erest which is more than usual directs Britain's gaze,
and especially the gaze of the Empire, to Gallipoli, and that is the
interest of sacrifice. Here is the scene of a great and glorious attempt
in war, and here lie many thousands of our dead.
The flag of Britain flies over Anzac, and every 25th of April (Anzac Day)
at Anzac Bay and throughout Australia and New Zealand, services are held
to commemorate the landing in 1915, and the bold attempt to win through,
to beat the Turk and liberate the Russian. It is all pure poetry now,
the wrecked lighters stuck in the sand, the sweep of Ocean Beach, the
rounds of Suvla Bay. You see it one day, and all the sea is impotently
angry, raging against a shore which does not reply; you see it another,
and it is lapped in an eternal peace; you see it as it is going to look
hundreds of years hence, when all the cemeteries are fitted out in stone,
and the cypresses have grown around them, and the British have gone home,
and no one visits Gallipoli any more--serene, untroubled.
You run from the once bullet-swept water's edge to the slight shelter of
a sand-bank, and walk by the narrow sap into "Shrapnel Valley," still
strewn with old water-bottles and broken rum-jars, by a trench then to
"Monash Valley," and there probably you start coveys of partridge, which
abound now in great numbers, or you start the silver fox or ever-present
hare. Wild life has returned as if there never had been a sound of gun.
You walk the path up which the rations went in the old days, and see the
litter still. You see the great charred patches where stores were burned
before the evacuation. How untouched all seems between these giant
crags! How vividly you see all that they saw, the grandeur of Nature,
the glimmer of the sea! You can still smell the Dardanelles expedition,
and tread in old footsteps which hardly have been worn away.
It is an astonishing position, dominated by vast inaccessible ridges.
Leaving the so-aptly named "Dead Man's Gully" on the left, you look up to
the "Sphinx," that perfect position of the sniper, climb to "Battleship
Hill," and then to Chunuk Bair. In an hour or so you may walk all the
way we ever got. And we did not need to have got much further than
Chunuk Bair. Down below on the one hand is the sea where the men-of-war
lay and thundered with their guns. But across and in front gleams in the
sunlight what was the Promised Land, the roofs of Chanak and the purple
na
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