Moorehead’s Gallipoli!

Our book today was a very thoughtful gift! The little old lady who reviews the same novel every week for the Silver Spring Scold recently tapped out her pin money onto the kitchen table, put on her finest bonnet, tottered around the corner to her favorite second-hand bookstore, Puss-in-Books, and procured for me a plastic-wrapped copy of Alan Moorehead’s feisty, eloquent 1956 book Gallipoli, a soup-to-nuts history of that doomed World War I campaign.

I hadn’t read the book in decades, and back when I did read it, I read a battered, stained UK paperback while I was staying in a guest house in Canakkale. I was waiting out the healing of a nasty little scrape, and my hosts had kindly installed me and my beagles in a third-floor room with brushed stone walls, a stone floor covered in knitted rugs, and a wooden-shuttered rectangular window overlooking the water. In a further desperate, uncomprehending gesture of hospitality, they screamed at their teenage son to go and collect every book in English he could find among their neighbors on the little street, and Moorehead’s Gallipoli was part of that dragnet. It did me no good to protest, to point out that the well-thumbed Greek romance novels belonging to the lady of the house would have been just fine with me – they thought they were in my debt, and they thought I was English, so a cardboard box of books left behind by generations of travelers was deposited at the foot of my bed.

I already knew much of what to expect when I opened Gallipoli. I knew the campaign itself – Winston Churchill’s epic idea of sending a small fleet of past-date warships in a spearhead up the Dardanelles to Constantinople, knocking the Turks out of the Great War and opening a shipping passage to the Black Sea ports of Britain’s ally Russia – from other accounts, and I knew of Moorehead from other books, mainly his masterpiece The White Nile but also his scrappy collections of war-reporting. I knew to expect fantastic prose, and I got it right away, in his description of the reckless Ottoman decision to enter the war:

By their daring – perhaps even because they had to dare in order to keep in office – the Young Turks had got their country into a war which was much too big for them. They were small gamblers in a game of very high stakes, and, as it usually happens in such cases, their presence was hardly noticed by the other players for a while. They watched, they waited, they made their anxious little bids, they tried desperately to understand which way the luck was going, and they put on an air of being quite at ease which was very far from being the case.

By the time he wrote Gallipoli, Moorehead was deeply familiar with military stupidity in all of its depths, so the near-demented planning of the Dardanelles campaign naturally draws his ire. Noting that the London War Council formally resolved “That the Admiralty should prepare for a naval expedition in February to bombard and take the Gallipoli Peninsula with Constantinople as its objective,” he follows through with classic fish-eyed British studied incredulity:

In the years that followed great play was made over the wording of this resolution. ‘It is impossible,’ the Dardanelles Commissioners wrote in their report in 1917, ‘ to read all the evidence, or to study the voluminous papers which have been submitted to us, without being struck by the atmosphere of vagueness and want of precision which seems to have characterized the proceedings of the War Council.’ How, it was asked, can a fleet ‘take’ a peninsula? And how could it have Constantinople as its objective? If this meant – as it apparently did mean – that the Fleet should capture and occupy the city, then it was absurd.

And his book ends on a beautiful, mournful note on the monstrous futility of the campaign. He reflects on the anonymous graves of the soldiers who died there:

Yet hardly anyone ever visits them. Except for the occasional organized tours not more than half a dozen visitors arrive from one year’s end to the other. Often for months at a time nothing of any consequence happens, lizards scuttle about the tombstones in the sunshine and time goes by in an endless dream.

Re-reading this sturdy hardcover copy on a warm, misty Boston January night was a delight, as was studying the elaborate fold-out maps this edition has and that old paperback certainly did not. Even when it first appeared, Moorehead’s Gallipoli was widely regarded by critics and buffs as the best book on its subject, and in my view half a century has done nothing to change that. I owe that little old lady a bowl of soup.