This chapter explains how failure at Gallipoli in spring 1915 focused attention on fighting the Ottoman Empire. The secret 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, understood by historians as emblematic of broader British and French imperial ambitions, also provided a blueprint for the prosecution of the war. In this multifront war, what happened on one battlefront had consequences on others and for Allied military and domestic agendas back in Europe.

Was Churchill a military figure who happened to have gone in for politics or was he a civilian politician with a military background? His role in the early stages of the war as first lord of the admiralty did seem to indicate that he was combining military, naval and political leadership in his own person: taking personal command at the siege of Antwerp, adopting a ‘hands-on’ style at the admiralty and blurring the distinctions between land and sea command. The problem with the Dardanelles campaign was the confusion over whether it was to be a purely naval operation or a joint military–naval one, and the blame for this confusion must lie at least in part with Churchill’s 1914 decision to bring Fisher out of retirement. Churchill’s sacking was a sharp reminder of the ultimate authority of the prime minister, while his service on the Western Front reminded him that his heart really lay in Westminster. Ultimately, he experienced the war from an astonishing range of perspectives while operating as a lone figure. The war provided an important apprenticeship for 1940–5, but it also confirmed that he was essentially a civilian politician who happened to have a strong military side.

English-language poetry of the First World War is still largely thought of through the filter of the same dozen or so much-anthologised and now-canonised British poets: Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, et al. One dominant image of the war, and of poetic responses to it, has become almost entirely created by their adhesive poems: initial idealism succeeded by protest and pity. To engage with the First World War poetry of Australians Leon Gellert and C. J. Dennis, New Zealanders Alfred Clark and Donald Lea, and Maori ‘action song’ writers Sir Apirana Ngata and Paraire Henare Tomoana is to have that dominant image significantly modified and complicated. In their work, myths of nation-building, larrikin heroics, and imperial sacrifice jostle uncomfortably with scenes of horror, dark comedy, and stoicism. In particular, a number of Leon Gellert’s Gallipoli poems stand comparison with the best of the established canon.

The war entered 1915 with Germany in possession of most of Belgium and firmly entrenched in northeastern France, Serbia holding its own in the Balkans, and Russia in occupation of Austrian Galicia and Turkish territory along the Caucasus front. On the Western front the British Empire provided much of the manpower in Flanders and the Artois sector, but the Germans successfully stood on the defensive against them, and against the French in the Champagne, making the first effective use of poison gas on the battlefield. In the east, Germany joined Austria-Hungary in liberating Galicia, then conquering Russian Poland, only to have Tsar Nicholas II refuse to consider a separate peace. The Western Allies anticipated the pressure on Russia and tried to force the Dardanelles, an ill-fated campaign that left British and Imperial forces focusing for much of the year on Gallipoli, where Mustafa Kemal became hero of the Turkish effort to repel them. In the spring Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary, opening up a front in the Alps and along the Isonzo River which soon became as stalemated as the Western front. On the Balkan front, Bulgaria entered the war in the autumn, joining the Central Powers in overrunning Serbia.

Under oath at the Dardanelles Commission, convened in 1917 to investigate the Gallipoli campaign, Surgeon General Sir Neville Howse, Director of Medical Services (DMS) for the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), stated that ‘as far as the Australian troops were concerned’ medical arrangements for the Gallipoli campaign ‘were so inadequate that they amounted to criminal negligence’.1 He squarely laid the blame for this ‘negligence’ on the shoulders of the British General Staff and informed the commissioners that he intended to share his concerns with Australia’s leaders. A palpably frustrated Howse stated: ‘I personally will recommend my Government when this war is over, that under no conceivable conditions ought they ever to trust to the medical arrangements that may be made by Imperial authorities for the care of their sick and wounded.’2 His scathing critique not only called into question the British General Staff’s ability to plan and execute a comprehensive strategy but also revealed his doubt regarding the benefits of Australian deference to Britain in medical–military matters.

This chapter focuses on Callwell’s role in the inception, conduct and aftermath of the Dardanelles Campaign (1915). Callwell occupied the important position of Director of Military Operations (DMO) at the War Office (1914-15) and therefore played a central role in shaping policy and strategy. He was also a key witness at the Dardanelles Commission (1916-17), an enquiry set up to investigate the causes of the Allied defeat. Finally, Callwell wrote extensively on the campaign, including his book The Dardanelles, published in 1919 as part of his Campaigns and Their Lessons series.

This chapter argues that Australia and New Zealand versions of the invasion novel crystallized an indigenized, militaristic settler masculinity that soon proved adaptable to other geopolitical contexts. Novels such as George Ranken’s The Invasion (1877) and Kenneth Mackay’s The Yellow Wave (1895) defined settler masculinity by valorizing character qualities previously associated with indigenous colonial resistance. The global circulation of that formal logic, spurred by the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), can be seen clearly in the work of Erskine Childers: alongside editing a history of the war’s guerilla phase, he reworked the invasion novel in The Riddle of the Sands (1903) to imagine countering a threat of metropolitan conflict with a colonial mindset. In World War I, the Australian and New Zealand role in the Dardanelles Campaign was also celebrated in texts such as John Masefield’s Gallipoli (1916) as a settler invasion of Europe. Casting militarized settler masculinity as “surplus value,” highly valuable and yet disposable, constitutes one final intersection of political economy and literary form, colony and metropole, arising from the Victorian settler empire.