1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [196]
Whatever was in store for them they, at least, would have a ‘fight for it’.
Chapter 24
Gallipoli was the most ancient and, to a classical scholar, the most romantic of battle-fields. More than six centuries before the birth of Christ the Greeks had colonised the peninsula and founded a city on the site of the modern town of Gallipoli and christened it Heliopolis. The Turks called it ‘Gelibolu’ and it lay on the eastern coast of the peninsula looking towards the coast of Asia across the Dardanelles – the narrow seaway that reached north towards Constantinople on the Sea of Marmara, and flowed south to meet the waters of the Aegean. Long ago the ancient city of Troy had stood guard at the mouth of the Dardanelles, controlled its seaborne trade and grown rich and powerful on the proceeds. For this was the Hellespont of history and legend.
It was across the Hellespont that Leander swam each night for a lovers’ tryst with Hero, priestess of Aphrodite, who flung herself into its waters when he drowned. The legendary Helen of Troy, heroine of Homer’s Iliad, might have looked across these straits from those fabled ‘topless towers of Ilium’. Five hundred years before the dawn of Christian history Xerxes built a bridge of three hundred boats to carry his army across the Hellespont and up the peninsula on a march that ended at Thermopylae, and a century later Alexander the Great crossed to Asia on his way to conquer an empire. The Dardanelles had witnessed the passage of scores of armies and over the centuries, and as recently as the Balkan Wars a mere twelve months before, the peninsula had been lit by the campfires of soldiers and echoed to their curses and the tramping of their feet.
Few of the modern soldiers were classical scholars, but looking out from the western shores of the peninsula to the islands floating beneath a turquoise sky on the blue Aegean Sea, they were impressed by its timeless beauty.
On the small island of Bozcaada near the toe of the peninsula, British warships were anchored in the harbour of Tenedos where, according to legend, the thousand black-prowed vessels of Agamemnon’s fleet had sheltered long millennia before. Bozcaada just ten miles to the south was easily visible to the naked eye. Away to the west Samothrace, once home of the sea-god Poseidon, was hard to pinpoint in the glaring daylight, but it could be seen on the evening horizon when the peaks of its hills were lit by the setting sun and the glorious sunsets were balm to the red-rimmed eyes of soldiers wearied by the heat and dust of an ugly day.
Now and again they caught a fleeting glimpse of Lemnos in the distance, and this was familiar ground, for it was there in Mudros harbour that the soldiers left the troopships that brought them from Egypt and boarded destroyers for the last leg of the voyage to Gallipoli. No one had troubled to tell them that Lemnos, like Imbros, was immortalised by Homer in the Iliad and when a soldier recognised the faint outlines of these islands on the horizon, if he thought anything at all it was merely to hope he would soon have a closer view on the first leg of the voyage home.
Even the minority who had enjoyed a classical education found that Hellenic travel, even at the Government’s expense, soon palled and during a brief rest period in a miserable fly-ridden dug-out Captain Clement Attlee amused himself by putting the general feeling into verse.
Many a time I’ve longed these ways to go,
To wander where each little rugged isle
Lifts from the blue Aegean’s sparkling smile
Its golden rocks or peaks of silent snow,
The land of magic tales of long ago,
Ulysses’ wanderings and Circe’s wile,
Achilles and his armour, Helen’s smile,
Dear-won delight that set tall Troy aglow.
Happy the traveller whose eye may range
O’er Lemnos, Samothrace and Helles’ strait,
Who smells the sweet thyme-scented breezes. Nay,
How willingly all these I would exchange
To see the buses throng by Mile End Gate
And smell the fried fish shops