Were you brave?
Were you quaking?
Were you tough or were you faking?
Did you cry for your Mum’s embrace?
Or bite your cheek just to save face?
Did your letters euphemise?
Were they scribed with tear filled eyes?
Did you pray for silent nights?
Try to unsee grisly sights?
Did you think how life would be if you made it back across the sea?
Did you deliver a mate’s last note and hug his Mum with a lump in your throat?
Did you come home claiming glory or never voice your untold story?
Your sacrifice I can’t repay,
and so I honour on this day
a face that is unknown to me
who paid the price for my liberty.

War came. How could it not? Bringing many things especially death. They wanted to knock Turkey out of the war. One ally less for Germany.
Many events happened. Some were firsts. All included death. It was the stuff of legends. Making small nations great and great nations small and killing their empires.
It was quite a LIST:
The big ships duelled it out with the forts, boom!
And the action off the Dardanelles. Historic?
A Shorts rag wing biplane made history and put a tin fish into a Turkish ship.
Much needed Ottoman army supplies lost aboard sunken ships.
Allied subs attacked Ottoman ships in the Bosporus more than thirteen times, bled the Turks white.
Those same subs being the first enemy warships to penetrate Istanbul since 1453, the Royal Navy sub B11 sank Turkey's Mesudiye battleship.
Being killed themselves, subs still on the seabed: Royal Navy E7, E14; French Navy Saphir, Joule, Marionette.
Two were British, sunk by a German U-boat, U-21, in three days.
Australia lost the AE2 but not before she dodged mines and sank a Turkish ship. Running aground near a fort was dangerous. AE2 was the first Allied ship to transit the Dardenelles.
Massive Allied battleships and dreadnoughts fought it out with the forts ashore, the French lost Bouvet and over six hundred sailors. Bouvet brushed gunfire off but a mine killed her.
Two Royal Navy ships died by mines while shelling the forts and gun emplacements: HMS Ocean and Irresistible. Inflexible was damaged. So were French's Suffren and Gaulois.
The forts did their job, thwarting the big ships and making a land campaign necessary.
The Turkish battleships fought back, firing over their peninsula.
It wasn't all one sided, for a Turkish torpedo boat, Muavenet-i Milliye snuck through the narrows, to sink HMS Goliath, and drowning over five hundred men, with three torpedoes.
The Turkish high command was sick of RN battleships raining destruction down on their forces.
They stuck it out and weren't knocked out. The ANZACS went ashore...