The beach at Sedd El Bahr in Turkey is a truly melancholy place, for we can say for sure that the hundreds of Irishmen who died there in 1915 did so quite in vain. More than in vain: their sacrifice helped lay the moral foundation for the 1916 Rising, and all the horrors of armed republicanism ever since, writes Kevin Myers
Madness and evil brought about the Gallipoli campaign. And the one consolation is that it was better for the allied offensive to have been defeated there than to have proceeded to Istanbul and beyond, to the plains of Anatolia and to certain and greater catastrophe there.
Quite mysteriously, the British had come to believe that all that was needed to knock Turkey out of the war - to which it had lately and foolishly come - was to send a fleet up the long channel of the Dardanelles, with a Turkish shore lying on either side, into the sea of Marmara, and thence to Istanbul. And there, or so the theory went, merely the presence of British dreadnoughts would cause the Sublime Porte to flee, and the Turkish people to surrender their capital, which Britain could then hand over to Russia.
Ancient loyalties
Hand over Istanbul to Russia. That simple. How is this possible? How could those intelligent, sophisticated Georgians, who regarded themselves as guardians of civilisation and of liberty, think that a mere battleship flourishing its turrets at a city could make its citizens utterly abandon their ancient loyalties and their passionately held identity?
Bizarrely, those erudite Whigs had tried a similar trick not long before, when the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, sent a battle squadron to Belfast to cow the unionists into accepting Home Rule. It hadn't worked then; but now it was hoped that the Turks would be of softer mettle.
Yet leaving this ludicrous theory aside for a moment, British foreign policy over the previous century had been predicated on preventing Russia getting control of the warm-water port of Istanbul/Constantinople, though which it would achieve permanent mastery of the eastern Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. This was a sound central principle, but one which the British were now jettisoning, in the fond belief that once Istanbul had fallen the allies could march through the back door of the Balkans into Berlin.
One might as well plan to go via the Sea of Tranquillity. And the farce gets worse, because for the British to get their warships up the long channel of the Dardanelles, with the Turks controlling both shores, they would first have to occupy those shores. Hence the Gallipoli invasion; but that operation would secure only one shore. What about the other shore, on the Asian side of the channel? Well, since the British felt such a challenge was beyond them, they just didn't bother doing it. So even if the Gallipoli landings were successful, the Ottoman forces would still control the Asian shore, where they had 200 howitzers which could dominate the narrows up which the Royal Navy would have to pass.
Doomed from outset
So the great Dardanelles adventure was doomed from the outset; yet it was better that it perished on the shores of Gallipoli than it should succeed. For success would open the way for an attempt on Istanbul, with the probable result that a new and terrible Flanders front would be created on the Anatolian plain, 3,000 miles, and many happy new U-boats, away from home.
The madness does not even stop there. Because at no stage in the entire operation did the allies land enough men on the Gallipoli peninsula to conquer it. All they could do there was to die in vast numbers, and kill still vaster numbers of Turks defending their homeland, without achieving anything like "victory", whatever that might mean.
The hecatomb began on April 25th, 1915. For the Irish, the Dublin and Munster Fusiliers suffered monstrous casualties as they approached Sedd-El-Bahr in rowing boats and the River Clyde collier, into intersecting arcs of machine-gun fire. The waters of the bay turned red as hundreds of young Irishmen were shot dead or, wounded, drowned in them.
How can you blame people at home for wondering about the futility of such a sacrifice? Nor was it perverse for some to say that it made far more sense for Irishmen to die in battle at home for Ireland than about some incomprehensible project in the eastern Mediterranean. Thus Sedd El Bahr - and later the beaches of Suvla, where the 10th Irish Division landed that August as the insane, vampire appetites of the Dardanelles campaign drew in fresh supplies of blood - became ethically conjoined with physical force republicanism.
Easter Rising
So it is fair to say that some of the seeds of the Easter Rising were thus sown, giving Gallipoli a special place in Irish history. Generations of children learnt the place-names from the ballad The Foggy Dew - "For 'twas was better to die 'neath an Irish sky than at Suvla or Sedd El Bahr" - without having the least idea what they meant; because, of course, they hadn't been taught the greater historical truth that Irishmen, heeding the advice of their political leaders, had served in huge numbers in the Great War.
Few Irish feet ever tread the cemeteries and the beaches of the peninsula these days. Yet if ever there's a place where Ireland might properly raise one more monument to commemorate those sons who perished so futilely, so far from home, it is on the Gallipoli peninsula, through whose shores pass the twin meridians of Irish nationalism.