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Though it is best recommended as an overnight journey, a visit to Gallipoli is most definitely worth a detour.

Gallipoli

Landscape of Sacrifice

CATHARINE REYNOLDS

THE COMMONWEALTH War Graves Commission information sheet referred to in the following article is excellent, and is available as a complimentary download from the Commission’s Web site. Go to cwgc.org; then click on Publications, Free Publications, and Information Sheets, and scroll down alphabetically to Gallipoli.

CATHARINE REYNOLDS wrote the wonderful “Paris Journal” column for Gourmet for more than twenty years, and the column was honored with a James Beard Foundation Award in 1998. She also was a longtime contributing editor of the magazine, and she now divides her time between Paris and Boston while working on a biography of Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV’s first minister of finance.

GALLIPOLI. FOR many of us the name summons scenes of Mel Gibson and his fellow Australians in Peter Weir’s film of that name, struggling onto Turkey’s shores under fire in one of World War I’s bloodiest campaigns.

History buffs may think of Winston Churchill’s support for the operation conceived to bring Constantinople and all Turkey into Allied hands: to enable the Allies to gain access to Russian grain, and to supply the Eastern front, thus easing pressure on the Western trenches.

Neither approach conveys the totality of this complex and horrific battle. The 259-day campaign in 1915 and early 1916, described by one who fought in it as “hell heaped-up,” resulted in more than half a million casualties. Still controversial, the campaign is generally considered an imaginative strategic ploy botched by such catastrophic incompetence that not even the dazzling heroism of Allied troops could redeem it.

Last autumn I set out from Istanbul with three friends to visit the battlefield at Gallipoli and to understand better the struggle for the sixty-mile-long peninsula that juts off Turkey’s European coast, separating the Aegean Sea from the Dardanelles.

Approaching from Çanakkale on the boat across the Dardanelles to Kilitbahir, a ten-minute trip, I was immediately struck by the difficulty of the peninsula’s little-populated scrub-covered terrain—which seems to have bemused the Allied commander, the British general Sir Ian Hamilton, who reported to his Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener: “Gallipoli looks a much harder nut to crack than it did over a map in your office.”

Hamilton’s objective was to clear the peninsula of the Turkish troops allied with Germany, so silencing the artillery and clearing the mines that had foiled naval attempts to win the Dardanelles in February and March. His plan called for a double blow by British, French, Australian, and New Zealand forces at the southern tip of the peninsula, at Cape Helles, and a landing south of Arı Burnu on the west coast, with two diversions: a landing at Kumkale on the Asian shore and a demonstration at Bolayır near the neck of the peninsula.

Planning our visit, we had noted the relative compactness of the battleground, an area roughly twenty miles from north to south. Fighting was confined to three sectors, the Cape Helles landing beaches, Anzac Cove on the Aegean coast, and the Suvla Bay beaches north of Anzac.

Signs to orient visitors are so few that we were glad to have an excellent map on the information sheet issued by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. And we were relieved that our car was a rental as we edged off the ferry onto washboard roads.

The beautiful and desolate Gallipoli countryside has largely been returned to the grazing land that has sustained its few inhabitants, many of them nomads, since ancient times. A national park encompasses the area around Anzac Cove, although Commonwealth, French, and Turkish authorities maintain the cemeteries and national monuments scattered over the hills.

That first afternoon, we made for the Cape Helles landing beaches first so that we could orient ourselves and appreciate the strategic situation. On April 25, 1915, Helles defenses