The Fires of Gallipoli
By Barney Campbell
The Fires of Gallipoli is a heartbreaking portrayal of friendship forged in the trenches of the First World War.
‘In this vivid and engaging novel of war and friendship, Barney Campbell shows us once again that he is a natural writer. This is a novel of men at arms of the highest quality.’
~ Alexander McCall Smith
Edward Salter is a shy, reserved lawyer whose life is transformed by the outbreak of war in 1914. On his way to fight in the Gallipoli campaign, he befriends the charming and quietly courageous Theodore Thorne. Together they face the carnage and slaughter, stripped bare to their souls by the hellscape and only sustained by each other and the moments of quiet they catch together.
Thorne becomes the crutch whom Edward relies on throughout the war. When their precious leave from the frontline coincides, Theo invites Edward to his late parents’ idyllic estate in Northamptonshire. Here Edward meets Thorne’s sister Miranda and becomes entranced by her.
Edward escapes the broiling, fetid charnel-house of Gallipoli to work on the staff of Lord Kitchener, then on to the Western Front and post-war espionage in Constantinople. An odd coolness has descended between Edward and Theo. Can their connection and friendship survive the overwhelming sense of loss at the end of the war when everything around them is corrupted and destroyed?
The Fires of Gallipoli is a heartbreaking, sweeping portrayal of friendship and its fragility at the very limits of humanity.
Excerpt
Everywhere was screaming and vicious, animal grunting. Edward seemed for a moment to have been put there artificially, a spectator to some alien carnage, enclosed entirely by the night and cut off from everything outside. He had no idea who else was alive, where Rossi was, if the battalion understood what was happening, on how wide a frontage the Turkish assault was. Then there was a gap in the flares going up and for ten seconds the trench seethed in complete darkness, no one knowing what on earth they were shooting or hacking at before another one came up and the sickly light resumed.
Edward could hear Thorne’s voice through the din. ‘Keep at it, men! Keep at it! Man the line, man the line, stand to, stand to!’ he screamed, shoving men up to the firestep. He reached down to one prostrate figure, shouting, ‘Get up, man, get up there or I’ll kill you myself,’ and then, realising he was dead, dropped him to the floor.
Edward started to follow his lead, realising that the immediate danger was over and the first Turkish attack had withered. Now they had to ensure a second one wouldn’t get nearly as close. He peered over the parapet, the first time he had dared to do so, seeing the yellow lights of the dropping flares swirling in the interplay with the darkness. In the trench the screams of the fight started to give way to shouts of military order, instructions being barked, ammunition being called for.
And then the Turks came again.
The night passed. It passed in hideous technicolour, it passed in clinical, anodyne black and white. It passed in unearthly screams, tense silence, tears of grief and primal howls. It passed in calm commands, stentorian bellows and soft whispers into ears urging the dying to go well. Tracers bouncing off rocks faded like shooting stars into the sky and over Achi Baba. Bullets flew, sometimes dully into sandbags and sometimes ricocheting angrily off metal or bone. Shrieks of artillery covered first a Turkish withdrawal and then set the foundations for a new attack at midnight, throwing earth up in great plumes, bursting eardrums and shredding nerves.
Splintered images heaped up in Edward’s brain, his blinks a camera shutter that burned the scenes onto his mind. A Turk thrown bodily in the air by a shell to land, impaled, on a barbed wire post. Marks appearing down the line, his arm hanging shredded by his side, to tell Edward matter-of-factly that Rossi had been killed, shot in the chest, in the first wave of the assault, before he, in turn, collapsed. Baffle on the firestep firing round after round into each new wave. A wounded Turk on the floor of the trench striking a grenade as Cradley tried to stem the bleeding from his chest, its blast riddling him with metal slivers as he died in blinded screams some glacial minutes later. Thorne walking up the line with his revolver, encouraging the men on. Haynes-Mattingly white and in shock after taking a bullet in the calf and his hand livid with a burn from the barrel of a Turkish rifle which he had grabbed to push away from him before shooting his attacker. He would be out for weeks with those wounds, Edward thought dispassionately.
The fighting finally ceased at around three o’clock. At the arrival of the grainy half-light before dawn, the true scale of the night was laid bare for them all to see: dead men looking as though they were sleeping and those left alive moving as if they were dead.
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Barney Campbell
Barney Campbell, author of The Fires of Gallipoli, was brought up in the Scottish Borders and studied Classics at university. He then joined the British Army where he commanded soldiers on a tour of Helmand Province, Afghanistan at the height of the war there.
That experience inspired him to write his first novel Rain, a novel about the war, which was published by Michael Joseph in 2015. The Times called it ‘the greatest book about the experience of soldiering since Robert Graves’s First World War classic Goodbye To All That’.
Barney has walked the length of the Iron Curtain, from Szczecin in Poland to Trieste in Italy. He currently works and lives in London.
