'Tis not for lust of glory, no new throne/
This thunder and this lightning of our power/
Wakens up frantic echoes .../
.... We but war when war /
Serves Liberty and Keeps a world at peace./
FRANCIS LEDWIDGE’S poem “
The Irish in Gallipoli
” articulated the conflicted emotions that drove so many young men like him, many idealistic nationalists, others, unionists, to fight and die for what they saw as the cause of small nations. It was a cause which for generations would have them written out of our history. “I joined the British Army because she stood between Ireland and an enemy common to our civilisation,” he would write, “and I would not have her say that she defended us while we did nothing.” He survived Gallipoli but would die in Flanders – “In you, our dead enigma”, Seamus Heaney would reflect on the poet.
The tribute paid yesterday by President McAleese to the Irish dead at Gallipoli was moving, important and overdue. Of the quarter million Allied soldiers killed, wounded or missing in that bloody, incompetent campaign in 1915, 3,411 were from the 10th (Irish) Division, 569 from the Dublin Fusiliers. Others, from the 29th Division, Dublins, Munsters and Inniskillings, and Irishmen serving with the ANZAC forces also died in their hundreds. Turkish losses were on a similar scale.
It was a heavy price, and for what? A misconceived diversionary operation, dreamed up by Winston Churchill, with two ends, both failed: to relieve pressure on the stalemated Western Front and to link up with Russian allies seizing the strategic sea route to Constantinople through the Dardanelle straits. Ill-prepared and equipped they were mowed down as they landed on the beaches and in the hills around Suvla Bay.
There are extraordinary tales of courage and comradeship. Many of the young soldiers were friends who signed up together and died together – famously the Dublin “Pals of Suvla Bay”, many of them rugby mates who joined up at a rally at Lansdowne Road. They elected the popular Ernest Julian, 36-year-old predecessor of Mrs McAleese as Reid Professor of Law at Trinity, to go for a commission while the rest would serve in the ranks. He did not survive the dreadful August days. And, Private Wilkins, also a Pal, who was in a trench catching grenades and throwing them back at the Turks. He caught five, the sixth blew him to pieces.
It is right now that we should recognise their sacrifice and honour them as Irishmen who died not for Ireland but for an honourable if disputed cause. And we should honour the generosity with which the Turks also remember those who came to attack their land. The words of modern Turkey’s founding father, Kemal Ataturk, are engraved in a memorial at Gallipoli: “To those heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore, rest in peace. ... Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. Having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.”