ON GALLIPOLI AFTER NINETEEN YEARS

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 252, 21 July 1934, Page 13

ON GALLIPOLI AFTER NINETEEN YEARS

Flowers of Remembrance Heal the Scars of War

A party of 700 people, made up of former service men, representing British regiments which fought in Gallipoli, and of friends and relatives of those who fell, recently revisited the battlefields, travelling from England in the liner Duchess of Richmond. Among them was Licutcant W. E. Stanton Uope, one of the last officers to leave, the Peninsula at the evacuation, fie wrote the following article for the “Daily Telegraph' 1

“How ,quiet it is.’’ The remark is made by au ex-corporal of the famous 29th Division as the Duchess of Rich-, in'otid approaches Gallipoli at dawn. And the same thought must occur to most of the other former service men returning to the peninsula. At Khelia Bay, where the liner anchors, we board the Denizls, a ramshackle steamboat. whose deck plates are plastered with concrete, and journey back through the Narrows bordered by Kllid Bahr and She creeps toward the ruins of Sedd-el-Bahr fort, and wo see clearly the familiar V Beach, looking strangely barren without the dugouts and tents, and the collier River Clyde, which was run aground there laden with troops. Much debris of the war days litters V Beach, as at Lancashire Landing, just round the cape. Nearby, below the fort, peasants grow figs and olives. We disperse to find the remains of those bivouacs, trenches, and barricades best known to us. In company with a few others I tread again the old Krithia Road, past the cypress grove through which I had last tramped on the night of the evacuation, January 8, 1916. The French dug-outs on the ridge bordering the grove remain wellpreserved, but then the French had elephant iron roofing instead of the tarred blankets supplied to British troops. Several men, however, recognise the site of their own “rest camps,” where the lines of former shallow dugouts are faintly distinguishable.

We bathe in Morto Bay, in water crystal-clear and icy cold. It is wonderfully quiet—and “Asiatic Annie,” the famous big gun across the Straits, is only a war-time memory. British cemeteries mark the site of Skew Bridge, Pink Farm, Redoubt and Twelve Tree Copse, all well designed and beautiful with iris, stock, and rosemary, the Hower of remembrance. The Turks have a memorial, but they have never collected their own dead on Gallipoli. Past Backhouse Post and far up on the left of the Krithia Road,. I readily recognised the Vineyard, once a shambles, although previously I had never had anything but a worm's-eye. view of it. t 'L Even in peace time, the hill Aclii Baba frustrates us. Lack of time compels us to turn back. Turkish notabilities from Chanak came off to dine in bur ship, and among them is the man many of. us would have given our Maconochi rations to have met in ’ls—thq O.C. “Asiatic Annie." ' ■ < ' *

Through an interpreter, I had a long, chat with this officer; Mehmet Bey,.a likeable kind of man With bald brown head and many rippling crow’s feet at. the corners of his eyes. He tells me that Annie was roughly bMlin. calibre, and the gun moved frequently its position in the Chanak area of Asia, although she never “ran. on rails,” as many of our troops surmised. lie says also that late in the campaign, a British monitor firing over Rabbit Island, in the Aegean Sea, scored a direct hit, killing five men and putting the gun out of action for six days. In return I tell him how, on the last night of the evacuation, we had a bugler posted on Sedd-el-Bahr fort to sound the long G for warning each time lie saw Annie’s yellow hash. Mehmet Bey states that the warning bugle note reached him faintly across the Straits. After a night’s sleep I do two things I have wanted to do for 19 years—enter ruined Krithia village and scale the summit of Achi Baba. My companions are two ex-officers of the Royal Army Medical Corps. The treacherous cliffs and nullahs of Achi, the well-sited trenches, the former gun emplacements, reveal clearly the magnitude of the Allied task. “A second Gibraltar,” comments one of my companions and the other on the summit remarks: “From here you can see everything except the unexploded shells at the bottom of the sea." On arrival back at Khelia Bay I see a former rating of our Royal Naval Division arm-in-arm with a Turk. The man, Blackburn, whom I knew well In the war days, has lost his left hand; the Turk has his right arm missing. Someone interprets the Turk’s smiling comment on the situation: “We are brothers."

Before we leave for Constantinople we visit Anzac and Suvla, travelling over rough roads in rougher transport. Ou Chocolate Hill, where once the flames of burning scrub swept down on the dead and wounded, I see a fellow-passenger from the ship walking up the slope carrying a picnic lunch and a bottle of Turkish Pilsener. He wears a rather limp starched collar, and—a black bowler hat!

Barbed wire and French wire, much of it remarkably 'preserved, reveal how the Turks created new defensive lines immediately after the evacuation. Wild boars in the' country behind Suvla Bay uproot the crops, and have become a pestdo the peasants, who are unable to ketep down their numbers.

The sun smiles on Gallipoli, and some of those who were not here in ’l5 think it is all “very nice.” The unore knowledgeable survey the rugged slopes and nullahs, and wonder anew at the miracle of youthful strength and endurance. Everyone comments favourably on the work of Tasman Millington, the Australian who is representative of the Imperial War Graves Commission—the man responsible for the upkeep of the cemeteries which dot the rugged coastline from Shell Green to Azmac, Lone Pine, Walker's Ridge, the Nek, Chtinnk Bair, Hill 10—everywhere the country is overgrown and flowering.

A colony of Russians, employed in maintaining the cemeteries, live in Shrapnel Valley. One of them, Chocklov, was once a well-known tenor in opera at Petrograd, and sometimes when dusk descends on the Peninsula, the melody of his voice is heard mounting through the stillness as he returns from Lone Pine. There is a living spirit in all the hills and nullahs of Gallipoli, but you cannot become attuned to it among a mixed company. You must go from among them and be alone.

No bursting shells or bombs, no crackling rifle lire. Goats and sheep graze In the valleys. The sea Is empty of warships, mine-sweepers, and hospital ships. How quiet it is . . . ,