Gallipoli by Mat McLachlan
The climate is hard in western Turkey. The August sun has been blazing all day and, even though it’s well after
5pm, the temperature still hovers over 30 degrees. A hot breeze sings through the branches of a grove of spindly
olive trees, and a flock of wiry goats scratches at the baked earth, the tin bells round their scrawny necks
clanking half-heartedly. The shepherd wears a dusty suit coat and a three-day stubble, and wanders behind the
flock, content to follow it where it leads. He’s doing pretty much what his father did before him, and what
shepherds have done here for hundreds of years.
No one much comes to this corner of the Gallipoli peninsula. This place is for shepherds and tomato farmers –
the tourists all head further north, to places with romantic-sounding names, like Anzac Cove and Lone Pine.
Here, near the tiny village of Krithia at the southern toe of the peninsula, the shepherd and his goats have the
place pretty much to themselves.
There’s not a lot to suggest that anything important happened here, no clue that more than 50,000 men died in
these insignificant fields. The shallow trench that snakes through the nearby pine copse could just as easily be a
drainage ditch. The metal screw pickets that once supported barbed wire entanglements could be mistaken for fence
posts. About the only thing that reveals this as a former battlefield is the cemetery, with its neat rows of
headstones laid out like soldiers on parade. In one corner of the cemetery lies Corporal Archie Odgers, a
25-year-old plumber from Melbourne who, for reasons unknown, enlisted, fought and died under the alias ‘Mark
Wraith’. We don’t know much about Archie Odgers, except that he joined up within two weeks of the outbreak of war
and that he did well as a soldier in the nine months he served with the Australian 7th Battalion.
Archie was killed in May 1915 during the Second Battle of Krithia, one of the forgotten chapters of the
Gallipoli story (for Australians at least). Australian soldiers had been sent to the southern sector of the
peninsula from their base at Anzac Cove to help the British in a major advance. The Australians went over the top
into a hurricane of Turkish fire and pushed bravely forward. Men fell by the hundreds, and the Australians
eventually dug in after an advance of only a couple of hundred metres. Against the fierce Turkish fire, they could
do little more. It was a big battle, but Australian history scarcely remembers it. That’s the funny thing about
Gallipoli – this huge campaign took place on several fronts and involved massive armies from almost a dozen
nations, but Australians only remember a small fraction of the story. A fog of myth, glory and patriotism swirls
around the landing at Anzac Cove, so thick that it obscures almost everything else from view.
A local guide tells the story of a wealthy Australian couple who flew to Gallipoli from Istanbul by helicopter,
landed near Anzac Cove and spent half an hour wandering along the beach and pocketing a few pebbles from the
shoreline. They thanked him for ‘showing them Gallipoli’ and reboarded the helicopter for their flight back to
Istanbul, having missed the scenes of most of the fighting and the cemeteries where many of the Anzacs lie. To be
fair, most Australian visitors are more open-minded than that, and spend a half- or full-day seeing the key Anzac
sites near the beach and up on the ridges.
But for those visitors who look further afield, the true picture of the Gallipoli campaign, and the full extent
of the glory and the pain, is revealed. The Battle of Krithia that claimed the life of Archie Odgers and more than
500 other Australians made up a small part of a tortuous nine-month advance at Cape Helles, 20 kilometres south of
Anzac Cove. British and French troops had come ashore here at the same time the Australians and New Zealanders
landed at Anzac Cove, and clawed their way inland against fierce Turkish opposition. From April to July, the
British and French threw themselves at the Turkish defenders in a series of violent attacks that gained them little
ground and cost them thousands of casualties. The British lost more than 70,000 men at Gallipoli, most of them at
Helles, and the French more than 20,000. And what did they have to show for it? After nine months of fighting they
were still two kilometres short of their objectives for the first day. Today the Helles battlefield reveals a
different side of the Gallipoli story to the one we commonly know. There were no rugged cliffs to scale here – the
battles at Helles took place in rolling countryside, amidst the olives and the sunflower crops. Unlike the rugged
landscape above Anzac Cove, it’s pretty country down here, and the fields have been reclaimed by the plough. If not
for the cemeteries, this could be any corner or rural Turkey.
It’s the same story at the other end of the peninsula, at Suvla Bay. In August 1915 the was the scene of a huge
British landing that was a shambles from the start. Today Suvla is isolated and lonely. There’s four big cemeteries
up here, containing the graves of men who mostly came from the north of England – the working men who had responded
to Lord Kitchener’s intimidating pointing finger and his demand of ‘I Want You’ for his New Army. The battle at
Suvla really only lasted a few days – while the British were dithering on the beach, paralysed by poor leadership
and no clear plan, the Turks were streaming troops to the surrounding hills and hemming the British in on the
plains below. Suvla became a siege, and despite launching several costly attacks, the British never succeeded in
breaking out. The fighting a Suvla really was a disaster, and today history seems to want to forget about it. As
Les Carlyon so eloquently put it in his epic Gallipoli, at Anzac and Helles the cemeteries seem to say ‘Lest we
forget’. At Suvla they seem to say ‘Lest we remember’. Yet a visit here can be one of the most rewarding
experiences of a trip to Gallipoli. It’s only when you stand on the flat Suvla plain, beside the graves of
thousands of boys from Manchester and Sheffield, that you realise what a debacle the Gallipoli campaign really was.
You get a sense of it at the Anzac battlefields, but trying to sum up the whole campaign from that narrow
perspective is like trying to make sense of a book by only reading the back cover.
Back at Helles, the shepherd and his flock keep wandering, and the cemetery is still deserted. Archie Odgers’
headstone bears an inscription from his family back in Australia, who never had the chance to visit his grave:
Still Living, Still Loving, Still With Us. It’s an apt sentiment – Archie Odgers and his Anzac comrades are still
with us, if only we make the effort to seek them out.
Mat Mclachlans Battlefields Tours
Thank you to Mat McLachlan and thank you to Travel & Living magazine.
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