The day previously a snowstorm had swept down on the north wind that wrought havoc with the shipping in the Cove. Pinnaces broke from their moorings and barges went ashore and were smashed. How wonderful the hills on the morning of the 29th, covered with a snow mantle, which astonished the Australians, the great majority of whom were experiencing their first snowstorm! Icicles hung from the trenches--the sentries stamped up and down. The wind howled down the gullies, that were soon turned into morasses; the trenches were ankle-deep in mud. For three days the frost continued, but the troops were in good spirits and fairly comfortable. Many of the men suffered frost-bite, but on the third day of December the sun shone and the conditions had materially improved.
And now, in this strange eventful story comes the last stage of all. Though the decision for the evacuation was taken in November, the troops guessed nothing of it even up to a week before it took place. They had no realization that the series of very quiet evenings, when scarcely a shot was fired along the whole of the 5-mile front that Anzac now comprised, had in them any definite end. It was all part of the plan conceived by General Birdwood (now commanding the whole Gallipoli forces in place of General Monro) for beginning the education of the Turks to our leaving. But the main proposition to be faced was how to remove 200 guns and hundreds of tons of stores, equipment, and munitions and men, and keep up a semblance of normal activity of throwing supplies into Anzac. Cloudy skies and a first-phase moon helped at night, when the guns were stealthily drawn from their covered pits. There was no unusual gathering of transports by day, though the waters at night might resemble the days of the early landing, when the pinnaces and trawlers had crowded inshore with tows. The tows they removed now contained arms and munitions. More often they contained men declared not absolutely fit.
It was often remarked in the trenches, as December began, that it was an easy matter now to get a spell. The very slightest sickness was sufficient excuse to send men to the beach, from whence all the serious cases had long ago been removed, and so to the transports or hospital ships, as the case might be. Yet during the day, when Turkish aeroplanes hung menacingly over the position, observers might have seen bodies of men marching up the tortuous sap to the trenches. There was more indication of permanency, even of attack, than of evacuation.