Pte Ralph Goode (Lilydale), 2^nd Field Ambulance: On Lemnos Island. In his diary –‘At 4am this morning the last of our boys left Anzac. What a wonderful piece of work something like forty thousand Australians and New Zealanders have left Anzac and are safely here, without losing a man. Evidently the Turks know nothing about it, what a shock they will get when they find nobody in our trenches’.

Pte Ralph Goode (Lilydale), 2^nd Field Ambulance: On Lemnos Island. In a letter to his mother –‘Just think what a fine feat we have accomplished – almost as wonderful as the landing. Thousands of us left Anzac and not a man was lost. It took six nights to get us away. When you think that in some places our trenches were only 15ft away from the Turks, and every man had to make his way to the beach, get in to a barge and be towed out to transports. The second last night of leaving there were not more than 500 men on Anzac. They were all in the trenches and the Turks never dropped to anything.

Everything that could not be got away was burnt or destroyed. All that was left were hospital tents, that was so that the Taubes could see them when they flew over, and on Tuesday 21^st at 4am, the last of the men got away. We never lost a man or a gun. What a shock for Johnny Turk! As soon as daylight appeared the warships fired into the hospital tents we had left standing, and set them on fire, and great stacks of other stuff were piled up on the beach and soaked with kerosene and these the ships set on fire.

Some sailors who were there after we left told me that it wasn’t until the fires were burning that the Turks dropped to anything and by eleven o’clock the same morning Anzac was alive with Turks running about like madmen, absolutely astounded. Then the warships tickled them up and inflicted fearful losses on them. It’s cruel, but war’.

Pte Ralph Goode (Lilydale), 2^nd Field Ambulance: On Lemnos Island. In his diary – ‘We all feel it very much and are a little downhearted at leaving the place we so dearly won, but we must have confidence in our Generals. If it had been left to the men, not a man would have left. But when one comes to look at it, we were not doing much good there, only keeping a small portion of Turks engaged. It is quite certain that the ‘Dards’ cannot be forced, we did our work when we first landed and smashed up the flower of the Turkish Army. I will now close this book on the day we finished at Anzac and say ‘here endeth the first chapter of the Australian Expeditionary Force’ – I wonder where our next chapter will start?’.