Gallipoli

It was the silence of the Gallipoli peninsula which most surprised and awed the survivors of the campaign who returned there after the war, the stillness of the cliffs and beaches where nothing much remained of the battle except the awful sight of the white bones of unburied soldiers and the rusting guns along the shore. Of the sunken battleships nothing was to be seen; the Majestic was broken up by an Italian company and sold for scrap, and the other vessels, the Triumph, the Irresistible, the Bouvet and the Ocean lay too deep for salvage. The River Clyde was gone. Although she had been shelled a thousand times they towed her off the beach at Sedd-el-Bahr and at Malta engineers soon patched up her broken plates. In 1920 she was sold to a Spanish owner, and in the nineteen-fifties she was still sailing the Mediterranean under the name of Muruja Y Aurora.

The peninsula itself was cordoned off as a military area by the Turks, but the peasants came back and replanted the land about Cape Helles and Maidos and Suvla Bay. At the Narrows the Allied occupation force dismantled the guns, but the two mediæval castle-fortresses still stood. Chanak was rebuilt, was shattered by an earthquake and was rebuilt again; and little by little the other towns on the peninsula were restored to what they were. All the rest of the wild and lonely coast remained unchanged, and the second world war passed over it without making any difference. Today the hills are as deserted as ever, and packs of wolves still appear from time to time. In a cold winter they descend to the valleys to attack the flocks, and they have even been known to bring a donkey down.

Today one needs a guide to find one’s way around the battlefields. At Sedd-el-Bahr one recognizes at once the shattered fortress, the half-moon beach and the ledge of sand under which the first survivors of the River Clyde waited all day on April 25, 1915; but beyond this, on the long slopes to Achi Baba all traces of the fighting have gone. Just occasionally a farmer ploughing deeply will turn up a rusted bullet or a piece of shrapnel, and it is not unknown for a hand-grenade to burst beneath the bullocks’ hooves.

At Anzac, where the land is too broken up for any cultivation to be possible, there is much more evidence of the battle. Here the trenches, growing shallower and shallower every year, can yet be seen; the holes of the old tu

The cemeteries at Gallipoli are unlike those of any other battlefield in Europe. As soon as the Armistice was signed an Allied war graves commission arrived, and it was decided that the dead as far as possible should be buried where they fell. Consequently a score or more of cemeteries were made, some with only a hundred graves, others with thousands, and they lie on every height where the fighting reached its zenith. Each is surrounded by a bank of pines, and the graves themselves, which are not marked by crosses but by marble plaques in the ground, are thickly planted with cypresses and junipers, arbutus and rosemary and such flowering shrubs as the Judas tree. In winter moss and grass cover the ground, and in summer a thick carpet of pine needles deadens the footfall. There is no sound except for the wind in the trees and the calls of the migrating birds who have found these places the safest sanctuary on the peninsula. The effect upon the visitor’s mind is not that of tragedy or death but of an immense tranquillity, of the continuity of things.

The highest of these cemeteries lies on Chunuk Bair at the spot where the New Zealanders reached the crest and Allanson and his men looked briefly down upon Maidos and the Narrows. Here perhaps more than anywhere else the Gallipoli campaign is revealed, for as the eye roams round from west to east it falls on the salt lake at Suvla, and then on the cascade of hills and ravines around Anzac Cove, and finally on the high stone pillar which has been erected on Cape Helles just above the beach where the 29th Division came ashore. These scenes are in the immediate foreground, and they are set, as it were, in a frame of other older battlefields in the Ægean Islands, the Troad and the Hellespont.

For nearly forty years the cemeteries have been tended with great devotion by a Major Millington, an old Australian soldier. He has a curious existence, for at Chanak on the Narrows, where he has his house, he is in a Turkish military area and may not move more than a thousand paces in any direction without escort. However, the young Turkish conscripts accompany him willingly enough as he goes over to the peninsula month by month and year by year to supervise his staff of local stonemasons and gardeners. The Turks find this preoccupation with the dead somewhat strange, since their own soldiers who died at Gallipoli were buried in anonymous communal graves, and until recently almost their only memorial was a legend picked out in large white letters on the hillside above Chanak. It reads, ‘March 18, 1915’—a reminder to all passing ships that that was the day when the Allied Fleet was defeated. However, the Turkish gardeners work well; no wall around the French and British cemeteries is allowed to crumble, no weed is anywhere allowed to grow, and now in the nineteen-fifties the gardens are more beautiful than ever. Yet hardly anyone ever visits them. Except for occasional organized tours not more than half a dozen visitors arrive from one year’s end to the other. Often for months at a time nothing of any consequence happens, lizards scuttle about the tombstones in the sunshine and time goes by in an endless dream.

Bibliography

THE author’s thanks are due to the publishers who have allowed him to take quotations from the books marked with an asterisk.

Encyclopædia Brita