Remember and understand Gallipoli

Johnny Turk, he was ready, he primed himself well. 

He rained us with bullets, and showered us with shell, And in five minutes flat, he’d blown us all to hell, Nearly blew us back home to Australia. And the band played Waltzing Matilda, As we stopped to bury our slain, and we buried ours, and the Turks buried theirs, Then we started all over again.

ERIC BOGLE’S The Band Played Waltzing Matilda is one of the great anti-war songs. It captures the cruelty and waste, the stupidity and heartbreak that humanity more or less constantly inflicts upon itself in a powerful way. In 1915 it was farm boys from Australia shoulder-to-shoulder with Dublin and Munster Fusiliers fighting their Turkish contemporaries in a place most Allied soldiers could hardly find on a map. Though Bogle describes the Gallipoli campaign through Australian eyes the anthem is equally relevant to Ireland and the 3,500 Irish men who died in an utterly wasteful exercise on the arid peninsula in western Turkey.