Haunted by the ghosts of Gallipoli, I went to my own war in Helmand

The sun glinted on the sea and its heat warmed the back of my neck. I walked, completely alone, up paths and across fields, as the country around me was starting to burst into spring. It was April 2009 and I was on leave before going to Helmand Province in Afghanistan as part of the British Army’s effort to bring security to the country.

The peace was broken only by the sound of birds and my own laboured breathing.

In 1915, though, the Gallipoli peninsula in the eastern Mediterranean was a deathscape – the scene of some of the most appalling conditions and brutal fighting of the entire First World War. Nearly a century later, I had travelled up the west coast of Turkey to spend a few days exploring the Gallipoli Peninsula and trying to better understand the ground of this infamous campaign, which has become a byword for military disaster.

That day, I had seen some of the landing beaches, the monumental Helles memorial on the very tip of the Peninsula and had walked up away from the crowds past several of the cemeteries that studded the Cape Helles sector of the battlefield where British, Empire and French forces fought.

The headstones were markedly different, I noticed, from the iconic ones of the battlefields of the Somme and Ypres; instead of bright white vertical slabs, they were small, stone plaques set face up on low concrete pedestals.

No one else was at these cemeteries at all.

Having joined the Army in 2006 and now a 25-year-old lieutenant about to command soldiers in combat against the Taliban, I found it incredibly moving to see hundreds of plaques, each marking a life. Later that day, I asked a taxi driver to drive me to Anzac Cove, the narrow strip of beach further north of Helles where the Australians and New Zealanders began their valiant, doomed attempts to try to break out from their own beachhead.

The driver agreed to wait an hour for me. I walked down to the beach, all alone again, the setting sun igniting the sky to the west. Suddenly, all the hairs on my neck stood on end, my skin tingling.

Never before nor since have I had such a feeling of the air around me being so freighted with an invisible presence. Spooked, I ran all the way back up to the car, where the driver turned to me and smiled: “Yes, most people don’t manage to last very long there in the dark.”

Everywhere in Gallipoli there is this sense of unquiet ghosts. Cemeteries and memorials dot the landscape and trenches still line the fields of Helles, the vertiginous ridges around Anzac and the hills around the broad expanse of Suvla bay. While the peninsula is very busy around late April when it is packed with Australians and New Zealanders coming to commemorate Anzac Day on April 25, for much of the rest of the year it is nearly deserted.

It is different from the battlefields of the Western Front in France and Belgium because unlike them, which have precious few distinguishing features with which to orientate yourself, it is very easy to quickly understand the entire thesis of the Gallipoli campaign.

In an instant, the ground allows you to see exactly the import of what the Allies were trying to do. And that aim was, in my view, the boldest piece of strategic thinking in the entire war.

At the end of 1914, it was apparent to the British Cabinet that the fighting in France and Belgium wasn’t going to produce a decisive victory for years, if at all.

Perhaps, however, knocking the German ally Turkey out of the war might make the Central Powers’ eastern flank more vulnerable, as well as throwing open a lifeline to the British ally by opening up its access to the Mediterranean and therefore allowing imports and the export of grain from the region. If they could capture Constantinople – now known as Istanbul – it was assumed that the whole of Turkey would fall.

To get to Constantinople, though, the Royal Navy had to pass through the Dardanelles, a stretch of water 40 miles long and ranging in width from one mile at its narrowest to five miles at other places.

The left-hand side of the straits were formed by the Gallipoli peninsula, the right by the Turkish mainland.

Initially it was thought the Navy might force the straits by itself – but, when an all-out attack was repelled on March 18, 1915, it was decided that the flanking peninsula would have to be captured by land forces to enable ships to pass through the straits unimpeded.

So on April 25, having had barely more than five weeks to prepare the largest amphibious operation ever undertaken at that point in history, the Allies landed tens of thousands of men to try to crack the nut. For months the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF), under the leadership of the vaunted General Sir Ian Hamilton, threw all it could at trying to capture the peninsula. But the Turks fought with astonishing tenacity.

As the year dragged on, the campaign descended into a bitter stalemate, with appalling casualties on both sides. Hamilton was sacked in the autumn, and Winston Churchill, who – as First Lord of the Admiralty – masterminded the scheme, also lost his job, alongside a host of generals. Eventually, over several nights between December 1915 and January 1916, the entire MEF was withdrawn in conditions of great secrecy and with barely a single casualty. It was the most successful operation of the campaign, ironically.

For Turkey, it was a pyrrhic victory. Never again in the war did they attain such a triumph and by its end, the Ottoman Empire lay in ruins. Their inspirational commander, Mustafa Kemal – later to become Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish nation – was perhaps the battle’s preeminent star. I left Gallipoli intrigued and knowing that one day I had to write about it.

I thought much about the campaign when I was in Afghanistan serving my own tour of duty, and was able to recognise in my own troops the same bravery and self-sacrifice that have characterised British soldiers for generations. When we got home, the general who awarded our medals said we could consider ourselves the heirs to the soldiers of Waterloo and the First and Second World Wars. I thought he was exactly right; I was so proud of what we had done.

I left the Army in 2012 and wrote a novel called Rain, which tried to explain the experience of British soldiers in Helmand. For my new book, however, I wanted to write a story that had Gallipoli as its backdrop.

The British view of the First World War has become overly fixated on the trenches of north-western Europe, to the detriment of our understanding the conflict’s true nature, which was that it was a global war that saw British and Empire Forces fighting and losing their lives in dozens of other countries: Italy, Greece, Turkey, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Tanganyika amongst others, not forgetting all those lost at sea.

We see the war’s influence all around us today, in , in Gaza, in the mutable borders of a Europe whose old state the war ripped to pieces.

More simply, with the book, I wanted to pay tribute to that formative trip I had made to Gallipoli and to try to honour the memory of the campaign by using it as the setting for my story, which centres on two young officers who establish a deep friendship when they are thrown into the fighting. Now aged 41, 15 years after I returned from Afghanistan, I wanted to use my experience in Helmand to portray how similar to modern-day soldiers those men who fought at Gallipoli were.

We might think that, separated by 110 years now, they are completely different from our generation. In my view, however, the essential experience of soldiering remains the same throughout history, and I wanted to bring my own experience of friendship between comrades to bear on the story.

The great conundrum of Gallipoli, nowadays denigrated by historians but nevertheless in my view still tantalising, is “What if it had been a success?”

What if Hamilton had pulled it off, if Constantinople had been taken, if Turkey had been knocked out of the war? Would the Russians have been able to do better against the Germans and Austro-Hungarians on the Eastern Front? And if they had, might there not have been a Bolshevik revolution? If not, the whole course of the 20th century might have been entirely different.

But that is all conjecture. What we do know is that on this extraordinarily dramatic landscape, the bodies of hundreds of thousands of soldiers still lie – Britons, French, Turks, Australians, Indians, New Zealanders, Gurkhas, Senegalese – united in death. As Atatürk himself, the great victor of Gallipoli, so magnanimously put it:

You, the mothers,

Who sent their sons from far away countries

Wipe away your tears,

Your sons are now lying in our bosom

And are in peace

After having lost their lives on this land they have

Become our sons as well.

I only hope The Fires of Gallipoli can reawaken people’s interest in this fascinating, tragic campaign.

• The Fires of Gallipoli by Barney Campbell (Elliott & Thompson, £18.99) is published on Thursday Feb 13