Gallipoli and the Death of Innocence in the First World War

Much ink has been spilled over Gallipoli, the ill-fated attempt by British, Empire and French troops in 1915 to force the Dardanelles straits and so open up a route for the Royal Navy to enter the sea of Marmara and knock Turkey out of the war. There is so much about the battle, that John Keegan called the ‘only epic of the war’, that is controversial: the vaulting strategic ambition of the campaign; Cabinet wranglings in London; insufficient supply of shells and manpower; the performance of the force’s commander, General Sir Ian Hamilton and his staff; poisonous rivalries between senior officers; the role of the Navy, and a host of other issues. Whether or not they will ever find a definitive resolution is unlikely now, 110 years on from the campaign.

What is, however, I think certain about it is that it seemed to mark the death of the jingoistic spirit of adventure and idealism with which Britain had entered the war in 1914. Although thoughts that the war would be over by Christmas are largely wide of the mark – Lord Kitchener in the very first days predicted that the country would need to prepare for a war lasting until 1917 at the earliest – very many people in Britain greeted the war enthusiastically. Rupert Brooke, the famous poet, wrote in his poem Peace,

Now, God be thanked who has matched us with his hour,

And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping!’

Brooke was, ironically, about to find himself at the very forefront of this sense of romance being blown apart. At the start of 1915 Winston Churchill and others in the cabinet were desperate to bring the war to an early close after realising that stalemate on the western front could run on for years. A proposed solution was that knocking Turkey out the war might precipitate a collapse of the Central Powers on their eastern flanks. When the Royal Navy failed to force the Dardanelles in March it was decided that the Army was to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula, the piece of land that flanked the western side of the straits and so enable the navy to pass through unscathed  Troops landed on April 25th and spent the rest of the year in bitter fighting against the defending Turks, who fought superbly and with command of the high ground throughout.

All this, however, was in the future for Brooke and his comrades when they sailed for Gallipoli as part of the Royal Naval Division, a recent creation of Churchill’s which had in its number a large proportion of the aristocracy and glamourous young men who were such a feature of pre-war life. One particular group of friends in the RND included Brooke, the Prime Minister’s son Arthur Asquith, the composer Denis Browne, the Olympic oarsman Frederick Kelly and the socialite and talented banker Patrick Shaw Stewart. Onboard their troopship SS Grantully Castle they formed the ‘Latin Club’ and would quote Homer to each other and dream about being the heirs to the great Trojan War heroes, Troy being visible from Gallipoli on the other side of the Dardanelles.

It all seemed preordained that Brooke, this strikingly handsome and gifted young man, was destined to win glory and renown in the campaign. But he never even made it to the Peninsula, dying of blood poisoning from an infected insect bite on his lip two days before the landings. He was buried on the island of Skyros.  The force’s commander, General Sir Ian Hamilton, was himself moved to comment on Brooke’s death with the Homeric, ’God has started a celestial spring cleaning, and our star is to be cribbed bright with the blood of our bravest and best.’

Brooke was, therefore, never to witness his friends’ dreams of adventure dashed upon the rocks of industrialised warfare from the very moment they landed. The Gallipoli campaign was to drag on through the year, ending in a bloody stalemate from which eventually the Allies decided to withdraw in December. It had not been glorious; there were precious few illusions about the hard road that awaited the survivors. The war was to last nearly another three years. But those young men on the Grantully Castle had had no idea of that as they headed east, to fight in the footsteps of Achilles and Hector.

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