Posted by
Mike McDermott on
Apr 27, 2012; 8:08am
URL: http://sundownersadventures.385.s1.nabble.com/Gallipoli-tp5663673p5669624.html
Yes, Kathy; that is pretty much how everyone felt there. I don't know how much it was the place, and how much our knowing so much about it before we got there, but it seemed to have a feel about it that I have found nowhere else.
Especially the ages of the soldiers on the gravestones. So many were still just kids, really.
I reckon whoever's shell casing that was would be very happy to be remembered in the way that you and your husband have done.
Mike
PS on a more irreverent note, I was wounded at Gallipoli - twice!
Once, I stepped on what I have just found out on Wikipedia must have been a Weever (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weever). Poison came to into view, creeping up inside my foot. The pain, the pain, but thinking of the old Indian proverb "I had no shoes and complained, until I met a man who had no feet", I grinned (well, OK, grimaced) and bore it as a kind of tiny window into the experience of pain suffered there by so many in 1915.
The other time, not being a Kiwi and having been there many times before, I stayed on the bus while everyone else went off to Chunuk Bair. The driver (who shall remain nameless, especially because I really don't remember who it was; but, Simon, it DEFINITELY wasn't you!!) hadn't put the handbrake on well enough, so the bus started rolling down the hill. Fortunately, as no-one was there I had time to take of my disguise as Clark Kent, mild mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, and faster than a speeding bullet leapt into the drivers seat and stopped the coach. Unfortunately, I wacked my shin on the steering wheel as I did so, and got a lump the size of half a peach to prove it.
Moral: be careful of those ghosts at Gallipoli; some must have a sadistic sense of humour.