Gallipoli French Cemetery

Gallipoli French Cemetery; At Morto Bay is the French National Cemetery and Memorial, with 3236 graves and four ossuaries containing the bones of 12 000 unidentifiable soldiers.

Gallipoli French Cemetery

It surprises Australians to learn that more French soldiers were killed at Gallipoli than Australians. At Morto Bay is the French National Cemetery and Memorial, with 3236 graves and four ossuaries containing the bones of 12 000 unidentifiable soldiers. Memorial plaques recall the loss at the Dardanelles of French sailors from warships like the Bouvet. The French component of the Allied force at Gallipoli was known as the Corps Expéditionnaire d’Orient, made up of French and French colonial African troops. The Corps was responsible for a section of the right of the Allied line at Kereves Dere (Kereviz Dere), a deep gully about a kilometre north of the Turkish memorial (Çanakkale Martyrs Memorial).

At Kereves Dere the French struggled in a number of attempted advances to take the Turkish positions and so allow the whole Allied line to push towards Achi Baba. So fierce was the fighting, and so heavy were French losses, that they called this the ‘Ravin de la Mort’, the Ravine of Death. Here French soldiers, men of France, Algeria and Senegal, battled for Turkish positions like Haricot (Bean) Redoubt and Le Rognon (The Kidney). Such homely names belied the French and Turkish blood that flowed for these forgotten battlefield locations. A French medical officer, Dr Subin, wrote of this area: ‘Wounded everywhere! The killed lay in confused heaps which increased as you advanced … the bodies had swollen and their uniforms were tight and narrow. It was awful!’

During the campaign, Morto Bay was well behind the lines but open to Turkish shelling from Kum Kale across the Straits. Here Dr Subin had a dressing station under a cliff, probably not far from where the Turkish memorial is today. On 8 May 1915, the day the Australians attacked at the Second Battle of Krithia, the French also tried to advance. Dr Subin described the casualties: ‘We laid the poor fellows in rows … groans were piteous to hear … bandages soaked in blood, clothes torn to ribbons … ever more wounded arriving’. Subin’s words seem appropriate for Morto Bay, literally ‘Death Bay’.

The sacrifice of French troops in the Gallipoli battles is often unappreciated and forgotten. There were about 27,000 killed, nearly three times the number of Anzac dead (at less than 10,000, of the British Empire total of about 115,000 killed). The French made a successful feint landing at Kum Kale on the Turkish Asian coast on 25th April, 1915, but they started landing on V Beach in the evening of the 26th and took over the right of the Allied line. The French advanced up the eastern side of the Gallipoli peninsula (on the Dardanelles coast).
The French dead were buried in half-a-dozen cemeteries, but following the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne these were concentrated into a single large cemetery at Morto Bay (although a few bodies were then taken back to France).

The French National Cemetery and Memorial, Gallipoli contains 2,240 identified burials, with details (including place of original burial) listed in the superintendent's cottage just inside the gate on the left. On the right is the small Kilitbahir Ossuary, which contains the remains of 22 soldiers and sailors. The impressive (15 metre high) lantern tower Memorial is itself an ossuary, with four more sarcophagus-shaped mass graves around it, containing altogether the remains of about 15,000 French dead (many of them Colonial troops). The memorial wall contains plaques from original cemeteries, regimental and naval plaques.