Dulce et decorum ain't
Well, took in Gallipoli yesterday. I can't get my thoughts straight, so the cut is probably blitherage, but my thoughts about the Gallipoli campaign in general can be summed up in the words of the Australian poet, A.D. Hope:
"We are the young they drafted out
For wars their follies brought about
Go tell those old men, safe in bed
We took their orders and are dead"
The Turks and the ANZACs had no reason to fight each other. The Aussies were invited to join up with posters promising an exciting adventure for less than five cents a day. Most of them had no idea where Gallipoli was. I saw a gravestone for a 17-year-old, another for an 18-year-old. Plenty of nineteens. Plenty in their twenties. The average age of the Turkish fighters was 25. The youngest ANZAC combatant was 14. Plenty falsified documents and "served as" someone else in order to get in underage. I saw an "L. I. Hughes, 19" and thought of Lee Hughes, back in England now, age 27, ripe for the wars were he born a century earlier, and of Seren, still a month of nineteen to go.
I saw many inscriptions that enraged and depressed me. For example, on the eighteen-year-old's grave: "Only a boy, but he died a man, for liberty and freedom. Mum and Dad." Liberty and freedom, ha! He died because the British generals wanted to capture Constantinople and secure a Black Sea trading route with Russia so they could open a southern front against Germany, which, let's not forgot, was not mass-murdering Jews in THIS war. Not to say that some weren't touching -- my personal favourite was "To live in the hearts of those we love is not to die."
But in general, I liked the Turkish graves better. They generally consisted of five lines. The first stated the solider's hometown. The second, his father's name with the Turkish suffix meaning "son of," followed by the soldier's name, so, for example, "Alioğlu, Mehmet," meaning Ali's son Mehmet. The third line recorded the soldier's date of birth, and the fifth, his age.
I guess maybe the Turks had a more routine view of it all. They were in the middle of ten years of wars. The Balkan wars, when Greece and Bulgaria and Serbia split off from the Ottoman Empire, were from 1912 to 1914, I believe. The Great War, which they only joined on the Germany side when the Brits refused to have them, was 1914-1918, of course. Then came the war of Independence. By 1924, the ratio of men to women in the newly independent and secular Turkey was 1:6. I actually never knew this before. How on earth did Atatürk do it? No wonder they revere him as a semi-deity. At the same time, the flower of Turkish intellectual youth was wiped out. Pulled out of universities and high schools and sent to fight. Five percent of the Turks in the Gallipoli trenches were literate. Over ninety percent of them perished.
The last remaining Turkish veteran commented in 1990, after meeting and saluting, in toothless, cheery, old man-style, the last remaining ANZAC veteran -- "Their duty was to attack. Ours was to defend." It was nothing personal, said our guide.
A report came early in the campaign of an ANZAC soldier down and shrieking in no-man's-land. Soon a white flag waved over the Turkish trenches. A burly Turk appeared out of them, picked the man up and brought him safely to his own trenches. No one shot at him as he went back to his own side. From that time on, the ANZACs called the Turks "Johnny Turk." In the war museum, the first picture that moved me to tears was of an Australian soldier giving water to a wounded Turk, lying in a field.
Our tour guide estimated that including those KIA, those who died of dysentary and other diseases in the trenches, those who died in hospital off the field, those who died of their wounds at home... that 500,000 men died due to the Gallipoli campaign. Half Turkish, half ANZAC, almost exactly.
In one day on Bloody Ridge, 21,000 men died. Twenty-one thousand. Over far less than a kilometre of ground. In one day.
Before one early and decisive battle, Atatürk told his men, "I am not ordering you to attack, but to die. In the time that it will take us to die, more men will come to replace us." They did, indeed, all die.
In a later battle, Atatürk was shot in the chest, his life saved by his pocket-watch, which shattered on impact. He battled on with several broken ribs.
The ANZACS were there for eight and a half months and were then pulled out in a near casualty-less evacuation. Then, they were sent to France.
Our tour guide showed us the trenches near the Australian memorial, eight metres apart. Eight metres. The men used to sing to each other. After a particularly bloody bout of fighting, the Aussies noted that the Turks weren't singing. One wrote of his concern for the singer... perhaps they had killed him? It was called a battle between gentlemen.
They traded food. Bully beef for whatever the Turks had. The Turks soon decided this wasn't such a great trade, though, as they weren't certain if the bully-beef contained pork, which they couldn't eat. So one savvy one got down in English, "You, tobacco, we paper. Everyday." The Turks had lots of paper. The ANZACs had tobacco, but no paper to roll it with.
They also played hot-potato... with hand-grenades. They'd make them out of old bully-beef cans, filled with shrapnel and gun powder, light 'em up, and fling them across to the Turkish trenches. The Turks then flung them back. The grenades often exploded in the air or in someone's hand.
Our guide told us that the chances of two bullets colliding in mid-air is one in 160 million. There were ten displays of such collisions in the museum, and the guide, ironically named Barış, which means "peace," showed us an eleventh that he himself had found while walking the paths around the battlefields. The machine guns sent out sixty bullets per second.
Part of the campaign took place in summer. The flies probably killed more men than the bullets. One soldier commented that if the Turks didn't kill them, their bodies would. In some places the bodies were buried three metres deep. There were information tunnels checkered between the trenches, several metres deep in the ground. There were reports of blood seeping through their roofs.
Part of the campaign took place in winter. It rained so hard one day that the ANZAC trenches filled with mud and water. There was a stampede. Thousands of men died. The next day, the Aussies, many of whom had come from the bushlands of central Australia, reported something white falling out of the sky. In the snow, thousands more men froze to death.
It is horrifying in a beautiful way, the respect that the tramping Aussie tourists show for the battlefields, the honour each side now seems intent on showing the other, glorifying their courage, their dignity, their honour. Atatürk himself was instrumental in the Gallipoli battles, in many of the key Turkish victories. These are his words:
"Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well."
I found them beautiful at first. Now I found them horrifying. 250,000 dead, to lie "in the soil of a friendly country"?
Our tour guide was fantastic, as is probably obvious from the wealth of detail that I can remember -- far less than what he actually told us! He was Turkish, but blonde-haired and blue-eyed, obviously a cause of constant hilarity for all his tour groups. All of his family has been from Turkey, he says, all the way back. "I'm still looking for the milk-man!" He was a lecturer at Troy University, presumably in history.
Fantastic trip. Well worth the money.
But from both my Troy and Gallipoli explorations, the most overwhelming sensation I got was of the senselessness of war. Of course, in the legend of Troy, there is much talk of the involvement of the gods. Ultimately, it is said, the war was Zeus' way of reducing the human population, which he felt was getting out of hand. The end result was pre-determined -- Troy would fall. But in the meantime, a fair few of those pesky humans were fly-swatted.
Can't help feeling not much has changed since then.
"We are the young they drafted out
For wars their follies brought about
Go tell those old men, safe in bed
We took their orders and are dead"
The Turks and the ANZACs had no reason to fight each other. The Aussies were invited to join up with posters promising an exciting adventure for less than five cents a day. Most of them had no idea where Gallipoli was. I saw a gravestone for a 17-year-old, another for an 18-year-old. Plenty of nineteens. Plenty in their twenties. The average age of the Turkish fighters was 25. The youngest ANZAC combatant was 14. Plenty falsified documents and "served as" someone else in order to get in underage. I saw an "L. I. Hughes, 19" and thought of Lee Hughes, back in England now, age 27, ripe for the wars were he born a century earlier, and of Seren, still a month of nineteen to go.
I saw many inscriptions that enraged and depressed me. For example, on the eighteen-year-old's grave: "Only a boy, but he died a man, for liberty and freedom. Mum and Dad." Liberty and freedom, ha! He died because the British generals wanted to capture Constantinople and secure a Black Sea trading route with Russia so they could open a southern front against Germany, which, let's not forgot, was not mass-murdering Jews in THIS war. Not to say that some weren't touching -- my personal favourite was "To live in the hearts of those we love is not to die."
But in general, I liked the Turkish graves better. They generally consisted of five lines. The first stated the solider's hometown. The second, his father's name with the Turkish suffix meaning "son of," followed by the soldier's name, so, for example, "Alioğlu, Mehmet," meaning Ali's son Mehmet. The third line recorded the soldier's date of birth, and the fifth, his age.
I guess maybe the Turks had a more routine view of it all. They were in the middle of ten years of wars. The Balkan wars, when Greece and Bulgaria and Serbia split off from the Ottoman Empire, were from 1912 to 1914, I believe. The Great War, which they only joined on the Germany side when the Brits refused to have them, was 1914-1918, of course. Then came the war of Independence. By 1924, the ratio of men to women in the newly independent and secular Turkey was 1:6. I actually never knew this before. How on earth did Atatürk do it? No wonder they revere him as a semi-deity. At the same time, the flower of Turkish intellectual youth was wiped out. Pulled out of universities and high schools and sent to fight. Five percent of the Turks in the Gallipoli trenches were literate. Over ninety percent of them perished.
The last remaining Turkish veteran commented in 1990, after meeting and saluting, in toothless, cheery, old man-style, the last remaining ANZAC veteran -- "Their duty was to attack. Ours was to defend." It was nothing personal, said our guide.
A report came early in the campaign of an ANZAC soldier down and shrieking in no-man's-land. Soon a white flag waved over the Turkish trenches. A burly Turk appeared out of them, picked the man up and brought him safely to his own trenches. No one shot at him as he went back to his own side. From that time on, the ANZACs called the Turks "Johnny Turk." In the war museum, the first picture that moved me to tears was of an Australian soldier giving water to a wounded Turk, lying in a field.
Our tour guide estimated that including those KIA, those who died of dysentary and other diseases in the trenches, those who died in hospital off the field, those who died of their wounds at home... that 500,000 men died due to the Gallipoli campaign. Half Turkish, half ANZAC, almost exactly.
In one day on Bloody Ridge, 21,000 men died. Twenty-one thousand. Over far less than a kilometre of ground. In one day.
Before one early and decisive battle, Atatürk told his men, "I am not ordering you to attack, but to die. In the time that it will take us to die, more men will come to replace us." They did, indeed, all die.
In a later battle, Atatürk was shot in the chest, his life saved by his pocket-watch, which shattered on impact. He battled on with several broken ribs.
The ANZACS were there for eight and a half months and were then pulled out in a near casualty-less evacuation. Then, they were sent to France.
Our tour guide showed us the trenches near the Australian memorial, eight metres apart. Eight metres. The men used to sing to each other. After a particularly bloody bout of fighting, the Aussies noted that the Turks weren't singing. One wrote of his concern for the singer... perhaps they had killed him? It was called a battle between gentlemen.
They traded food. Bully beef for whatever the Turks had. The Turks soon decided this wasn't such a great trade, though, as they weren't certain if the bully-beef contained pork, which they couldn't eat. So one savvy one got down in English, "You, tobacco, we paper. Everyday." The Turks had lots of paper. The ANZACs had tobacco, but no paper to roll it with.
They also played hot-potato... with hand-grenades. They'd make them out of old bully-beef cans, filled with shrapnel and gun powder, light 'em up, and fling them across to the Turkish trenches. The Turks then flung them back. The grenades often exploded in the air or in someone's hand.
Our guide told us that the chances of two bullets colliding in mid-air is one in 160 million. There were ten displays of such collisions in the museum, and the guide, ironically named Barış, which means "peace," showed us an eleventh that he himself had found while walking the paths around the battlefields. The machine guns sent out sixty bullets per second.
Part of the campaign took place in summer. The flies probably killed more men than the bullets. One soldier commented that if the Turks didn't kill them, their bodies would. In some places the bodies were buried three metres deep. There were information tunnels checkered between the trenches, several metres deep in the ground. There were reports of blood seeping through their roofs.
Part of the campaign took place in winter. It rained so hard one day that the ANZAC trenches filled with mud and water. There was a stampede. Thousands of men died. The next day, the Aussies, many of whom had come from the bushlands of central Australia, reported something white falling out of the sky. In the snow, thousands more men froze to death.
It is horrifying in a beautiful way, the respect that the tramping Aussie tourists show for the battlefields, the honour each side now seems intent on showing the other, glorifying their courage, their dignity, their honour. Atatürk himself was instrumental in the Gallipoli battles, in many of the key Turkish victories. These are his words:
"Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well."
I found them beautiful at first. Now I found them horrifying. 250,000 dead, to lie "in the soil of a friendly country"?
Our tour guide was fantastic, as is probably obvious from the wealth of detail that I can remember -- far less than what he actually told us! He was Turkish, but blonde-haired and blue-eyed, obviously a cause of constant hilarity for all his tour groups. All of his family has been from Turkey, he says, all the way back. "I'm still looking for the milk-man!" He was a lecturer at Troy University, presumably in history.
Fantastic trip. Well worth the money.
But from both my Troy and Gallipoli explorations, the most overwhelming sensation I got was of the senselessness of war. Of course, in the legend of Troy, there is much talk of the involvement of the gods. Ultimately, it is said, the war was Zeus' way of reducing the human population, which he felt was getting out of hand. The end result was pre-determined -- Troy would fall. But in the meantime, a fair few of those pesky humans were fly-swatted.
Can't help feeling not much has changed since then.