Turkish Delight: Chapter 6

Get Down in Turkey

Putting a lid on it

I was grateful for my battered digger hat under the midday sun. We had scrambled up and down the rugged old battlefield — mostly up, my burning legs were complaining — and the shade of my wide-brimmed hat was welcome, as were the sips of water from my replenished supply.

And this was spring. In 1915 the soldiers had fought from April until December; in the heat of summer, it must have been brutal. No sunscreen in those days.

But for now, Tommy and I walked down the ridge from the gaudy fraud of the Turkish cemetery to the more restrained Australian affair at Quinns Post. As with all the British war graves here, this one was a peaceful plot of lawn, sprinkled with grave markers. The soldiers lay together, officers and men, Australian, New Zealanders, British in ranks according to the day of their death or whatever happenstance of burial.

I read the names and inscriptions. Many had no words from next of kin, many had trite sentiments, and some just pulled my heart to pieces.

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die. Our dear boy at rest

— Private L Hyde KIA 27 April 1915

When I had a moment, I hunted up a photo of this young soldier. From the crown of his slouch hat to the shine on the points of his boots, he and his uniform are fresh and neat.

As, no doubt, is his outlook on life. How innocent he looks! No wonder his loss left a tender spot in hearts at home.

His career as a fighting soldier lasted two days. The landing was on the 25th of April and he died here on the 27th.

He would have trained in Melbourne, swung aboard a troopship on the first convoy to the war, seen Ceylon and the Suez Canal, and then surprisingly found himself and all his mates in Cairo.

Apparently, the British war commanders weren’t ready to have troops from the Southern Hemisphere summer languish in the English winter. There would be nothing happening until spring, might as well keep them in Egypt where they could train some more. Besides, the Ottomans might need to be taught a good lesson about messing with the Empire.

A short and interesting life. I wondered if that sweet face had ever kissed a woman’s lips, or discovered more perhaps, in the back streets of Cairo where the Anzacs had found entertainment from days of digging and drilling.

I looked at the very real and living Tommy beside me. While I read the grave markers and mooned over those long dead, he had pulled out another hand-rolled cigarette and was regarding the hills and the blue sea beyond, a fragrant wisp of smoke curling from his nostrils.

I took the rollie from his lips and drew the smoke into my lungs. I could use a nicotine hit right now.

I got a bit more than I expected. No filter-tipped refined commercial smoke, this one. Raw Turkish tobacco, full of flavour and carcinogens and go-joe. I could feel it having a wild time in my lungs after having cut its way down my throat.

I sat down with a thump and weakly offered the cigarette back.

“Yairs, she’s a rough old durrie, the Turkish tobaccy. Lets you know you’re alive, that’s for sure.”

I was a bit more alive than I had been all day. My brain sparkled and jumped about while my body did the opposite.

“Crikey. Don’t those things come with warnings?”

“Yeah. Me. You didn’t ask. Ah, you might want to steer clear of their coffee, too.”

I pointed out the gravestone inscription. “You know, out of all the ones I’ve seen today, this is probably the closest to the truth.”

He read it and shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“Well, think about it. We often say that when someone dies they leave a hole in our hearts. In fact it’s the exact opposite. We have someone in our hearts, and when they go, that bit of them is left behind.”

He rolled out a long slow stream of fragrant but lethal smoke. “So I die, but the memories live on, is that it?”

“More than that. Each time we form a close relationship with somebody, we also build up a picture of them. The way they look, the way they act, the way they think. We don’t need to be with them to know what they would say or do.”

The way someone thinks. Even someone completely apart. It was amazing how I could think about a different mind and suddenly have everything about them close enough to touch. Close enough to talk with. My grandmother, for example. Not a day went by that I didn’t sit down with her, tell her things, ask her questions, receive the comfort of her presence.

I’m not a Christian but I feel that those who pray with all their heart must have a similar relationship with Jesus. Hard to go wrong with daily life advice from a great teacher.

Tommy stubbed out his evil cigarette and flicked the butt into the bushes. “Let’s have a look at something different, eh?”

He led me out of the cemetery. There was an empty plinth at the entrance. Tommy jerked his thumb at it. “Used to be a brass plaque there. Someone lifted it a while back.”

He took me around the side and down a little path. The steep hillside was covered in vegetation; thorny little bushes that reached out so the path was like a tunnel as we followed it down the slope.

“Look along there. What do you see?”

An impenetrable thicket. The sky above. The brim of my hat. An overgrown path. A level shelf in the hillside. Aha.

“Right. This is one of Malone’s Terraces.”

He took me further down the hill. Again and again, the terraces revealed themselves. The lowest were little more than eroded, overgrown bobbles in the slope, but they were there.

“The Turks called this place ‘Bomb Ridge’ because both sides kept chucking grenades and bombs over the top. We had to make our bombs out of jam tins stuffed with explosive. Stick a bit of fuse in it, light it with yer durry, launch it towards Constantinople and if it came back at you, boomerang it at the bastards. Great fun until someone loses a hand.

“Our boys didn’t have time for housekeeping. Too busy trying to stay alive. In their copious spare time they were carrying stuff up from the beach. An’ if things stopped for five minutes, they fell asleep. They dropped their rubbish and shit down the hill, or if they were feeling energetic, they’d fling it over the parapet. There were flies, rats, fleas, lice, worms, snakes, jackals, you name it, all spreading disease. If the Turks didn’t get you, the wildlife did. Bugger of a life.

“Then the New Zealanders took over. Colonel Malone took one look at the place and doubled the workload of his men. You’d think they’d hate him, but they worshipped the ground he walked on because he kept them safe. Built up the trenches with sandbags, set up machineguns to keep the Turks honest and dug out these terraces with proper latrines and overhead protection. Used wood to make the roofs and piled sandbags on top to stop the bombs. Every bit of wood had to be carried up from the beach. At night, of course.

“He was one of those rare soldiers with brains and balls, pardon me French. If he got an order to attack and there was no point to it, he’d refuse to do it on the spot and work out a way to get the job done without his men being slaughtered.”

He paused for breath. Me, I was looking at the slope back up to the road and hoping we wouldn’t have to climb back up.

“What happened to it all?” I asked. There must have been quite a shanty town here.

“After we left, the Turks came in and took the place over. Wanted to be sure we wouldn’t be back. As if. It was winter then, and the troops found every scrap of wood on Anzac and burnt it to keep warm. Including the crosses on the graves.”

I took a few photographs. Some of the terraces were still in good shape. They must have taken a lot of digging to cut out of the hill. At night, of course. Not great photography but I tried to capture some of the eerie feeling to the place.

Tommy reached for my pack before I could hoist it onto my aching shoulders, offered his hand and hauled me back up to the road.

“All downhill from here,” he reassured me.

We trudged down the road on the ridge. Every few metres there was another sign. Wire Gully, Steeles Post, Courtneys, Johnstons Jolly. To be honest, my feet were dragging and I wasn’t sure I could take another cemetery.

“Just one more,” Tommy said. “You can’t miss Lone Pine!”

And there it was. We crossed a carpark full of workman vehicles, passed the workmen themselves erecting stands for the Anzac Day visitors that would crowd the site in a few days, and found ourselves in the biggest of all the cemeteries.

As per the name, there was a lone tree in the middle. A twin to the one standing in the grounds of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, grown from a cone of the original. As was this one here, they say.

“Used to be one tree here and they called it Lonesome Pine Plateau when our boys first landed. Didn’t last long, of course; too good an aiming point for the gunners. It marked one of the hardest Turkish positions on the peninsula, and we were told to capture it as a diversion. A hundred yards across flat open ground. Suicide.”

“We won that battle, didn’t we?”

“Yup. The galahs up at the Nek just got out of their trenches and charged, but here the Australian officers weren’t having any of that. They dug tunnels across, almost to the Turkish trenches, and then dug another crossways, just under the surface for our soldiers to jump out of.

“During the day, they got all the assault troops over into the trench and just before the whistle blew, opened the whole line up and got stuck into the Turks before they woke up from the artillery. And that’s when they found that all the Turkish trenches had been covered over by logs. They had a hell of a time getting through with bullets coming in from both flanks and bodies piling up.”

“But we won.”

“If you can call it that. After three days every trench was full of bodies crawling with maggots, and there were bloody thousands and thousands of the poor buggers. Some bloody victory.”

He gestured to the grave markers all around. “Tell it to these guys.”

Silently, we walked up the hill to the memorial on top. I needed his hand, where so many of our men — hell, men from both sides — had given everything they had. And now just a bit of Turkey, like it always had been. What was the point?

In the shadow of the tall white memorial, long stone slabs listed the names of those with no known graves. Five thousand names. Add in all those grave markers I’d seen today, and all those I hadn’t…

“One in every three hundred men in Australia and New Zealand died within a mile of where we are standing.”

Tommy had pulled out another cigarette. I knew better than to ask for a puff, so I took a swig from my water bottle.

There were doors at the bottom of the memorial. Tommy rattled the handle. Locked.

“Hey, Mehmet!” he called to one of the nearby workers, and made a key-turning motion. The man shrugged, but when Tommy fired off a string of Turkish, he reached into his pocket and with a gesture of staged astonishment pulled out a key.

Inside was a dark little chapel. A visitors book lay open on a bench, a ballpoint marked with the Qantas logo beside it, some souvenir left by the last visitor, no doubt. I offered it to Tommy.

“My name’s already here. This is for you. There’ll be about a million of your mates coming through here in a few days, including the Prime Minister. Write something for them.”

The book was full of names, mostly Aussies, and they all had something heartfelt and trite to say. I thought for a moment about all those boys and added my own words.

Their hearts live on in ours.

Britni Pepper, Melbourne.

“Can I have a few minutes?” I asked, dropping down onto one of the wooden chairs.

I could hear Tommy and the Turkish workman chatting outside while I meditated. Just long enough to bring my mind to stillness, to listen for the voices of the dead here in this place.

“Good news,” Tommy announced when I emerged into the light, filled with grace and the sound of the sighing wind in the lonesome pine. “These blokes will give us a lift back to your car.”

I smiled, and I’m sure my feet were grinning in their shoes. I was pretty much done in for the day. Besides, that one icecream hadn’t been enough, and my stomach had been making noises about lunch.

The lift back to the beach turned out to be the traybed of a work truck. The two Turks took the comfy seats, and we braced ourselves against the metal sides as the vehicle bounced down a dirt track. I held on tightly to Tommy’s hand, and it wasn’t all for support.

One way or another, the day had taken a lot out of me. Here in this calm little piece of wilderness, the thoughts of so many Australians rested. Every year more and more took a little piece of Turkey home in their hearts. I knew that I would never forget what I had seen and felt.

© 2021 Britni Pepper. All rights reserved.

First Chapter: Get Lost in Turkey Second Chapter: Get Naked in Turkey Third Chapter: Get High in Turkey Fourth Chapter: Get Saved in Turkey Sixth Chapter: Get Shot in Turkey Seventh Chapter: Get Lucky in Turkey