The bastion known as Quinn’s Post after Major Hugh Quinn,
the first commanding officer there, was said, by soldiers, to be ‘the hottest
corner of Gallipoli’ and it was a vital position, too, sitting at a fork in
what was known as Monash Valley. It was said that if Quinn’s was overrun, so,
soon, would the rest of the ANZAC lines be rolled up by Turkish forces who
would be on the beach in minutes.
Not only were the Australian trenches dangerously close to
the Turkish ones – close enough that they could hear the enemy talking, and
vice versa – but they also occupied the low ground, meaning the Turks could lob
grenades and fire rifles and machine guns from their higher elevation down into
the network of trenches at Quinn’s.
Famed war journalist, Charles Bean – who is responsible for
meaty, early detail of the Gallipoli campaign and, in some ways, is also
responsible for the beginnings of the Anzac Legend – wrote of Quinn’s that men
pass by there, looking at it as they might have looked at a haunted house.
Without doubt, it was a charnel house of almost unimaginable horror, where
killing occurred day and night, and where so many wounded men lost hands or
wrists or sometimes entire arms after attempting to toss grenades back from
whence they’d come, back into the Turkish lines. They were successful on
occasion, but the consequences when they weren’t were dire.
Just like with his excellent The Lost Boys of ANZAC (which I reviewed earlier, and can be found
here), author/historian Peter Stanley focuses on a small part of the Gallipoli
campaign and finds great success as a result. In ‘Lost Boys’, it was those men
who had found their way far inland on the first day, and killed because they
were so scattered. In Quinn’s Post, he captures the horror of that ugly and
violent place.
Even if the rest of the Gallipoli peninsula was quiet,
Quinn’s Post was a raging battle that seesawed back and forth. Australians
would attack, gain Turkish trenches – generally using bayonets, the most
gruesome way to take another man’s life – but a Turkish counter-attack would
soon push them back. Bombs were thrown back and forth with violent regularity,
not just the grenades issued to them, but, as supplies dwindled, homemade
bombs, jam tins packed with nails, shards of metal and whatever else the ANZACs
could find, topped off with a wick for detonation. It was a brutal example of
Australian ingenuity on Gallipoli.
Stanley relies heavily on eyewitness evidence, framing
diary, letter and memoir excerpts with snatches of prose from Charles Bean and
other first-hand accounts of the violence and courage that saturated Quinn’s
Post from the first hours of the invasion to the last gasp of the campaign,
just before evacuation. Around that, with a historian’s eye for detail and a novelist’s
eye for the dramatic, is a tight narrative of the long-running battle for
command of one of the most important spots on the entire Gallipoli battlefield.
There is less about the lead-up and aftermath of the
campaign and, indeed, very little other than some broad stroke detail on events
going on elsewhere on Gallipoli that didn’t directly affect what was taking
place at Quinn’s Post. It’s just the claustrophobia of close-in fighting that
is ghastly to imagine and would surely have haunted survivors on both sides for
the rest of their lives.
Quinn’s Post is
both a tribute to the tenacity of men on both sides, and a stark reminder of
why war should be avoided at all costs.
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