Subtitle: A Walk on the Gallipoli Peninsula(Book Review)
[This is another book in which I did the abridged version because I did it as an audio book.]
I never heard of Gallipoli, or the Gallipoli Campaign, before I came to Australia. But since arriving here, it’s popped up many times.
It’s not that my Australian friends are always talking about it. (It’s only come up a couple times in actual conversation.) But it is part of the culture here. When you go to the bookstore, you always see books on Gallipoli. When you read the newspapers here, they reference it. And of course when you visit a War Memorial in Australia, there’s always something about Gallipoli.
My understanding of what happened was that during World War I, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), still under the British rule at that time, were sent to invade Turkey by sea from the Gallipoli peninsula. It was a disastrous mission, and many Australians and New Zealanders died before the allied commanders finally realized it was a lost cause.
And this was the origin of ANZAC day, the Australian and New Zealand version of Veterans Day.
This is a book by an Australian writer who goes to Gallipoli in Turkey to retrace the steps of his great uncle (a Gallipoli veteran) and to experience an ANZAC day ceremony on Gallipoli itself.
It is a book written by an Australian for other Australians (I’m not even sure if it’s available outside Australia), and as an American reading it I was obviously outside the target audience. But I enjoyed it.
The book was located in the history section of the University library, and I initially checked it out because of my interest in history. But it’s actually a combination of different genres and subjects. It’s partly about the history of Gallipoli, partly a travelogue on Turkey, partly about the history of Turkey, and mostly just about the Australian tourists who visit Turkey for ANZAC day.
I was not aware of this, but apparently every ANZAC day Turkey is flooded with Australians and New Zealanders who make the pilgrimage to the Gallipoli peninsula to visit the graves, and participate in the dawn service.
It is definitely an interesting phenomenon. Particularly interesting that in the 21st century (Wright is writing after September 11th, and during the events of the Iraq War) thousands of young Australians with no memory of World War One would think it necessary to come out and pay their respects at Gallipoli. (And the way Wright tells it, it does sound like it’s mostly the young Australians.)
[To the best of my knowledge, there’s no American equivalent of this. I know we have lots of dead buried at Normandy, but Normandy isn’t flooded every D-day with Americans coming to pay their respects. (Or is it? It could be I’m just ignorant. Someone feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.)]
And, as Wright notes, all this is to commemorate not a glorious victory, but a disastrous defeat on a badly planned campaign in a war that’s now widely acknowledged as being pointless.
The book starts off with Wright arriving in Turkey by plane, then getting distracted for a few days in Istanbul by his Turkish guide who shows him around all the sights, and teaches him some interesting Turkish history.
[There’s an interesting Japanese connection here. It turns out that the Sultan’s of the old Ottoman Empire were fascinated by Chinese pottery, and when China couldn’t supply the pottery due to internal wars or trading problems, Japan learned to produce imitation Chinese pottery to fill the gap. So Wright‘s guide, it turns out, is an expert on Japanese pottery at the museum, and knowledgeable about Japanese culture.
He gives the anecdote that the day after September 11th, every Japanese tourist in Turkey got a phone call saying their travel insurance would be void unless they left Turkey immediately, and in one day all the Japanese tourists were cleared out of Istanbul. The Turks themselves thought this was a little silly since Turkey was located nowhere near ground zero.
Having been in Japan during September 11th and the months following, I can attest that there was a little bit of over-reacting going on there. School trips going anywhere abroad (even to places like New Zealand) were cancelled for that whole year.]
Anyway, Wright eventually breaks free and heads down to the Gallipoli peninsula. He goes budget class the whole trip, and stays primarily in youth hostels where he meets lots of young Australian and New Zealand backpackers, and he records his conversations with many of them as he tries to figure out why so many of them find it necessary to make this pilgrimage.
He doesn’t quite arrive at a conclusion, although he does float some interesting ideas—including an idea that preserving the importance of Gallipoli is a subtle way of excluding from mainstream Australia the new waves of Asian immigrants, most of whom are too recently arrived in Australia to have had any ancestors in World War I.
(From my own experience in Melbourne I can attest to both the changing face of Australia’s demographics, and to some of the tension this has produced.)
Speaking of my own experiences, after completing this book, and realizing what an important part of Australian culture ANZAC Day really is, I somewhat regret sleeping through the ANZAC ceremonies during my stay here. My Australian friends had assured me I didn’t need to wake up for it because it wasn’t really an big deal, and not many people care much about it any more. Tony Wright paints a much different picture.
And finally Wright also writes about "the lone pine tree" (W), a pine tree on the Gallipoli peninsula that the Australian soldiers named after an American book/song/movie. Wright notes that Americanization was becoming a problem even then. (Tying in one more aspect of my own experience, Americanization of Australia is a subject that's occasionally crept up over here with Australian friends).
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Not a bad little book, and Wright is obviously a talented writer. The cover jacket however did promise a “sometimes hilarious” travel guide.
This may have been overselling Wright’s comic powers somewhat. The book's okay, but I went in expecting something with a lot of rich humor, like Bill Bryson’s travelogues and was unfortunately somewhat disappointed.
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After a war, people need some sort of way to mourn their dead. But there’s always a tension about the meaning of war memorials. Are we supposed to remember the senseless slaughter of one war so that we will think twice before engaging in another one?
Or are we praising the courage and duty of one generation in order to remind the next generation that a similar sacrifice might someday be expected of them?
For the most part it’s a sneaky little debate. It’s not an argument that is out in the open during official Veteran’s Day events, but it’s in the subtext of everything. It’s in the little things people chose to emphasize and the way they emphasize them.
This is true in Australia as well as in the US. While I was in Melbourne, there were some public events held during the week of ANZAC day debating the meaning. And the bookstores displayed copies of a new book about the Politics of ANZAC Day.
Wright largely dodges the issue. He records the various views of people he meets along the way (some of which fall on one side or the other of the debate), but he avoids taking a strong stand himself.
I guess there’s a lot one could say about this debate one way or another.
As for me, I’ve recently been reading through a collection of the Great War Poets. I never really realized how much great poetry that War had produced. After serving in the front lines themselves, these poets were able to talk about the reality of war with such clarity. It’s a shame I was never introduced to these poets earlier. They really should be required reading in school. Of course that would never happen. (The military would have an even harder time making its recruitment goals if kids were exposed to this stuff.) But it should.
The Great War poets deserve to be a lot more widely read than they are, and part of me would like to quote them all in full. But if I had to pick just one poem, “The Next War” by Osbert Sitwell strikes me as being the most appropriate here.
The long war had ended.
Its miseries had grown faded.
Deaf men became difficult to talk to,
Heroes became bores.
Those alchemists
Who had converted blood into gold
Had grown elderly.
But they held a meeting,
Saying,
"We think perhaps we ought
To put up tombs
Or erect altars
To those brave lads
Who were so willingly burnt,
Or blinded,
Or maimed.
Who lost all likeness to a living thing,
Or were blown to bleeding patches of flesh
For our sakes.
It would look well.
Or we might even educate the children.''
But the richest of these wizards
Coughed gently;
And he said:
"I have always been to the front
- In private enterprise-,
I yield in public spirit
To no man.
I think yours is a very good idea
-A capital idea-
And not too costly . . .
But it seems to me
That the cause for which we fought
Is again endangered.
What more fitting memorial for the fallen
Than that their children
Should fall for the same cause?''
Rushing eagerly into the street,
The kindly old gentlemen cried
To the young:
"Will you sacrifice
Through your lethargy
What your fathers died to gain?
The world must be made safe for the young!"
And the children
Went . . .
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Update: just the other day I saw in Saint Kilda (a suburb of Melbourne) a statue dedicated to the fallen soldiers with the words "they died so that we might have peace."
The subtext of course is that war is necessary for peace. I don't think that's true, although that's a different debate for a different post.
It is, however, uncontroversial to say at least that in most of the wars Australia has fought (the Boer War, World War I, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War) were completely unconnected to domestic peace within Australia.
Link of the Day
Why WikiLeaks Won’t Stop the War By Noam Chomsky
Turn Right at Istanbul: A Walk on the Gallipoli Peninsula by Tony Wright: Book Review (Scripted)
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