There followed the admirable official history prepared by Brigadier Aspinall, and it amply confirmed all Churchill had written.
Meanwhile the authors who had served in the campaign had been at work. There were Hamilton’s own diaries, Compton Mackenzie’s Gallipoli Memories, Henry Nevinson’s graceful and accomplished account of the operations, a short book from the Poet Laureate, John Masefield, and two novels that were widely read, The Secret Battle by Alan Herbert, and Tell England by Ernest Raymond. By the nineteen-thirties a large library had grown up, British, French, Turkish and German, and although there was general criticism of the tactics no serious student now questioned the wisdom of the Allies going to the Dardanelles.
An astonishing number of the Gallipoli commanders survived to see this vindication. Birdwood lived on until his ninety-seventh year, and Keyes, having served as Director of Combined Operations in the second world war, died in 1945, leaving behind him an endless speculation as to what might have happened had he been the admiral in command in the Dardanelles and de Robeck his chief-of-staff. Nasmith of the E 11 went on to become the youngest admiral afloat. Others took up careers that could never have been predicted: Allanson became the British consul at Monte Carlo, Murdoch, the Australian journalist, became the owner of a powerful chain of newspapers and radio stations, Unwin resigned from the Navy almost at once and became a well-known yachtsman; he had three children. Others again were young and obscure when they fought at Gallipoli, but later the world knew them very well. Among these there were Clement Attlee, then a spruce young captain of thirty-two, and three future field marshals, Slim, Harding and the Australian, Blamey. Of the group of officers who buried Rupert Brooke on Skyros only Freyberg and Arthur Asquith survived. Freyberg fought through the second world war, a V.C. with three bars to his D.S.O., and subsequently Governor-General of New Zealand. De Robeck, Monro and Stopford died at the end of the nineteen-twenties.
Hamilton was not asked to serve in the field again after the campaign, but his later career was in some ways the most remarkable of all. In 1918 he became Lieutenant of the Tower of London, and in 1932 Rector of Edinburgh University. Year after year, while all but a few of his Gallipoli contemporaries reached the ends of their lives, he continued into a distinguished and sensitive old age, the nimbus of Gallipoli always overhanging his name but never daunting him. His Gallipoli Diary, which appeared in 1920, was followed by a prophetic study of the trend of modern war and several books of reminiscence. The second world war passed, and he was still there in his pleasant home at Hyde Park Gardens in London, surrounded by his books, his military trophies and by many friends; a tall thin figure, very well dressed, and it was still a groomed and supple mind. If he was not entirely vindicated at least he was loved and respected. All the great opponents of Gallipoli were gone, Monro and the generals of the western front, Bonar Law, Carson and Northcliffe. When the General died on October 12, 1947, he had reached the great age of ninety-four, and a large congregation of the leading people in Britain gathered at a service in Westminster Abbey to honour his memory.
It was the silence of the Gallipoli peninsula which most surprised and awed the survivors of the campaign who returned there after the war, the stillness of the cliffs and beaches where nothing much remained of the battle except the awful sight of the white bones of unburied soldiers and the rusting guns along the shore. Of the sunken battleships nothing was to be seen; the Majestic was broken up by an Italian company and sold for scrap, and the other vessels, the Triumph, the Irresistible, the Bouvet and the Ocean lay too deep for salvage. The River Clyde was gone. Although she had been shelled a thousand times they towed her off the beach at Sedd-el-Bahr and at Malta engineers soon patched up her broken plates. In 1920 she was sold to a Spanish owner, and in the nineteen-fifties she was still sailing the Mediterranean under the name of Muruja Y Aurora.
The peninsula itself was cordoned off as a military area by the Turks, but the peasants came back and replanted the land about Cape Helles and Maidos and Suvla Bay. At the Narrows the Allied occupation force dismantled the guns, but the two mediæval castle-fortresses still stood. Chanak was rebuilt, was shattered by an earthquake and was rebuilt again; and little by little the other towns on the peninsula were restored to what they were. All the rest of the wild and lonely coast remained unchanged, and the second world war passed over it without making any difference. Today the hills are as deserted as ever, and packs of wolves still appear from time to time. In a cold winter they descend to the valleys to attack the flocks, and they have even been known to bring a donkey down.
Today one needs a guide to find one’s way around the battlefields. At Sedd-el-Bahr one recognizes at once the shattered fortress, the half-moon beach and the ledge of sand under which the first survivors of the River Clyde waited all day on April 25, 1915; but beyond this, on the long slopes to Achi Baba all traces of the fighting have gone. Just occasionally a farmer ploughing deeply will turn up a rusted bullet or a piece of shrapnel, and it is not unknown for a hand-grenade to burst beneath the bullocks’ hooves.
At Anzac, where the land is too broken up for any cultivation to be possible, there is much more evidence of the battle. Here the trenches, growing shallower and shallower every year, can yet be seen; the holes of the old tunnels still vanish into darkness, and one has only to kick the dust to turn up jagged pieces of metal, the remains of a pannikin or a hobnailed boot, perhaps a broken segment of a rum jar with the makers’ name still on it. The scene of the past fighting is evoked very easily: the mule teams winding up from the beach, the city of dugouts perched on the sides of the cliffs, the soldiers bathing in the sea, the heat and the flies and the fearful racket of shellfire re-echoing in every valley. But it is still hardly possible to bring oneself to believe that for nearly nine months men could have lived and fought at such places as Quinn’s Post. One jump brings you from the Turkish trench to the Allied line; it is too close, too savage, too intimate to be entirely credible to an age that only knows the enemy at a distance, and as a disembodied figure in a machine.
The cemeteries at Gallipoli are unlike those of any other battlefield in Europe. As soon as the Armistice was signed an Allied war graves commission arrived, and it was decided that the dead as far as possible should be buried where they fell. Consequently a score or more of cemeteries were made, some with only a hundred graves, others with thousands, and they lie on every height where the fighting reached its zenith. Each is surrounded by a bank of pines, and the graves themselves, which are not marked by crosses but by marble plaques in the ground, are thickly planted with cypresses and junipers, arbutus and rosemary and such flowering shrubs as the Judas tree. In winter moss and grass cover the ground, and in summer a thick carpet of pine needles deadens the footfall. There is no sound except for the wind in the trees and the calls of the migrating birds who have found these places the safest sanctuary on the peninsula. The effect upon the visitor’s mind is not that of tragedy or death but of an immense tranquillity, of the continuity of things.
The highest of these cemeteries lies on Chunuk Bair at the spot where the New Zealanders reached the crest and Allanson and his men looked briefly down upon Maidos and the Narrows. Here perhaps more than anywhere else the Gallipoli campaign is revealed, for as the eye roams round from west to east it falls on the salt lake at Suvla, and then on the cascade of hills and ravines around Anzac Cove, and finally on the high stone pillar which has been erected on Cape Helles just above the beach where the 29th Division came ashore. These scenes are in the immediate foreground, and they are set, as it were, in a frame of other older battlefields in the Ægean Islands, the Troad and the Hellespont.