TRAGEDY OF GALLIPOLI.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIX, Issue 5301, 18 July 1928, Page 3

TRAGEDY OF GALLIPOLI.

A DREADFUL EPISODE.

REVELATIONS BY EYE-WITNESSES*

“On these dates (November 26-29, 1915) a terrible blizzard of hail* and rain-, followed by a heavy fall In the temperature, swept over the unfortunate victims of the Cabinet’s indecitgon. - Two hundred and eight Bri.tish soldiers were drowned. 'in the trenches, and many more were frozen to death where they stood; 16,000 cases of frostbite had to be evacuated.”

Mr Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett reveals -in these words; in a new book, ‘ The Uncensored Dardanelles,” one of the last and most dreadful episodes in the Gallipoli tragedy.

Mr Ashmead-Bartlett, compelled by what he had seen with his own eyes, and’ urged by officers of all ranks in the Dardanelles army to let the world know the 1 truth —which G.H.Q. suppressed—wrote a letter in September, 1915, to Mr Asquith, the Prime -Minister, telling him that Gallipoli, must be evacuated, and why. Some one at Gallipoli betrayed the fact that he had written-, and Mr Ashmead-Bartlett, the authorised British newspaper correspondent, was summarily ordered to

go Home. His letter begins! by declaring that the “last great effort (Suvla Bay) to achieve some definite success against the Turks was the most ghastly and costly fiasco in our history-since the battle of Bannockburn.” He states that Sir lan Hamilton, the Com-mander-in-Ohief. and. his staff were openly spoken of with derision, and that “the lack of a. real chief at the head of the army destroys its discipline and efficiency all throughMr Ashmead-Bartlett’s stony of the ( campaign, consisting largely of “his private diary,” is the most vivid account that has been published. It describes the “Homeric enterprises, which future generations, will hardly credit and which might had emanated from Troy,” and it tells about the ghastly ordeals to which the troops were subjected.

Mr Ashmead-Bartlett, who makes severe attacks on Sir lan Hamilton, quotes the description given to him by Colonel Les-l'e Wilson (now Sin Leslie Wilson, Governor of Bombay) of the battle for "Achi Baba on J uno 4 as; “a cold-blooded" massacre." This was was when the Collingwood Battalion of the Naval Division was wiped, out. He quotes the late Mr Aubrey Herbert’s “charge against G.H.Q. —the cruelty of leaving thousands, of our wounded to perish between-the lines after these attacks had failed-, instead of ar<"anging for an armistice to collect them.”

Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett came to London in June, 1915, and, he quotes from his di,a,ry his ’ interviews with Bona? Law, Lord Car.sons Mr Churchill, Lord Balfour, and others. A small dinner party is described -—“with Lady Randolph Churchill to meet Winston.” Mr Churchill was during dinner, but “suddenly burst forth into a tremendous discourse on the expedition and what might have been, addrles-sefl directly across the ta,ble in the form of a lecture to his mother, 'who listened most attentively. Winston seemed unconscious of the limited number of his audience, and continued quite heedless of those around him- He insisted over and over again that the battle of March 18 (the? naval attack on the Dardanelles) had never been fought to a finish, and, had it been, the Fleet must have got through the Narrows. This is; the great obsession of his mind, and will ever remain so. • • • The loss of the ships leaves him undismayed. His. only regret, like that 'of some ancient Anahuac god, is that the sacrifices, were stopped before the full number of victims, waiting to belaid on the altar of chance, had reached their destination. Mr Churchill’s idea of taking the Dardanelles and, Constantinople was, in Mr Ashmead-Bartlett’s opinion, strategically right, and just the thing that the great Duke of Marlborough would have done. Yet he holds, that “the operations as djawn up by Sir lan Ham’lt'on were doomed to failure from the start.”