Gallipoli has long been remembered as a campaign of lost opportunities. From the failed forcing of the Dardanelles to the bungling of the Landing, the push on the ridges in August and the stalled advance on Suvla, historians and generals alike have wondered if the outcome could ever have been different. Perhaps with more troops, firmer resolution, better timing or better luck, the allies might have succeeded. Whether the Anzacs could have won and what might have happened if they had remains a matter of pointless speculation. What is beyond dispute is that the Centenary of the Landing represents a lost opportunity for Australia.

As far as the official records are concerned, the story of Alfred Morris is rather unremarkable. The young journalist from Geelong enlisted in the first weeks of the war, and departed Australia with the first contingent. Trooper Morris served with the Light Horse Field Ambulance. He saw action at Gallipoli, was evacuated sick to Lemnos, and spent another two years in the deserts of Sinai. Morris was discharged medically unfit in 1917 and returned, nursing on a hospital ship, to Sydney. His service dossier – a bare record of postings and promotions – runs to less than fifty pages.

But as one might have expected of a journalist, Morris kept a diary, and here one finds a rather different story. A series of hastily scribbled notebooks, the diary contains the hallmarks of many soldier narratives. It begins with a lyrical description of the voyage, offers a compelling account of fighting ‘and living like rabbits in a hole’ at Gallipoli, takes a moment amid the ‘awful din’ of the guns to sketch a sunset over Samothrace, and records the incessant rumours that ran through that ‘small city’ of Anzac. Much of it is written with a frankness, intimacy and even an innocence that takes the reader by surprise. There is not much Morris failed to record in his ‘beloved little diary’, his one ‘constant companion’ through every day of his war service.1

A sunset over Samothrace: Morris’ diary evokes many scenes such as this. He was acutely aware of the juxtaposition between Gallipoli as a place of horror and suffering but also a site of immense beauty. Leslie Fraser Standish Hore, ‘The Bacchant tolls the knell of parting day’, World War I Sketches courtesy State Library of New South Wales.

Morris had hoped that the August Offensive would yield a swift and conclusive victory for the Allies; it was – as historians have noted – the last opportunity to ‘break out’ from the narrow beachhead at Anzac. As ships’ guns boomed from the sea, shells whistled overhead and the men prepared to charge, Morris confidently predicted the greatest day in history. But that ‘brave effort’ ended only in slaughter.

Sunday 8th August It’s a hard thing to write these lines as I would like to blot from my memory the thought of this awful day. . . .  the casualties on both sides were enormous. We were evacuating the sap and along this all the mules, ammunition and reinforcements had to come up and the Turks knew this and poured shrapnel into it all day. It was Hell. They shelled the beach with the wounded lying [there] helpless as they could not be taken to the ships. We had to go backwards and forwards all day and night with our stretchers stepping over the dead, and being bumped by the mules. How we escaped was miraculous. Bullets went through our clothing, but it got four of our best men two killed and two wounded. Our patients in some cases killed on [their] stretchers. Dead were falling all around us . . .  2

Morris snatched only a couple of hours’ sleep that night. As dawn broke he found himself in a ‘congested trench’ surrounded by the dead and dying:

we could not get them away, and it was awful to see them suffering. They were lying out in [the open] with the sun beating . . .  down on them. We did every thing we could for them, made them tea, Bovril etc but the suffering cannot be described here in words. On the beach it was worse. The hospital ships are full they cannot get them . . .  the smell from the dead near the beach is frightful.3

One might have expected these scenes would have hardened Morris – and ruled out any possibility of sympathy for the enemy. But that is not the case. At several points throughout the diary, the young medic admires the ‘great stand’ made by Johnny Turk, and even the ‘plucky’ courage of their snipers. Turkish dead lying in the gullies are described as ‘an awful sight’, the ‘effects of our guns’ terrible. Morris recorded the case of wounded men, starving and flyblown, being offered water by Ottoman soldiers and shaking their hands. He took time to visit a party of Turkish prisoners on the beach. Amongst them was a woman, a camp follower, he noted, not a combatant – she was a reminder that these men, too, had wives and families they cared for.4

Trooper Morris continued to fight the Turk, and to believe in the cause of the British Empire. But there also remained a grudging respect for the man on the other side of the trenches, a recognition that both sides shared the terror of battle and the squalid conditions of war in the desert and at Anzac. In the gruelling advance through Palestine, Morris even risked his own life to save the life of the enemy:

On the other side of the redoubt . . .  I could see a poor beggar of a Turk badly hit. So with my officer’s permission I climbed down to him. [A] sniper fired five shots at me but they all went wide. I reached the poor beggar dressed his badly shattered leg and dragged him into the shade and gave him some morphia to allay his suffering. I left him then for a party of our men waving to me from the hill . . .  I found four dead and three badly wounded, one had six wounds on him.5

Compassion is a rare thing in war, and men – even medics – are often brutalised by battle. What makes Morris’s diary so remarkable is its steadfast refusal to embrace the common caricature of the ‘unspeakable Turk’ or to casually dehumanise the enemy. That is not to say he did not feel fear, or hatred, or relief when their side rather than his was the one that suffered. Nor, like most Australian soldiers, was he averse to souveniring from ‘Abdul’. Morris voted for conscription in 1916. He would do whatever he thought necessary to secure an Allied victory.

Abdul: Frederick Collis’s caricature of the Turk is not so dissimilar to the account in Morris’s diary. Collis admires the stoicism and dogged courage of a man he was encouraged to see only as the enemy; so too did Alfred Morris. ART00046 courtesy Australian War Memorial.

Morris and his beloved diary came home to Australia. Mindful again that he was a witness to history, his accounts of the war on Gallipoli and in the Sinai were deposited in Sydney’s Mitchell Library. And there was something else included in his papers. In August 1915, in one of those ‘brutal days’6 described so well in the diary, Morris found a tiny copy of the Koran clasped in the hands of a dead Turkish officer. A man – not much older than himself – had carried it into battle, just as men on Morris’s side carried their Bibles.

And here we come to the lost possibilities of the Anzac Centenary. In 2012, an expert panel of historians advising the Anzac Centenary Board made a unanimous recommendation: Morris’s Gallipoli Koran should be repatriated to Turkey. Every other panel advising the Board agreed; the sacred text would be placed again in Turkish hands on the hundredth anniversary of the Landing. This might have been a gesture of reconciliation in a bitterly divided world; it might have signalled tolerance, inclusiveness and diversity; and it might have recognised – as Alfred Morris surely did – that whatever uniform one wears, whatever language one speaks, and whatever religion one professes, we all share a common humanity. Nothing came of that proposal.

A gesture of reconciliation in a bitterly divided world: The Gallipoli Koran taken by Morris and now held in an Australian archive. The return of this sacred text would have signalled the enduring friendship between Australia and Turkey and built a bridge across cultural and religious differences. Alfred Prichard Kington Morris Papers, ML MS 2886 courtesy State Library of News South Wales.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on the service dossier of Alfred Morris NAA: B2455, MORRIS ALFRED and his papers at the State Library of New South Wales ML MS2886. The authors thank Tracey Bradford for her assistance.

1 Diary dated 5 August, 2 September, 16 October 1915, Alfred Prichard Kington Morris Papers, ML MS 2886, State Library of News South Wales.

2 Diary dated 8 August 1915, Morris Papers. Much of this entry is illegible and the punctuation erratic. We have indicated breaks with ellipsis and included full stops and capital letters in the interests of readability.

3 ibid, 9 August 1915.

4 ibid, 11, 16 August 1915.

5 ibid, 16 October 1916.

6 ibid, 23 August 1916.