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
"There were now just 17,000 men left, and January 8 [1916] was another calm spring-like day. Once again as at Suvla and Anzac great stores and ammunition were got ready for destruction. Landmines were laid, and the self-firing rifles set in position in the trenches. Once again the sad mules lay dead in rows. . . .The thing that the soldiers afterwards remembered with particular vividness was the curious alternation of silence and of deafening noise that went on through the day. . . .Apart from the spasmodic shelling there was no movement in the Turkish lines, and as the night advanced the Turks very largely ceased to count; it was the weather which engrossed everybody's mind. By 8 p.m. the glass was falling, and at nine when the waning moon went down the wind had risen to thirty-five miles an hour. . . ."
The Allies' Gallipoli campaign, begun in April with great hopes of quick victory, was in its penultimate day. Having already evacuated their positions at Suvla Bay and Anzac Cove to the north, a British force, its numbers determined by what the fleet could transport in a single night, held, and thinly, only Cape Helles at the end of the peninsula.
Gallipoli by Alan Moorehead, page 346, copyright © 1956 by Alan Moorehead, publisher: Perennial Classics 2002 (HarperCollins Publications 1956), publication date: 2002 (1956)
1916-01-08, 1916, January, Gallipoli, Cape Helles, evacuation
