HISTORY: Gallipoli destroys common-sense. Faced by those brilliant blue waters, by the Hellespont, by Troy, by the sense that European civilisation was born here, rationality perishes, and atavism triumphs. How else can one explain the lunatic impulses which drove the Gallipoli operation in 1915, and how the campaign has been written about since?
Almost every historian seems to be infected with what-ifs and if-onlys, all implying that success was denied by circumstance, poor leadership and stupidity. This is rubbish: the straits of the Dardanelles, had they been conquered, would simply have been a highway to an unspeakable hell: a fresh Flanders on the plains of Anatolia, 3,000 miles from Britain.
This was - thank God - never achievable, for either side of the Dardanelles was controlled by Ottoman forces; yet the allied project only ever intended to subdue one coastline. Ottoman forces would still remain in control of the other shore, from which they could of course command the narrow waters up which the allied fleet would have to advance.
Yet the allied theory proposed that once the advance to Istanbul had been - mysteriously - achieved, the fleet was - equally mysteriously - to secure the surrender of the Ottoman capital, which was then - more mystery - to be tamely handed over to the Tsar.
In the history of war, there has not been a more ludicrously unattainable project. Indeed, it cannot properly be examined by military minds or by historians: it demands the attentions of a team of psychiatrics specialising in denial and dementia.
Out of the lunacy of Gallipoli has emerged the great Australian myth of ANZAC. Like all great myths, it is irreducible by truth. Most Australians are convinced that the Gallipoli campaign was an entirely Australian affair, in which the lives of their gallant young soldiers were squandered by incompetent British generals. Yet, more French soldiers died than Australians at Gallipoli, and together they did not match British (including Irish) casualties.
L. A. Carlyon's Gallipoli is told emphatically from the Australian viewpoint: even the New Zealanders - the forgotten NZ of ANZAC - get short shrift. Moreover, it is infected with the same old what-if Gallipoli-virus which contaminates virtually every account of the campaign. Only at the very end he asks the pertinent question: even if the Dardanelles had been forced, how could the appearance of a couple of British battleships off Istanbul in 1915 have shortened the war?
For all his flashes of wisdom, and some fine, often moving writing, the author is too inclined to reach for the familiar old Australian cliche about the British: when he invokes the word "chap", he invariably does so at the expense of some cretinous pommy general. Yet, for all his avowed self-belief in his understanding of the British, he is poor on the cabinet politics which gave Churchill his head, and which despatched the Gallipoli venture to certain disaster.
Without Churchill - his lies, his bluster, his bullying, his endless manipulations - there would have been no Gallipoli. He mesmerised and bamboozled opponents, he wilfully misrepresented their arguments, he turned logic on its head: he was the true author of one of the most needless military calamities of the 20th century. And having caused tens of thousands of men to die purposeless deaths in a doomed campaign, for the rest of his days, he remained sneeringly and triumphantly unapologetic.
The scale of that calamity, even with the passage of nearly 90 years, is hard to grasp without deep emotion: the young men hurled to their deaths in repeated assaults on the unassailable. It is easy to blame the generals, but they were given an impossible task. The balance of forces was never sufficiently in their favour to allow them the basic rudiments of fire and manoeuvre; moreover, they were fighting an enemy defending his land, and in a war for which they and the men they commanded had had absolutely no training.
Yet some pretty basic questions remain. The first assault on the peninsula began in April, and it was soon learnt that success depended on two things: ready supplies of water and hand grenades. Yet when the 10th (Irish) Division arrived in August, those were the two commodities they were in immediate and dire need of. The Irishmen's catastrophic lack of both largely explains their comprehensive defeat in the torrid battle on Kiritch Tepe Sirt.
Such is the author's obsession with matters Australian that this tragedy hardly receives a mention. Anyway, the real protracted hell of the Gallipoli campaign lay not in Suvla, where the 10th met its nemesis, nor in ANZAC, but in Helles, where British division after division was battered to pieces in a series of heart-breakingly futile assaults in Gully Ravine and the hamlet of Krithia.
The Irish reader will struggle to learn here about the travails of the many Irish battalions which served on the peninsula, and one may consult the index in vain: for it is exactly what one has come to expect from modern publishers - an utter disgrace. The Royal Dublin Fusiliers are listed once in the index, but five times in the text - a rather niggardly tribute to a regiment which lost well over a thousand dead in Gallipoli.
This is a curate's egg of a book: in parts very good indeed. However, though they also both exhibit the tiresome what-if virus, for the first-time reader of the Gallipoli campaign, I would emphatically recommend Michael Hickey's or Robert Rhodes-James's accounts before this one.
Gallipoli. By L. A. Carlyon. Doubleday, 608 pp. £20
Kevin Myers is an Irish Times journalist