Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [190]
The next wave included the refitted collier River Clyde, conceived as an amphibious Trojan horse to be run aground along the shore, spilling 2,000 British infantrymen onto the 400-yard-long beach. Few made it, wiped out by machine-gun fire from the Turkish troops dug into the surrounding slopes. Allied commanders had failed to appreciate that the six weeks taken to muster troops and transport had permitted German field marshal Otto Liman von Sanders’s Turkish conscripts to entrench themselves and to train.
Today, the beach at Cape Helles is curiously domesticated, with whitewashed buildings dotting the inlet. I asked myself whether the youngsters playing soccer along the beach knew anything of the men little older than they who had lost their lives grappling ashore nearly a century ago.
To the west of the beach the austere 100-foot Helles Memorial obelisk marks some of the first ground taken by British soldiers on April 25—and the last from which they withdrew on January 9, 1916. The names of 20,763 British, Australian, New Zealand, Newfoundland, and Indian dead are engraved in honey-colored stone alongside the names of formations and ships that participated in the campaign. The late-afternoon sun refracted across the approach to the Dardanelles, as if to emphasize the unattained goal.
Less than two and a half miles east stands the French War Cemetery, commemorating the 10,000 Frenchmen who died establishing and holding the right end of the Helles line, and the more recently erected Turkish Çanakkale Martyrs Memorial. In keeping with local custom, the 25,000 Turkish dead had long gone uncommemorated, buried in communal graves in the seasonal watercourses that scar the landscape.
Today the Turkish government is trying to make Gallipoli a focus of nationalism. It has erected the Martyrs Memorial and a variety of other monuments, as well as a highly informative modern museum at Kabatepe, a twenty-minute drive from the French cemetery. Although the one-story building is architecturally uninspired, the museum’s collection is absorbing. Exhibits, labeled in Turkish and English, illustrate the squalid conditions under which Allied and Turkish troops operated.
Despite the torrid summer, the former were often outfitted in woolly uniforms. Rations of bully beef, butter, and tea were no more suitable, and, for the Allies, who never reached the inland wells, water was scarce. The Turkish infantryman, nicknamed Mehmetçik, was better nourished—on legumes and vegetables—than his British counterpart. Flies plagued everyone, and dysentery was rife; Allied casualties from disease were double the battle casualties.
Anzac Cove, a few miles northwest of the museum, is the most visited site of the battlefield, a place of pilgrimage for Australian backpackers and other young people. It takes its name from the 16,000 men of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps—or Anzacs—who were put ashore on April 25 at this second landing zone. The dash and tenacity of these soldiers became the stuff of epic.
Approaching the area, we paused at Beach Cemetery, a poignant spot where 391 graves cling precariously to the shore. The Commonwealth dead were mostly buried where they fell, so there are thirty carefully tended cemeteries in addition to this one scattered across the peninsula.
In the second prong of the April landing, an uncharted current swept the craft carrying the Australian and New Zealand battalions a mile north of their intended landing place to an inhospitable crescent beach backed by steep bluffs