The hell where youth and laughter go

From Castles of Steel by Robert K. Massie. Page 430.

The real impetus for the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns came from a general revulsion in Britain at the carnage taking place on the Western Front. The German march on Paris had been brought to a standstill, and by December 1914 huge armies confronted each other in trenches running from the Channel to Switzerland. No breakthrough appeared possible by either side: machine guns slaughtered infantrymen as soon as they climbed out of the trenches; by the end of November, Britain and France had lost almost a million men. This grim fact did not deter Field Marshal Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief of the BEF, who insisted that the decisive theater lay in France and that the war could be won only by continuing to hurl waves of men into enemy machine-gun fire until somewhere, someday, the German line was pierced. It was this philosophy of war that led Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated soldier, to write,

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

Sir John French’s belief was shared by France’s government and generals and by Lord Kitchener, who, although he personally disliked Sir John French, remained generally supportive. Nevertheless, by the end of the year, a majority in the British War Council—Asquith, Churchill, Lloyd George, and Haldane—were eager for an alternative: a place where the Allies might attack the Central Powers at a weaker point with a lower cost in blood. This was a particularly British approach to war. Always in the past when fighting great continental powers, Britain had used her sea power to mount operations in secondary theaters; over time, these campaigns had drained the enemy’s power and will to fight. And the form this strategy was to take in this particular war—an attack on the Dardanelles—had a particularly personal flavor. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill had helped to create the mightiest sea weapon in the history of the world. Yet this huge armada seemed almost impotent; it could not strike a telling blow because its enemy would not fight. In a man of Churchill’s temperament, this passive role stirred bitter frustration. The first specific mention of an attack on the Dardanelles came in a War Council meeting on November 25, 1914, in connection with reports that the Turks were preparing an overland attack on Egypt and the Suez Canal. As a countermove, Churchill suggested a combined land and sea operation against the Dardanelles and the Gallipoli peninsula. Kitchener immediately declared that, although strategically the idea had merit, no troops were available. Churchill said that while a substantial military force—40,000, 50,000, 60,000 men—might be required, the soldiers need not necessarily be British. Fisher asked whether Greece could be persuaded to land an army on the Gallipoli peninsula. Grey replied that any immediate hopes of Greek participation were illusory, and the council passed to other business. But the seed of a campaign against Turkey had been planted.