Then in the nineteen-twenties the reaction began to set in. The first surprise came from the Turkish General Staff when they admitted that on March 19, 1915, nearly all their ammunition at the Narrows had been shot away, and that a renewed attack on that day might very well have been decisive. The whole conception of the naval attack was now seen, if not in a new light, in a more controversial way. Other evidence followed — evidence of the extreme political tension in Constantinople at that time, and of the fact that Turkey possessed only two arsenals which the Allied Fleet might easily have destroyed.

In its report the Turkish staff stated: ‘A naval attack executed with rapidity and vigour at the outbreak of the war might have been successful… if the Entente Fleets had appeared before Constantinople the eight divisions retained there would have been impotent to defend it.’ And so that first and much derided directive: ‘The Admiralty should prepare for a naval expedition in February to bombard and take the Gallipoli peninsula with Constantinople as its objective,’ was not so fanciful after all.

Roger Keyes, not surprisingly, needed very little persuading about the importance of these revelations. In 1925, when he was in command of the Mediterranean Fleet, he steamed through the Dardanelles and, according to Aspinall, who was with him, he could hardly speak for emotion. ‘My God,’ he said at last, ‘it would have been even easier than I thought; we simply couldn’t have failed… and because we didn’t try, another million lives were thrown away and the war went on for another three years.’

Other experts — and they were still in a majority — remained unconvinced. Yet no one could altogether ignore the admission of Liman von Sanders and the Turkish commanders that more than once the divisional generals at Cape Helles had wanted to withdraw behind Achi Baba; that on at least two occasions, at the original landing at Anzac in April and again at Suvla in August, the Allies were on the very edge of breaking through and were only prevented from doing so by the intervention of Mustafa Kemal.

Gradually too with the passing of time the great events of the war and its aftermath were falling into perspective, and the Gallipoli adventure was seen, not in isolation, but as a part of the general strategy; not as a sideshow, but as an alternative to the fearful three years of slaughter that followed in the trenches in France, to the long campaign against the Turks in Mesopotamia, and to the expedition to Salonika. It was even perhaps not too much to say that if the Allies had succeeded in penetrating the Dardanelles in 1915 or 1916 the Russians would not have signed a separate peace, and that the revolution might not have followed, not at all events so soon, or possibly so drastically.

Seen in this new light the Gallipoli campaign was no longer a blunder or a reckless gamble; it was the most imaginative conception of the war, and its potentialities were almost beyond reckoning. It might even have been regarded, as Rupert Brooke had hoped, as a turning point in history. Certainly in its strictly military aspect its influence was enormous. It was the greatest amphibious operation which mankind had known up till then, and it took place in circumstances in which nearly everything was experimental: in the use of submarines and aircraft, in the trial of modern naval guns against artillery on the shore, in the manœuvre of landing armies in small boats on a hostile coast, in the use of radio, of the aerial bomb, the land mine, and many other novel devices. These things led on through Dunkirk and the Mediterranean landings to the invasion of Normandy in the second world war. In 1940 there was very little the Allied commanders could learn from the long struggle against the Kaiser’s armies in the trenches in France. But Gallipoli was a mine of information about the complexities of the modern war of manœuvre, of the combined operation by land and sea and sky; and the correction of the errors made then was the basis of the victory of 1945. The next time, as Kitchener had once hoped, ‘they got it right.’

It was Churchill himself who first restored the reputation of the Gallipoli campaign with the publication in the twenties of The World Crisis, his study of the first world war. He had never really been heard before, and now, step by step, he took the story through the political and military events which led up to the campaign: the controversy with Fisher, the arguments in cabinet, the long struggle to win support for Gallipoli from Joffre and the trench-warfare generals in France, the agonizing delays that hung on Kitchener’s word, the trembling balance of politics in the Balkans, and finally the crises of the battle itself, when just for a few moments, in a vacuum of indecision, all depended upon the inspiration of a single act of faith.

There followed the admirable official history prepared by Brigadier Aspinall, and it amply confirmed all Churchill had written.

Meanwhile the authors who had served in the campaign had been at work. There were Hamilton’s own diaries, Compton Mackenzie’s Gallipoli Memories, Henry Nevinson’s graceful and accomplished account of the operations, a short book from the Poet Laureate, John Masefield, and two novels that were widely read, The Secret Battle by Alan Herbert, and Tell England by Ernest Raymond. By the nineteen-thirties a large library had grown up, British, French, Turkish and German, and although there was general criticism of the tactics no serious student now questioned the wisdom of the Allies going to the Dardanelles.

An astonishing number of the Gallipoli commanders survived to see this vindication. Birdwood lived on until his ninety-seventh year, and Keyes, having served as Director of Combined Operations in the second world war, died in 1945, leaving behind him an endless speculation as to what might have happened had he been the admiral in command in the Dardanelles and de Robeck his chief-of-staff. Nasmith of the E 11 went on to become the youngest admiral afloat. Others took up careers that could never have been predicted: Allanson became the British consul at Monte Carlo, Murdoch, the Australian journalist, became the owner of a powerful chain of newspapers and radio stations, Unwin resigned from the Navy almost at once and became a well-known yachtsman; he had three children. Others again were young and obscure when they fought at Gallipoli, but later the world knew them very well. Among these there were Clement Attlee, then a spruce young captain of thirty-two, and three future field marshals, Slim, Harding and the Australian, Blamey. Of the group of officers who buried Rupert Brooke on Skyros only Freyberg and Arthur Asquith survived. Freyberg fought through the second world war, a V.C. with three bars to his D.S.O., and subsequently Governor-General of New Zealand. De Robeck, Monro and Stopford died at the end of the nineteen-twenties.

Hamilton was not asked to serve in the field again after the campaign, but his later career was in some ways the most remarkable of all. In 1918 he became Lieutenant of the Tower of London, and in 1932 Rector of Edinburgh University. Year after year, while all but a few of his Gallipoli contemporaries reached the ends of their lives, he continued into a distinguished and sensitive old age, the nimbus of Gallipoli always overhanging his name but never daunting him. His Gallipoli Diary, which appeared in 1920, was followed by a prophetic study of the trend of modern war and several books of reminiscence. The second world war passed, and he was still there in his pleasant home at Hyde Park Gardens in London, surrounded by his books, his military trophies and by many friends; a tall thin figure, very well dressed, and it was still a groomed and supple mind. If he was not entirely vindicated at least he was loved and respected. All the great opponents of Gallipoli were gone, Monro and the generals of the western front, Bonar Law, Carson and Northcliffe. When the General died on October 12, 1947, he had reached the great age of ninety-four, and a large congregation of the leading people in Britain gathered at a service in Westminster Abbey to honour his memory.