Nigel
Steel will be a familiar name to many visitors to
the Long, Long Trail as he is a prolific author on
the subject of the Great War. One
of his best works is "Defeat at Gallipoli", written
with his fellow staffer at the Imperial war Museum,
Peter Hart. This work, published in the familiar
Battleground Europe style by Pen & Sword, is a guide
book to the fast-changing battlefields of the Gallipoli
peninsula.
Perhaps not many of us will ever make it to this
remote part of Turkey: I suspect that this edition
will be more for the armchair enthusiast than the
battlefield visitor, although cheap air travel and
the development of transport and roads to Gallipoli
from Istanbul are making the trip far more of a possibility
than it used to be. If you plan to go and can avoid
the mad rush of Australian backpackers who flood
into the area for ANZAC Day (25 April), Gallipoli
can make for a truly excellent visit, being a compact,
fascinating and romantic place to be. But it is,
for its small size, a confusing battlefield simply
because of the jumble of beaches, ridges, nullahs
and other geographic features that made it so challenging
for the British, Australian, New Zealand, Indian
and French forces that landed there. A straightforward
guide book is a must if you plan to travel independently.
Nigel Steel's book mixes the telling
of the war story with a guide around the modern battlefield.
It is changing in many respects - much building going
on and in some places, the development of roads necessarily
altering the landscape. I am not sure that it would
be a very easy book to use when you are on the ground
- you would need to read or wade through the story-
telling to find out whether to turn left or right at
the junction. As a condensed reader in the campaign
it is not bad at all, but clearly in 200-odd small
format pages you would not get the full story as in
"Defeat at Gallipoli" and indeed the author makes this
plain in his introduction. There are some excellent
"then and now" style photographs and shots of the terrain
today, but only two or three maps - which to me reinforces
that this is more of a book to be read by a cosy fireside
than on the slopes of Sari Bair Ridge.
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