DOWN THE ANCIENT SEAROADS TO GALLIPOLI

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23020, 23 April 1938, Page 1 (Supplement)

DOWN THE ANCIENT SEAROADS TO GALLIPOLI

By ELSIE K. MORTON

'JHE golden lights of Piraeus, ancient seaport of Athens, flashed friendly farewell as our ship moved out at midnight. The moon, a distorted disc like a dented sixpence, gleamed for a moment over the rim of a sailing cloud, touching the crests of the waves with ghostly light, shaping in dim outline the circling hills behind Athens. Then land and sky and sea disappeared once more in a pit of darkness broken only by the twinkling lights Dawn was bringing faint brightness to the sky when I looked through my porthole early next morning, eager for the first glimpse of land in the ancient seaways of the Aegean. Faintly blue lay Tenedos against the sky, a spark of light still twinkling from the lighthouse on a jutting headland. Then Tenedos fell behind and all through the morning wo ploughed a broad white furrow up through the seas that wash the coast of Asia Minor. Mudros Bay The distant ridge of Lemnos grew clearer; beneath its mountain slopes we presently sighted Mudros Bay and as I gazed across the empty sea a ghostly fleet seemed to rise from the depths. The seas were no longer rough and tossed with the wind, but calm beneath the stars, and there was no sound as the ships full of men went gliding by into the bright dawn that was to open

An Anzac of To-day

for them the gates of death behind the waiting hills or Anzac.

Hour after hour we followed the sea road to Gallipoli. For many of those aboard our ship, this part of our long voyage through the Mediterranean to the Holy Land was a spiritual pilgrimage. For over twenty years, I had dreamed of one day seeing the land to which the thoughts of all New Zealanders turn as Anzac Day draws near. Here and there a tiny village huddled beneath the shoulder of a mountain ridge, a tiny gleam of green showed up in sharp contrast to the barren, treeless hillside. Desolate, arid, were the shores of this ageless sea, with glimpses of sandy desert wastes on the Asiatic coast and a high ridge of snow-capped mountains gleaming afar against the sky. Cape Helles Memorial Lemnos became more grim and hostile as afternoon wore on. Steep cliffs rose straight up out of the sea and every glimpse of vegetation disappeared in sandy wastes that ended in rockbound gullies and harsh ravines. As we passed the last headland of Lemnos, a wall of brown cliffs gradually took shape on the horizon—our first glimpse of the shores of Gallipoli. All eyes were now fixed on two tiny white objects that gleamed in the late afternoon sun on the summit of one of the most sinister, savage strips of coastline upon which I had ever gazed. We were looking at the Cape Helles lighthouse and the British War Memorial on the extreme point of Gallipoli Peninsula. They were tiny toy things, like something out of a doll's house,

seen across the miles of white-capped waves, but set there on the highest point of those stark, hostile cliffs that stretched like a crouching beast between sea and sky, they seemed to take on a deep and awesome significance. The waters beneath those menacing cliffs had once run'red with the blood of our kinsmen; on the tall white memorial were graven the names of a host of men who had died on those grim shores for England. Fury of the Gale

Swiftly the coastline ahead took shape, clearer grew the outline of Cape Helles, the coast of Imbros, and the faint blue line of hills that was distant Samothrace. And .now we who had hoped all day long that we might, ere nightfall, look upon the lonely beach of An'zac, knew that we must pass on our way and never see the hills and valleys that held the dust of our dead. The bitter wind that had opposed us all day strengthened, toward sunset, to terrific force. To venture near the shores, and coast down the Peninsula, was out of the question.

It was something more than a gale that came roaring down on us from the riven heights and desolate ravines of Gallipoli. The wind was a thunder in the sky. It held the bitter violence of a blind maniac, shouting and thrashing in the strength of unleashed fury. It sprang on us like a lion with bared fangs every time we ventured out on deck, and drove us to the meagre shelter of the windowed portion, where we huddled together, numbed with cold, hardly able to realise the import and significance of the moments that brought us nearer and nearer, to the steep headland of Cape Helles. Braving the fury of the gale, I struggled to a corner of the upper deck, and stood for a moment looking down at an open bay and shallow beach. Standing out from the shore were the supports of a rotting pier. Again the vision of a ghost ship passed before my eyes, a ship with a great hole in her side, from which men of superhuman courage came crowding out into a hail of bullets and bursting shells. The River Clyde Here it was that the troopship River Clyde was beached on the opening day of the Gallipoli campaign. Now beach and bay were empty, but on the cliff top rose the stately white shaft of Britain's memorial to her dead, a beacon that for countless years to -oome will gleam in the light of rising and setting suns. . . .

Not far from the memorial rose in dark silhouette against the sky a grove of cypress trees, sheltering the Cross of Sacrifice that marks the British War Cemetery. Soon we passed the French cemetery, then a Turkish burial ground. The whole of that bleak and desolate headland is now a city of the dead, surely one of the loneliest in the-world. At the foot of the cliffs, farther along the coast, we saw the remains of a great Turkish fort, the walls still showing the gaping holes torn in them by shell fire from British warships. Darkness had fallen when we came to the Narrows, and in the thundering of the wind I seemed to hear the roar of guns that once shook the very sky. In the bitter cold and fury of the gale that had defeated our long-dreamed-of pilgrimage, I sensed something of the dreadful ordeal endured by the men of Anzac in that pitiless winter of 1915, when sentries were frozen at their posts, and human endurance was strained to its utmost limit.

"They suffered, they endured; then in the darkness of night they stole away., New in the darkness of night we were passing up the seaway they were denied, passing in a confusion of stormy seas and bitter gale that would henceforth encompass all our memories of Gallipoli. v But for us, another day would dawn, that to-morrow for which they fought and died, and fought and died in vain. To-morrow, we would be in Constantinople.