Gallipoli has not lent itself to literature. The First World War on the Western Front has furnished a body of poetry, prose fiction and memoir so substantial, and so distinguished, as to equip any O-Level English student with at least an adequate historical knowledge of the campaign. But even if it were true, as Geoffrey Moorhouse claims, that ‘no battle or campaign fought between 1914 and 1918 has ever been remembered quite so tenaciously as the ill-fated Allied expedition to the Dardanelles,’ this would not be the result of any literary work. Rupert Brooke, setting out to fight at Gallipoli, died before he ever got there. One of Siegfried Sassoon’s brothers was killed in action there, but Sassoon himself went to France. Sir Compton Mackenzie’s Gallipoli Memories (1929) hardly ranks alongside Goodbye to all that. By default, the rare representations of the campaign in popular culture are elevated into distorting prominence, and it is almost certain, as a result, that most of us know even less about the Gallipoli campaign than we think. Those, like me, whose awareness of the disaster is limited to Peter Weir’s Gallipoli will have fallen for the biggest myth of all: that Gallipoli was primarily an Antipodean tragedy. In fact, as Hell’s Foundations soon makes clear, Britain lost 21,000 men there – twice as many as Australia and New Zealand put together.

But if that is myth as simple delusion, what of the Dardanelles campaign as a representative story, as a lesson? Such was the scale of the Allied failure to capture the Gallipoli peninsula, knock Turkey out of the war, and take control of the vital Dardanelles waterway, that not even the brilliant evacuation of all forces in 1916 – the one unqualified success of the whole adventure – could transform it for posterity into an earlier version of Dunkirk. ‘To the last,’ writes John North in his 1936 history, it was ‘a singularly brainless and suicidal type of warfare.’ After the worst debacle of all, when General Stopford’s inertia threw away any chance of success in the crucial Allied landings at Suvla Bay, while the commander of the campaign, Hamilton, politely declined to intervene over his incompetent subordinate’s head, Prime Minister Asquith wrote to Kitchener that ‘the generals and staff engaged ... ought to be court-martialled and dismissed from the Army.’ Out of 410,000 Allied soldiers who fought in the campaign, half fell casualty. Besides the slaughter, the troops suffered dreadfully from dysentery, from the heavy heat of the summer months, and then encountered one of the worst-ever winters on the peninsula. Add in that the prime mover of the campaign was Churchill, whose decision that the Navy bombard Turkish positions at the outset to test their defences only gave the enemy advance warning of the invasion – a blemish that sits unhappily with his subsequent apotheosis – and that, in those days, the Dardanelles (especially when compared with the war on the Western Front being waged only seventy miles east of London) were simply a very long way away, and here are more than enough reasons for posterity to try and forget all about Gallipoli.

Geoffrey Moorhouse’s subject, however, is the remembrance of Gallipoli in England – how the events of the battlefield registered civilian consequences elsewhere, and the ways in which people back home chose not to forget. The battalions of soldiers who fought at Gallipoli came from somewhere, and returned to somewhere: Moorhouse, a Lancastrian whose grandfather fought in the campaign, chooses one regiment, the Lancashire Fusiliers, and its home base, the mill town of Bury. ‘How,’ he asks, ‘has the memory of those appalling months been kept so vividly alive for so long, and to what end? What uses, if any, have been made of the mythology, what lessons have been learnt from it, or not? ... The most important question of all, perhaps is this: how do we use our legends of heroism in the years that follow the courageous acts?’

Bury, he shows, has always commemorated Gallipoli Day with more pomp and wider civic participation than Armistice Day. It lost 1800 men in the Dardanelles campaign. For a collective act of bravery by one unit during the ‘Lancashire Landing’ on W Beach its regiment, uniquely in the British Army, received six Victoria Crosses. Its Member of Parliament, Charles Ainsworth, elected just after the Armistice and sitting until 1934, was a Gallipoli veteran whose initial election victory owed much to his Liberal rival’s unpopular opposition to conscription. The largest local landowner, Lord Derby, whose estates actually owned all of Bury until 1925, was so successful in exhorting Lancashire’s young men to enlist for the Front that Asquith soon made him National Director of Recruiting. Bury’s boys’ schools have retained an enthusiastic tradition of enrolling their pupils in the Combined Cadet Force. With such details Moorhouse illustrates the simple ubiquity of the military tradition in the town, both before and after the Dardanelles campaign. Soldiering, he implies, from the Crimean War and then the Boer War onward was, regardless of the efficacy of the battles the Lancashire Fusiliers were sent to fight, something they did rather well. By the time his history reaches the Thirties, however, it is offering somewhat different inferences. On the eve of the Second World War the Bury Territorial Army was facing severe shortages of men, and the military correspondent of the local paper expressed his bafflement that Bury’s young men appeared more keen to enlist in the Auxiliary Fire Service or become ARP wardens. By the Fifties measures had been taken to amalgamate the Fusiliers with other regiments, and 1960 saw its last home-trained recruits passing out of the town for service in Germany. In the Seventies and Eighties plans by the Ministry of Defence to extend its use of open moorland around Bury for army manoeuvres were arousing local opposition.