Rock and Hard Places (25 page)

He was Alec Campbell, and he was 103 years old when he died, just a few weeks after leading the 2002 Anzac Day parade in his native Hobart. He joined the fifteenth battalion of what was then called the Australian Imperial Force in 1915; he lied about his age, adding two years to the sixteen he had on the clock at that point. He arrived on Gallipoli six months into the eight months that the campaign lasted. He served as a rifleman and water carrier, was wounded, contracted a serious fever which partially paralysed his face and was invalided out of the army still a year too young to have joined it in the first place.

Campbell’s remaining eighty-six years were eventful and industrious: he built railway carriages, sailed ocean-going racing boats, helped in the construction of Australia’s first parliament house, organised and ran trades unions, married twice, and fathered nine children, the last of them at the age of sixty-nine. He disdained attempts at co-option into the role of mythical elder. “Gallipoli,” he told one inquirer, “was Gallipoli.”

This chapter is for him, and for all the others.

AS DAWN ASSERTS itself through unseasonal April clouds, the first Australians to make it off the beach have occupied the steep, flat-topped hill they call Plugge’s Plateau; one of them wears his national flag draped around his shoulders like a cape. On the next row of ridges, a few bold pathfinders pick their way through the clinging scrub and the deep, treacherous trenches dug by the hills’ defenders. Some of the
Australians break left, scrambling up to positions at Quinn’s Post and Walker’s Ridge. Others head right towards Lone Pine.

Back down on the beaches of Ari Burnu and Anzac Cove, chaos reigns. Confused and exhausted invaders search in the dim light for the people they landed with, and the people they were supposed to meet prior to pressing on up the cliffs. Thousands of dry, blunt, Antipodean accents call names and swear the sweet, misty air blue.

A lone bugler by the cenotaph at Ari Burnu signals the end of 1998’s Anzac Day dawn service, and I wander off in my own hopeless hunt for the bus I arrived in, which is parked in the dark among dozens of others in a queue of headlights that winds along the beach road. Not for the first or last time, I wonder what it is with my countryfolk and this rugged, uninviting sliver of Turkey, trailing awkwardly into the Aegean. Eighty-three years, we’ve been coming ashore here, and we still can’t get it right.

 

THE DARDANELLES CAMPAIGN of 1915 had all the core ingredients necessary for the staging of a really top-notch military catastrophe: a) a bad idea; b) the inept execution of same; and c) the total boneheaded refusal by those responsible for a) and b) to stare the truth in the face when it became apparent that the wheels were falling off.

The bad idea, largely that of a First Lord of the Admiralty called Winston Churchill, was the forcing of the Dardanelles, the narrow strait between the asiatic Turkish mainland and a dog-leg-shaped peninsula called Gallipoli. The view from whichever region of Cloud-Cuckoo Land that British high command were inhabiting was that such an expedition would lead to the swift capture of Constantinople and the removal of Turkey from World War I. So confident were they that simple, fearful Johnny Foreigner would fold his tent and flee at the first meaningful brandishing of British steel, that the initial attempt to take the Dardanelles, on March 18, 1915, was an exclusively naval operation. A British fleet, consisting of 18 battleships and many more cruisers and destroyers, sauntered up the straits—“an unforgettable picture of aloof grandeur,” according to the historian Robert Rhodes James.

It didn’t impress the gunners in the Turkish fortifications. They sank three of the British battleships and crippled three others. By
the time this aloof, grand Imperial armada limped back whence it came, no doubt with hoots of Turkish derision pursuing it across the water, it had 700 fewer sailors than it arrived with. Turkish losses totaled forty men and four cannons. From a British point of view, the humiliation can barely be imagined: a nation which had defined itself so much for so long as the greatest of the world’s naval powers had been dealt a rare old caning by a people still popularly regarded as backward peasants with daft tassled hats and a mania for selling carpets. It was as if Manchester United had been given a Cup draw away to Ed’s Bar & Grill of the Runcorn & District Jumpers For Goalposts Sunday No-Hopers’ League and gotten stuffed 6-0—except, of course, that the overwhelming majority of the British public didn’t think it was hilarious. On April 25, 1915, allied troops went ashore on Gallipoli.

British troops of the twenty-ninth division landed at Cape Helles, on the tip of the peninsula. French troops took Kum Kale on the Asian side of the strait. The British encountered stiff resistance and incurred shocking casualties. The French captured their objective with minimal difficulty. Both groups of soldiers were instantly forgotten by posterity. To the north, on Gallipoli’s Aegean shore, the first assault was made by the Australian & New Zealand Army Corps—the Anzacs.

Gallipoli has since been so completely appropriated into the mythologies of Australia and New Zealand that it’s news to most of my British friends that anybody other than the Anzacs took part in the campaign. The truth is that French, Canadian and Indian troops also fought and died for the allied cause, and that of the 36,000 commonwealth servicemen whose names are listed in Gallipoli’s thirty-one allied cemeteries, two-thirds are British. Regrettably, if they’re remembered at all, it is mostly in the context in which they were portrayed in Peter Weir’s 1981 film
Gallipoli
: ambling ashore at Suvla Bay, “drinking tea on the beach,” while the eighth and tenth regiments of the Australian Light Horse were fed into Turkish machine-guns at a slim, rocky platform called The Nek in a series of absurd bayonet charges. While it’s true enough that this criminally senseless slaughter occured, on August 7, 1915, the implicit suggestion that British, or French, or Turkish troops were having a relatively easy time of it is at best insensitive and at worst insulting.

What
Gallipoli
the film does depict accurately is Gallipoli the popular legend, a myth that is as much a part of growing up Australian as Vegemite toast for breakfast: our bravest and finest martyred by stupid, arrogant, brandy-swilling, upper-class pommy martinets with suspiciously camp lisps. True or not—and the officers who could have called off the carnage at The Nek, Colonel Jack Anthill and Brigadier Frederic Hughes, were both Australians—it’s what we’ve been taking out on the English on the cricket pitch ever since. I suppose it could be worse. The only other nation to base so much of its self-image on a military shellacking by Turkey is Serbia, and the world would certainly be a happier place if they’d been able to placate their rage by whizzing a few bouncers around Michael Atherton’s ears.

The Anzacs were put ashore a mile or so north of their intended landing site—the squabbling has continued ever since about whether this was due to drifting currents, inaccurate maps, misunderstandings on the ground or thundering incompetence at command level. “All of the above” seems as good a bet as any, though the latter option, naturally, is the received folk wisdom (In July 1993, I came to Gallipoli while backpacking around Turkey, and went to the battlefields with a group of Australians. When our guide introduced himself as an Englishman, we raced to make the same joke—“Make sure you take us to the right beach.”) Instead of hitting the relatively gentle slopes just south of Hell Spit, the Anzacs found themselves staring up at serrated cliffs and ridges that rose almost vertically from the beach, hundreds of feet high, to a triangular pinnacle nicknamed The Sphinx.

Even discounting such obstacles as barbed wire, trenches, mines, mortars and raking machine-gun and sniper fire, the cliff face at Ari Burnu is daunting. I couldn’t climb it in a day, not even with regular breaks for water and hyperventilation. The first Anzacs ashore on the first Anzac Day began their ascent at around 4:30 AM. By 8:00 AM, one group of Australians, led by Captain E.H. Tulloch and Captain J.P. Lalor, had not only scaled these towering heights, but fought their way inland as far as The Nek, a mile or more from where they’d landed.

The Gallipoli campaign—grotesque, murderous and futile even by the standards of World War I—was allowed to fester for eight more months before the peninsula was evacuated. In that time, the Anzacs got no further than they had on the first day, but they dug themselves
immovably into the cherished memories of three nations—Australia, New Zealand and, altogether bizarrely, Turkey.

 

ACROSS THE DARDANELLES from Gallipoli, tucked into a bay at the narrowest point of the straits, is the town of Cannakalle. Cannakalle is the centre of the Gallipoli industry, and one of the strangest places on earth. Cannakalle, uniquely, is a city-sized shrine to a defeated invader.

In Australia, commercial exploitation of the Anzac name is prevented by law. In Cannakalle, there is an Anzac Hotel, an Anzac Bar and at least two Anzac grocery stores, both of which stock Vegemite and Violet Crumble bars. One restaurant posts the latest Australian Rules football scores in its windows, and another hangs a sign offering free glasses of the Australian chocolate drink Milo with every meal. The map of the peninsula I buy in Cannakalle confirms that Turks still call Gallipoli’s desolate ridges and hills what the invading soldiers did: Quinn’s Post, Monash Valley, Shrapnel Gully. Anzac Cove is known officially as Anzak Koyu. So far as I know, there is not an area of the Ardennes renamed Wehrmacht Wood—nor, more pertinently, a suburb of Darwin called Tojo. On April 24th, the day before Anzac Day, the barely distinguishable flags of Australia and New Zealand are flying from poles along the seafront and in the windows of every shop.

Granted, Cannakalle’s status as a corner of a foreign field that is forever Australia is partly basic commercial sense, of which Turks are not generally short. Several companies based in Cannakalle run tours of the battlefields, and while Cannakalle is a pretty little town with a couple of nice places to eat, there’s no other reason why you’d go out of your way to visit it. But the respect of the locals for the invaders of 1915 and the fondness they harbour for the visitors of 1998 are both unmistakably genuine. I have a cold glass of Victoria Bitter in the Anzac Pub and reflect that if I was to open a bar where I live now, in the East End of London, and call it The Luftwaffe, my only passing trade would be from local arsonists.

The Anzac Day embarkation begins just after midnight. Ponderous white ferries crowd Cannakalle’s tiny dock area while tourist coaches, minibuses and bedraggled, bleary-eyed solo travellers with bedrolls and backpacks roll and shuffle aboard. Aboard the ferry, it’s quieter
than I ever imagined several hundred Australians in a confined space could be, though I suspect this is due less to a sense of occasion than it is to exhaustion. Most are in their 20s, though there’s a smattering of older folk, some with service medals pinned to their cardigans and windcheaters, and a few here in uniform, taking breaks from peacekeeping operations in the Middle East and Bosnia.

In the interminable queue for the toilet on the car deck, I strike up a conversation with an Australian Air Force officer in desert camouflage. He has been serving in Kuwait.

“Fucking hot, fucking dusty, fucking full of fucking Americans who fucking think they fucking know fucking everything, and a complete fucking waste of our fucking time,” he says, summing up his current posting. “Nothing to fucking drink, either.” I ask him if he and his men are excited, or awed, or honoured, or what, by the thought of being on the beach at Gallipoli for Anzac Day. “Fucked if I know,” he shrugs. “We’d have gone on holiday to fucking hell to get out of fucking Kuwait.”

We are not, as a people, prone to rigorous self-analysis. I don’t get much further elsewhere on the boat with my efforts to find an explanation for this pilgrimage (the term is appropriate: the Anzac Day crowd is not just backpackers who were passing through—my flight from London to Istanbul two days previously had been rammed full of Australians). Sample responses include “Dunno, mate,” “Dunno, really,” and “Dunno, mate, really, just wanted to see what the place felt like.”

This is actually not a bad answer. It’s certainly why I came to Gallipoli the first time. I’ve never known what to make of the whole thing—no rationalisation of its place in the Australian consciousness really holds up. True, a lot of Australians died here, but more died at Villers-Bretonneux three years to the day later, and we won that one. True as well that Australians fought here with extraordinary courage, but it’s not like we remember their names—though most of us have heard of Private Simpson, killed while ferrying wounded soldiers to safety on his donkey, few Australians could name even one of the seven Anzacs who won Victoria Crosses during the battle for Lone Pine between August 7th and August 9th, 1915 (Keysor, Symons, Shout, Tubb, Burton, Dunstan and Hamilton, but I had to look them up).