“Like Kings to Death”

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 337, 24 April 1928, Page 10

“Like Kings to Death ”

GALLIPOLI AND AFTER

The Men Who Made Anzac

MIDNIGHT. Sunday, April 25. The moon dropping behind the islands of Mudros. Imbros and S’-mothraee in th murky Aegean; the shore line of Gallipoli fading to an indefinite violet.” . . . The stage is set for that tragic passage of arms to which New Zealanders went, in the words of Masefield, ‘Tike kings in a pageant to imminent death.” Thirteen years ago to-morrow the Dominion excitedly accepted the news that her men had begun the assault. The grief was to come with the casualty lists. But the years have dulled the edge of sorrow and to-morrow Auckland will praise rather than mourn.

Disastrous blunder, strategic mistake, attempt at the impossible: the Gallipoli campaign has been called all these things. It was a failure in that it failed to reach its objective—by how much or how little the Turks and the Germans alone knew —; it was disastrous for the flower of the manhood of nations; it fell far short of the standards of military strategy, except in the brilliantly-planned evacuation. There are times when

that rugged strip of land between the JEgean and the Straits of the Dardanelles seems to have been a bloody altar upon which the young and the brave were wantonly sacrificed. GALLANT FAILURE

But John Masefield, in his "Gallipoli,” brings back our pride in the gallant failure. He says, “When there was more leisure I began to consider the Dardanelles campaign, not as a tragedy, nor as a mistake, but as a great human effort which came, more than once, very near to triumph, achieved the impossible many times and failed in the end, as many great deeds of arms have failed, from something which had nothing to do with arms or with the men who bore them. That the effort failed is not against it; much that is most splendid in military history failed, many great things and noble men have failed. To myself, this failure is the second great event of the war; the first was Belgium’s answer to Germany.” They were men, who left in the days of the glamour and pageantry of war, travelled, as Sir lan Hamilton has said, “further than Ulysses in his 10 years’ Odessey,” to begin their

great perilous adventure before dawn on April 25, 1915. After reviewing them at Heliopolis in March the commander wrote to Lord Kitchener: “The physique of the rank and file could not be improved on.” This was the judgment of a campaigner. Now study the impression of a poet: “They were the finest body of young men (the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and the Naval Division) ever brought together in modern times. For physical beauty and nobility of bearing they surpassed any men I have ever seen. They walked and looked like the kings in old poems.” A lucky misdirection caused the Anzacs to land at a beach further north than the one planned for them and incidentally prepared for them by the Turks. But the enemy quickly saw its mistake and a battalion of Turks doubled toward the landingplace firing at the boats, which had been swept by shrapnel from the heights. The Australian and New Zealand Division went forward over the beach of death and up those barren sun-smitten heights, which had seemed graceful hills in the distance. They were to be “the scenes of some of the noblest heroism which ever went to atone for the infamy of war.” Masefield has painted the long assault, the advance over the ‘hills entrenched with landing mines, the beaches tangled with barbed wire, ranged by howitzers, and swept by machine-guns. ... In their withering and crashing tumult of modern war. and then to dig themselves in a waterless and burning hill, while a more numerous enemy charge them with the bayonet.

“And let them (the civilians) imagine themselves enduring this night after night, day after day, without rest or solace, nor respite from the peril of death, seeing their friends killed and their position imperilled, getting their food, their munitions, even their drink from the jaws of death and their breath from the taint of death. Let them imagine themselves driven mad by heat and toil and thirst by day, shaken by frost at midnight, weakened by disease and broken by pestilence, yet rising on the word with a shout and going forward to die in exultation in a cause foredoomed and almost hopeless.”

In the more banal words of Sir lan Hamilton, written on board H.M.S. Queen Elizabeth: “They are not charging up into this Sari Bair ridge for or by compulsion. They are all the way from the Southern Crosi earning Victoria Crosses, everyone If them.”