The Best Gallipoli Yarns and Forgotten Stories
Page 20
‘This fellow’s a parasite,’ he said aloud, considering it further, ‘or perhaps I’m all wrong. Perhaps there’s some right thinking behind all this after all. The shadow may be more than the substance.
‘But, by God,’ he concluded, ‘I’d like to run into some who did their bit here, and pass the joke on.’
The steamer whistled again; and McCullough pushed back through the scrub to the spur, which overlooked the beach. He saw a large vessel coming in under a good head of steam. Nearer and nearer she came—her decks alive with a freight very different from that carried in his time!
As he gazed, like one in a trance, the liner drew in cautiously to the pier; and the place, which before had seemed unpeopled, soon became crowded with men and women. Vehicles were making their way down to the landing place; and, guessing these to be the means of transit to the pub higher up, it struck McCullough that the dry throat must have been notably out of fashion in this later breed of Anzac.
It was a long time since McCullough had seen a crowd like that—in another existence, it seemed. There were men in holiday attire such as he had seen on the pier at Southport and women in clothes that were new and much changed in fashion since the casting-out of his soul into the wasteland . . . but very becoming, he thought, for all that.
There were youths, too, and girls of all ages.
McCullough felt a great longing to get closer to that crowd.
So strong was this feeling that he pushed further out upon the spur which, being eroded and sandy like much of the land there, gave way suddenly beneath his weight. He made a frantic attempt to get back to safety—but too late. With a swiftness that completely blotted out his senses, he dropped, amidst a great welter of stones and dust, into the ravine below.
***
‘I think he’ll do well enough now,’ said the doctor, as he turned, with something like a smile, from the bed in the hospital ship. ‘He seems to be recovering and I think he’ll beat the fish this time.’
McCullough opened his eyes. He could feel a heavy wrapping of bandages about his head and limbs. Above him, looking down into his own, he saw a woman’s face, a nurse’s face.
‘So you’ve stopped dreaming at last?’ she said.
LEON GELLERT
JIM HAYNES
Leon Gellert was a poet, soldier and respected journalist and newspaperman. Born in 1892 and educated in Adelaide, he was beaten by his father until he decided to take self-defence lessons at the YMCA and threw his father on his back when he was next attacked.
Gellert left school at seventeen, worked as a pupil-teacher at Unley Public School and, with the financial help of an uncle, educated himself further at Adelaide University and taught P.E. at Hindmarsh Public School until he enlisted as a private in the AIF in October 1914.
Gellert landed on Anzac Beach at dawn on 25 April and survived nine weeks on Gallipoli before being wounded by shrapnel and suffering from septicaemia and dysentery. He had to be evacuated to Malta, where he contracted typhoid and was sent to England to convalesce. That is where most of his Anzac poems, later collected together in Songs of a Campaign, were written.
After collapsing into a coma Gellert was diagnosed as having epilepsy, repatriated and discharged as medically unfit in June 1916. Amazingly, he re-enlisted in Adelaide in November, only to be discharged four days later when his medical record was uncovered.
He returned to teaching, at Norwood Public School, and revised and added to Songs of a Campaign, which was hailed by The Bulletin as one of the best verse collections to have come out of the war. Published in 1917, the book won the prestigious Bundey prize for English verse, and in 1918 Angus & Robertson Ltd published a third and enlarged edition, illustrated by Norman Lindsay.
A second collection of verse, The Isle of San, was published as a limited edition in 1919, but Gellert became disillusioned with literature and turned to journalism.
After his marriage to Kathleen Saunders on Christmas Day 1918, the couple moved to Sydney where Gellert taught English at Cleveland Street Intermediate High School until 1922. He wrote a column for Smith’s Weekly and, through his friendship with Norman Lindsay, became editor of Art in Australia and a director of Art in Australia Ltd, which also published the magazine Home that Gellert edited as well.
This led to other editing positions and he continued working in Sydney as a journalist and literary editor with The Daily Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald until his wife died in 1969.
Gellert then returned to Adelaide and spent his last years with his pet dachshund at Hazelwood Park in a house he called Crumble Cottage. He died in August 1977.
Leon Gellert was a great character and a truly gifted poet. His Anzac poetry and children’s verse were much anthologised and remembered throughout the first half of the twentieth century, but are now mostly long out of print and forgotten.
ANZAC COVE
LEON GELLERT
There’s a lonely stretch of hillocks;
There’s a beach asleep and drear;
There’s a battered broken fort beside the sea.
There are sunken, trampled graves;
And a little rotting pier;
And winding paths that wind unceasingly.
There’s a torn and silent valley;
There’s a tiny rivulet
With some blood upon the stones beside its mouth.
There are lines of buried bones;
There’s an unpaid waiting debt;
There’s a sound of gentle sobbing in the South.
OUR SONS AS WELL
JIM HAYNES
These days Turkey is still a poor nation by European standards. Many Turks have migrated over the past decades—one and a half million, in fact. The bulk of these have relocated on a temporary basis as ‘migrant workers’ in European nations, especially Germany.
Turkish migration to Australia, however, has for the most part been by families wanting to settle permanently. Government-assisted migration to Australia began in 1968 and the early intake was of unskilled labourers and peasant families with little English. Since the 1980s this has changed and permanent visas are given only to highly skilled Turks and those qualifying under family reunion regulations. According to the 2006 census, there were some 59,400 Turkish Australians.
***
In 1972 a Turkish migrant and former Turkish heavyweight wrestling champion, Kemal Dover, decided to march with six other Turks in Sydney’s Anzac Day march under a banner that read ‘Turkish–Australian Friendship Will Never Die’. Their participation was apparently completely unofficial but well received by the crowd.
When official requests were made by Turkish groups to be involved in Anzac Day in the early 1980s, they were denied. Victorian RSL president Bruce Ruxton famously stated, ‘Anyone that was shooting us doesn’t get in.’
The Turkish attitude to their old foe, the Anzacs, has always been generous, forgiving and understanding. When our official Australian War Historian, Charles Bean, returned to the peninsula in 1919 to document and photograph the battlefields and the graves, he was received with courtesy and respect. Similar cooperation was afforded to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which was assisted by the Turks in setting up the many beautifully laid-out and cared-for Allied graveyards on the peninsula.
Even though the Ottoman army lost more than 86,000 men at Gallipoli, compared to 11,000 Anzacs and 31,000 British and French, there is really only one Ottoman cemetery on the peninsula. It is a combined cemetery, mosque and memorial to the 57th Regiment. It contains a wall showing 1,817 names of those who died from the regiment.
The 57th was one of those under the command of Kemal Ataturk. An all-Turkish regiment, it happened to be on the parade ground ready for exercises when news of the landing came on the morning of 25 April. It was the regiment to which Kemal issued the famous order-of-the-day:
I don’t order you to attack, I order you to die. In the time it takes us to die, other troops and commanders can come and take our places.
In buying time to allow reinforcements to be brought up into place on 25 April, the 57th Regiment was completely wiped out.
The Turks did build other monuments at various places on the battlefields at Anzac and at Helles. There is a gigantic statue of Kemal Ataturk on the spot where he turned the tide of the battle at Chunuk Bair. It stands beside the enormous monolithic memorial to the New Zealanders who died defending the hill.
There are a few isolated Turkish graves and other Turkish memorials and statues on the peninsula, including the statue of a brave Turkish soldier who carried a wounded British officer back to his trench during the fighting on 25 April. The bulk of the memorials and graveyards, however, are those of the invaders, not the defenders.
In 1934 Kemal Ataturk summed up many Turks’ sentiments about the experience of 1915 when he wrote the words now enshrined on an enormous cement tablet above Anzac Cove:
To those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives . . .
You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country, therefore rest in peace.
There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehemets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours.
You, the mothers who sent your sons from far away countries . . .
Wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.
***
In 1973 the Turkish government designated 330 square kilometres of the peninsula as the Gallipoli Peninsula National Historical Park. In 1997 this became a Peace Park with a rehabilitation plan organised by the International Union of Architects.
From the late 1980s there has been Turkish representation in Anzac Day marches in Australia and, in 1985, a small group of Anzac veterans returned to Gallipoli on Anzac Day as invited guests of the Turkish government. At the same time Turkey officially renamed Ari Burnu Cove ‘Anzac Cove’, or ‘Anzak Koyu’ in Turkish.
A larger group of Gallipoli veterans was there for the dawn service in 1990 to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of Anzac Day, along with 10,000 others, including then Australian prime minister, Bob Hawke, and political leaders from Turkey, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
Since that time the pilgrimage to Gallipoli for Anzac Day has grown to the point where new roads are having to be built to deal with the convoys of buses bringing in more than 20,000 travellers each Anzac Day. The centenary celebrations have been planned for years.
What is even more significant is that the crowd consists, to a large degree, of young Australian and New Zealand backpackers and school groups. The interest and involvement displayed by young people in the Anzac Day celebrations is fascinating and gives a true indication of the campaign’s place in Australia’s history, national pride and self-perception.
In my youth, the conventional wisdom of the day was that Anzac would be forgotten as the veterans passed away. Despite the usual primary school lessons every April, as a young man I had little interest in the Gallipoli legend. My grandfathers fought at the Somme and in the Balkans as members of the British army, not at Gallipoli. Also, like many of my generation, I was busy in my youth protesting our involvement in the war in Vietnam.
It was only much later, after many years of researching, analysing and writing about the Australian character, that I became fascinated by the role of Anzac in our folklore. And for someone with no personal or family connection to the event itself, I was rather surprised to find that my September 2004 visit to the battlefields of Gallipoli was a deeply moving and emotional experience.
My idea had been to visit the area as research and background for this book. My main interest was to gain an understanding of the terrain and the landmarks that had become so familiar as I had collected and read and edited stories written about the campaign and its effects on the lives of Australians ninety years ago. My motivation for putting together this collection came from a more literary and sociological viewpoint than from any personal, military or historical perspective.
It wasn’t until I stood at Ari Burnu Point, where the first boats touched the shore, with the water lapping my shoes and uncontrolled tears running down my face, that I fully realised how much the Gallipoli experience is a part of the Australian psyche. I was rather glad the battlefields and beaches were virtually deserted when I was there.
I am sure many Turks feel the same about the ‘Battle of Canakkale’. Former New South Wales RSL president Rusty Priest once said, ‘Australia and Turkey are perhaps the only two countries in the world that have a strong friendship born out of a war.’ He meant, of course, a war in which the two countries were enemies.
***
A few days before reaching Anzac Cove, we sat having lunch on the deck of a wonderful seafood restaurant in the town of Gelibulou. This town is the ‘Gallipoli’ after which the peninsula is named. It is situated well north of the battlefields and was untouched by the battles which bear its name.
The blue waters of the Dardanelles sparkled all around us in the September sunshine as Ali and I spoke of our differing perceptions of the events of 1915. We agreed to disagree on several points and Ali concluded by stating that, to his way of thinking, the Gallipoli campaign changed the history of many nations, but affected three in particular.
‘It helped make the nation of Turkey and it gave your new nation an identity,’ he said. Then he added, ‘And if we had lost and you had won, supplies and arms would have reached Russia and there would probably have been no Russian Revolution. Imagine how that would have changed world history.’
Ali could well be right. It is certainly food for thought.
Ali also claimed the Turks probably knew about the withdrawal from Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay, but let our troops go without further casualties because they were leaving. I think he is wrong on this point, of course. There is solid evidence that the Ottoman and German generals had no idea about the evacuation. It was one time when we actually got the better of the Turks at Gallipoli.
I can forgive Ali for this lapse. It would be impolite to argue every point with such a wonderful host. Ali is all that any visitor to Turkey could wish for as a guide and travelling companion.
***
Back here in Sydney, when I check the international football results online, I find myself hoping that Besiktas has won on the weekend . . . and Fenebache has lost.
Back in Istanbul, Ali Salih Dirik, long-distance supporter of the Sydney Swans, hopes that any other team has beaten Collingwood, and the Sydney Swans have been victorious in his nation’s colours.
DUR YOLCU
NECMETTIN HALIL ONAN
Necmettin Halil Onan was born in 1902 in Çatalca, a rural district in Eastern Thrace on the European side of the Bosphorus, outside of Istanbul. He studied Turkish literature at Istanbul University and went to Ankara to join the national struggle during the civil war that followed WWI. After working for the Anatolian News Agency and in private schools, he was appointed Professor of Old Turkish Literature at Ankara University in 1942. He died in 1968. His two volumes of poetry were published in 1927 and 1933.
The first verse of this poem is carved into the hillside opposite Canakkale—it applies to all who fought at Gallipoli.
Dur yolcu, bilmeden gelip bastığın,
Bu toprak, bir devrin battığı yerdir.
Eğil de kulak ver, bu sessiz yığın,
Bir vatan kalbinin attığı yerdir!
Bu ıssız, gölgesiz yolun sonunda,
Gördüğün bu tümsek Anadolu’nda
İstiklal uğrunda, namus yolunda,
Can veren Mehmed’in yattığı yerdir!
Bu tümsek, koparken büyük zelzele,
Son vatan parçası geçerken ele,
Mehmed’in düşmanı boğduğu sele,
Mübarek kanını kattığı yerdir! . . .
Düşün ki haşrolan kan, kemik, etin
Yaptığı bu tümsek, amansız, çetin,
Bir harbin sonun
da bütün milletin,
Hürriyet zevkini tattığı yerdir!
TRAVELLER, HALT (DUR YOLCU)
TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH RHYME BY JIM HAYNES
Traveller, halt on this quiet mound.
This soil you thus tread, unaware,
Is where a generation ended . . . Listen,
The heart of a nation is beating there.
Where Anatolia meets the sea,
Here, at the end of our land,
For the sake of our independence,
Our soldiers made their stand.
From this mound arose our nation,
From this sacred sand and mud.
Our sons overwhelmed the invaders,
And bought freedom with their blood!
Think of the blood, bone and flesh
That made this sacred ground
When we fought in the war of all nations . . .
And halt, on this quiet mound.
TURKEY–AN ABBREVIATED HISTORY
JIM HAYNES
The nation of Turkey as we know it today did not exist in 1915. The Anzacs, and the other Allied forces on the Gallipoli Peninsula, were fighting against an army assembled by the Central Powers and consisting mostly of units of the Ottoman army, with some German officers and some German artillery. Although Turks made up a large part of the Ottoman army, its troops were actually an ethnic mixture that reflected the extent of the Ottoman Empire.
The people known as ‘Turks’ or ‘Seljuks’ or ‘Seljuk Turks’ were Muslims from central Asia, east of the Caspian Sea. They invaded Anatolia in 1071 and defeated the Christian Byzantine army at the battle of Manzikert. From that time onwards, the Christian religion and Greek language were gradually replaced in Anatolia by Islam and the Turkish language.
Christians in Western Europe sent a series of military expeditions called the Crusades to drive the Seljuk Turks from the Holy Land. However, the Seljuk Empire endured until 1243, when the Asian nomads known as Mongols invaded it.