To the Dardanelles! The Entente Allies successfully capture their objective and plant their flags in this boy's 1915 war game, as they did not in life, neither in the naval campaign, nor in the invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula.
Aux Dardanelles; Victoire; Vive les AlliésLogo and number: ACA 2131Reverse:Artige - Fabricant 16, Faub. St. Denis Paris Visé Paris N. au verso. Fabrication Française - Marque A.C.A
"[The troopships] were already full of wounded. Eventually we arrived at a ship which had some space. My stretcher was winched up and lowered through a forward hatch onto the deck below. There were 600 wounded aboard that boat, two doctors, no nurses, no medical orderlies, no anaesthetics, and there we lay. I wasn't touched all the way to Alexandria. I lay there without any attention at all with these sticky bandages around me; they began to get a bit nasty. I don't know how long that voyage lasted. Perhaps four nights. Perhaps five. I lay looking straight up at the foremast the whole time. I was one of the luckier ones."
Tony Fagan was felled at Gallipoli by a Turkish bullet that struck the identity disk in his left breast pocket, deflecting the bullet into his abdomen and out through his left buttock. He found his way to two lost fellow New Zealanders who carried him until finding stretcher bearers who brought him to Anzac Cove to be evacuated. In Alexandria, Egypt, Fagan recovered in 'an extraordinarily good hospital with Indian doctors and Sikh orderlies.' He had landed on the April 25, 1915, the first day of the Allied Gallipoli campaign, and was wounded on his third day. He returned to Gallipoli in the autumn, and later fought in France.
Voices of Gallipoli by Maurice Shadbolt, pp. 20, 21, copyright © 1988 Maurice Shadbolt, publisher: Hodder and Stoughton, publication date: 1988
1915-04-28, 1915, April, Gallipoli, Gallipoli Campaign, The Allied invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey, The Gallipoli Campaign
