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Graves of Gallipoli

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It was olive season when I visited Gallipoli. I roll my tent and take a last, heavy look across the headstones bathed in the morning mists before hefting my rucksack to start the day’s hike. The road hums with cars ferrying pickers to the fields. Looking out over the groves, the stones of Twelve Tree Copse Cemetery glow golden in the low sunlight, another vast necropolis whose scale and grandeur can only be fully appreciated from this distance.

Over 56 000 Commonwealth and French troops were killed in the prolonged and failed campaign to take control of the Dardanelle Straits in Turkey, and the Ottomans lost a similar number. The military disaster of 1915-1916 was of such magnitude as to enter the realms of myth and legend on both sides.

Australians and New Zealanders gather in remembrance of their war dead each 25th April, this anniversary of their First World War baptism of fire. Stories abound to illustrate their idealised national characteristic ‘ANZAC Spirit’ of smiles and self-sacrifice in the face of intense hardship that were exemplified amongst their troops facing a hopeless task.

The Turks too remember the campaign annually on ‘Martyr’s Day’, the 18th March. More than a month in advance of the main Allied assault, a preliminary naval force attempted to pass the Straits. The ships fell victim to mines laid in response to still earlier British naval assaults and the ships were forced to retreat. The heroic defence of the Turkish homeland during this campaign marks the start of Mustafa Kemal’s great ascension to power and his founding of the Turkish nation in the aftermath of the war. Kemal later took the title of ‘Atatürk’ – father of the Turks – and his continuing cult of personality is obvious enough to any visitor to Turkey, though Erdoğan’s face is now seen as often in public places.

For six days, I hiked and camped between the battlefields and cemeteries. Most Ottoman dead were interred at the Martyrs’ Memorial but outside the few smaller cemeteries, generators buzz and pith helmets, flags and fridge magnets dangle from souvenir stalls. I find myself grateful for the quiet oases of the Commonwealth Cemeteries, perfect gardens free of national flags and emblems save the architectural trappings of these cemeteries the world over, and the uniform headstones with their touching personal epitaphs:

 

AS IVY CLINGS TO THE OAK,

MY MEMORY CLINGS TO THEE,

MY SON

“IF THE CALL COMES

I AM WILLING TO DIE”

FROM HIS DIARY

HIS LAST WORDS

GOODBYE COBBER,

GOD BLESS YOU

 

HIS FRIENDS BEREFT

HAVE ONLY LEFT

HIS PHOTO ON THE WALL. MOTHER

 

GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN

THAN HE LAY DOWN HIS LIFE

FOR HIS COUNTRY

 

 

Each night I managed to find some quiet corner of these forgotten fields where I could pitch my tent to join several hundred men, mostly of my age, for one night of their eternal sleep. To inhabit this space for six long days allows the objective and emotional magnitude of this campaign and war to sink in, and to question its inevitability.

 

After two years of fighting, Gallipoli was a total failure for the Allies; it had only achieved its secondary objective to draw Ottoman troops and resources away from the Ottoman’s Eastern Front where they were fighting the Russian Empire. Today, both Erdoğan and Putin are said to be neoimperialists:  Sultan and Tsar exporting economic and cultural influence and using religion to erode their Republics - and we once again find Turkey at war with Russia, this time in Syria.

Nationalism is easier to spot in other people and cultures, but a mirror can be startling. My own distaste for the souvenir stands at war cemeteries comes from my own cultural associations with Remembrance of war dead, and it was only by visiting this peninsula that I ever considered Gallipoli from the Ottoman point of view: staving off a full scale invasion with the intent to collapse and conquer the heart of the Empire. But I feel more justified in my thanks for the flagless culture of respect that the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission developed even while the War was ongoing. To acknowledge loss and sacrifice, bravery and vulnerability is not to profiteer from it or to glorify it to political ends. Patriotism can do the former, nationalism the latter. We must carefully consider why we do it as we do, how closely we link ourselves to those who went before and avoid political propagandist abuses of these voiceless dead.

Stepping out of Redoubt Cemetery, I pluck an olive from one of the trees whose roots draw life from those they embalm below. Squeezing the black fruit, a drop of juice as dark and opaque as a clot of blood bursts from the top before staining my fingers as it falls and soaks into the ground at my feet.

 

‘The Vineyard’ was the site of some of the fiercest fighting on the peninsula and the inscriptions here are mostly prefixed with ‘BELIEVED TO BE BURIED IN THIS CEMETERY’, or simply ‘A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR † KNOWN UNTO GOD’. The low sun picks out lines in the ground, remains of trenches, scars of war. Now the olive groves are ploughed and harrowed and the sounds of guns are replaced by the gentle bustle of harvesting. As swords are beaten into ploughshares, so too are the vines that fuelled the Mineads’ madness transformed into olive branches of peace. But we are all part of that process.

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