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By Root 947 0

Streets was of the 12th Battalion, York and Lancaster Regiment, and he was one of the unsung poets of the 1914-18 conflict. Streets was reported “wounded and missing” on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916, and then reported “killed” on May 1, 1917. The Undying Splendour was published posthumously. Orga notes that, in Gallipoli, “no sides are taken, there is neither victory nor defeat, accusation nor judgement: Johnny Turk and Bulldog Brit, ‘the mighty dead,’ are one and the same, separated only by uniform—cannon fodder and conscripts on a short road to the afterlife.”

RECOMMENDED READING

A very thorough Gallipoli bibliography, featuring forty titles from the Imperial War Museum’s Department of Printed Books, may be found by a link on the Gallipoli 1915: The Drama of the Dardanelles Web page, Iwm.org.uk/upload/package/2/gallipoli/index.htm.

Catharine Reynolds and guide Kenan Çelik (see text box on page 468) highly recommend the following: Gallipoli, by Robert Rhodes James (Macmillan, 1965), which Catharine says “remains the benchmark,” and Gallipoli, by Alan Moorehead (Harper Perennial, 2002). Additionally, Catharine also recommends Gallipoli, by Michael Hickey (John Murray, 1995), and Kenan adds Birds Without Wings, by Louis de Bernières (Knopf, 2004), as well as Gallipoli, by Les Carlyon (Macmillan 2001), whom Kenan actually assisted in the writing of this book.

I weigh in heavily on Alan Moorehead’s volume. I have been a huge fan of Moorehead’s books on the Nile, and this work on Gallipoli is just as lively and informative. Moorehead (1910-1983) was a foreign correspondent for the London Daily Express and became internationally known for his coverage of World War II campaigns. He writes in the introduction to Gallipoli that, by August 1914, “the setting could hardly have been better for the complicated intrigues that now began: the foreign ambassadors, installed like robber barons in their enormous embassies along the Bosphorus, the Young Turks in the Yıldız Palace and the Sublime Porte, and everywhere through the sprawling decaying beautiful capital itself that hushed and conspiratorial air which seems to overtake all neutral cities on the edge of war. It was the atmosphere of the high table in the gambling casino very late at night when every move takes on a kind of fated self-importance.”

In the epilogue, Moorehead quotes from a moving preface given by General Sir Ian Hamilton to the Gallipoli soldiers:

“You will hardly fade away until the sun fades out of the sky and the earth sinks into the universal blackness. For already you form part of that great tradition of the Dardanelles which began with Hector and Achilles. In another few thousand years the two stories will have blended into one, and whether when ‘the iron roaring went up to the vault of heaven through the unharvested sky,’ as Homer tells us, it was the spear of Achilles or whether it was a 100-lb shell from Asiatic Annie won’t make much odds to the Almighty.”

Hamilton was given command of the Gallipoli Peninsula in April 1915, a post he held until the following October. During his tenure, he visited every front line of the trenches, and his dispatches from the Dardanelles remain models of their kind.

Troy

I regret that I haven’t been to Troy. For a long time I just thought that huge replica of the wooden horse was somehow too corny, but on my next trip to Turkey I will definitely be making the journey there. After all, it’s one of Turkey’s World Heritage sites, added in 1998, and, as the Lonely Planet guide states, for anyone who’s read the Iliad or who’s heard the tales of the Trojan War, Troy has “a romance few places on earth can hope to match.” All the guidebooks have fairly thorough visitor information, but to get the most out of a visit, I recommend reading any of the following: The Complete and Unabridged Bulfinch’s Mythology, by Thomas Bulfinch (Modern Library, 1998); Mythology, by Edith Hamilton (New American Library, 1940); Gods, Graves, and Scholars, by C. W. Ceram (Knopf, 1951), in which Troy is included