Thoughts on Turkey: Attlee and Kemal at Gallipoli, remembrance, nation building and human life

That morning, at Troy, it was tempting to believe that if the gods were once ever present, they left the place to itself a long time ago. Yet once, in Homer’s world, each turn, each twist of the ten years of the Trojan War saw the Gods intervene to save, to maim, to kill.

We don’t really have gods anymore. The vast majority of the men who fought on the Gallipoli peninsula beloved in God: one God. They were men of the great religions of the book. Many sought the solace of God in the face of what was one of the most brutal and hard fought campaigns of a war hardly short on either. Some prayed for God to save them. It is perhaps at times like that that the divine will is hardest to fathom of all. For some, of course, it was hardly God’s will at all…