
pressure during all the days of holding on, but one of the cleverest
ideas put into operation was the arrangement devised by an engineer
whereby rifles were firing automatically in the front-line trenches
after every man had left. There is no doubt the Turks were completely
bluffed. When the remaining stores were fired after being well soaked
with gasolene, the Turkish artillery evidently thought they had made a
lucky hit and they poured shells into the flames and completed for us