They could hardly believe it when they landed again on Egyptian soil. They thought they would soon be turned around and sent back to the peninsula.
It didn’t seem right, after such a struggle, to leave the place in the hands of the Turks. The costly work of months, that had revealed to them they could kill, was abandoned like a bathing box at the end of the season. They left everything: all their fallen, and all the makeshift arrangements that had structured their daily lives. There would be no going back next summer. No going back at all. They’d wanted so much to force a way through, to find that back door to Constantinople, that most of them hadn’t imagined ever abandoning Gallipoli without that achievement.
‘Well,’ Eddie said affably, ‘I was looking forward to leaving it myself. I jus
