This afternoon the ship did “scenic cruising” through the Dardanelles straits. When I first saw the name on the program, I didn’t recognize it, Dardanelles doesn’t really register with me, but then someone mentioned it by a name I did know: Gallipoli.
If you know anything about the history of WWI, you’ll doubtlessly have heard of the Gallipoli campaign, several months of bloody carnage, in which the Canadians, Australians, and British took massive losses. Literally hundreds of thousands of soldiers storming the beaches, drowning in trenches, the water on the coast line is said to have run red with blood. Oh yes, if you’re Canadian, and you took history, you studied Gallipoli.
I remember when I was in high school; we studied the campaign, as everyone did. And they made us watch the movie that was based on it, I remember nothing except the end – which was a freeze frame shot of the main character, who had wanted nothing throughout but to go home, charging over the trenches and getting raked down immediately. Blood everywhere. It’s one of those images that stays with you, even if you remember nothing of the rest of the events that might have gone with it. I couldn’t tell you names and dates, I couldn’t tell you numbers, but I can tell you the sorrow I felt at that one image.
Today, when you sail through the Gallipoli area it looks…as it should, and as it shouldn’t. It’s all green hills and lush valleys, windmills crown the top of the horizon and small seaside towns dot the coast. There’s one large city Gallipiloo, that looks like a city from a distance, the rest can barely be made out along the beaches. You can’t see the memorials from here, you can’t see the bloodstains. As with so many things, I’m reminded of words that aren’t mine:
“People always speak of ruins of being picturesque, and perhaps they are, but that’s long after the centuries have washed away the blood, and time has blown away the stench of the battle smoke.”- David Eddings, Belgarath The Sorcerer
There’s little there now, to say how many of my countrymen – and others, lost their lives here. In a completely and totally pointless battle, a stalemate that one no one anything on either side, and, in fact, probably did more good to the defense than the Allies. Someone’s son, someone’s husband, someone’s brother. Probably with no real idea why they were there in the first place.
The war, after all, lasted so much longer than anyone expected.
My mom went on a cruise when she was my age, and the ship she sailed on was British (I think), and I grew up hearing what she saw when she went through these same waters. Unlike us, her ship went through in the middle of the night, and this was before the days of deck-side narration. Nothing was said about it, nothing pointed out. But she happened to be on the stern in the middle of the night, reading a book while seated on the aft railing (how no one caught her, or how she didn’t fall overboard I have no idea to this day), and so it was that she saw the Captain, and two officers come out, throw a wreath overboard, and salute. Apparently every Canadian, Australian, or British ship that passes through these waters does the same thing. We don’t, because the line I work for is an American company, and the Gallipoli campaign was before the states joined the war.
And in the height of irony, when I returned to my desk, while still passing through these waters, through this strait that holds so much significance for so many people. What is it my passengers are arguing with me about?
Who won yesterday’s daily trivia contest…
Sometimes I think I’m the only one with perspective.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
Blessed Be.
It gives me shivers just remembering it! It was so cool…….so incredibly … private