Gallipoli

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The innocence of young men facing the prospect of war for the first time is an unchanging theme of both history and literature. But the letter home written by that incurable romantic Rupert Brooke in March 1915, on passage to the Dardanelles, stands nonetheless among the most memorable of all time.

It’s too wonderful for belief. I had not imagined Fate could be so kind… Will Hero’s Tower crumble under the fifteen-inch guns? Will the sea be polypholoisbic and wine-dark and unvintageable? Shall I loot mosaics from St. Sophia, and Turkish Delight and carpets? Should we be a Turning Point in History? Oh God! I’ve never been quite so happy in my life. I think… I suddenly realise that the ambition of my life has been… to go on a military expedition to Constantinople.

Brooke, of course, was dead of blood poisoning by 23 April, buried on Lemnos, before the first Allied soldier landed at Gallipoli, having made his one significant contribution to the campaign by writing the lines that immortalised him: ‘If I should die, think only this of me…’.

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