The Gallipoli campaign dragged on for another five months. Turkish forces of the Ottoman Empire put up a strong resistance until the British withdrew from the Turkish peninsula on January 8, 1915. The battle had lasted just over eight months,
and neither side could claim a clear victory, but over 100,000 men
from both sides of the conflict died, and over 230,000 were injured. Gellert’s
poem “Anzac Cove” remembers not only the men who did not return home, but those who loved and would forever miss them.
Anzac Cove by George Lambert, © Australian War Memorial |
Anzac Cove
There’s a lonely
stretch of hillocks:
There’s a beach asleep and drear:
There’s a battered broken fort beside the sea.
There are sunken trampled graves:
And a little rotting pier:
And winding paths that wind unceasingly.
There’s a torn and silent valley:
There’s a tiny rivulet
With some blood upon the stones beside its mouth.
There are lines of buried bones:
There’s an unpaid waiting debt :
There’s a sound of gentle sobbing in the South.
There’s a beach asleep and drear:
There’s a battered broken fort beside the sea.
There are sunken trampled graves:
And a little rotting pier:
And winding paths that wind unceasingly.
There’s a torn and silent valley:
There’s a tiny rivulet
With some blood upon the stones beside its mouth.
There are lines of buried bones:
There’s an unpaid waiting debt :
There’s a sound of gentle sobbing in the South.
The poem never details
the battle, nor does it describe the men who fought there. Instead, 9 of the 12 lines of the poem narrate the landscape of Anzac Cove, beginning with There’s
or There are as they sketch a
picture of the scene. There’s a melancholy tenderness in the description, as if a soldier has returned home to
tell the family of his dead mate, “Here is where he fought; this is where he
lies.” The hills, forts, and beaches bear witness to the lonely desolation of
war: what has been left behind is battered, broken, torn, and rotting. Sunken graves mark the lines of buried bones,
and the valley is silent.
The only sound that
breaks the silence is that of “gentle sobbing in the South – the grief of the mothers
and fathers, sisters and brothers, wives and sweethearts who loved the men who
fell at Gallipoli.
Despite his
efforts to rejoin the Australian Imperial Forces, Gellert was not among the Australians
sent to France in the preparation for the battle of the Somme in July of 1916. The London paper, in describing the
Australian troops who arrived in France in the spring of 1916, characterized Gallipoli as a heroic tragedy, and it described the survivors as “hard
fellows….with Homeric fighting qualities.”
As the Australians marched through a French market town, London
correspondent Philip Gibbs noted,
Leon Gellert |
In less than six
weeks, much of that youth and laughter would again be silenced and replaced yet once more by “a
sound of gentle sobbing in the South.”
My Great Uncle (a Brit old soldier) had emigrated to Australia just before WW1 but took his cavalry skills to the recruiting office in Queensland and joined the Light Horse. He now lies in a grave on the Gaza Strip. We remember Captain Levingston an honorary Australian
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ReplyDeleteWe will remember him, Ian. Thank you, Captain Levingston.
ReplyDeleteBeautiful and poignant. One of the ANZACs memorialized on the Lone Pine Memorial came from a tiny farm in rural Minnesota - Pvt. Leon Tabbut. His engraved bugle eventually made it back home to his family in the USA.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this special story.
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