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
"On May the twenty-fourth there was an armistice. I was involved in that as an observer, nothing else. I wasn't among the burial parties. My job was to look out for Otago bodies. Actually I only found one. The rest were either buried before I got there or on the Turk side of the line. They put a line of pegs halfway between the two lines, each peg with a little strip of white calico. We buried all the men on our side of the armistice line and they buried all the men on their side. But that wasn't the first idea. The first idea was that we would pick up the Turks on our side of the line and carry them over the centre line. The Turks were to do the same with our fellows on their side. This turned out to be impossible. You couldn't move the bodies."
Description by George Skerret of the New Zealand Otago Battalion of the May 24, 1915 armistice to bury the dead. After the Turkish attack at Ari Burnu — Anzac Cove — on May 18 and 19, bodies lay between the Turkish and Allied lines in a no-man's land that was, in places, only tens of yards wide, and decayed rapidly in the heat. Fearful of disease, wanting to bury their dead, the two sides arranged a truce. As Skerret says, the men originally planned to bury their own, moving enemy dead across the armistice line. The bodies were so badly decomposed moving them was impossible. This was the only such truce of the Gallipoli campaign.
Voices of Gallipoli by Maurice Shadbolt, page 52, copyright © 1988 Maurice Shadbolt, publisher: Hodder and Stoughton, publication date: 1988
1915-05-24, 1915, May, Gallipoli, truce, armistice, burial, Gallipoli Campaign, May truce, May armistice, May burial
