‘<i>Sic transit gloria mundi</i>’: Gallipoli, a centenary reflection

A first visit to Anzac Cove is a profoundly moving experience. Walking along the narrow, lonely littoral of Ari Burnu and looking up to the surrounding, towering, grim ranges of the Sari Bair Ridge is to fill oneself with a sense of crushing despair at the huge and futile cost, in human terms, of the effort expended to both invade and seize, this, the land of the Turks. After Russia declared war on Turkey in November 1914, the Dardanelles were closed, the Germans being on hand to advise appropriately: the Dardanelles have been described as Russia's ‘windpipe’, one which allowed the egress of materials from the Black Sea via the Sea of Marmara. Prior to that time, the Britain's Naval Mission had provided massive support, advice and armaments for Turkey to enable the straits to be defended; artillery, torpedoes, trawlers and searchlights were supplied by companies such as Vickers-Armstrongs Limited. Despite this knowledge, Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, felt that a naval attack could forcibly re-open the Dardanelles through to Constantinople. In the subsequent attack of 18 March 1915, the Allied fleet suffered the worst defeat for the Royal Navy since Trafalgar. Churchill was relieved of his position at the Admiralty, becoming Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Following the naval failure, the next phase of the ‘planning’ involved the landing of ground troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula itself, under the command of 62-year-old General Sir Ian Hamilton, who subsequently noted in his ‘Gallipoli diary’ in 1920: ‘my knowledge of the Dardanelles was nil; of the Turk nil; of the strength of our own forces next to nil.’ In the time between the failed naval adventure and the landing of the troops of the ‘Mediterranean Expeditionary Force’ (MEF) under Hamilton's command, the Turks had been organized by Otto Liman von Sanders, the head of the German Military Mission to Turkey and defender of Gallipoli. The Turkish troops underwent feverish and intensive training and were deployed in peninsular positions thought to be likely sites for landings; defences were constructed until there was no more barbed wire remaining and landmines were constructed from torpedo heads: a most productive use of the time provided by the Allies' lack of forward planning for the campaign. On 25 April 1915, Ari Burnu, subsequently named Anzac Cove, a narrow pebbly beach, awaited the Anzac troops followed by a near impossible climb up onto the Sari Bair range, a terrible landscape. Also awaiting these troops were the Turks under the command of Mustafa Kemal; his instructions were clear: ‘I do not order you to attack; I order you to die!’ The inaccurate maps used in the Allied landings were developed from an old French survey of the area in 1854. Unfortunately, the Australian and New Zealand troops landed at a most inhospitable site, some 2–3 kilometres north of that planned, the intended site, having much more favourable terrain. The occupied landing area proved to be some 700 metres by 20 metres; the first Casualty Clearing Station was established in an area of just 6 square metres, competing for space with all manner of stores and munitions (Fig. 1). Colonel Neville Howse V.C. was the assistant director of medical services, First Australian Division. Anzac Cove. (Image courtesy of the Australian War Memorial P02647_047). Even prior to their reaching the landfall, heavy casualties were sustained in the landing crafts. At ‘Hell's Spit’ on Anzac Cove, one boat lay aground, packed with dead men; elsewhere dead and wounded lay half in and half out of the water, in the hot sun, unable to be retrieved. Once on shore and battling for their lives, it must be emphasized that the path for those wounded and surviving, prior to proceeding to definitive treatment, was a long, hazardous and generally agonisingly painful one. On Gallipoli, all transport was by stretcher, on foot, rarely by mule, and if that evacuation was successful, one entered the phase of waiting on the beach under constant and heavy fire, before, weather conditions permitting, being transferred by boat to a larger vessel and dispatch to a euphemistically named ‘base hospital’ on one of the islands adjoining the peninsula. The stretcher bearers were the primary carers; haemorrhage was controlled by application of small sterile bandages, which every soldier carried, known as the ‘first field dressing’. In truth, many dressings were dirty and incorrectly sealed, the result of shoddy manufacture and profiteering by contractors, including Australians. Fractures, where possible, were splinted and on occasion tourniquets were applied. It was expected that operations were not to be undertaken on Anzac beach. As an example, abdominal cases were to be rested, nil orally and moved only as necessitated; to minimize surgical trauma, wounds were not to be explored until evacuation of the victim. There was disagreement over the topical antiseptic of choice; one could choose between ‘eusol’, hydrogen peroxide, iodine and saline preparations. The use of antitetanus serum was one of the success stories of medicine at Gallipoli, aided also by the absence of manure-associated organisms in uncultivated soils. Surgery on the peninsula was reserved for cases adjudged to be time-critical: undertaken in or under tents, the operating table frequently being the stretcher on which the casualty lay, supported by timbers driven into the ground at each corner; at the head was a table for the anaesthetist and his sparse requirements; scattered around could be found towels, dressings, a mechanical sterilizer, water and disinfectants. The conditions for the medical staff were appalling, one comment should suffice: ‘one of our officers, a Captain Green, was operating on a man when a shrapnel shell from “Beachy Bill” battery burst overhead … and a pellet went right through his chest and Green fell into the arms of the doctor who was administering the anaesthetic’. Almost all medical posts were prone to either direct line of fire or shrapnel, many casualties being wounded as they awaited evacuation. The ill-planned original medical scheme had allowed for the wounded to be triaged prior to evacuation offshore; having regard for the unexpected volume of casualties, triage broke down, the ‘scheme’ collapsed and the seriously wounded, along with those with cuts and sprains, were retrieved, adding to the bedlam. The chaos at Anzac Cove was unimaginable; the tiny beach bursting at the seams with incoming troops and supplies coupled with those desperate for evacuation. At this very time the possibility of a complete withdrawal was being debated by the MEF commanders on a battleship lying off Anzac Cove. Accordingly, the evening of April 25 saw the temporary halt of the evacuation of the wounded until this matter was decided. Neville Howse then took the matters into his own hands and, having supervised the refloating of a large lighter which had run aground earlier in the day, had 150 stretcher cases evacuated just after midnight. This urgent work of primary care, emergency surgery and evacuation then continued under the dual possibilities of either complete withdrawal of the invading force or Turkish counterattack. Howse and his team worked like ‘possessed’ men and by 3 in the morning, the beach was clear of all wounded, only the dead and dying remained, the latter assisted in their agony with morphia. In short, Howse had evacuated, from a narrow beachhead under constant fire and shrapnel attack, some 2000 wounded in small open boats which were rowed, an almost impossible and certainly unprecedented feat (Fig. 2). Only then it was announced that the MEF command deemed that evacuation was impossible, from offshore advising those on shore to ‘dig, dig, dig until you are safe’; the feared Turkish onslaught did eventuate but not until 19 May. Evacuation of casualties from Anzac, April 1915. (Image courtesy of the Australian War Memorial C02679). General Sir William Birdwood, the commander of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, subsequently noted, ‘the manner in which 2000 wounded were collected and transferred to ships during the day and night of 25th April was highly creditable and due in the main to the excellent arrangements made by Colonel N. R. Howse V.C.’. Incredibly, it was Howse, who had emigrated to Australia from England for ‘health reasons’ and on account of ‘weak lungs’ and yet it was this very same man who volunteered to serve in the New South Wales Medical Corps, participating in the South African campaign of 1900–1902. In July 1900, Howse earned the Victoria Cross for retrieving a wounded man at Vredefort, under very heavy crossfire, and carrying him to a place of shelter. He remains the only Australian medical officer to have received this award. Neville Howse had trained at the London Hospital under the supervision of Frederick Treves whom he regarded as the greatest surgeon in England. Treves also served as a civilian surgeon in the second Anglo Boer War 1899–1902 and wrote an account of that experience in ‘The Tale of a Field Hospital’.1 In his preface, Treves noted, inter alia, ‘this brief narrative is concerned not with shouting hosts in defiant array, but with the moaning and distorted forms of men who have been ‘scorched by the flames of war’. It deals with the grey hours after the great, world-echoing display is over, with the night that ends the gladiator's show, when the arena is occupied only by the maimed, the dying and the dead’. The final chapter of this ‘Tale’ centres around Treves' description of a solitary man approaching the hospital lines, concluding with, ‘Poor lad! This was a sorry home-coming at the last. A squalid ending of a march; staggering in alone, a shuffling wreck, without a single comrade, with no fifes and drums, no cheering crowd, and no proud adoration of mother or wife. He was helped to a bell tent and put to bed on a stretcher, and on the stretcher he died; and this was the end of his soldiering. Sic transit gloria mundi!’ These Latin words of Thomas à Kempis translate as, ‘thus passes the glory of the world!’ Disquiet was growing not only at Gallipoli from the very outset of the doomed campaign, but also in London as time went by and as any attempt to expand the battlefield met with fruitless bloodshed. John Monash, in command of the Australian Imperial Force's Fourth Infantry Brigade, commented in a letter dated 25 September 1915, ‘… it's about time that somebody asked about the treatment of Australian soldiers in Tommy hospitals, for it's the absolute dizzy limit. Nothing could be better than our Australian or New Zealand or Canadian hospitals, but as to the British hospitals, here, well, the sooner they hang somebody for gross mismanagement the better’. Writing of World War I, Field Marshall Montgomery would later note, ‘I would name Sir John Monash as the best general on the Western Front in Europe’. War correspondents were present at Gallipoli both from Britain and Australia, all being subject to strict censorship. Keith Murdoch paid a 4-day visit in September 1915 and after having met with Sir Ian Hamilton and having signed a letter agreeing to the conditions of censorship breached those imposed conditions by agreeing to carry a letter from Ashmead-Bartlett, correspondent for the London ‘Daily Telegraph’, to Herbert Asquith, the British Prime Minister, outlining the true circumstances extant at Gallipoli. While Murdoch was in Marseilles, en route to London, he faced the threat of being detained in custody unless he surrendered the letter to a British officer, with an escort, who was acting on information received from the battlefront. Arriving in London and aware of the content of the seized letter, Murdoch immediately dictated his own version addressing it to the Australian Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher; although Murdoch had done so in the Australian High Commission, the Editor of ‘The Times’ read this version and promptly facilitated its transfer via Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer and an opponent of the Gallipoli campaign, to Asquith's desk. Murdoch was astonished to see his ‘Gallipoli letter’ to the Australian Prime Minister, printed by Asquith as a ‘state paper’ and circulated to the members of the Dardanelles Committee, which was in charge of the campaign. Such is the ‘power of the pen’ that Lord Kitchener was then dispatched to Gallipoli to assess the true situation; subsequently and in quick succession, Ian Hamilton was relieved of his command and the decision made to withdraw all troops from the peninsula. All this occurred after 8 months of fruitless heroism and loss of life. In truth, the withdrawal on 20 December 1915 was the only aspect of the Gallipoli campaign that was planned rigorously and was also completed successfully, being achieved with no loss of life. The final Gallipoli statistics are horrific. Turks: casualties, 251 309; dead, 86 692. Allies: casualties, >140 000; dead, Australia, 8709; Britain, 21 255; France, 10 000; New Zealand, 2701. Mustafa Kemal, the victorious commander of the Turks went on to become the reforming president of modern Turkey; he became known as Atatürk, meaning ‘Father of the Turks’. His superb words inscribed on a large memorial plinth at Anzac Cove include these: ‘Your sons are now living in our bosom and are in peace, after having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well’. An aphorism attributed to Hippocrates states, ‘he who wishes to be a surgeon should go to war’. Newton's third law of motion states, ‘for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction’; surely, the aphorism of Thomas à Kempis, ‘sic transit gloria mundi’ also satisfies that law.

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