The dead man, he assumed, had been its master, as he went up to stroke it – and then saw to his horror that part of the man's head had been blown away and the cat was enjoying a dead meal of human brains.

He was particularly moved by a cat which had cuddled close to the face of a dead Turk in the street, one leg embracing the top of his head. A British Lieutenant recalled that the only two living things he saw in one of the Turkish villages were two cats and a dog. This is a lengthy account, yet enlivened with many a detail bringing home the grim reality of war. Among the eye-witness accounts are those of Captain William Wedgwood Benn of the London Yeomanry, father of Tony Benn, and the future Prime Minister Clement Attlee, then a Lieutenant from the 6th South Lancashire Regiment, who enjoyed discussing socialism in the officers' mess with men that disagreed with his views but relished passionate yet good-natured political debates. Hart has drawn heavily on personal accounts by individuals at all levels and all sides, from Britain and ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps), and from the Turkish side as well. It was a huge drain on Allied military resources, involving nearly half a million troops, with the British Empire losing about 205,000 – 115,000 killed, wounded or missing and 90,000 evacuated sick – while the French lost 47,000, and the Turkish over 251,000.

In his introduction he calls the eight-month exercise an epic tragedy with an incredible heroic resilience displayed by the soldiers, yet ultimately a futile and costly sideshow for all the combatants. It was more a matter of a wild scheme which was poorly planned and doomed from the start, compounding the Allies' problems by diverting large numbers of troops from attacking Germans on the Western Front, where they would arguably have been better employed. This painstakingly-researched account shows that this was not the case.

The campaign ended in failure and retreat, yet for many years it was portrayed as a brilliant strategy undermined by bad luck and incompetent commanders. Summary: A detailed study, with many eye-witness accounts, of the unsuccessful Allies' campaign in 1915 to eliminate Turkey from the First World War.Įarly in 1915 the Allied Powers attempted to seize the Dardanelles, capture Constantinople and eliminate Turkey, who had joined the Central Powers, from the First World War.

Gallipoli by Peter Hart