Anzac troops remembered in service at Gallipoli
Version 0 of 1. They were in hell before they even hit the beach, and at a simple ceremony in hazy spring sunshine on the glorious but unforgiving peninsula they tried to seize 100 years ago, they were remembered. Prince Charles and Prince Harry read at the service at the Cape Helles memorial, a towering stone obelisk on the southernmost tip of the Gallipoli peninsula whose square base walls bear the names of the 20,673 British and Commonwealth servicemen who lost their lives near here “and who have no known grave”. Prince Charles, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand, Tony Abbott and John Key, laid wreaths during the hour-long service of music, readings and prayers, one of several on the peninsula this weekend, as did the presidents of Ireland and Pakistan, Michael Higgins and Mamnoon Hussain, and British foreign secretary, Philip Hammond. “The monument around which we are gathered today honours all who served [at Gallipoli],” said Air Chief Marshal Sir Joe French in his address. “They represented many cultures, held many faiths and none, and spoke many languages … Today, we recognise their courage, and remember their sacrifice.” Around 58,000 Allied troops – including 29,000 British and Irish soldiers, and 11,000 Australians and New Zealanders – were killed in the disastrous eight-month attempt to capture the Gallipoli peninsula, arguably the most ill-conceived, incompetently led and ultimately pointless campaign of the first world war. Around 87,000 Ottoman Turkish troops also lost their lives defending the narrow strip of land that guards the western shore of the Dardanelles strait, while at least 300,000 on both sides were seriously wounded. The courage and sacrifice of their soldiers helped forge the identity of Australia and New Zealand as young, independent nations. The calamitous British-conceived campaign is seen as the birthplace of the core Antipodean values of endurance, heroism, sacrifice, humour and – above all – “mateship” or camaraderie. To a congregation of around 600 people, Prince Charles read from Gallipoli, by John Masefield, who observed of the unfortunate men who clambered ashore on one of the five beaches around Cape Helles at dawn on 25 April 1915 that within a few hours “perhaps a tenth would have looked their last on the sun, and be a part of some foreign earth or dumb things that the tides push”. Serving soldiers read, too, from the letters and diaries of men who fought here. The Allied troops who rushed the beaches here 100 years ago, wrote Captain Richard Willis of the First Battalion, the Lancashire Fusiliers – who went on to win a Victoria Cross that day – were little more than “target practice for the concealed Turks”. While still 100 yards from the shore, Willis wrote – his words read by Corporal Andrew Evans – “only half of the 30 men in my boat were left alive”. Once on land, the soldiers were forced to wait for wire-cutters to slash through the coils of barbed wire so were “shot in helpless batches, while they waited. They could not even use their rifles in retaliation since the sand and sea had clogged their action”. Related: Remembering Gallipoli: honouring the bravery amid the bloody slaughter The Last Post rang out, and a minute’s silence was marked by two shots from one of the six warships anchored off the promontory. Roger Boissier, the son of a naval lieutenant commander at Gallipoli, read from Rupert Brooke’s The Dead, remembering those who “had seen movement, and heard music; known slumber and waking; loved, gone proudly friended … Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended”. Gallipoli was the brainchild of Winston Churchill – then First Lord of the Admiralty – in early 1915, with the aim of breaking the deadlock on the Western Front by opening up the heavily mined Dardanelles, seizing Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) and linking up with Russia to knock Ottoman Turkey out of the war. A naval bombardment of the heavily fortified 50-mile peninsula failed miserably, and it was decided Gallipoli would have to be captured by land. Mainly British troops came ashore around Cape Helles, and the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landed further north, at an area now known as Anzac Cove. Under raking fire, many showed extraordinary courage: six of the First Battalion, Royal Lancashire Fusiliers were awarded Victoria Crosses for their actions on the first day of the landings alone. But they were hopelessly pinned down by a well-dug-in and well-equipped defending force, and the battle rapidly descended into trench warfare. Those who survived the initial onslaught found themselves “under the ground, sweating in the trench, dodging death and danger without rest or food or drink, in the blazing sun or the frost of a Gallipoli night, till death seemed relaxation and a wound a luxury,” according to Masefield, read by Prince Charles. Conditions were appalling: suffocating heat in summer, shortages of food and water, rotting unburied corpses that drew thick swarms of huge black flies, and above all the scourge of dysentery that spared almost no one, leaving them weakened and exhausted. A summer offensive and renewed landings proved equally ineffective, and in the end the war council in London had little option but to withdraw the Anzac forces in late December, and the British troops in January 1916. Prince Harry read from AP Herbert’s poem The Bathe, drawn from the poet’s own experience at Gallipoli: “Come friend and swim. We may be better then, / But here the dust blows ever in the eyes / And wrangling round are the weary fevered men, / Forever made with flies … Tomorrow we must stagger up the hill / To man a trench and live among the lice.” A Turkish staff colonel, Osman Kardal, read the words of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, a lieutenant colonel who commanded a division at Gallipoli when he was 33 years old and would, barely eight years later, become the founding father of the Turkish republic. His soldiers’ trenches were barely a dozen metres from the Allies’, Atatürk recalled – close enough for the enemy to lob lit bottles of petrol across the gap, setting fire to the trenches’ timber reinforcing beams: “The heroic devotion of our men stood up unflinchingly in the face of all the flames and explosions. They held their positions with admirable determination, and gave effective response to the enemy.” All 10,500 places for the traditional dawn service at Anzac Cove were allocated months ago by ballot, and a further 10,000 Australian and New Zealand tourists are believed to be on the Gallipoli peninsula for the centennial commemorations. |