Today we commemorated March 18th to pay our respects to the soldiers from around the world who died in Gallipoli. We would like to thank all of our students and staff who participated in this event. Below you will find a transcript of my closing comments. My best wishes to everyone for an enjoyable spring break.

Yours,

Jeffrey

“The Soldier”

Rupert Brooke (1887 - 1915)

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England’s, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Rupert Brooke died just before the battle of Gallipoli and was buried on the nearby island of Skyros, Greece. His tomb in Greece is now “forever England”. Had he lived, he would have joined the battle and most likely would have perished there. Many of Brooke’s contemporaries, taken by his dashing looks and charismatic personality, viewed the youthful author as the embodiment of the soldier-poet.

Brooke wrote his poem in the idealistic fervor surrounding the early days of WWI. The Great War, as it is often called, turned out to be anything but great as it involved unprecedented slaughter with casualties nearing 40 million, by some estimates---well over twice the population of our own city of Istanbul.

To provide some contrast to the heroic vision of war in “The Soldier”, here is an excerpt from a young man’s experience of the fall of Antwerp at the beginning of World War I:

“. . . I saw what was a truer Hell. Thousands of refugees, their goods on barrows and hand-carts and perambulators and wagons, moving with infinite slowness out into the night, two unending lines of them, the old men mostly weeping, the women with hard drawn faces, the children playing or crying or sleeping.

. . . The eyes grow clearer, and the heart. But it’s a bloody thing, half the youth of Europe, blown through pain to nothingness in the incessant mechanical slaughter of these modern battles”.

This passage is also from the pen of Rupert Brooke and describes “a truer hell”, indeed: not an infernal realm of demons torturing souls but humanity torturing and destroying itself. The grimness of war should not be forgotten, especially today as we commemorate the loss of so much life.

The stark account of refugees and the desolation of “mechanical slaughter” hauntingly reminds us of Syria and the unheroic brutality of war forces us to reflect further on suffering and the human condition. How could we do otherwise?

Upon such reflection, it is clear that humanity will become truly free and civilized, when instead of fomenting differences into divisions and violence between tribes and nations, we realize that we are all brothers and sisters and that this bond is and should be stronger than any political alliance.

From that vantage, we may see clearly that our real foes are war, suffering, crime, ignorance, environmental destruction, poverty, disease, and death; and then we may understand that rather than fighting each other we ought to channel our efforts, passions, intellects, and resources toward peaceful solutions that improve our lives and our planet.

Let us, then, truly honor those who fell at Gallipoli and who have fallen in the many wars that have plagued our times and our shared history by promising never to engage in conflict unless to protect our own lives or the lives of others who cannot defend themselves.

This will allow us to move closer to a world in which the people of all cultures and nations work together to mitigate suffering and improve prosperity and happiness for all. Moreover, by doing so, we also will commemorate most appropriately the dead from so many lands who have enriched the earth of Gallipoli with their “richer dust”. If we learn this lesson from their collective sacrifice, then we will be able to say with a clear conscience that the dead of Gallipoli did not die in vain.