It deserves substantial promotion, individual enthusiasm to offset the inevitable apathy to the subject matter. Using private papers as well as official records, Alan Moorehead re-creates the drama of Gallipoli with its tragic hesitations and missed opportunities. The landing of troops at the wrong point, the total breakdown of communications, the untold waste of effort and heroism - from the tragedies of Gallipoli Moorehead proclaims that human achievement is in the doing alone, and, in the final working out, undone by human ignorance, weakness, folly. For two reasons:- the living intimacy with which all details, all persons, all atmosphere and sensations are evoked everything is somehow transfigured, mere fact and circumstance become fundamental truth. This is really literature, though its genre is unidentifiable. But Moorehead transcends factualism and the refinements of its rendering. In passing, this is a vindication for Churchill, even a tribute to his skilled planning. As journalism, spare, precise, only rarely- but then superbly- poetic as history, complete in both detail and context, this dates from the intricate political tangle which finally drove Turkey into the German camp to the days of peace when ""lizards scuttle about the tombstones"" of the quarter of a million Allied casualties from the Gallipoli campaign.
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