e Gallipoli business. There is no man who was on the Peninsula
who does not admire General Sir Ian Hamilton, and most of the officers
believe that Britain has never produced a more brilliant general. That
the expedition failed was not the fault of the commander-in-chief nor
of the troops. And, anyway, we Australians are good enough sports to
realize that there must be blunders here and there, and we're quite
ready to bear our share of the occasional inevitable disaster.

But Gallipoli was not the failure many people think. Some people seem
to have the idea that a hundred thousand troops were intended to beat a
couple of million, and take one of the strongest cities in the world.
There never was a time when the Turks did not outnumber us five to one,
when they did not have an enormous reserve, in men, equipment, and
munitions, immediately at their back, while our base was five hundred
miles away in Egypt. The Turks had a Krupp factory at Constantinople
within a few hours of them, turning out more ammunition per day than
they were using, while ours had to come thousands of miles from
England. Of course, we were never intended to take Constantinople.
The expedition was a purely naval one, and we were a small military
force, auxiliary to the navy, that was to seize the Narrows and enable
the ships to get within range of Constantinople, and so compel its
surrender. We failed, in this final objective, but we accomplished a
great deal, nevertheless. We held back probably a million Turks from
the Russians, and we left, in actual counted dead Turkish bodies, more
than double our own casualties (killed, wounded, and missing). But,
above all, we definitely impressed the German mind with the fact that
Great Britain did not only mean the British Isles but the equally loyal
and brave fighters from Britain overseas.

Here is no history of Gallipoli, but let me try to sketch four pictures
that will show you the type of men that there joked with death and made
curses sound to angel ears sweeter than the hymns of the soft-souled
churchgoer.

CHAPTER XIII

THE LANDING THAT COULD NOT SUCCEED--BUT DID

Picture yourself on a ship that was more crowded with men than ever
ship had been before, in a harbor more crowded with ships than ever
harbor had been crowded before, with more fears in your mind than had
ever crowded into it before, knowing that in a few hours you would see
battle for the first time. Having comrades cro