Gallipoli

What did it achieve?
All the fighting and the killing,
young men, hardly grown,
leaving their family and homes.

If the guns or bayonets did not kill them,
many froze to death, lost limbs,
others drowned in the floods or torrents,
became diseased from the flies that followed.

Such an ill fated offensive,
so what did it achieve ?
The men left alive had no sense of joy.
Knowing they had lost so many of their boys.  

© Freda Robinson
March 2015.