Remembrance

When I made the second of my long trips, the overland from London to Singapore trip, I passed through Gallipoli shortly before Anzac Day. My diary for the day is rather sombre. A little less than a week before that anniversary I visited the cemetaries and the small museum. I thought that today, Remembrance Day, would be an appropriate time to quote the diary and also the poem that I wrote after my visit.

20th April 2001

The plan for today had been explained in last night’s daily briefing as ‘drive around the various cemeteries and monuments of Gallipoli’. It turned out to be exactly that - a drive, without stopping, around various cemeteries and monuments until we reached the Australian Cemetery at Lone Pine. Gallipoli was one of the most famous campaigns of World War One and if few people in England ever mark it nowadays that is partly because twentieth century history is a topic out of fashion but mostly because it means so much more to Australians, New Zealanders and Turks. Over 10,000 Australian and New Zealand troops were lost during the campaign. In total from both sides a quarter of a million were dead, wounded or missing. 86,000 Turks and 160,000 Allied troops were estimated as having been killed in the action. Considering that the Anzac forces and the Turks fought a series of bloody naval and military engagements to little effect other than the loss of so many lives each side came to have an unusual amount of respect for the others and a strange bond was forged between the enemies. Now every year on 25th April, the anniversary of the day in 1915 when the troops first landed, all of the nations involved commemorate the occasion with Anzac day when the dead of both wars are honoured. In Turkey, at the Lone Pine Cemetery preparations were underway for the service to be held there. Wooden decking was being erected for the seating and everywhere was being made even more neat and tidy than before. I walked around reading the plaques laid flat in the ground. On grave after grave the story was plain, soldiers still in their twenties had died here. It was a cold but bright day and there was a sense of peace and infinite sadness about the place made all the more poignant for the fact that this cemetery was on the ‘enemy’ soil.

We drove on to the main site where there is a small but moving museum. The displays of bullets, bombs and bones were not in themselves very interesting but a series of display cases filled with letters and documents from the Anzac troops and similar items with translations provided from the Turkish troops were especially moving. Saddest of all is the way that the sentiments in the letters home, if not the actual words, mirror each other perfectly to the extent that it is difficult to know simply from the words who was writing - an Australian far from home or a Turk in his own country. Every letter is filled with trivial detail of how beautiful the area is and how much they miss being with their families in their own homes. When the fighting and bloodshed is mentioned at all it is with a melancholy understatement as if there was an unspoken agreement to protect their loved ones from the full horror of the situation.

One letter from a Turk to his mother talks of how he wishes she could see how beautiful and peaceful the land here is and how sad it makes him to think of home.

The experience of visiting such melancholy sites affected me more than I would have expected. I am not an Australian, a New Zealander or a Turk. I am not a soldier or a fighter. Nevertheless, perhaps because of my already sombre mood I found that it was the most moving and emotional war memorial that I had ever seen. Perhaps that should be ‘antiwar memorial’ for no-one who has visited Gallipoli can fail to see the futile irony of conflict. Afterwards, reflecting upon what I had seen as we drove back to our campsite, I wrote the first draft of what eventually became this poem.

In Gallipoli Museum

I saw two letters, under glass
In a room of weapons
Uniforms and photographs
And more.
I saw the fragments of the shells,
Mounted, captioned
Memorabilia of hell
And war.
The letters drew me to the day
- The calm between the storms -
When two men had tried to say,
"Goodbye!"
With words that might console
If grimmer tidings came
And their name was on the roll
Of those to die.
Transcribed afresh and copied clean
Where faded ink on yellow page
Might be no more than simply seen,
And yet not read.
Each wrote of optimistic times,
Comforted his family far away
Tonight on opposing battle lines,
Tommorow dead.