The other trenches: the Dardanelles, 100 years on

In August 1915, in his tent at GHQ on the Aegean island of Imbros, General Sir Ian Hamilton, commander-in-chief of the Gallipoli expedition, woke from a dream in which someone was attempting to drown him in the Hellespont. ‘For hours afterwards,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘I was haunted by the thought that the Dardanelles were fatal: that something sinister was afoot: that we, all of us, were pre-doomed.’ This was not how it had seemed when what had been confidently designated ‘the Constantinople expedition’ set out for the distant and largely unknown Turkish peninsula. As an exhilarated Rupert Brooke had explained to his mother:

We are going to be part of a landing force to help the fleet break through the Hellespont and the Bosphorus and take Constantinople, and open up the Black Sea. It’s going to be one of the important things of the war, if it comes off.

For young officers like Brooke, well grounded in the classics, the Gallipoli campaign had an irresistible glamour. Sailing past the coast of Africa, he wrote: ‘We’ve been gliding through a sapphire sea, swept by ghost of triremes and quinqueremes, Hannibal on poop, or Hanno … Soon — after Malta — we’ll be among the Cyclades. There I shall recite Sappho and Homer. And the winds of history will follow us all the way.’ About to embark on the same ship, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, one of the most gifted classicists of his generation, had written that he was looking forward to fighting ‘in the Chersonese or on the plains of Troy’, adding: ‘I am going to take my Herodotus as a guidebook.’ As Petty Officer David Fyffe, one of those who bear witness in Richard van Emden and Stephen Chambers’s handsome volume, puts it: ‘One felt somehow as if one were clasping hands across the centuries with the great adventurers.’

Alan Moorehead’s classic account of the campaign, originally published in
1956, is appropriately replete with classical allusions and takes its epigraph from Herodotus:

And now, as he looked and saw the whole of the Hellespont covered with vessels of his fleet and all the shore and every plain about Abydos as full as possible with men, Xerxes congratulated himself on his good fortune; but after a while he wept.