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Gallipoli

The band played softly and mournfully and my father kissed us children, then said his good-bye with lips that were wooden and stiff. An old man came forward and handed him the Turkish flag and the people all shouted “Padişahim çok yaşa” and my father stepped into his place, amongst the other recruits.… Then they turned the corner, out of our sight, only the sound of the cheering and the singing voices and the noise of the band, coming ever fainter back to us.

—IRFAN ORGA,

Portrait of a Turkish Family

The drama of the Dardanelles campaign by reason of the beauty of its setting, the grandeur of its theme and the unhappiness of its ending, will always rank amongst the world’s classic tragedies. The story is a record of lost opportunities and eventual failure.

—BRIGADIER GENERAL C. F. ASPINALL-OGLANDER,

History of the Great War Based on Official

Documents (a twenty-eight-volume series

covering the military operations of the British

Army during World War I, usually referred to

simply as the British Official History)

The History of the Great War Based on Official Documents referred to on the previous page was written as a technical history for military staff rather than for the general public. The first volume was published in 1923, the last in 1949. British historian John Keegan has been critical of the work’s dry prose, and has remarked that “the compilers … have achieved the remarkable feat of writing an exhaustive account of one of the world’s greatest tragedies without the display of any emotion at all.” Regarding Gallipoli, anyone who’s seen the movie knows the conflict was gushing with human emotion.

For a very basic and succinct summary of the campaign, one would have to search hard for a better one than that provided by “Gallipoli 1915: The Drama of the Dardanelles,” an excellent Web page compiled by the Imperial War Museum in London: “Early in January 1915 matters came to a head when Russia asked for help in its fight against the Turks in the Caucasus. Britain and France began a naval campaign to break open the Dardanelles, the narrow strip of water that led from the Mediterranean into the Sea of Marmara and divided European from Asiatic Turkey. The ultimate aim was to knock the Turks out of the war by threatening their capital, Constantinople. When the most concerted attempt to smash the central defences of the Dardanelles failed on 18 March, a military force was assembled and plans were made to capture the shoreline of the Gallipoli Peninsula and so allow the naval campaign to be resumed.” As Napoléon remarked in a letter to his aide-de-camp Marquis de Caulaincourt in 1808, “Essentially the great question remains: who will hold Constantinople?”

One would have to search equally as hard for a more heartbreaking scene than this one, from Portrait of a Turkish Family. The author has learned about the fate of his father from a captain, who disclosed that, on the march to the Dardanelles, his father had suffered from foot trouble. When his feet began to swell they had to cut his torn boots off him, and they found that his two feet were so badly infected up to the ankles that he was left by the roadside, as was the custom, and a message went back down the lines that a wounded man was lying under a tree. “And eventually this message would reach the end of the marching lines where a horse-drawn cart lumbered for the express purpose of picking up the sick and wounded. But if the cart was already full to overflowing with all the other sick soldiers who had dropped out on the way? Ah well—in that case a man just lay by the side of the road under the blazing sun and waited for the next lot of marching soldiers to take up the same old cry, that a man lay wounded under the trees by the side of an alien road. Down, down the weary lines the cry would go, but perhaps by the time the sick-cart reached the spot a man would be dead and there was not much point in carrying a dead man—when there were so many living who still