This Intimate War Gallipoli/Canakkale 1915

Icli Disli Bir Savas: Gelibolu/Canakkale 1915

Robyn Rowland, Mehmet Ali Celikel

• Publisher: Spinifex Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781925581416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Poetry
• Index: Literature

"Very few collections bring home so powerfully the vulnerability of individuals in the face of history, " writes Lisa Gorton of Robyn Rowland's powerful poems recording the experiences of soldiers, nurses and doctors, women munitions workers, wives, mothers, composers, painters and poets during the Gallipolli War, 1915. It began with the Battle of Çanakkale and the defeat of the British navy. The land battle was hand-to-hand killing, the physical closeness of its soldiers unmasking the depersonalization of the propaganda of war. Importantly, the book finishes with a poem on women's friendship 100 years after the war, and the healing nature of love.

Ways of Seeing

The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them.

– John Berger, Miners, exhibition catalogue, 1989, Keeping a Rendezvous, 1992

I Sketches at Gallipoli, 1915

Watercolours and drawings of Major LFS Hore (b.1870 India, d.1935 New Ireland), rediscovered in the Mitchell Library, Sydney, N.S.W.

He’d wanted to paint but there was no drying time for oils there.

Ink, pencil and watercolour make the sketches so soft

you wonder at the ferocity of battle that surrounded him.

Almost pastel, a wash of creams and soft browns, purple hills

under cornflower-blue skies, shroud the images in sweetness.

Yet of his men in the 8th Light Horse at the Battle of the Nek,

10 out of 12 fellow officers were carved to crimson by the new war,

and only 5 percent of the men were left alive.

There is a porcelain fineness in detail, an elegance of nib.

He captures the edges of empire, Indian and Maori.

A huge Poupou guards that contingent’s place

in the Great Sap, for men who would use their old

warrior strength in support of the Empire.

‘I am well,’ wrote Huira Rewha to his family

as he headed for Gallipoli, ‘my only grief is

I hear nothing but the English voice.’

Hore’s Bathing Party slips into a dark-blue sea at night

under the sphinx and full moon above;

not a boat in sight, not a barge about to be blasted to pieces,

legs and arms lying about in jumbled disarray

as if discarded with clothing before their swim.

Tea on the terrace is irony in colour,

a lurid sunset, officers squatting in scrubby sandhills while

opposite across a still bay, Imbros and Samothrace lounge.

Görme Biçimleri

Sanatın tuhaf gücü; kimi zaman insanların ortak yönlerine, farklı yönlerinden daha acil ihtiyaç duyduğumuzu göstermesinde yatmaktadır.

– John Berger, Madenciler, sergi kataloğu, 1989, Randevuya Gitmek, 1992

I Gelibolu’da Eskiz, 1915

Binbaşı LFS Hore (d.1870 Hindistan, ö.1935 New Ireland) suluboya ve karakalem çalışmaları, Mitchell Library, Sydney, N.S.W.’de yeniden ortaya çıkarıldı.

Resim yapmak istiyordu, ama yoktu boyayı kurutacak zaman.

Mürekkep, kalem ve suluboyayla öyle yumuşaktı ki eskizler

sanırsınız sebebi, savaşın şiddetidir çevresini kuşatan.

Neredeyse pasteldi, biraz krem ve açık kahve, mor tepeler

peygamber çiçeği mavisi göğün altında, sımsıcak örtülürdü imgeler.

Yine de Nek Savaşında, 8. Hafif Süvari Birliğindeki adamlarından,

12 subaydan 10’u yeni savaşın kızıl kanları içindeydiler,

ve sadece yüzde 5’i kaldı yaşayan.

Porselen inceliği vardı detaylarda, uçlarda bir zarafet.

İmparatorluğun uçlarını yansıtıyor resimleri, Hint ve Maori’yi.

Büyük bir Maori totemi koruyordu birliğin yerini

Büyük Siperde, kullansın diye askerler

İmparatorluk savunmasında eski savaşçıların kuvvetini.

‘İyiyim,’ diye yazdı Huira Rewha ailesine

Gelibolu’ya giderken, ‘tek bir kederim var

o da sadece İngilizce duymak başka sesler yerine.’

Hore’un Yüzme Partisi kayıp gider geceleri koyu lacivert denize

sfenksin altında ve dolunay üstte,

hiçbir tekne yok görünürde, ne de mavnalar paramparça olmak üzere,

kollar ve bacaklar karmakarışık yayılmış yerlere

sanki çıkarılıp atılmış giysiler gibi yüzmeden önce.

Terasta Çay ise renkli bir ironidir,

kızıl bir günbatımı, çömelmiş subaylar çalılık kum tepelerinde

durgun bir koya karşı, Gökçeada ve Semadirek uzar gider önlerinde.

Three ships rest near the golden pathway of a red

sinking sun. June 1915 – maybe June 4 –

a quiet evening after ‘an exquisite summer’s day’

for the Third Battle of Krithia, 6000 allied casualties,

9000 Turkish dead. Or June 18 when Hamilton and

his staff, in celebration of the hundredth anniversary

of the Battle of Waterloo, dined on crayfish

watching languid summer skies from the safety of Imbros.

After Gallipoli – France, appointments and awards. Who knows

what else he carried with him to the colony of a colony,

as he retired quietly in faraway Rabaul, silent New Ireland.

You have to wonder what it was he kept out of the sketches;

what stayed with him. There are no battles, no blood, just

ordinary life in a mad new existence. The smallness of his paper

allowed such intimacies with landscape, such smallness of citizenry

in his almost-vacant Gallipoli. And yet, he was there.

II The Myth Rider

Sidney Nolan, ‘The Gallipoli Series’

His brother’s ghost is everywhere,

grief being a strange creature in the forms it takes

to visit and revisit. Drowned in a dam waiting for

demobilisation in a second ‘world war’,

Raymond Nolan is lying submerged

in the Drowned Soldier, a failed Icarus; and

held by his father – still drowning – in the dip...