Barney Campbell, on The Fires of Gallipoli

Barney, many congrats in the new novel. This is your second after the acclaimed Rain which was set during the conflict in Afghanistan. Now with The Fires of Gallipoli you’ve written about the Great War. This was a hugely traumatising war for Britain, was that why you wanted to write it?

Thank you very much. I just loved writing it. I’m constantly struck by how shattering an event the Great War was for Britain. Even now it forms an inextricable part of our national character. Every town and village carries a memorial of it, usually in its most visible place.  The experience of the war of course then shaped the rest of our twentieth century, most obviously in the politics of the 1920s and 30s but also beyond the Second World War too. I wanted to capture that, but I also wanted to highlight how formative an episode it was for the wider world too. So many issues in the news today – Ukraine and Gaza most obviously – can trace their causes directly back to those dreadful years when Europe decided to tear itself apart.

Edward Salter is your hero in The Fires of Gallipoli. With your own military experience, do you place yourself in the shoes of your main character in the novel?

Edward is a much better soldier than I ever was! No, Edward is definitely not me, but as he is the main character, and the necessary conduit through which the reader views the action, I suppose that one or two things he thinks, physical sensations for instance, are founded on aspects of my own experience. But really Edward is intended more as a kind of everyman character, someone who is thrust into the most brutal situation and yet manages to find deep and valuable experiences and relationships within it.

Gallipoli was quite rightly a hugely significant campaign for ANZAC forces, but it is often forgotten more British troops were killed than any other nationality on the allied side. What is it about Gallipoli that interests you?

People also forget that 10,000 Frenchmen were killed there too. Gallipoli intrigues me for so many reasons. I think it is the Great War’s most tantalizing ‘what if’ moment. What If Ian Hamilton’s forces had captured the Gallipoli peninsula and so allowed the Navy to capture Constantinople? Would the Turks have been knocked out of the war? And if so would the war have been shortened? And, and this is the big one, if that had happened would there have been a Bolshevik revolution in Russia? Like with all alternative history to speculate like this is essentially pointless but still very entertaining. I think it’s that element of the great strategic gamble and the sheer vaulting ambition of the enterprise that make the campaign so interesting.

Do you think the general public understand the traumatising effects of war?

Largely, yes I do. I think that so much of the literature of the twentieth century, and the film and television of this century, have done a very good job of conveying this to the public. Sadly also the constant stream of news from warzones round the world every day shows the suffering of civilians in a way that simply didn’t happen in previous conflicts.

Salter ends up working for Lord Kitchener as his friend returns to the trenches. Was a sense of abandonment something you wanted to explore when close comrades are separated for whatever reason?

The separation that Edward and Theo undergo in the book when they leave Gallipoli is a really testing moment for their relationship, which has been forged in such intense circumstances. That phenomenon is I think common to all sorts of friendships made between comrades, colleagues or friends when they leave the environment in which that friendship was made, be it school, a job or indeed a holiday. Can you keep it on track when the thing that glued you together at the start is no longer there? I think you can, definitely, but it does need work and application to make it do so.

What’s your assessment of Kitchener during WW1?

There’s a question!  The thing about Kitchener that you have to grasp is that whatever his qualities (which were many) and his faults (which were many) the nature of the position that he occupied as Secretary of State of War was quite extraordinary, arguably more powerful and influential over the military dispositions of this country than anyone in our history, expecting perhaps medieval kings. For anyone to bear that pressure well was impossible and I think you can see in Kitchener’s behaviour over the war until his death in 1916 something approaching a nervous breakdown. I simply don’t think anyone’s brain would have been big enough to have coped with it all. I view it as highly unlikely that he would have been kept in post by Lloyd George – who hated him – when he succeeded Asquith as Prime Minister in December 1916. As it happens Kitchener dying when he did rather protected his reputation to a quite significant degree.

Do you think Churchill is blamed too harshly, and the Admiralty and commanders on the ground sometimes get away with criticism for the failures of Gallipoli?

There are so few senior commanders who emerge from the campaign with reputation unblemished.  Beyond criticism of individuals I think the bigger problem with it was one of base logic, that a force of the size the Allies were able to deploy was totally insufficient for the task as they could and would not spare troops from the main theatre of war in northwest Europe. Such a force was never going to succeed in capturing a piece of land where the enemy held all the commanding ground and was dug in well. I am convinced that Montgomery, Slim, Eisenhower, Schwarzkopf, Petraeus or any other vaunted modern military commander would have come a cropper when faced with the challenges and frictions that Gallipoli presented.

Which authors have inspired you, and similarly which were there non-fiction books on Gallipoli that you found most helpful?

I read Classics at university and did a dissertation on how classical works inspired the literature of the First World War; those writers have always been a huge influence. Of more modern writers I love William Boyd, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Sebastian Faulks, Susan Hill, Nicholas Monsarrat and Karl Marlantes. The literature on Gallipoli is voluminous; the pick of the bunch I think are the books on it by Alan Moorehead, Robert Rhodes James and Tim Travers. Louis de Bernieres’s novel ‘Birds Without Wings’ has an amazing section on Gallipoli written from the Turkish point of view that I could not recommend highly enough.

Will we see Edward return or will you begin a new story next?

Edward may return, indeed the book does set him up for more adventures, doesn’t it? But my next project is to do with the aftermath of the Great War and a young woman trying to come to terms with her father’s death in it. We use her experience as a microcosm for how the country as a whole tried to work out how to deal with that dreadful blow it had just received.

Barney Campbell is the author of new novel, The Fires of Gallipoli.