![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The men had no cinemas, no music, no radios, no ‘entertainment’ of any kind, and they never met women or children as the soldiers did behind the lines in France. ![]() ‘It was in some ways,’ Herbert says, ‘a curiously happy time.’ It is a strange remark, but one feels one understands it very well. With marvellous rapidity the men removed themselves to another plane of existence, the past receded, the future barely existed, and they lived as never before upon the moment, released from the normal weight of human ambitions and regrets. Gallipoli swallowed them up and made conditions of its own. There can be no fair comparison with the relatively comfortable lives of the soldiers in the second world war, or even with the lives of these men themselves before they enlisted. It was ghastly but it was not yet petty or monotonous. With the mere cataloguing of the Army’s miseries a sense of dreariness is transmitted, and this is a false impression at this stage life on the peninsula was anything but dreary. “Yet it seems possible that one can make too much of the hardships of the soldiers at Gallipoli, or rather there is a danger of seeing these hardships out of their right context. ![]()
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