..marking Australia’s ‘coming-of-age’, should be seen as a quite brilliant Turkish victory against superior forces that led to the creation of the modern Turkish state led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk - the country’s first president. It would be better to say that Australian forces really distinguished themselves on the Western Front under the brilliant General Monash. When in 1918, Monash assumed command of the Australian Corps, his appointment, recommended by Field Marshall Haig and supported by the Australian government, met the opposition of correspondents Bean and Murdoch in "perhaps the most outstanding case of sheer irresponsibility by pressmen in Australian history". Keith Murdoch – father of Rupert was something of a serial offender in the war – but at least there was no Fox News to present a balanced coverage.
Churchill had almost single-handedly ensured that Turkey would enter the war on the German and Austro-Hungary side when he approved the Royal Navy seizing two Dreadnoughts destined for Turkey. Even though this was contractually permissible, this naturally caused considerable ill-feeling because, when the government had been financially unable to fund the ships, the people, who were largely poor, donated money as an expression of national pride and hope. The fund-raising appeal was of enormously popular significance - a medal was given to those who made significant donations entitled “The Navy Donation Medal” – and the loss of both ships proved to be a crucial factor in turning Turkey against the allies.
Early in the war, on August 10th, in a stroke of tactical mastery and individual bravado, the German battle cruiser SMS Goeben and light cruiser SMS Breslau that had been pursued across the Mediterranean by the British Fleet , commanded by that superb seaman Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, (that “droop-jawed, determined man in a long, ill-fitting frock coat”), entered the Dardanelles and were transferred to the Ottoman navy. Soon after, still crewed and led by Germans they, somewhat against the better judgment of the Turks, sailed off and shelled the Russian Black Sea port of Odessa. Thus the Turks found themselves committed to fight against the Allies.
Russia dropped out of the war with the overthrow of the Czarist regime by the Bolsheviks in 1917 and Lenin had been transported to Petrograd in a sealed railway carriage “like a plague bacillus”* from Switzerland. Assisted by the infusion of millions of German gold marks, channelled through a gentleman called Parvus who had amassed a fortune acting as an advisor to the Young Turks in Constantinople, Lenin’s tiny band eventually assumed the position of absolute dictator over the land of the Czars. Curiously, his arrival shortly before dusk at Finlyandsky Station was witnessed by three Englishmen. Paul Dukes, a courier with the British embassy, who was underwhelmed but still alert enough to the rhetoric of world domination to warn the Foreign Office. The second, William Gibson, who left the most vivid description, described Lenin as a man”….below medium height, with eyes like daggers, he regarded the crowd with a look of insolent mastery.” The third, Arthur Ransome, then a journalist with the radical Daily News and a future famous writer of children’s books,** spy, and later husband of Trotsky’s personal secretary, was not at all impressed and made no report at all.
The Treaty of Versailles, which led to Germany’s crippling war debt of £8000 million, was cheerfully supported by the vituperative Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes. Hughes was in Parliament from 1901 to 1951, was expelled from three political parties and represented four electorates in two states, changing parties a total of four times. He additionally ensured that Germany payed half of the £364 million that Australia spent on the war and vacated its colony in New Guinea (and also stopped Japan from starting one), whilst ensuring that Australia got a seat on the ineffectual League of Nations – an organisation to which he was totally opposed as in it he saw the flawed idealism of 'collective security'
Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, thought Hughes "A pestiferous varmint”. The British foreign secretary, Lord Robert Cecil, described him as "that shrimp". President Clemenceau of France referred to him as a "cannibal" – perhaps humorously. An eager warmonger, ‘the little digger' wanted to hang the Kaiser, reduce Germany to penury and parcel out its overseas possessions to the victors. The historian Seth Tillman described him as "a noisesome demagogue", the "bete noir of Anglo-American relations."
The Treaty of Versailles ensured the next war – even though many could see that this might be a consequence. Only Smuts of South Africa had expressed grave misgivings describing it as “this rotten thing of which we shall all be heartily ashamed in due course, this thoroughly bad peace – impolitic and impracticable in the case of Germany and absolutely ludicrous in the case of German Austria.”
After the war the boundaries of Europe were redrawn, countries merged and emerged. Economies staggered along sometimes grew and often collapsed; governments were elected and thrown out, people were born died but often just suffered quietly and alone. The grass and trees slowly covered the scars of the Western Front but not the lacerations in hearts and minds. There were empty spaces in too many homes.
After each war there always are.

*Winston S. Churchill -The World Crisis, Volume five.
** The ‘Swallows and Amazons’ series