In the context, the word “”uncle” was tragic. “”Uncle” means jovial, middle-aged, slightly wise, certainly knowledgeable. The nephew is young and sees the uncle as a figure of perhaps indulgence. Not this time. Kevin Grieves had come to pay respects at his uncle’s grave.
It was marked 376 Pvt H G Grieves 1st Australian Infantry, 19 May 1915. Age 20.
Killed in action at Gallipoli. Buried in Shrapnel Valley.
Kevin and his wife, Gwen, placed two small Australian flags on the grave and stood back a moment. Their Turkish taxi driver stood to attention.
Kevin then took out his video recorder and panned from the grave to battle sites beyond.
He had come with a print-out from the records of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. The details enabled him to find the grave very quickly. It was one of thousands in several cemeteries at Anzac in the middle of the Gallipoli peninsula and Cape Helles at its toe.
Official War Historian Charles Bean who was sent back to the site on his way home after the war recommended the whole Anzac area be one cemetery and that soldiers be buried where they were found or remain in graves where they were buried.
It was not possible and they are now collected into four or five major cemeteries and the whole area is national park.
The last line on each gravestone tells the tragedy: Age 20, Age 23, Age 19, Age 28, Age 31, Age 20, Age 20. You are hard-pressed to find any dead over 40 at Anzac.
Commander-in-chief, Lieutenant-General Sir Ian Hamilton who directed from a ship in the Aegean or from the off-shore island of Lemnos was in his sixties.
Even 80 years is not enough distance to prevent the questions: what if, if only, should have, could have, might have, ought to have, why didn’t they. Kevin Grieve’s visit to his uncle’s grave shows this is not an archaeological or historical curiousity, but a timeless site where the arrogance and pomposity of age condemns the innocence of youth.
The same Prime Minister who revelled in the 75 anniversary of it sent young Australians to an equally irrelevant Gulf. And a latter-day Churchill in high heels sent Age 20, Age 19, Age 22 to die for some specks in the Atlantic.
The Anzac battle site is so pitiably small. So many died for such a small amount of ground.
The Anzac site is destination of the closest things Australians have to a pilgrimage.
Some visit as part of a European trip, others try to make specially on an Anzac Day, particularly a special anniversary. Oddly enough, the usual entrance for visitors takes them first to the objective of the Gallipoli _ the Narrows in the Dardenelles guarded by two Crusader forts at the town of Canakkale. Then the visitor gets a taxi which goes first through what were Turkish held area. Anzac Cove is the end of the journey.
I was fortunate in being able to land at Anzac Cove from the sea, in a sea kayak, shortly after dawn, after two days of paddling down the Dardenelles side and up the Aegean side of the peninsula. From the sea, the whole catastrophe is more evident.
And nearly 80 years after the event, I have to report what looked to me like an odd way to manage the site following the mid-year bushfire which burnt out 5000 hectares of mainly local planted pines.
Basically, the site is being clear-felled. It looks more like a logging operation than post-bushfire management. I saw:
Trees with greenery still on them sawn up.
Stumps with sap oozing out of them.
Kilometres of stacked logs.
No replanting.
Some unconfirmed suggestions from locals that the logs were being sent to Instanbul to make paper.
By contrast, in private land, adjacent to the site which had also been burnt, the trees had been left awaiting possible regeneration _ a more conventional way of dealing with bushfires.
The fire has also destroyed the prickly natural undergrowth exposing trenches and making the task easy for relic seekers _ it was easy to find water bottles, mess tins, buttons, cartridges and even bones could be seen on the ground, eighty years after the event. There is a market for the relics. A water-bottle, for example, would fetch about $15 in Canakkale for on-sale to tourists. By now the forest workers would have had the opportunity to take exposed material.
The rains are due in Turkey this month, and without the vegetation the remains of the trench systems are likely to be eroded more quickly.
However, the director of the Office of Australian War Graves, Air Vice-Marshall Alan Heggen, said there was nothing to be alarmed about.
Australia was working with Britain and New Zealand to see how it could help the Turks with cleaning up and afforestation. What form that help took was yet to be decided. With the 80th anniversary next year, Australia would be looking to some special gesture of support.
Australia could not object to the logging, because that was a matter for local control; there was no agreement covering timber. It was their timber.
The 1922 Treaty of Lausanne and the arrangement with the six-nation Commonwealth War Graves Commission covered only the actual cemeteries and the maintenance of war memorials.
The Heads of Mission in Ankara were having discussions about the long-term management to protect the area, facilitate visitors and control encroachment by urban development and farming.
( The battle sites do not include the whole peninsula. The Anzac area, including the Turkish lines, is about 4km by 2km half way up the peninsula on the western side. Another Gallipoli battle site where Australians and New Zealanders fought alongside larger British and French forces is at the toe of the peninsula at Cape Helles.
Air Vice-Marshal Heggen said, “”We are being kept aware of the clean-up and we are talking with the Turkish Government about how we might help reafforestation,” he said.
It need not be the formal pine plantation like before.
“”The Turks are inclined to say let’s go back to 1915, when it had lower-level scrub, not pine,” he said.
The clean-up would be useful “”because we can see things”. The fire had caused some shell detonations, so the site would be that much safer.
However, he admitted there was a danger that without stabilisation existing trench formations could be lost in erosion and that the site was more open to scavenging.
“”Scavenging is illegal under Turkish law, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t done,” he said.
At the site, we had a least a temporary advantage. Anzac now looks very much like the pictures in Charles Bean’s official history and his later “”Gallipoli Mission” and other historic pictures. That shows, of course, that the site has been thoroughly devegetated before and grown back.
Going by sea kayak revealed more clearly just how impossible the whole Gallipoli campaign was.
We set out from Canakkale (see map) where the Dardenelles are narrowest at about a kilometre. The Narrows are guarded by two 15th century Ottoman forts. In 1914 silly old Churchill imagined the Royal Navy could bluster its way up the Dardenelles knocking out the forts. It would then continue up the Sea of Marmara and take Instanbul (Constantinople) putting a cross on St Sophia’s church for the first time in 450 years.
Attacking Istanbul would relieve pressure on Russia on the Eastern Front. But the Navy action failed. So in 1915 the Army was to join the fray landing on the Aegean side of the peninsula marching over the top and taking the Narrows.
The first thing you notice about the Narrows is the current. It grabbed the kayaks and swept them down. Huge oil tankers coming up the Dardenelles against the current appear to hardly move. Sitting ducks for shore batteries. Of course, the naval action would fail.
Without much paddling the current took us the 22km from Canakkale to Cape Helles in a little over three hours.
The Turks have put an enormously imposing monument at the tip of Cape Helles in the sight of one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. For them, it was an invasion, but one of many. It is made more significant, though, because of the role played in the Gallipoli campaign by a young officer called Mustapha Kemal, who later became Kemal Ataturk the first president of modern Turkey, much revered for modernizing the country.
At Cape Helles we kayaked up to a splendid pension on the shore. The Aegean was startlingly clear.
The next day we kayaked 20kms up the Aegean side of the peninsula against the wind to Kom, just south of Gaba Tepe, the intended landing spot, and Anzac Cove, so we could go in at dawn.
My diary: “”Before dawn, Kom. Kayak past Gaba Tepe with the Nek and high ground in the distance. From the sea in the half light the blunder is obviously We paddle through a dead calm sea. Just past Gaba Tepe the bright red small billiard ball comes over the horizon. We continue to Anzac Cove.
“”But what’s this. There is no current here. Didn’t the Royal Navy offer current as an excuse for landing the troops too far north?
“”At Gaba Tepe there are no cliffs, no steep ground. Two kilometres further north at Anzac Cove, the actual beach landing it easier but the ground behind is hellish. Easy for the Navy hard for the Army. The three historic spurs are before us and the Nek. The whole site can be seen from the kayaks in the calm sea. Such a small piece of land from which to build a national identity _ barely one kilometre to the furthest point inland and less than a dozen men got far enough up the spine of the peninsula to see the objective beyond.
“”Silently we paddle into Anzac Cove. The sun is just up. A mist on the sea blurs the horizon into a single whitish blue.
“”A silent landing. Two kayaks each flying the Australian and Turkish flags. We get out of the kayaks and walk up a few metres to the Anzac Memorial.
“”Age 19, Age 21, Age 26, Age 18. 18!
“”(italic) Not though the soldier knew someone had blundered. (end italic). Into the cliffs of death climbed the six thousand. Same story different war.”
I thought about Australia’s anti-heroes. Those who lose and are cherished in national memory. What if some sea in the world were land and some land were sea. If the Dardenelles had been an ordinary valley with a river, there would be no Anzac. If the harsh desert of the Australian inland really had been an inland sea, there would be no Burke and Wills. No failure to identify with. But then we would have found others no doubt.
Bean, on returning to Anzac on his way home for the Western Front, recommended the site be taken over in perpetuity as part of the peace treaty and that Australian plants be established there.
Now the commission’s policy is for appropriate Australian plants at cemeteries, though it has no control over the surrounding area. Gums and wattles won’t grow there and a nursery experimenting with other plants was destroyed in the fire.
The site was obtained by the Allies as part of the treaty with Turkey at the end of World War I, but lapsed in World War II.
Bean championed the cause of commemoration. He was an evocative journalist and historian and to a large extent responsible for the Anzac legend. He was also the driving spirit behind the Australian War Memorial. The Anzac part of the official history of the Great War was written at Tuggeranong Homestead and it was here that Bean developed the vision for the war memorial that he first thought of at Anzac.
What a miserable, visionless government we have in the ACT to flog off part of the site for housing and to have neglected the rest. Surely, it would have been a good use for the ill-gotten casino levy if we had to have such a thing.
And what a hypocritical, opportunist Federal Government we have to put hand of heart at the 75th anniversary and yet to ignore the homestead where the Anzac legend was gestated.
Small wonder we have a tall poppy syndrome in Australia. Most of the guts and ingenuity came from the foot sloggers; most of the misery and folly from the tall poppies.
I don’t want to go over the well-traversed ground of the Anzac story, except to say that it becomes far more poignant when you come in from the sea and walk up to the memorials, especially after reading Bean (The Official History 1921 and in paperback QUP and Australian War Memorial 1981 and Gallipoli Mission, 1948 and in ABC Books 1990); the Boys Who Came Home (Broadbent, ABC Books 1990); and for the treatment when they came home, The Last Shilling (Lloyd and Rees, MUP 1994).
Our pilgrimage to Anzac was the first part of a two-part Aegean trip with the kayaks.
The second leg was island-hopping down the Dodecanese islands along the southern Aegean coast of Turkey and account of which will appear tomorrow (SUBS: Sunday or maybe next saty…see Bill). The second leg was done 50 years after the Allied commandos used earlier model Folbot kayaks launched from submarines in night raids on the Italian- and later German- occupied Dodocanese in World War II _ the sort of intelligent intelligence gathering that could have saved a lot of suffering in Gallipoli 29 years earlier.