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of the Royal Muster Fusiliers, Royal Dublin Fusiliers and the Hampshire Regiment being part of a larger force from the British 29th Division came ashore from the converted collier River Clyde, which beached itself allowing troops to disembark through cut sally points in her hull, down along gangways and across lighters acting as a form of bridge to the sand and into the jaws of Turkish machineguns, artillery and mined kill zones over looking barbed wire obstacles on the beach. I stood in the water here, walked along the stone pier jutting in to the sea and crouched behind the shingle wall where they hid and died in the hundreds. I walked through the battle step by step and saw where Corporal Cosgrove earned his VC for
pulling mined barbed wire stanchions out of the ground under intense fire to allow a channel of advance off the beach and I saw where his friends are resting now. Of the 1,100 Dublin Fu- siliers who fought at Gallipoli only 11 would survive unscathed. The surviving Dublin and Munster's from the landings would eventually be combined temporarily to form the Dubster's. The landscape that haunted the survivors of Gallipoli has stuck with me too albeit for different and at the same similar reasons and like Francis Ledwidge I too put my thoughts to words in a poem after returning home. I would like to thank Tony Roe and those other people involved for making possible my tour of Istanbul & Gallipoli.
An Cosantóir November 2011
