Gallipoli (53 page)

Gradually too with the passing of time the great events of the war and its aftermath were falling into perspective, and the Gallipoli
adventure was seen, not in isolation,
but as a part of the general strategy; not as a sideshow, but as an alternative to the fearful three years of slaughter that followed in the trenches in France, to the long campaign against the
Turks in Mesopotamia, and to the expedition to Salonika. It was even perhaps not too much to say that if the Allies had succeeded in penetrating the Dardanelles in 1915 or 1916 the Russians would
not have signed a separate peace, and that the revolution might not have followed, not at all events so soon, or possibly so drastically.

Seen in this new light the Gallipoli campaign was no longer a blunder or a reckless gamble; it was the most imaginative conception of the war, and its potentialities were almost beyond
reckoning. It might even have been regarded, as Rupert Brooke had hoped, as a turning point in history. Certainly in its strictly military aspect its influence was enormous. It was the greatest
amphibious operation which mankind had known up till then, and it took place in circumstances in which nearly everything was experimental: in the use of submarines and aircraft, in the trial of
modern naval guns against artillery on the shore, in the manœuvre of landing armies in small boats on a hostile coast, in the use of radio, of the aerial bomb, the land mine, and many other
novel devices. These things led on through Dunkirk and the Mediterranean landings to the invasion of Normandy in the second world war. In 1940 there was very little the Allied commanders could
learn from the long struggle against the Kaiser’s armies in the trenches in France. But Gallipoli was a mine of information about the complexities of the modern war of manœuvre, of the
combined operation by land and sea and sky; and the correction of the errors made then was the basis of the victory of 1945. The next time, as Kitchener had once hoped, ‘they got it
right.’

It was Churchill himself who first restored the reputation of the Gallipoli campaign with the publication in the twenties of
The World Crisis
, his study of the first world war. He had
never really been heard before, and now, step by step, he took the story through the political and military events which led up to the campaign: the controversy with Fisher, the arguments in
cabinet, the long struggle to win support for Gallipoli from Joffre and the trench-warfare generals in France, the agonizing delays that hung on Kitchener’s word, the
trembling balance of politics in the Balkans, and finally the crises of the battle itself, when just for a few moments, in a vacuum of indecision, all depended upon the inspiration of a single act
of faith.

There followed the admirable official history prepared by Brigadier Aspinall, and it amply confirmed all Churchill had written.

Meanwhile the authors who had served in the campaign had been at work. There were Hamilton’s own diaries, Compton Mackenzie’s
Gallipoli Memories
, Henry Nevinson’s
graceful and accomplished account of the operations, a short book from the Poet Laureate, John Masefield, and two novels that were widely read,
The Secret Battle
by Alan Herbert, and
Tell England
by Ernest Raymond. By the nineteen-thirties a large library had grown up, British, French, Turkish and German, and although there was general criticism of the tactics no
serious student now questioned the wisdom of the Allies going to the Dardanelles.

An astonishing number of the Gallipoli commanders survived to see this vindication. Birdwood lived on until his ninety-seventh year, and Keyes, having served as Director of Combined Operations
in the second world war, died in 1945, leaving behind him an endless speculation as to what might have happened had he been the admiral in command in the Dardanelles and de Robeck his
chief-of-staff. Nasmith of the E 11 went on to become the youngest admiral afloat. Others took up careers that could never have been predicted: Allanson became the British consul at Monte Carlo,
Murdoch, the Australian journalist, became the owner of a powerful chain of newspapers and radio stations, Unwin resigned from the Navy almost at once and became a well-known yachtsman; he had
three children. Others again were young and obscure when they fought at Gallipoli, but later the world knew them very well. Among these there were Clement Attlee, then a spruce young captain of
thirty-two, and three future field marshals, Slim, Harding and the Australian, Blamey. Of the group
of officers who buried Rupert Brooke on Skyros only Freyberg and Arthur
Asquith survived. Freyberg fought through the second world war, a V.C. with three bars to his D.S.O., and subsequently Governor-General of New Zealand. De Robeck, Monro and Stopford died at the end
of the nineteen-twenties.

Hamilton was not asked to serve in the field again after the campaign, but his later career was in some ways the most remarkable of all. In 1918 he became Lieutenant of the Tower of London, and
in 1932 Rector of Edinburgh University. Year after year, while all but a few of his Gallipoli contemporaries reached the ends of their lives, he continued into a distinguished and sensitive old
age, the nimbus of Gallipoli always overhanging his name but never daunting him. His
Gallipoli Diary
, which appeared in 1920, was followed by a prophetic study of the trend of modern war
and several books of reminiscence. The second world war passed, and he was still there in his pleasant home at Hyde Park Gardens in London, surrounded by his books, his military trophies and by
many friends; a tall thin figure, very well dressed, and it was still a groomed and supple mind. If he was not entirely vindicated at least he was loved and respected. All the great opponents of
Gallipoli were gone, Monro and the generals of the western front, Bonar Law, Carson and Northcliffe. When the General died on October 12, 1947, he had reached the great age of ninety-four, and a
large congregation of the leading people in Britain gathered at a service in Westminster Abbey to honour his memory.

It was the silence of the Gallipoli peninsula which most surprised and awed the survivors of the campaign who returned there after the war, the stillness of the cliffs and
beaches where nothing much remained of the battle except the awful sight of the white bones of unburied soldiers and the rusting guns along the shore. Of the sunken battleships nothing was to be
seen; the
Majestic
was broken up by an Italian company and sold for scrap, and the other vessels, the
Triumph
, the
Irresistible
, the
Bouvet
and the
Ocean
lay too deep for salvage. The
River Clyde
was gone.
Although she had been shelled a thousand times they towed her off the beach at Sedd-el-Bahr and at
Malta engineers soon patched up her broken plates. In 1920 she was sold to a Spanish owner, and in the nineteen-fifties she was still sailing the Mediterranean under the name of
Muruja Y
Aurora.

The peninsula itself was cordoned off as a military area by the Turks, but the peasants came back and replanted the land about Cape Helles and Maidos and Suvla Bay. At the Narrows the Allied
occupation force dismantled the guns, but the two mediæval castle-fortresses still stood. Chanak was rebuilt, was shattered by an earthquake and was rebuilt again; and little by little the
other towns on the peninsula were restored to what they were. All the rest of the wild and lonely coast remained unchanged, and the second world war passed over it without making any difference.
Today the hills are as deserted as ever, and packs of wolves still appear from time to time. In a cold winter they descend to the valleys to attack the flocks, and they have even been known to
bring a donkey down.

Today one needs a guide to find one’s way around the battlefields. At Sedd-el-Bahr one recognizes at once the shattered fortress, the half-moon beach and the ledge of sand under which the
first survivors of the
River Clyde
waited all day on April 25, 1915; but beyond this, on the long slopes to Achi Baba all traces of the fighting have gone. Just occasionally a farmer
ploughing deeply will turn up a rusted bullet or a piece of shrapnel, and it is not unknown for a hand-grenade to burst beneath the bullocks’ hooves.

At Anzac, where the land is too broken up for any cultivation to be possible, there is much more evidence of the battle. Here the trenches, growing shallower and shallower every year, can yet be
seen; the holes of the old tunnels still vanish into darkness, and one has only to kick the dust to turn up jagged pieces of metal, the remains of a pannikin or a hobnailed boot, perhaps a broken
segment of a rum jar with the makers’ name still on it. The scene of the past fighting is evoked very easily: the mule teams winding up from the beach, the city of dugouts perched on the
sides of the
cliffs, the soldiers bathing in the sea, the heat and the flies and the fearful racket of shellfire re-echoing in every valley. But it is still hardly possible
to bring oneself to believe that for nearly nine months men could have lived and fought at such places as Quinn’s Post. One jump brings you from the Turkish trench to the Allied line; it is
too close, too savage, too intimate to be entirely credible to an age that only knows the enemy at a distance, and as a disembodied figure in a machine.

The cemeteries at Gallipoli are unlike those of any other battlefield in Europe. As soon as the Armistice was signed an Allied war graves commission arrived, and it was decided that the dead as
far as possible should be buried where they fell. Consequently a score or more of cemeteries were made, some with only a hundred graves, others with thousands, and they lie on every height where
the fighting reached its zenith. Each is surrounded by a bank of pines, and the graves themselves, which are not marked by crosses but by marble plaques in the ground, are thickly planted with
cypresses and junipers, arbutus and rosemary and such flowering shrubs as the Judas tree. In winter moss and grass cover the ground, and in summer a thick carpet of pine needles deadens the
footfall. There is no sound except for the wind in the trees and the calls of the migrating birds who have found these places the safest sanctuary on the peninsula. The effect upon the
visitor’s mind is not that of tragedy or death but of an immense tranquillity, of the continuity of things.

The highest of these cemeteries lies on Chunuk Bair at the spot where the New Zealanders reached the crest and Allanson and his men looked briefly down upon Maidos and the Narrows. Here perhaps
more than anywhere else the Gallipoli campaign is revealed, for as the eye roams round from west to east it falls on the salt lake at Suvla, and then on the cascade of hills and ravines around
Anzac Cove, and finally on the high stone pillar which has been erected on Cape Helles just above the beach where the 29th Division came ashore. These scenes are in the immediate foreground, and
they are set, as it were, in a frame of other older battlefields in the Ægean Islands, the Troad and the Hellespont.

For nearly forty years the cemeteries have been tended with great devotion by a Major Millington, an old Australian soldier. He has a curious existence, for at Chanak on
the Narrows, where he has his house, he is in a Turkish military area and may not move more than a thousand paces in any direction without escort. However, the young Turkish conscripts accompany
him willingly enough as he goes over to the peninsula month by month and year by year to supervise his staff of local stonemasons and gardeners. The Turks find this preoccupation with the dead
somewhat strange, since their own soldiers who died at Gallipoli were buried in anonymous communal graves, and until recently almost their only memorial was a legend picked out in large white
letters on the hillside above Chanak. It reads, ‘March 18, 1915’—a reminder to all passing ships that that was the day when the Allied Fleet was defeated. However, the Turkish
gardeners work well; no wall around the French and British cemeteries is allowed to crumble, no weed is anywhere allowed to grow, and now in the nineteen-fifties the gardens are more beautiful than
ever. Yet hardly anyone ever visits them. Except for occasional organized tours not more than half a dozen visitors arrive from one year’s end to the other. Often for months at a time nothing
of any consequence happens, lizards scuttle about the tombstones in the sunshine and time goes by in an endless dream.

THE END

T
HE
author’s thanks are due to the publishers who have allowed him to take quotations from the books marked with an asterisk.

Encyclopædia Britannica
. 11th edition, 12th edition and 13th editions.