THE last time I visited Gallipoli, two years ago, I looked at the battlefields and cemeteries with very much an Australian eye. No one who visits there can leave without being deeply moved, and I was no exception.
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This time, as we walked around the Anzac Cove Cemetery and the Lone Pine Cemetery, reading tombstone inscriptions, taking in the atmospherics and looking out over a serene Anzac Cove, we could see Turkish workers erecting seating for tomorrow's Anzac Day ceremonies.
I had written about John Ritchie (see today's MVHS historical photo) just before I left, and my thoughts were very much of his story, told in his own words, of the landing at Gallipoli on April 25, and the defence of Lone Pine.
This time my group was accompanied by a young Turkish guide named Aykut (pronounced "I-coot"), who had attended university. I asked him to give us a Turkish view of Gallipoli. What follows comes from him, coupled with some of my own research.
My two weeks in Turkey included visits to a number of Turkish museums including the extensive museum attached to Atat rk's Mausoleum in Ankara (not to mention hot-air ballooning in Cappadocia but that is a digression).
"Gelibolu" is the name given to Gallipoli by the Turks, but the battles that took place there are referred by the Turks as the Battles of Canakkale (with the 'C' pronounced as 'Ch'), which is a town across the Dardanelles from the Gallipoli Peninsula, at their narrowest point.
While our national day of mourning for all our servicemen is April 25, the day of the Allied landing on Gallipoli in 1915, the Turkish national day of mourning called Martyr's Day is March 18, the day in 1915 when the Allied (British and French) naval assault began and was repulsed by the Turks, near Canakkale.
In 1915, Gallipoli was part the Ottoman Empire which, since its conquest of Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1453, had extended from the Balkan countries, through the Middle East to the north of Africa, including Egypt. By the end of the 19th Century, the Ottoman Empire was torn by internal strife within its Empire, and was called "the sick man of Europe". Isolated and antagonised by Russia, it agreed to become an ally of Germany in 1914.
Today Turkey is a modern country of about 55 million people about 95 per cent of the population is Muslim. Turkey has been a democratic country with a secular government since 1924.
This was due mainly to the efforts of one man, Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938), later given the name Atat rk, meaning "Father of the Turks". This man was a giant of the 20th Century world. Every town throughout Turkey has a statue or some memorial to Atat rk; everywhere there are pictures of him.
In 1919, Turkey was invaded by Greece, and Kemal led his country's resistance to victory. In 1924 he became modern Turkey's first elected president, introducing radical reforms: democratic elections, removing religious rule with secular courts and schools, replacing Ottoman scripts with a modern Roman alphabet and the Turkish language.
Every November 10, at 9.05 in the morning, sirens blare, traffic in Turkey comes to a halt, and a minute's silence is observed. This is the time in 1938 at which President Atat rk died in the Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul.
Amazingly, there is a memorial to Atat rk (the commander of forces opposing the Australian soldiers at Gallipoli) among all the memorials in Anzac Parade, Canberra. When Atat rk died in 1938, the RSL sent a message of condolence to Turkey.
Who was this man?
On April 25, 1915, Kemal was a little-known Turkish Lieutenant-Colonel serving at Gallipoli. At about 9.30am, Kemal saw the Anzacs landing and then saw a group of Turkish soldiers running in retreat from the Anzac Cove. In his book "Gallipoli", Robert Rhodes James gives Kemal's recounting of his words to these soldiers.
"'Why are you running away?' (I (Kemal) said.)
'Sir, the enemy,' they said.
'Where?'
'Over there,' they said, pointing out hill 261?
I said to the men who were running away, 'You cannot run from the enemy'.
'We have got no ammunition,' they said.
'If you haven't got any ammunition, you have got your bayonets,' I said, and shouting to them, I made them fix their bayonets and lie down on the ground'.
When the men fixed their bayonets and lay down on the ground the enemy also lay down."
The Australian War Memorial writes: "Kemal was later to see this as one of the most crucial moments of the day. The advancing Anzacs had been temporarily halted and he sent at once to have the advance units of the 57th Regiment sent up. For the rest of the day Kemal's men and, in a series of bloody counter-attacks, the soldiers of the 27th Regiment further south at Lone Pine, held back the Anzac attempts to advance. The Anzacs were unable to progress any further than those positions they would ultimately occupy for eight months at Gallipoli. On 25 April 1915, the Anzacs discovered that Turkish soldiers, well led and fighting for their homeland, would stand up to them."
A Turkish museum book writes: "Without waiting for orders, or permission, he (Kemal) immediately sent a regiment into action, and then his division. The Anzacs were halted and pushed back to the shore. Realising the danger, the combined fleet began furious rounds of shelling. If not for this assistance, the Anzacs would have been pushed into the sea. As it was, they were to remain on a narrow coastal strip until the end of the campaign."
A desperate Mustafa Kemal gave his most famous order to the men of the 57th Infantry Regiment: "I do not order you to fight, I order you to die. In the time it takes us to die, other troops and commanders can come and take our places." The 57th consequently suffered horrific losses. There is a memorial to the 57th at Gallipoli with a depiction of Mustafa Kemal giving this order, and a visit to Gallipoli is not complete without seeing this Turkish memorial.
Further up the road is Chanuk Bair, on top of a high hill overlooking Suvla Bay, strategically the most important of Gallipoli's hills. Here two memorials stand side by side: the New Zealand memorial and a statue of Mustafa Kemal. The New Zealanders captured Chanuk Bair at one stage but were subsequently removed by Kemal. Kemal's statue on Chanuk Bair marks the spot where he was struck in the chest by a bullet, which deflected off the watch in his top fob pocket, and he miraculously survived.
There was a mutual respect between the opposing soldiers at Gallipoli, exhibited during the battles and long after the war.
Lord Richard Casey, who had been a member of the Anzacs landing at Gallipoli on April 25, returned there in 1967 as Governor-General of Australia. In a speech, he recalled a lull in the fighting and a wounded British soldier lying severely injured in no man's land between the Allied and Turkish trenches. He saw a Turk, stripped to the waist and unarmed, leave his trench, pick up the wounded man and carry him over to the Allied trench, just a short distance away. A memorial has since been erected for this incident (but unfortunately the Turkish soldier carrying the wounded Brit is fully uniformed and has a rifle slung over his back).
A Turkish veteran, Adil Shahin, wrote:
Their duty was to come here and invade,
Ours was to defend.
At the Canakkale Martyr's Memorial, the first lines from an inscription by Turkish poet Mehmet Ersoy (1873-1936) are:
Do not ignore the ground on which you have walked,
It is not ordinary soil.
Reflect on the thousands of people, who lie beneath
Without a shroud.
It should be remembered that Australian casualties were greatly exceeded by British and Turkish casualties. The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs has issued the following casualty figures for Gallipoli: the United Kingdom is estimated at 32,000 dead with no figure for the wounded; France 9,798 dead, 17,371 wounded; Australia 8,709 dead, 19,441 wounded; New Zealand 2,721 dead, 4,752 wounded; India 1,358 dead, 3,421 wounded; Newfoundland 49 dead, 93 wounded; Turkey 56,643 dead, 107,007 wounded.
A stone monument, adjacent to the Anzac Beach Cemetery, is signed with "Atat rk, 1934". It gives a Turkish attitude to Gallipoli, and contains the following lines in its inscription:
You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries,
Wipe away your tears,
Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace.
After having lost their lives in this land,
They have become our sons as well.
The first (translated) verses from a poem called Gallipoli by Turkish Poet B lent Ecevit (1925-2006) are:
"What land were you torn away from
What makes you so sad having come here"
Asked Mehmet the soldier from Anatolia
Addressing the Anzac lying near.
"From the uttermost ends of the world I come
So it writes on my tombstone"
Answered the youthful Anzac "and here I am
Buried in a land that I had not even known"
"Do not be disheartened mate"
Mehmet told him tenderly
"You share with us the same fate.
In the bosom of our country
You are not a stranger anymore
You have become a Mehmet just like me"
On leaving Gallipoli, we caught the ferry across the Dardanelles from Eceabat to Canakkale. On the Canakkale side, a large red and white (Turkey's national colours) "18 Mart 1915" (18 March 1915) is emblazoned on the side of a hill near the city. Cut into the Gallipoli hillside is the large "Dur Yolcu" memorial, which pictures a soldier and several lines of a Turkish poem by Necmettin Halil Onan. One translation is:
Traveller halt! The soil you tread
Once witnessed the end of an era.
Certainly the poet was referring to the end of the Ottoman Empire, but perhaps Australians could take an inference from it as well.
So this Anzac Day, we will remember the sacrifice of all those Australians - from Gallipoli to Afghanistan - who have given their lives in foreign lands, as well as those who have returned home having served their country, many of whom were severely injured physically and mentally.
And perhaps we may also remember the sacrifice of the Turkish soldiers who lie in the Gallipoli soil so close to our Anzac soldiers.
LEST WE FORGET