The weather was suitably dreary and bleak for this quite depressing experience. Our recommended taxi/tour driver, Anil picked us up from the ferry from Canakkale at the Gallipoli Peninsular side at 2.30. We drove first to see Brighton Beach where the Anzacs were supposed to have landed, a quite manageable gently sloping beach with lowish scrub land behind it. Instead due to abysmal local knowledge of the British Navy of all things, a massive current swept the boats around to what is now Anzac Cove. A very different landing on a steep shore with next to no beach and a (horribly thickly covered with thorn bushes) steep hill with the Turks all settled in at the top to pick them off. What a disaster. Of course most Australians and New Zealanders are more than familiar with all this but it brings it home to actually see the site. So, from here across the road and around so many corners in the road around the Peninsular are many, many cemeteries both Turkish and Allied. 52 in all, 31 Allied and 21 Turkish. 120,000 dead, 44,000 Allied and the 80,000 Turkish. Most bodies could not be found or identified due to decomposition, being blown to bits and buried in trenches etc. It was all unbearably sad to remember the waste of lives on both sides largely due to dreadful leadership.

A very good book to read on this is "Birds Without Wings" by Louis de Bernieres (who also wrote "Captain Corelli's Mandolin"). It follows the lives of two village boys and in parallel the life of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (the leader of the Ottoman defence at Gallipoli and still considered to be one of the most influential leaders of the modern world leading Turkiye to independence and democracy after WW1). The sections covering the Gallipoli Campaign are excellent in terms of balanced facts and information in a very readable fashion.

Some 24 or 25 local Turkish people take care of all the cemeteries and they are beautifully kept. Wild herbs, thyme, lavender and of course rosemary for remembrance are planted between the gravestones and sheltered by lovely almond trees. Our driver was very well informed and told us many tales particular to the battles. We drove through no man's land between the opposing trenches, sometimes only a few metres apart! Somehow it was very hard to imagine how ghastly it would have been, but then again not if you tried hard enough without upsetting yourself too much. All very emotional.

The ferry trip is only 20 minutes and cost less than a dollar each way. We arrived back in Canakkale for a few stiff wines by about 7 pm!

After the Luxembourg War Cemetery a few years ago and the cemeteries all through the Meuse Valley a year after that we've just about wrung out by imagining the harrowing events and lasting loss of whole families through the future generations. …..and it's being repeated in the Ukraine right now. I can't stand it……. At the risk of seeming very shallow: no more cemeteries for a while!