The two photos above are the very moving English portion of Kamal Attaturk's inscription at the Turkish memorial to the disastrous 1915 campaign at the tip of the peninsula on the European side of the Dardanelles near the fishing village we call Gallipoli; and a small portion of the war graves at Anzac Cove, the worst of the killing grounds where Australian and New Zealand troops went ashore at dawn on April 25, 1915, Anzac Day.
Following up on the previous posts that mentioned Anzac Day, here is an excerpt of my travel journal of our trip to Greece and Turkey in 2004, about our visit to Gallipoli and nearby parts of Asia Minor:
In emails before we left Canada I had mentioned to my host, Çagatay Gφler, that I hoped we would be able to visit Troy and Gallipoli, but I never expected that he would take over a week off immediately before hosting the National Public Health Congress in order to take us there himself as well as show us his beloved Istanbul. He and his cheerful, linguistically challenged protege Etem Erginoz met us at our hotel at 8 am on the morning of October 22. I assumed the plan was to take us to a tourist agency, but soon realized that they planned to take us themselves to Gallipoli and Troy.
I had heard about Turkish hospitality. We were about to experience it. Çagatay Gφler is one of the nicest, kindest people we’ve ever known, altogether a lovely man. His English is adequate, not as fluent as that of many of his colleagues, although better than Etem Erginoz’s often mangled mishmash. (English is the language of instruction and communication in many Turkish medical schools but only partially at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Çagatay’s base). His accent and comprehension are adequate, and he compensates for imperfections with endearing turns of phrase, the most memorable of which is “In my childish time” when reminiscing about what life had been like in Turkey, especially in Istanbul, when he was a small boy.
With Etem driving, we headed south out of Istanbul on the expressway that leads to the border with Bulgaria, then cut across yet another mountain range to the road that runs beside the Sea of Marmara, and made our way by lunch time to Gelibolu which we call Gallipoli, a fishing village and small seaport at the inner end of the Dardanelles. Seeing that rugged terrain close up made me realize even before we reached the landing beaches that the plan to invade and conquer the Ottoman Empire by seizing the peninsula at the European end of the Dardanelles was one of the most extraordinary acts of stupidity of all the many perpetrated by the military planners in the 1914-1918 blood bath that irrevocably wounded European civilization. The landing places and especially Anzac Cove, could not have been more ill-chosen, on a steeply shelving beach where the sea is two meters or more deep only two or three meters from the shore, the beach itself is very narrow, the sand soft, and the crumbling sandstone cliffs are up to 20-30 meters high and nearly vertical. The Turks were forewarned and were well dug in with machine gun emplacements all along the tops of the cliffs. Wendy’s father and several of my uncles went ashore there in 1915, and one of my uncles is buried there. A huge diorama in the Ataturk Museum in Ankara helps to show why so many died. It is sacred ground now to Turks as well as to Anzacs, Brits, French, Indians. The toll of dead and wounded was about 250,000 Turkish defenders (mostly in naval bombardments) and about 215,000 on ‘our’ side. The former battle ground is dotted with many small graveyards rather than with a few large ones as in France – most of the dead are buried where they fell. So on the green lawn of Anzac Cove, in Shrapnel Valley, and several other places where we stopped to look, there are little neat rows of headstones. Interestingly, no distinctions of national origins are made in the Allied graveyards – Brits, Anzacs, French, Indians lie side by side. I was more moved – as much by anger at the stupidity of it all, as by sorrow – than at Gettysburg, Monte Casino, or the Somme and other battlefields of Northern France.
After a good look at these battlefields and the impressive Turkish memorial which includes the inscription above, a short ferry ride took us across the narrow seas of the Dardanelles at the Hellaspont, to Çanakkale, a city on the Asian shore near the bottom end of the Dardanelles. We used a new five-star tourist hotel in Çanakkale as base to visit some of the archeological sites on the Asian side of the northern Aegean. The first of these and by far the most interesting, more so than Gallipoli, was Troy. All who read Homer want to see Troy. It’s over 2000 years older than the city for which Priam, Hector, Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus and others waged the 10-year war Homer described. That took place about 800 BCE. Heinrich Schliemann did much damage with his ignorant digging in the 1880s but more carefully trained archeologists since then have unraveled the nine layers, dating back to 2500 BCE and earlier. We had a long, leisurely look on a hot sunny day, and I would have been happy to spend longer. This was obviously a great city several thousand years ago. The original harbour has long since silted up and is now a fertile plain several Km from the open sea, but it’s easy to recognize the strategic importance of this place in and before Homer’s time. We visited several other sites that day, most memorably a hazardous climb to the remains of a Temple of Athene on the top of a spectacular akropolis at Ossos overlooking the Aegean and the island of Lesbos, home of the Greek lyric poet Sappho whose reputed sexual orientation gave us the word lesbian.
To return to where I began this post, what distressed and angered me as I looked at the war graves scattered over the site of the futile battles of 1915, is that we, i.e. Australians and New Zealanders, have turned Anzac Day into a sacred (and also drunken) commemoration of one of the stupidest blunders perpetrated by the war planners of the 1914-1918 Great War. Winston Churchill who also planned the disastrous Canadian commando assault on Dieppe in 1943, led the team of "Whitehall Warriors" who planned the Gallipoli campaign. He is duly honoured for holding the line against the Nazis in 1940, but as a military strategist he was a one-man disaster.
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