I finished Les Carlyon's Gallipoli last night and it has impressed me like few war books have. It accomplishes what it needs to in terms of explaining the battle, from planning (or an enormous lack of planning in this case), describing all the principles involved and using a vast amount of resources, both public and private. (The number of personal diaries and letters that Carlyon excerpts is amazing and gives dozens of different viewpoints from soldiers of all ranks and origins.) But what really put this one over the top is how well the author inserted himself into the book. It's not a dry academic tome but while it is entirely factual and clearly nonfiction Carlyon tells you what he thinks of someone - he gives an opinion about someone if they did a huge ass bad job - he says yeah - this officer was guilty of not caring that his men were dying left and right and here's the evidence. It's pretty refreshing to have an author give an opinion without burying a book in politics - and it's well written to boot. Consider this quote from the battlefield:

"The siren-call of this beach has little to do with facts or common sense or the desiccated footnotes of academics. It is rooted in myth and nostalgia - and imagining. Everyone who comes here tries to paint pictures on the empty landscape, to bring it back the way it was. Dugouts and tents and piles of stores. Woolly clouds of shrapnel. Battleships rocking and half-hidden behind mustard clouds as they bombard the hills....Bundles that were once men, arms and legs at grosteque angles, lying out in no-man's land. Men hefting water up the ridges. Men stumbling down the ridges, bloodied and befuddled, heading for the beach, following the same instinct that tells a wounded animal to go home. Flies. Flies everwhere. Blue flies, green flies, black flies. And the scent of thyme."

The whole book is like that - like the way it was, how awful it was. And it also has the disturbingly familiar litany of foolish politicians who moved soldiers like they were playing a game - in this case a game on a board that they were totally and completely unfamiliar with. (Churchill is exposed for all of his foolish bluster over the Dardenelles and Kitchener - well, history knows what Kitchener was responsible for.) For over 500 pages I was shocked by how quickly it reads and by how often I wanted to repeat a quote to my husband (or the world). Consider this one:

"Gallipoli, the war that got away from its handlers, is a tale of all that is fine and all that is foolish in the human condition. If it made more sense, it would be a lesser story. The tale is mostly about frailty. This, along with the beauty of its setting helps explain why it lingers in the imagination after larger and more important wars are forgotten. Tragedies have more layers than epics and Gallipoli has somehow become bigger than the sum of its facts."

But what impressed me the most was how much it reminded me again and again how time has not changed, how humanity has not changed, how we still keep fucking up like we always have. You would think that after making war against each other for so long we would at least be better at that. And yet we still send soldiers out without adequate armament, without enough bullets, without decent intelligence. We (and I mean all of us, everywhere, every side) still keep thinking that we can fight by throwing ill prepared and ill equipped young men at each other and under enormous fire.

We keep thinking we can make war as quick and easy as we make paper dolls.

The quote that has lingered with me the longest though - the one that I think will stay with me forever, is from Sir Ian Hamilton, Allied Commander-in-Chief who became a scapegoat for all that went wrong for the British. Years after the war he said in a speech:

"These boys of yours did not die for reparations; nor for Mesopotamia; nor even for Jerusalem. They had hoped, God bless them, to kill war."

How sad we all are; how so very very sad.