Shell Green Cemetery is a Commonwealth War Graves Commission Cemetery from World War I in the former Anzac sector of the Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey. The battles at Gallipoli, some of whose participating soldiers are buried at this cemetery, was an eight-month campaign fought by Commonwealth and French forces against Turkish forces in an attempt to force Turkey out of the war, to relieve the deadlock of the Western Front (France/Belgium) and to open a supply route to Russia through the Dardanelles and the Black Sea.
The cemetery is on a former cottonfield at the edge of a steep slope leading from Bolton's Ridge to the sea, near the Southern end of the Anzac sector. The ground was captured by the 8th Australian Infantry on 25 April 1915 but remained sufficiently near to the front line for the rest of the campaign to suffer frequent Turkish shelling. Two cemeteries for Australian troops were established on the green in May. It continued to be used until December 1915 and the evacuation of the Anzac sector, by which time many of the graves had become elaborately decorated.
A cricket match was played on the green (and photographed) on 17 December 1915, whilst shells passed over it, as part of the Allied attempts to conceal preparations for the evacuation of the Anzac and Suvla Bay sectors.
After the Armistice the cemeteries were combined and 64 graves consolidated into it from four other cemeteries which were closed. Artillery Road and Artillery Road East Cemeteries contained 21 Australians killed between April and May 1915. Artillery Road was the name given to the track which leads from the coast road past Shell Green and up to Brown's Dip. Wright's Gully Cemetery contained the bodies of 8 Australians killed on 28 June 1915 and Eighth Battery Cemetery which contained 7 troops from the 8th Battery, Australian Field Artillery. The graves of 20 British soldiers and sailors who had been killed in 1922 and 1923 were transferred to the cemetery in March 1927.
Famous quotes containing the words shell, green, commonwealth, war, graves, commission and/or cemetery:
“I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
—Isaac Newton (1642–1727)
“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“I’the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all,
And women too, but innocent and pure.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“We are constantly thinking of the great war ... which saved the Union ... but it was a war that did a great deal more than that. It created in this country what had never existed before—a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union, it was the rebirth of the Union.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“The guileless old scapegoat;
For forty nights and days
Followed in Jesus’ ways,
Sure guard behind Him kept,
Tears like a lover wept.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
“Children cannot eat rhetoric and they cannot be sheltered by commissions. I don’t want to see another commission that studies the needs of kids. We need to help them.”
—Marian Wright Edelman (b. 1939)
“I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)