Graves of Gallipoli
Turkish and ANZAC Legends
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. I am here to visit the war graves of students who attended the same school as I did just over a century earlier.
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. I am here to visit the war graves of students who attended the same school as I did just over a century earlier.
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 between the battlefields. 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
HIS LAST WORDS
GOODBYE COBBER,
GOD BLESS YOU
“IF THE CALL COMES
I AM WILLING TO DIE”
FROM HIS DIARY
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
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.
By day I inevitably hiked the routes of major advances and battles as I went between cemetaries left in the wake of each offensive. Each night I found a space at a respectful edge to pitch my tent. If I arrived before dark, I would walk between the rows searching for the student on my list and repeat it in the rising mists of the next morning. I was 25 years old — older than most ages carved into each plaque. Every student I visited knew the same places I had for my five years of school. They knew the same town, sang the same hymns and songs and wandered the same rooms and broadly followed a similar way of life there, knew the same words of school slang and would mostly be from a similar background. Each gravestone I visited was me. I cooked simple dinners from what food I carried in my 20kg pack - similar to military loads of the day - zipped up my tent and slept amongst thousands of friends.
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 and stains my fingers as it falls and soaks into the ground at my feet.
These battlefields, known as ‘The Vineyard’ saw some of the fiercest fighting on this peninsula and the inscriptions 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, and I take a last glance at its illusion of incandescence on the limestone monument at Twelve Tree Copse, a mile away, warming its 3,360 souls.
Now the olive groves are ploughed and harrowed and the sounds of guns are replaced by the gentle bustle of the harvest. As swords are beaten into ploughshares, so too are is the Vineyard that fuelled these Maenads’ frenzy transformed into olive branches of peace. This was never a passive process though. We must prune the olive branches of our own trees well if we are to harvest the fruits of peace.
