GALLIPOLI AGAIN.

Taranaki Daily News, 22 February 1922, Page 5

GALLIPOLI AGAIN.

A NEW WAR BOOK. WAS VICTORY POSSIBLE? A MATTER OF GUNS. By Telegraph.—Preas Assn.—Copyright Received Feb. 21, 5.5 pan. London, Feb. 20. General Sir lan Hamilton, reviewing the war book written by Captain C. W. Bean (the official correspondent with the Australian Forces at Gallipoli), describes the author as the Kinglake of the Antipodes. Typical of Captain Bean was his effort to help General Bridges to maintain discipline in Egypt in January, 1915, by giving the Australian Press the naked facts about the conduct of a small section of the Australians, when it would have been easy for him to remain popular by blaming the General Staff. “An example of how it should be done is never complete without an example of how it should not be dene, and there is another letter by another Australian journalist, not a war correspondent, to the Prime Minister of Australia, which one day will supply that foil. That letter is t’ e one skeleton key which opens a certain locked cupboard in each of three biographies that are to be. Then everybody will be able to understand the difference between an appeal to Australian prejudice and an appeal like that on which Captain Bean stakes his all to her patriotism.” General Hamilton bears testimony to the value of the chapters od pre-war organisations in Australia and the creation of the Australian Imperial Force. The book, as a war record, is in a class by itself, being cast on intensely individualistic lines. It also stands alone for the very full account it supplies of the Turkish plans, movements and losses. He disagrees with Captain Bean in thinking the British needed 150,000 for the job, and speaking with new evidence before him General Hamilton emphatically declares that if he had been given the Ghurka brigade he asked for, and the East Lancashire division lying idle in Egypt, we could have done it right there. The Dardanelles was thrown away because Gallipoli had not reaped the benefit of the increasing output of guns and trench mortars. These were asked for on March 22, and each Ansae battalion could have had more by the date of landing.— A»’S--N.Z. Cable Assn.