In Dubious Baffle

GALLIPOLI (384 pp.) -- Alan Moore-head-- Harper ($4.50).

The British feel an emotional attachment to gallant defeats and desperate defenses that no mere victory can rival. Thus the Gallipoli campaign of World War I has always ranked high in British hearts, along with the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, the evacuation of Dunkirk and the siege of Tobruk.

How Gallipoli became a British synonym for "gallantry and folly" is the burden of the latest book by Alan Moorehead, Australian World War II war correspondent (North Africa, Europe). His account of this last great battle for Constantinople, when Western man last fought for "glory" and "immortality," gleams like a ribbon on khaki.

In Whitehall in 1915. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill and War Secretary Lord Kitchener concluded it would be a good idea to send the tleet to force the Dardanelles. It would cheer the Russians ; it would get Russian grain ships through to Britain; and it would break the bloody stalemate of trench warfare on the Western front. Only Admiral Sir John Fisher had forebodings. ''Damn the Dardanelles," he said. "They will be our grave."

Fisher was near right. The Allies sent half a million men to Gallipoli and half of them suffered wounds or death. The Turks' losses were equally heavy. But the glory seemed close and real as the Allies girded for battle in the arena of the ancients.

The operations commander. Sir Ian Hamilton, one of the "long tradition of British poet-generals," spoke to his men of Hector and Achilles; his chief of staff shaved each day before battle with Kipling's // propped up beside his mirror. Poet-Soldier Rupert Brooke (who was felled by sunstroke and died before he got to the scene of battle) dreamed crusaders' dreams of Christian soldiers in the mosque of

St. Sophia. "Everyone's blood was up," said Churchill.

But the folly began early. Britain's obsolete battleships steamed into the Narrows between Europe and Asia and tried to force their way through, turned tail just when Turkish batteries were down to nearly their last round. Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, steaming up the Dardanelles ten years later, was amazed. "My God," he exclaimed, "we simply couldn't have failed."

Bloody Sea. But fail they did, and the decision was made to open the passage by capturing the shore. On the morning of April 25, 1915, 60,000 Allied troops headed toward the Dardanelles peninsula in the first great amphibious land assault of modern times. In an age when armored landing craft were practically unknown, British, French and Anzacs went ashore in a flotilla of paddle steamers, trawlers, yachts and river tugs. Scarcely a naval gun boomed to soften up the Turkish beaches before them: the warships at Gallipoli were too busy transporting the troops. The result was carnage. At Cape Helles the Turks began "firing from a few yards away into the packed mass of screaming, struggling men in the boats." The men "died in the boats just as they stood, crowded shoulder to shoulder, without even the grace of an instant of time to raise their rifles. When all were dead or wounded--the midshipmen and sailors as well as the soldiers--the boats drifted helplessly away." Air Commodore Samson came flying over at this moment, "and looking down saw that the calm blue sea was 'absolutely red with blood' for a distance of 50 yards from the shore."

To the north the Anzac Corps of Australians and New Zealanders carried out a night landing just about six miles across thexinountains from the big Narrows forts. In the darkness tidal currents swept their boats a mile beyond their target beaches. But the Anzacs indomitably clawed up the cliffs, and "raising their absurd cry of 'Imshi yallah' [a phrase picked up in Cairo meaning 'Go away'], the Dominion soldiers fixed their bayonets and charged. Within a few minutes the enemy before them had dropped their rifles and fled."

By 7 a.m. the first Anzac scouts scaled Gallipoli's third ridge and looked down on the calm waters of the Narrows, only 3 1/2 miles away. Mustapha Kemal Ataturk was then an obscure colonel commanding a reserve division at Boghali near the Narrows. Grasping instantly that the heights were the key to the Allied assault, Kemal threw his whole division into the attack, drove the Anzacs from the ridges and pinned them to the cliffs. That night the Anzac toehold seemed so precarious that the corps commander asked permission to pull out. In the best British tradition Sir Ian fired off a midnight reply: "You have got through the difficult business, now you have only to dig, dig, dig until you are safe." Before dawn the assault troops turned the seaward slopes into a maze of huddled holes and ditches.

Ever since, the Australians have proudly borne the name of Diggers.

The Trojan Truce. But Kemal's tireless Turks had stopped the Allied expedition at the beachheads. In London Church ill was tumbled out of the Admiralty. At Gallipoli the battle bogged down in stalemate. One million men, Allied and Turk, were pinned down in a rocky battleground no more than 25 miles long by 13 miles wide; in places the trenches were only ten yards apart. Across the narrow no man's land, men exchanged gifts of food and cigarettes as well as shots.

Hamilton tried one more amphibious landing at Suvla Bay, once again was smashed off the peaks and back into a shallow beachhead by Mustapha Kemal. Hamilton was relieved of command. Of his successor. General Sir Charles Monro, Churchill wrote witheringly: "He came, he saw, he capitulated." But winter was setting on, and with Bulgaria gone over to the Central Powers, the Dardanelles could at last be munitioned directly from Germany's arms factories. The Allied position became hopeless. Evacuation, once ordered, threatened to be more harrowing even than landing. But this is an art at which the British are masters.

Skeleton battalions of men fired rifles from empty trenches while their comrades, on padded feet, filed by night to the beaches. One dawn, just 259 days after the landing, the Turks found they had no enemy, and half-incredulous went to the beaches to gorge themselves on plum and apple jam left behind by the British. But not before General Sir Fred erick S. Maude remembered he had for gotten his personal valise, and trudged back for his belongings. The British were about to blow up their ammunition dumps, and legend has it that when the belated general finally made his beach, the embarkation officer had the spirit to sing:

Come into the lighter, Maude, For the fuse has long been lit. Hop into the lighter, Maude, And never mind your kit.

As Author Moorehead tells it, the Dardanelles campaign sweeps through its fated course, a somber pageant of military error, a stunning tragedy of human valor. Here were great figures, great schemes. The book is the best account ever written of the action that started on March 18, 1915, even including Winston Churchill's own ringing apologia in The World Crisis. Through all Moorehead's painstaking documentation comes the authentic voice of men in battle, so that after 41 years the reader's heart still catches and he becomes a hopeless partisan in an engagement of which he already knows the outcome.

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