For nearly forty years the cemeteries have been tended with great devotion by a Major Millington, an old Australian soldier. He has a curious existence, for at Chanak on the Narrows, where he has his house, he is in a Turkish military area and may not move more than a thousand paces in any direction without escort. However, the young Turkish conscripts accompany him willingly enough as he goes over to the peninsula month by month and year by year to supervise his staff of local stonemasons and gardeners. The Turks find this preoccupation with the dead somewhat strange, since their own soldiers who died at Gallipoli were buried in anonymous communal graves, and until recently almost their only memorial was a legend picked out in large white letters on the hillside above Chanak. It reads, ‘March 18, 1915’—a reminder to all passing ships that that was the day when the Allied Fleet was defeated. However, the Turkish gardeners work well; no wall around the French and British cemeteries is allowed to crumble, no weed is anywhere allowed to grow, and now in the nineteen-fifties the gardens are more beautiful than ever. Yet hardly anyone ever visits them. Except for occasional organized tours not more than half a dozen visitors arrive from one year’s end to the other. Often for months at a time nothing of any consequence happens, lizards scuttle about the tombstones in the sunshine and time goes by in an endless dream.
Bibliography
THE author’s thanks are due to the publishers who have allowed him to take quotations from the books marked with an asterisk.
Encyclopædia Britannica. 11th edition, 12th edition and 13th editions.
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The Secret Battle. A. P. Herbert. Methuen, 1919.
*The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, with a memoir by Edward Marsh. Sidgwick & Jackson, 1915.
The War Letters of General Monash. Angus & Robertson, 1925.
Grey Wolf. H. C. Armstrong. Arthur Barker, 1932.
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*Mons, Anzac and Kut. By an M.P. (Aubrey Herbert). Edward Arnold, 1919.
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Gallipoli: The Fading Vision. John North. Faber & Faber, 1936.
*Secrets of the Bosphorus. Henry Morgenthau. Hutchinson, 1918.
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Golden Horn. Francis Yeats-Brown. Gollancz, 1932.
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Turkey in the World War. Ahmad-Amin. Yale University Press, 1930.
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Index
Abdul Hamid,
Abydos,
Achi Baba,
Agamemnon, H.M.S.,
Aghyldere,
Albion, H.M.S.,
Allanson, Major,
Allenby, Field-Marshal,
Anafarta Sagir,
Anzac bridgehead, April 25 landing; description of,
Anzio,
Arcadian, S.S.,
Ari Burnu,
Arif,
Armenians, massacre of,
Arno,
Ashmead-Bardett, Ellis,
Askold,
Aspinall, Colonel (Brig.-General Cecil Aspinall-Oglander),
Asquith, Rt. Hon. H. H.,
Attlee, Clement,
Ayas Bay,
Bailloud, General,
Baldwin, General,
Balfour, A. J.,
Barbarossa Harradin,
Battleship Hill,
Blamey, Field-Marshal Sir Thomas,
Bedri,
Birdwood, General Sir William, sent to Dardanelles; does not believe Fleet can get through; would risk a landing; commands Anzac Corps; advises landing at Bulair; confident; at Gaba Tepe; commands Anzac landing; asks to abandon bridgehead; determined to advance; his position attacked; wounded; warns of attack; takes part in truce; always in front line; urges attack on Sari Bair; plans attack; reproved by Hamilton for discussing plan; deception scheme at Anzac; secretly disembarks new troops; struggle for Sari Bair; leads August 6 attack; prepares new onslaught on Sari Bair; criticized by Murdoch; against evacuation; appointed temporary C.-in-C.; rejects appointment; comes round to idea of evacuation; his part in Keyes-Munro argument; remains in Gallipoli; anxiety over lack of secrecy; ashore for last time; eager to evacuate Helles; lives to be ninety-six,