As we appoach the
Gallipoli centenary, I have set myself the task of re – reading
some of the best examples of New Zealand writing about the disastrous
invasion. There are three books, Ormond E Burton's 'The Silent
Division', Robin Hyde's 'Passport to Hell' and Alexander Aitken's
'Gallipoli to the Somme', all based upon first hand experiences of
New Zealanders who fought in the bloody trenches of Gallipoli. I'll
start with the horror and some images of the 'fallen'. Here is
Private J. D.
Stark (8/2142, Fifth Reinforcements, Otago Infantry Battalion)
describing the bodies of the dead:
But the dead who waited in No Man's
Land didn't look like dead, as the men who came to them now had
thought of death. From a distance of a few yards, the bodies, lying
in queer huddled attitudes, appeared to have something monstrously
amiss with them. Then the burying-party, white faced, realised that
twenty four hours of the Gallipoli sun had caused each boy to swell
enormously – until the great threatening carcases were three times
the size of a man, and their skins had the bursting blackness of
grapes. It was impossible to recognise features or expression in that
hideously puffed and contorted blacknessi.
This
powerful and disturbing image, although surely important, is actually
not the dominant narrative theme of these memoirs. Although each is
distinctive and different, all three agree on one central feature of
the Gallipoli experience: the awful monotony, boredom and sense of
meaninglessness which dominated their cramped existence inside the
trenches. Aitken for example waxes lyrical about Troy, Homer and
Milton when he is recounting his Lemnos memories (just before
Gallipoli), but this sense of passion and meaning is completely
absent from his actual Gallipoli narrative:
I set down these
particulars once and for all, not to be referred to again, dull as
they must seem to anyone except a New Zealand infantryman who had
manned those terraces. But the greater part of modern war, when of
the static type, consists precisely of such monotony, such
discomfort, such casual death. And so let it be stripped of glamour
and seen for what it isii.
(Aitken 1963)
Burton's description of
Gallipoli is mostly about the mundane and uncomfortable details: the
terrible food, the lice and the unsanitary conditions:
Scorching heat, swarms of
venomous flies, hosts of never-resting lice, thirst, the pervading
stench of the unburied dead, and then a new experience – the
frightful monotony of war. A dangerous life is not necessarily an
exciting one. A man is not less bored at living in a clay ditch six
feet wide and eight feet deep for week on end without being able to
move more than fifty yards to the right or left, because at some
unknown moment a shell may blow him to smithereens. In war danger is
part of the very atmosphere. Beyond a certain point it could not be
guarded against. Snipers were always busy – shrapnel burst
everywhere. These dangers could not be avoided. They were exceedingly
annoying – sometimes even terrifying – but as a general rule not
exciting. After the fierce rush of the Landing battles, a daily
routine was established. Soon nothing was new, nothing was
interesting, nothing was profitable. The bully beef was always salt
and stringy; the biscuits were like armour plate bruising, rasping
and scraping along the tender gums, smashing gold crowns and
splintering plates. Nothing mattered. One thing was just as bad as
another and nothing could be worse than some of the things that had
gone before. This strain and weariness reacted upon the mental tone.
The bad food, the tropical heat, the flies, the smell, wore down the
physical condition. Then came the spectre of disease. In June scores
of men were going down with diarrhoea, dysentery and enteric; in July
they were being evacuated in hundredsiii.
There are of course other
narratives to be found: the military story which revolves around
questions of strategy and seeks to explain why Gallipoli was such a
disaster for the Allied forces. Burton's famous quote ‘somewhere
between the landing at Anzac and the end of the battle of the Somme
New Zealand very definitely became a nation’ provides the starting
point for the famous and heavily promoted narrative of national
identity. These sorts of narratives strike me as somewhat desperate
attempts to provide a higher meaning or purpose for an event which
lacks any redeeming features. The tediousness, horror and death of
Gallipoli is what stands out as the most solid and truthful aspect of
these first hand accounts.
The fact that the Allies
were defeated at Gallipoli can be looked at in different ways. From
the Turkish perspective the victory served as a powerful source of
impetus for Ataturk and Turkish nationalism. There were surely other
historical aspects to this process, but Gallipoli is a part of that
story. The 1915 victory was a precursor to the eventual establishment
of an independent Turkey in 1923. This victorious nationalism is
personified by Kemal Ataturk. If you travel through Turkey you will
see statues and photos of him everywhere, often posing on top of a
rearing horse. It's a powerful, masculine and militaristic image.
This victorious story of
Turkish nationalism which took place between 1915 and 1923 contains a
darker side: the Armenian genocide. Estimates differ, but most
historians agree on a figure of around 1.5 million deaths. Thousands
of other Christian minorites were also killed. Nationalism may have a
sense of pride and honour and duty, but it also tends to kill the
people it excludes.
From the Allied
perspective Gallipoli was merely a battle in a much larger war. The
battle may have been lost but the war was won. British and French
imperialism triumphed over the Ottoman Empire. Maps were redrawn,
promises were made and broken, new countries were formed out of the
wreckage of the Ottoman Empire. There's a very convincing line which
can be drawn from the outcomes of 1918 to the terrible conflicts we
see raging across the Middle East region today. The interference of
Britain and France in the region created the seeds of discontent
which are still playing out in the conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Palestine.
This is the truth about
Gallipoli: the outcomes are all negative. Looked at narrowly, it was
a cynical and callous act of power politics which claimed the lives
of thousands of men fighting each other in horrible conditions on a
tiny strip of coastline. Looked at from a broader perspective
Gallipoli was part of a nationalistic project which in its turn
claimed the lives of 1.5 million Armenians. As an aspect of British
and French imperialism, Gallipoli is also a part of a terrible legacy
of Western intervention in the Middle East.
With these facts in mind
it is hard to resist the conclusion that the nature and character of
the Anzac commemoration in 2015 is both absurd and obscene. Absurd,
because in its relentless and narrow focus upon the moral qualities
of the dead soldiers, and a sentimental ideology of “remembrance”,
it completely ignores the fact that absolutely nothing good resulted
from all of those deaths. Obscene because of the silence it fosters
about parallel events which have great relevance and very real
connection with Gallipoli seen from a broader historical perspective.
Isolating Gallipoli from the Armenian genocide, from the conflicts in
Syria and Iraq is an act of historical bad faith. The fact that the
rituals of Anzac are conducted with a solemn sense of moral duty
makes them even more despicable.
iHyde,
Robin. 'Passport to Hell', Auckland University Press 1986 (1936),
p.84
iiAitken,
Alexander. 'Gallipoli to the Somme', Otago University Press 1963
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