GALLIPOLI (384 pp.) — Alan Moore-head— Harper ($4.50).
The British feel an emotional attachment to gallant defeats and desperate defenses that no mere victory can rival. Thus the Gallipoli campaign of World War I has always ranked high in British hearts, along with the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, the evacuation of Dunkirk and the siege of Tobruk.
How Gallipoli became a British synonym for "gallantry and folly" is the burden of the latest book by Alan Moorehead, Australian World War II war correspondent (North Africa, Europe). His account of this last great battle for Constantinople, when Western man last fought for "glory" and "immortality," gleams like a ribbon on khaki.
In Whitehall in 1915. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill and War Secretary Lord Kitchener concluded it would be a good idea to send the tleet to force the Dardanelles. It would cheer the Russians ; it would get Russian grain ships through to Britain; and it would break the bloody stalemate of trench warfare on the Western front. Only Admiral Sir John Fisher had forebodings. ''Damn the Dardanelles," he said. "They will be our grave."
Fisher was near right. The Allies sent half a million men to Gallipoli and half of them suffered wounds or death. The Turks' losses were equally heavy. But the glory seemed close and real as the Allies girded for battle in the arena of the ancients.
The operations commander. Sir Ian Hamilton, one of the "long tradition of British poet-generals," spoke to his men of Hector and Achilles; his chief of staff shaved each day before battle with Kipling's // propped up beside his mirror. Poet-Soldier Rupert Brooke (who was felled by sunstroke and died before he got to the scene of battle) dreamed crusaders' dreams of Christian soldiers in the mosque of
St. Sophia. "Everyone's blood was up," said Churchill.
But the folly began early. Britain's obsolete battleships steamed into the Narrows between Europe and Asia and tried to force their way through, turned tail just when Turkish batteries were down to nearly their last round. Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, steaming up the Dardanelles ten years later, was amazed. "My God," he exclaimed, "we simply couldn't have failed."