French commemoration at Gallipoli

Like Britain and her dominions, France honoured her fallen when she returned to the Gallipoli Peninsula as an occupying force. About 10,000 of the corps expéditionnaire d’Orient (CEO) had been killed in action at the Dardanelles in 1915–1916.[1]

The French general Louis Franchet d’Espèrey reached Seddul-Bahr (Seddülbahir) on 27 November 1918. The commander-in-chief of the Allied Salonika armies had broken through the Macedonian front, forcing the Ottoman Empire to seek an armistice. As French and British troops occupied the Gallipoli Peninsula, Franchet d’Espèrey ordered his men to locate and put in order the battlefield graves of their comrades. Companies of the 45th Regiment of Infantry began work the following month.

A number of French cemeteries, ossuaries and monuments – ‘planned, in progress and proposed’ – are shown in a sketch map dated 9 November 1919.[2] They stretch right across the French sector at the southern tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula. The plan was drawn up in Constantinople by the director of works for French cemeteries at the Dardanelles, Lieutenant Colonel Lardant.[3]

No less than 13 cemeteries are shown on Lardant’s sketch map. By comparison, the Imperial War Graves Commission consolidated British and dominion burials at Helles into six. However, some of the French cemeteries are modest, the smallest containing only five graves. Most appear to have been wartime burial grounds, extended perhaps with remains taken from isolated graves nearby, and formally established with a boundary fence, entrance portico and memorial.

One of those wartime burial grounds was the field ambulance cemetery, located just outside the village of Seddul-Bahr. We have a description from an Ottoman soldier who saw it in April 1916.[4]

The graves of the French and the Muslims from Algeria and Senegal are separate. Each Muslim grave has a marker with the name, hometown and phrase ‘Mort au champ d’honneur.’ There are also crosses on French graves with the phrase ‘Mort pour la France.’ The graves are arranged in an orderly manner. The words ‘major’ and ‘general’ appear on some of them.

It is helpful to cross-reference Lardant’s 1919 map with the so-called Şevki Paşa maps, named for the Ottoman general who directed a topographic survey of the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1916 after the evacuation of the Allied expeditionary force. The Şevki Paşa maps record man-made features, like trenches and wells, but also cemeteries. They show 12 burial grounds in the French sector. In most cases, these correlate with cemeteries shown on Lardant’s 1919 map.

As well as cemeteries, the French army built two large ossuaries to house bones collected from the battlefield. Ossuaire Ganeval and Ossuaire Masnou were named for two French generals killed in the campaign. Both were sited atop Eski Hissarlik, the imposing headland at the entrance to the Dardanelles. Many of the bones housed in the ossuaries are undoubtedly French but the grim harvest must contain many Ottoman and perhaps some British dead, for they too fought over this ground.

Interestingly, on the 1919 map by Lardant, the Masnou ossuary appears to be a great church-like structure. From its dominant position on the cliff-top, just north of today's Turkish Abide memorial, the cross would have been visible to every ship passing through the Dardanelles and, more confrontationally, to locals of Muslim faith. Its final form was less overtly Christian.

Lardant’s map also shows monuments to mark important locations and events. Among these are three monuments sited at points on the French front lines of May and June 1915, culminating in the Monument de Krithia, an obelisk some four metres tall, placed at the point of furthest advance.

Not shown on Lardant’s map are two monuments on the Asia Minor shore. One was planned for Kumkale, where the French landed on 25 April 1915 in a diversionary attack, although little is known about this monument. The other was erected on Erenköy Bay where the pre-dreadnought battleship Bouvet was sunk.

In August 1919, a French army photographer, Pierre Roger Le Baron (1887–1934), produced an invaluable pictorial record of the work. His set depicts 12 cemeteries. Of these, two are individual plots (numbers one and two) that make up Cimetière ambulance, and one a cemetery outside the French sector, the Anglo-French cemetery at Kilid Bahir. The names given to the cemeteries are said to be from the original captions.

Le Baron also photographed the monument to General Henri Gouraud, commander of the CEO from 15 May until the end of June. A small obelisk was erected beside Seddul-Bahr castle where Gouraud was wounded by shell-fire on 30 June 1915, subsequently losing his right arm.

Gouraud returned to the Gallipoli Peninsula in April 1921, when he toured each cemetery and ossuary in turn. His visit was recorded by the French weekly magazine L’Illustration, who printed photographs of the two ossuaries, the 1st Division cemetery, the Gouraud memorial, as well as the naval memorial (Monument de la Marine) at V Beach, inaugurated by Gouraud during this visit. The photographs are credited to the writer of the article, Jean Norill, and the magazine’s Ottoman correspondent, Youssouf Razi bey.

A map accompanies the article in L’Illustration. It shows just six cemeteries in 1921, whereas Lardant’s 1919 map has 13. The map may be more indicative than comprehensive, but it is possible that some of the smaller cemeteries were by now concentrated in the larger burial grounds. Also shown on the map are the two ossuaries, and three of the monuments (Gouraud, naval and furthest advance).

The author of the article, Jean Norill, was impressed by the ingenuity shown in constructing and decorating the cemeteries and ossuaries, using just the detritus of the battlefield. 

Crosses were forged from barbed wire stakes, the name and rank of the dead inscribed on copper plaques made from shell casings. Officers’ graves were bounded by barbed wire and pickets, other ranks with brick sawtooth edging. Sandy paths had been laid, and irises and pines planted. Stone pillars, linked by black-painted Decauville railway track and surmounted by whitewashed cannon-balls, enclosed the burial grounds. (The stone missiles had been found in great numbers in the castle of Seddul-Bahr.) Meanwhile the monumental doors to the larger cemeteries and ossuary vaults were improvised from corrugated iron sheets. 

Painted white, the walls, porticos and monuments shone bright against the brilliant blue Aegean sky; likewise the two great ossuaries that were said to contain the bones of 12,000 men. 

The ossuaries, wrote Norill, were the work of two lieutenants, Lebrun and Colin, aided by two civilian workmen, a company of Senegalese and a few soldiers of the occupying force who wanted to pay tribute to their fallen comrades. 

Meanwhile, a monumental staircase, lined by heavy calibre shells connected by chains, ascended from Morto Bay to the Zimmermann cemetery, in a dominating position above the Falaise des oliviers (olive tree bluff) and clearly visible from the sea. The Zimmerman cemetery seems to date after 1919, for it is not shown on Lardant’s map. It is probably the genesis of the modern French cemetery, whose stairs down to Morto Bay may date to this period.

In 1922, some named burials were repatriated to France. The war ministry authorised families to claim the remains of their men, and expedited their transfer.

Later that year, in September, the French occupation force quit the Gallipoli Peninsula. Mustafa Kemal’s nationalist army had defeated the Greeks in Anatolia, entered Smyrna (İzmir) and were now threatening the Dardanelles. Britain retained Chanak (Çanakkale) as an outpost and garrisoned the peninsula. For a brief period, war seemed imminent, but negotiation won through. In 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne formally concluded the conflict that existed between the Allied Powers and the Ottoman Empire, which was now succeeded by the Republic of Turkey (Türkiye). The Allied Powers withdrew from Constantinople and the Gallipoli Peninsula.

As part of the treaty, the British Empire and France were granted in perpetuity the land upon which their cemeteries, ossuaries and memorials were found. Nevertheless, France chose to consolidate their expansive commemoration within a single site. The reason is not known to the authors. An economy, to save money on upkeep, or a card played in negotiation with the new Turkish government?

In 1923, under the direction of Mr André George, work began on a single necropolis. The Cimetière militaire français brought together all graves on the Gallipoli Peninsula, as well as those on the island bases of Lemnos and Tenedos (Bozcaada). The sole French burial in the Christian cemetery at Chanak was probably moved here at this time too. The new, single cemetery comprised 2,234 named graves and four ossuaries.

As the burials and ossuaries were consolidated, so too were the plaques from the various memorials across the French sector. Twenty slabs were removed from the old cemeteries and monuments and set within a new memorial, the Mur de souvenir (wall of remembrance), completed in 1926. The altar and two holy water fonts from the Masnou ossuary were placed in front of the whitewashed wall.

The final piece to be added was at the request of French Gallipoli veterans. Too often French ships entering the Dardanelles had mistakenly saluted the British memorial at Cape Helles or the dazzling white but now-empty French ossuaries above Eski Hissarlik. The veterans’ national society, the Association nationale des Groupements d’anciens combattants des Dardanelles,[5] successfully lobbied the government and the director of military graves to build a 22.5 metre column that would be visible from two kilometres out to sea, no matter the time of day and position of the sun.

Mr André George, under whose direction the cemetery had been built, was charged with the tower’s design. He hit upon an elegant solution. What appears from afar to be a tall column is in fact made up of four superimposed shafts with square, octagonal and cruciform cross-sections. These edge the whitewashed tower with shadows no matter the time of day. A series of dark niches cut from the tower further aid visibility. At its summit, four lenticular cabochons, seen as a cross from above, reflecting the sun and moon, act as a beacon for the dead. The tower was built by Turkish and Italian workers using reinforced concrete.

To inaugurate the cemetery tower and wall of remembrance, a great pilgrimage was organised by the French veterans. On 9 June 1930, four ships anchored off Morto Bay and disembarked some 800 travellers. Among them were General Gouraud, General Albert d’Amade (first commander of the Gallipoli expeditionary corps) and Admiral Émile Guépratte (who had led the French naval squadron at the Dardanelles in the first months of the campaign). Representing the Turkish army were Colonel Zeki Bey and commandant Fassih Bey.[6] The mass was celebrated by Father Eusebius, himself a veteran of the Dardanelles expedition. Later, wreaths were laid in the sea where the battleship Bouvet had been sunk and 643 lives lost. Among that party was Mme Rageot de La Touche, the widow of the Bouvet’s captain.

Today, the French military cemetery contains 2,257 graves (2,241 named) and five ossuaries.[7] At some point, an ossuary from Kilid Bahir was moved here. The wall of remembrance enshrines 22 plaques, one in bronze remembering the 1930 pilgrimage, the rest from earlier cemeteries, ossuaries and memorials. The black metal crosses hark back to those improvised from barbed wire stakes, while many of the whitewashed cannon-balls must be original. Also representing that early period of commemoration are 42 stone steles that once marked individual graves on the battlefield.[8]

Meanwhile, you can still find fragments of abandoned post-war French monuments in the landscape. There are clearly-identifiable structures in the fields west of today’s cemetery and north around Zimmerman Farm. Most evocative is a small column, mostly intact and bounded by four posts. Its face bears four holes to which the plaque, now presumably in the modern cemetery, was fixed. 

This website attempts to document sites of early French commemoration, and connect these with traces that are still visible in the landscape. We share the information in the hope of validating and extending upon it. We acknowledge that more research is needed, not least in the French archives.

Footnotes

1. The corps expéditionnaire d’Orient (CEO) became the corps expéditionnaire des Dardanelles (CED) on 4 October 1915. The French completed their evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula on 9 January 1916.

2. ‘Plan d’ensemble d'aménagement des Cimetieres, Ossuaires & Monuments du Champ de Bataille des Dardanelles’, Papiers Henri Gouraud 399PAAP/88 Dossier 1, Archives diplomatiques (La Courneuve, Paris).

3. Perhaps Paul Auguste Lardant (1872–1933).

4. Eyüp Durukan, edited by Murat Uluğtekin, Günlüklerde Bir Ömür vol.III: Çanakkale'den Mondros'a, 1915-1918.

5. The French association for Gallipoli veterans was established in 1920. Soon after, the defence ministry authorised serving personnel to join. By 1931, the association had 3,000 members and eight branches in mainland France and North Africa. In 1926, the association successfully lobbied the government to issue a Dardanelles medal to veterans of the campaign.

6. Both officers were certainly veterans of WW1 and maybe even Gallipoli. ‘Zeki Bey’ is probably not Ahmet Zeki Soydemir (1883–1954), battalion commander at Gallipoli who accompanied Charles Bean on the peninsula in 1919. ‘Fassih Bey’ may be Mehmet Fasih Kayabalı, who fought at Gallipoli with the 47th Regiment and wrote the excellent ‘Lone Pine diary’.

7. In 2015, according to a memorial booklet produced for the centenary by the French embassy in Turkey, there were 2,240 named graves in the cemetery. In 2022, a further 17 men (one named) were transferred to the cemetery after their remains were found during archaeological work at Seddülbahir  castle. The original typewritten lists of burials kept at the cemetery were said to be found in poor condition and are now kept at the French embassy in Ankara. Apparently the lists contain numerous typing and transcribing errors and may not be complete.

8. Another stele can be seen in the garden of the informal Ahmet Uslu museum in Seddülbahir village. Two further stele were seen by the authors at the bottom of Eski Hissarlik in 2022 and reported to the local authorities.

References

War diary, 45th Infantry Regiment, 7 November 1918 to 16 August 1919, Mémoire des hommes website (memoiredeshommes.sga.defense.gouv.fr), Ministry of Armed Forces of France

Photographs by Pierre Roger Le Baron (search auteur Pierre Roger Le Baron and name bahr), ImagesDéfense website (imagesdefense.gouv.fr), L’Établissement de communication et de production audiovisuelle de la Défense (ECPAD), Ministry of Armed Forces of France

L’Illustration, 16 April 1921 (no. 4076), 26 March 1927 (no. 4386), 23 April 1927 (no. 4390), 21 June 1930 (no. 4555)

Les Dardanelles 1915–1930 (Paris: Association nationale des groupements d’anciens combattants des Dardanelles, 1931)

Durukan, Eyüp, edited by Murat Uluğtekin, Günlüklerde Bir Ömür vol.III: Çanakkale'den Mondros'a, 1915-1918 (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2015)

Çanakkale Tahkimat Haritası / Mehmet Şevki Paşa (Ankara: Genelkurmay Başkanlığı, 2009)

Seddul-Bahr: Cimetière militaire, list of burials, MemorialGenWeb (memorialgenweb.org)

‘Cimetière militaire français de Seddülbahir’, booklet produced by the French embassy in Ankara for the centenary of the campaign, 2015