Gallipoli.

Before last week, the word didn’t mean a lot. Yes, it was associated with World War 1 and ANZAC day, the annual red poppies and entrenched in the national consciousness as our most significant military commemoration, but that was about as far as my awareness went. That all changed last week when we visited Gallipoli during our trip to Turkey.

We spent three hours with a local guide exploring the small stretch of land that makes up the Gallipoli peninsula. And I mean small. I had no idea that during the eight months of the failed Gallipoli campaign, the fighting took place on an area the size of Takapuna, or that the extent of their advance was only a few kilometres up scrubby mountainous land. The aim of the campaign had been to control the Dardanelles, the stretch of water that connects the Mediterranean to the Black sea and is thus the key sea route to Russia, who were allied with Britain and France, as well as to take over Istanbul, effectively putting the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey) out of World War 1. Those in charge saw the Ottomans as an easy target, expecting to take them by surprise, storm down the peninsula and capture Istanbul within 24 hours. Eight months, 44,000 Allied deaths and 87,000 Turkish deaths later, the Allies evacuated.

The main battlefields are now cemeteries, the trenches shallowed and eroded by time, and thousands of unmarked graves lie all through the valleys and beaches – now holding names given to them by the Allies. First was Anzac Cove, where the first NZ and Australian waves mistakenly landed on steep terrain, unnoticed by the couple of Turkish battalions in the area. Around the corner is North Beach, where more troops landed later that day – by which time the same Turkish soldiers had had time to set up machine guns on the hill facing directly onto the beach, resulting in a slaughter of the first arriving troops. Many were dead before they even set foot on the ground. North Beach is where they set up camp for those long, hard eight months, occasionally boating a few seriously wounded back to the offshore island Greek Island of Lemnos where their commanders resided in comfort. Up the hill is Rhododendron Ridge, where New Zealand battalions led the only successful taking of Chunuk Bair during the August Offensive, the high ground that was their goal. They held it for three days, before fresh Turkish troops caught them by surprise as they were changing guard with the British, forcing them back down to the beach camps.

The whole campaign seemed like a tragedy of miscommunication and poor planning, a bloodbath of thousands of young men who never came home. Maybe if the very first arrivals at Anzac Cove hadn’t gone back to the beach to wait for the next waves of troops, they would have been able to come up behind the Turkish machine gunners and prevent the first deaths. Maybe if the British and other battalions up and down the coast had kept going further into enemy territory, rather than waiting three days for those at North Beach, they would have taken the Turks by surprise rather than giving them time to set up a front line. Maybe if they had some other way of fighting rather than trench warfare, madly rushing at each other over bare patches of no-man’s land, running over their dead friends and being shot down in droves, fewer would have been killed. It is a whole host of maybes, and nothing can change what happened. All we can do is learn from it, and remember those who gave their lives in vain.

I never thought seeing and learning about Gallipoli would be so affecting. But standing on the now peaceful grassy hills, covered in unmarked graves, cemeteries and monuments for both the Allied and Turkish soldiers lost, reading that they came from Otago, from Auckland, from Victoria and everywhere else, these 17, 18, 19 year old men with loving inscriptions on their headstones from their mothers who sent their young sons off to a great glorious war and never, ever saw them again, was heart-breaking. It brought it painfully close – these New Zealand and Australian boys the same age as my brother, who were probably terrified, cold and hungry, living in trench squalor, pushed into a war they never asked for and never having the chance to get married, to have children, to even live beyond their teenage years.

I also hadn’t realised the extent of the Turkish fatalities – 87,000 were dead on their side. At one point, 10,000 were enlisted from high schools and universities in Istanbul and sent into battle in May with another 30,000t troops, with 3000 dead in one day of fighting. They had to declare the only truce of the campaign to bury the dead as the stench of rotting bodies, left for five days in the sun, was so horrific. Although most of the Anzac soldiers were young single men, many of the Turkish forces remembered in Gallipoli cemeteries were professional soldiers, in their thirties and forties, probably with wives and children left behind. I’m not sure which is worse – leaving children behind to never see them grow up or not having the chance to have a family at all.

Anyway. This recipe is in remembrance of all those who fought at Gallipoli. A traditional recipe from NZ and Australia, ANZAC biscuits have been made since the 1930s, based on a biscuit recipe that mothers and sisters made to sent to their boys on the front. Those biscuits were teeth-breakingly hard, dry cookies not unlike a gingernut that had to last months, and became so inedible many soldiers ground them into their porridge. But never fear – this version, developed in the following years, is far more enjoyable – a buttery, oat-coconut biscuit, caramel tinged with golden syrup and brown sugar, and perfectly chewy in the middle with a bit of crunch around the edges. Notably, no eggs are used, probably because of the scarcity of eggs during war time and so they would keep for months when shipped. Of course, I had to give them a dunk in chocolate as well – who could resist?!

The post Anzac Biscuits & The Gallipoli Campaign appeared first on The Brick Kitchen.