The New Zealanders will have their special monument here beside the cemeteries where their many dead are lying. They took Chunuk Bair, and unsupported, pressed on to win the day, only to be outnumbered and met by terrible odds of swarming Turks. You may pause now and pick an anemone in that terrible no-man's land, where the skeletons of our old dead, picked clean by the jackals, were found otherwise untouched when we came again in the November of '18. You can see the damped, slightly discoloured patches where dead men lay, and even find still now and then a human bone—of friend or foe, who now can tell?
We have gathered together the bones and have buried them all, be they English or Turk, and have decently cleaned up Gallipoli—as Englishmen would. Australians and New Zealanders work there now with simple devotion and energy, and are astonishing the Turks, who ask, "If they do so much for the dead, what will they do for the living?"
A few army huts on the height above Kellia Bay mark the headquarters where Col. Hughes and his Anzac staff are living. From ever-windy hills they look across the Narrows to the wan house where Byron lived. Gangs of Greeks are working for them. The extremity of Gallipoli Peninsula is as it were an imperial estate, and every day a round of work goes on at Helles, at Greenhill, at Suvla, and the rest. With the coming of summer the ships are coming with the marble, and the stone slabs will climb the hills where once our fellows struggled upward. It is a fine undertaking. No ranks are distinguished in the gravestones, and all are equal in sacrifice. But dominating everything will be a tall white obelisk to be put up on the highest point of Helles, visible to all ships passing through the Gate and going forth upon the seas. Australia will be there. England might lose its interest in the Dardanelles—but the Empire never. The younger men have their eyes upon it. And what a contrast the Laodicean atmosphere of G.H.Q., and the frankness of an Australian and New Zealand mess!
A certain widow of a brave general who died in the attack, has, through wealth and influence, obtained permission to erect a personal monument to her husband on Gallipoli. If this is carried out it will be greatly resented by the Australians, who say, "If wealth can purchase a monument, there are plenty of rich Australians who would readily erect memorials to their gallant kith and kin who perished here." A pity if the equality and simplicity of the Gallipoli cemeteries is broken into.
An exchange of hospitality with H.M.S. "Tumult," standing off Chanak, kept us in touch with the outside world, giving us the wireless messages each day. Thus we heard of the application of the "sanctions" to Germany, the conclusion of the trade treaty with Soviet Russia, the fall of Batum, and other items of world interest. The first officer told us how they stood off at Sevastopol and took on Russian wounded, the most appalling cases of suffering where there was never a murmur from the men, and the Russian sisters sat with them all day and all night with a never-tiring devotion. The Commander and every one were strongly Russophile—won to them by personal contact with the Russians, and that although the ship "stank like a pole-cat" before it could bring the refugees to port.
The Commander very kindly gave me a passage to Gallipoli, where a large part of Wrangel's army was encamped. We tore up the channel at an unexampled pace, the cleft north wind driving angrily past as the destroyer rived its way through. And in an hour we came to the ramshackle capital and main port of the peninsula, where a host of khaki-clad soldiers stared at us from the quay.
General Wrangel's army numbered about eighty thousand men when it was transported from the Crimea, and about ten thousand had left him for one cause and another at the time when the French presented the ultimatum—"Go to Brazil or back to Soviet Russia, or we shall cut off the rations on April the first." Wrangel's war material, his guns and machine-guns and ammunition, were given mostly to the Georgians, who promptly lost it to the Bolsheviks or sold it to Kemal. The Greeks certainly complain that the Kemalist army, after being almost devoid of artillery, suddenly became possessed of it in a mysterious way, and shelled them with French shells. The Greek set-back at Smyrna is no doubt partly attributable to the disposal of Wrangel's weapons. His ships and stores were mostly commandeered by the French, and the value of them set off against the rations supplied to the army.
France probably thought originally that she could yet employ these forces in a further adventure against the Bolsheviks. Her idea doubtless was to throw Wrangel's army into the scale on another front of war whenever opportunity should arise. Britain, in refusing to support Wrangel, actually cut herself free from an enormous amount of material responsibility in case of Wrangel's failure.
Wrangel's army was not aided by us as a fighting force, and it could not as a matter of policy be aided by us in its tragical plight after the débâcle. It had to depend on the French.
Wrangel, it is said, had a guarantee from the French that they would ration his army when they took upon them the transport to Gallipoli and Lemnos. France would no doubt have continued to do so but that the conclusion of the trading treaty between Russia and England showed that the external fight against the Bolsheviks was over, and, indeed, put France in a highly disadvantageous position. For as long as France retained General Wrangel she could not reasonably hope to enter into trading relationship with Soviet Russia.