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Tragic tales of the Gallipoli Campaign

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  • Tragic tales of the Gallipoli Campaign

    Arts & Book Review
    February 28, 2015
    First Edition


    TRAGIC TALES OF THE GALLIPOLI CAMPAIGN

    THE FALL OF THE OTTOMANS BY EUGENE ROGAN (Allen Lane, £25) » Order at
    £20 inc. p&p from the Independent Bookshop

    by GEORGE ARNEY


    IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE soldiers having to face more nightmarish
    conditions in the Great War than they did on the Western Front. But
    that may be true of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign, which was
    intended by British politicians and generals to deliver a swift
    knockout blow to the Ottoman Empire, but instead ended in an Ottoman
    triumph and lengthened the conflict. Although casualties were fewer,
    combatants who served on both fronts said that conditions at Gallipoli
    were yet more vile. In France, troops could take leave well behind the
    front lines; here there was no respite from the incessant shelling,
    sniping and mines. The unburied bodies which lay between entrenched
    enemy lines stank in the summer heat and attracted swarms of flies
    carrying sickness from the dead to the living.

    Amidst these horrors, there were moments of fraternity between the
    armies. "Johnny Turk" was not demonised by the Western Allies as the
    Germans were. At some points, the trenches were so close that gifts
    could be exchanged. A Turkish soldier remembered throwing cigarettes,
    raisins and nuts to the Anzacs, who reciprocated with cans of fruit
    and jam. Another eyewitness account tells of a private in the
    Lancashire Fusiliers who saved the life of an Ottoman soldier during a
    battle and subsequently had his own life saved by the same man.

    Such personal stories drawn from diaries and memoirs enliven Eugene
    Rogan's satisfyingly straightforward narrative, and nowhere more so
    than in his account of the genocide perpetrated by the Young Turk
    leadership against the Empire's Armenian subjects.

    The horrors of the enforced "death marches" are especially vivid.
    Thousands were murdered by bands of armed men. Stragglers were
    finished off by the guards. Others committed suicide by hurling
    themselves into rivers, including the mother of one survivor, a
    nine-year-old boy who was taken in by Kurdish villagers as the columns
    of wretched Armenians passed through to their planned exile in the
    Syrian deserts.

    The creation of a homeland for Armenians in the Caucasus was one
    outcome of the First World War. The dismemberment of the Ottoman
    Empire led to many other territorial changes, above all in the Middle
    East, where new borders were drawn by the triumphant Western allies to
    further their imperialist ambitions. These borders have endured for
    nearly a century - until last year, at least, when Isis declared an
    Islamic Caliphate and abrogated the border between Iraq and Syria.

    The last Caliph was the Ottoman Sultan, who theoretically exercised
    religious authority over Muslims worldwide. British and French fears
    that his call for jihad would inflame Muslim subjects in their
    colonies turned out to be largely exaggerated. Rogan raises the
    question of whether 21st-century fears of global jihad are equally
    misplaced.

    But the post-war settlement imposed by greedy and sometimes perfidious
    European powers have left the Middle East riven with conflicts, not
    least between Arabs and Israelis, to this day.

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