Ignorance compounded by stupidity, and a longed-for homecoming denied

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

A friend of mine once told me how little she liked those lines. Crass nationalism she found them, and I can see her point. After all, it doesn’t even talk about Britain but merely about England – as so often with the English, the Scottish, Welsh and (arguably) Irish are simply left out of account.

She may be right. And yet to me the key word is the last: ‘home’. These are lines expressing a wistful longing for home, and the speaker’s heartbreak at knowing it will never be realised. England is named only because he happens to be English.

The poet, Rupert Brooke, was indeed English. And he was never to return home. There is some corner of a Greek island that he’s made forever England. 

Rupert Brooke's grave on the Greek island of Skyros

In April 1915, he was shipped out to the far easternmost parts of the Mediterranean, to join an army that was tasked with landing on Turkish territory, on the Gallipoli peninsula that guards the entrance of the Dardanelles. This is the first part of the narrow waterway linking the Mediterranean with the Black Sea. Where it opens into the Bosphorus stands Istanbul, then capital of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire.

The army’s mission was to seize that capital and force the Turks out of the First World War.

Some weeks ago, I had dinner in Berlin with a German-American colleague and her German partner. He, the partner, at one point said to me, ‘Have you read Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson? Because if you haven’t, you should.’

It took the advice of a young German for me to discover a book by an American that would illuminate a strange and painful episode of British history.

Lawrence in Arabia isn’t the same thing as Lawrence of Arabia though it chiefly focuses on the same man. It’s a remarkable study of the duplicity and incompetence principally of the British, but also of the French and Turks, in the Eastern Theatre of World War One. It’s also an enthralling retelling of the stories of some extraordinary men: the Jewish agronomist and spy Aaron Aaronson, the American oil man and spy William Yale (yes, his family founded the university), the German anthropologist and spy Curt Prüfer and, above all, the larger-than life figure of the British warrior and spy, T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia.

T. E. Lawrence in Arab dress

When the British decided to land their forces at Gallipoli, they did so against Lawrence’s advice. He argued for a landing instead at Alexandretta, modern day Iskenderun, where the Turks were desperately vulnerable – as they knew themselves, given that the roads were terrible and the railway in a desperate state following heavy flooding. For Lawrence, a force of only a few thousand could capture it and threaten to split the Ottoman Empire in two. Even less optimistic colleagues felt 20,000 would do it.

But the British chose the Dardanelles instead. They made several attacks before the main landings, giving clear warning of what was to come. It also made no sense to go for the end of the Gallipoli peninsula. The main German adviser to the Turks couldn’t believe his luck when they did, as he had expected them at a far more difficult spot to defend further up the Dardanelles. Scott Anderson points out that ‘one would be hard pressed to find a worse landing site most anywhere on the three-thousand-mile long Mediterranean coast of the Ottoman Empire’.

Yet it was here that they attacked. Their first day objective was to ‘secure a small village some four miles inland, and then to advance on the Turkish forts just above. Over the next seven months, the British would never reach that village, but would suffer nearly a quarter of a million casualties trying.’

A quarter of a million lost in failure when 20,000 might succeeded elsewhere.

Meanwhile, an army from British India went gaily up the Tigris with little idea of what lay ahead of it. At Baghdad, they were turned back and retreated to the town of Kut where they were surrounded and besieged. The British lost a golden opportunity to save their men when Indian troops stumbled into a Turkish citadel which had been left undefended, but were ordered out because it hadn’t been properly bombarded beforehand. When they tried to capture it later, they failed at a cost of 4000 men. Two relieving forces lost 10,000 each and the garrison at Kut was obliged to surrender ignominiously.

Lawrence himself would write, ‘British generals often gave away in stupidity what they had gained in ignorance.’

Rupert Brooke died even before his generals would compound their ignorance with stupidity. A mosquito bite became infected. In those pre-antibiotic days, sepsis was impossible to treat. He died aboard ship on 23 April 1915, two days before the landings started.

Lawrence also spoke of the simple soldiers sent out by Britain. ‘We were casting them into the fire of the worst of deaths, not to win the war but that the corn and rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours… All our subject provinces to me were not worth one dead Englishman.’

Not a single death was worth what the British Army had been sent out to win. Brooke had been washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home. A lamentable waste that he and thousands of others weren’t left there to continue enjoying them.

Burying Turkish dead at Gallipoli