10th (Irish) Division leaves Gallipoli

[curranl]

Hello All,

From The Tenth (Irish) Division in Gallipoli by Bryan Cooper:

As the 29th Brigade filed down the long sap to Anzac in the darkness, as the 30th and 31st Brigades retraced their steps past Lala Baba and over the beaches at Suvla, it was impossible to avoid retrospect. We had passed that way less than two months before, but going in the opposite direction full of high hopes. Now we were leaving the Peninsula again, our work unfinished and the Turks still in possession of the Narrows.

What does one recollect most clearly when one looks back at Gallipoli?

A multitude of memories cluster toghether: dry, sand-floored gullies, thirsty men crowded round a well, Indians grooming their mules, lithe, half-naked Australians, parched sundried scrub, but above and beyond all these one remembers the graves. Not a man came back from the Peninsula without leaving some friend behind there, and it is bitter to think that the last resting place of those we loved is in the hands of our enemy. Not all the dead of Gallipoli lie in the Peninsula itself. There are crowded cemeteries at Malta and Alexandria, and many a brave body has been lowered over the side of a hospital ship into the Aegean to mingle his bones with those of Argonauts and Crusaders and all the heroes of a bygone age. Nevertheless, when one thinks of Gallipoli one thinks first of graves.

You could not walk far in the Peninsula without seeing them, sometimes thickly crowded toghether outside a field ambulance, sometimes a solitary cross marking the spot where a sniper's victim had been buried. Each of these tombs had at its head a little wooded cross bearing the man's name, regiment, and rank, and the date of his death, and in some cases his comrades had done a little more. Here Australian gunners had made a pattern with fuse caps on the earth that covered their friend, and there a lid of a biscuit tin had been beaten into a plaque, bearing a crucifix. Death had made strange bedfellows: in one cemetery high up at the Chailak Dere behind Rhododendron Ridge there lay side by side Private John Jones, Royal Welsh Fusiliers and Sergeant Rotahiru of the Maoris. From the two ends of the earth Christian and Buddhist and Sikh had come to fight in the same cause, and in death they lay toghether. It was my lot in the last days of September to endeavour to compile a register of where the men of my Battalion had been interred, and as I went from grave to grave writing down the name of one Irishman after another I was irrestibly reminded of Davis's lines:

But on far flung fields from Dunkirk to Belgrade

Lie the heroes and chiefs of the Irish Brigade.

Now the age old quarrel with the Turk had carried Irishmen even further afield and the "Wild Geese" who had fought on the Danube under Prince Eugene found their sucessors in those of the 10th Division who lay under the Cross of Christ in the barren waste of Gallipoli.

Remembering today the Irishmen of 10th (Irish) Division who still lie in the barren waste of Gallipoli.

Regards,

Liam.

[The Plummed Goose]

And ... Although not part of the 10th Division ...

Could one be more Irish

eric

[Derek Robertson]

What a super epitaph that is:

"Unheard voices calling to the west, dinna forget".

Thank you Liam and Eric.

[curranl]

Hello All,

Here is what Ireland's Memorial Records says about Sergeant Ireland:

Ireland, Robert. Reg. no. 9967. Rank Sergeant, Royal Munster Fusiliers, 1st Battalion. Killed in Action, Gallipoli, May 12th 1915. Born St. Marys, Dublin.

Regards,

Liam.

[steve fuller]

Lovely words Liam - thanks