No monopoly on grief

Tony Wright/October 30, 2008

Gallipoli is a sacred site to the Turkish people as much as it is to the Australians.

MUCH anxious hand-wringing and expulsion of hot air has accompanied reports this week of bones being exposed by work on what is known as the Second Ridge Road on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Passion is to be expected, of course, for the story of Anzac and the dreadful sacrifice of life on that ridge, with its paradoxically lovely view across the Aegean Sea below, is an integral part of the history of both Australia and modern Turkey.

It is natural to recoil at the idea of soldiers' remains torn apart by bulldozers, and it is proper to require respect for the dead.However, much of the reaction in Australia to the story of the roadworks is at best ill-thought-out and at worst an insult to the Turkish authorities who are trying under increasingly difficult circumstances to maintain access not only to Australian, New Zealand and British memorials, but to places considered sacred to the Turkish people.

It is worth remembering that the Gallipoli Peninsula, and the battleground known as Old Anzac, is Turkish land. It is undeniably tragic that some 8700 Australian and New Zealand lives were lost there. But at least 10 times that number of Turkish troops perished defending their land against what was a breathtakingly ill-conceived invasion.

The Turkish people — victors, we might remind ourselves — never needed to declare Gallipoli a peace park honouring all those who died there, including the invaders, but that is precisely what they have done. Turkish troops probably didn't need to allow our soldiers to sneak away, without a single casualty, from the peninsula once the futility of it all was finally realised, either.

Despite all the myths about the clever ruse of the withdrawal in December 1915, it remains beyond belief that the Turks did not know of it; more likely, they simply decided to allow the invaders to leave unmolested, happy the killing was over. What is rarely mentioned is that the Anzacs booby-trapped the trenches with dynamite, killing scores of Turks as the Allied ships sailed away.

Perhaps, then, it might be worth stepping back from some of the more sanctimonious reaction to Turkish efforts to improve a pretty ordinary road that takes a big annual pounding. Those who have spent time wandering the old Gallipoli battlefields know how simple it is to unearth bones.

You need do little more than scratch the surface of the weatherbeaten and crumbling earth beside the Second Ridge Road. Rainfall and snow melt and wind continuously expose ghastly reminders of the slaughter of 1915. The place is a boneyard.

Once, as I walked alongside that road opposite the fearful old fortress known as Quinn's Post, my foot went through the roof of what I can only assume had been a Turkish tunnel, and I still recall the revulsion of touching bones in that soil.

No one is ever likely to know with certainty whose remains might have been exposed during the recent roadworks, but they are vastly more likely to be those of Turkish soldiers than of Anzacs. The soldiers of the Ottoman Empire died in hideous numbers up here. Their name for the area we know as Lone Pine was Kanlisirt — Bloody Ridge.

Thousands who perished during a single assault in May 1915, plus many hundreds who had fallen in the weeks and months before, were buried in mass graves around Bloody Ridge. No headstones for them, though the remains of most of the Anzacs who were buried up there were later disinterred and carried for permanent burial in cemeteries elsewhere on the peninsula.
More than 10,000 Australians and New Zealanders now make an annual pilgrimage to Gallipoli for Anzac Day ceremonies and thousands more visit at less frantic periods during the year. But over the past few years, the Turkish Government has urged Turkish people to visit those weathered hills at least once in their lives. So every weekend, increasing numbers of adults and schoolchildren grind up the road in heavy buses to learn of their own history. The road that takes the biggest beating, and thus needed upgrading, is the Second Ridge Road. This thin strip of bitumen runs from Lone Pine past Johnson's Jolly, Wire Gully, Steele's Post, Courtney's Post, Quinn's Post, rising past the hill known as Baby 700 and beyond, the bigger Battleship Hill, all the way up to the heights of Chunuk Bair.

These names hold within them many of the most haunting stories of the Anzac legend, but the Turkish people have numerous names for particular areas along this road, too. Their most important memorial is a martyr's cemetery built about halfway up the road to commemorate the 57th Regiment of the Ottoman Army. It was here, on the first day of the invasion — April 25, 1915 — that Mustafa Kemal, later named Ataturk, the first president of the Turkish Republic, gave a chilling order to his troops: "I do not order you to attack. I command you to die! By the time we die, we will be replaced by other troops and commanders."

All 628 Turkish soldiers, including the commanders, duly died over the first four days of the Gallipoli campaign, most of them on that first day. Their sacrifice, and those of tens of thousands of other Turkish soldiers, meant that the Anzacs (and the British, the French, the Indians, Senegalese, Newfoundlanders and others regularly forgotten in the telling of this appalling tale) never reached the high ground, and thus never had a hope of success.

For Australians to take the high ground almost a century later about Turkish road building techniques — however unfortunate the result — seems a little rich.

National editor Tony Wright is the author of Turn Right at Istanbul — A Walk on the Gallipoli Peninsula. He has travelled to Gallipoli five times since 2000
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