After two weeks, Esher closed for repairs. We all went back to the hospital at Wandsworth. News had just come of the evacuation of the Peninsula. In the ward I was sent to were half a dozen of our boys. I asked them what was the trouble, and they told me frozen feet. "Frozen feet," I said, "in Gallipoli? You're joking." They assured me that they were not and referred me to their case sheets that hung beside the beds. Shortly before the evacuation a storm had swept over the Peninsula. First it had rained for two days, the third day it snowed, and the next it froze. A torrent of water had poured down the mountain side, flooding the trenches, and carrying with it blankets, equipments, rifles, portions of the parapet, and the dead bodies of men who had been drowned while they were sleeping. The men who were left had to forsake their trenches and go above ground. Turks and British alike suffered. The last day of the storm, while some of our men were waiting on the beach to be taken to the hospital ship, they told me they saw the bodies of at least two thousand men, frozen to death. Our regiment stood it perhaps better than any of the others. It was the sort of climate they were accustomed to. The Australasians suffered tremendously. I met one man who had been on the Peninsula during the evacuation. They had got away with the loss of two men killed and one wounded for the entire British force. The papers that day said that the Turks claimed to have driven the entire British army into the sea, and to have gained an immense amount of booty. The booty gained, our men said, was bully beef and biscuits. Far from being driven into the sea, the British got off in two hours without the Turks suspecting at all; and it was not till the second day after that the Turks really found out. It had taken a great deal of ingenuity to devise a scheme that would let the evacuation take place secretly. The distance from the shore was about four miles. As soon as the troops knew they were to leave, they ripped up the sand bags on the parapets, and broke the glass in the periscopes, so they would be useless to the enemy. Then they attached the broken periscopes to the parapets, so that the Turks looking over would see the periscopes above the trench, just as they would any ordinary day at the front. Only one problem remained unsolved. As soon as the Turks heard the firing cease entirely, they would think something was not as it should be. If they began to investigate before the troops got away, it might mean annihilation. At first it was planned to leave a small party scattered through the trenches, but this meant that they would have to be sacrificed in order to allow their comrades to escape. An Australian devised a scheme. He took a number of rifles, placed them at different points along the parapets, and lashed them to it. In each one he put a cartridge. From the trigger he suspended a bully beef tin, weighted with sand.