Richer Dust - A Story of Gallipoli  by Stanton Hope   (reprint)

I was a little apprehensive when I first opened this book and discovered it was not a "real" Gallipoli history, but rather a work of fiction based on the background of the actual 1915 campaign.

This approach had been tried before (like e.g. in "A Naval Venture" by T.T.Jeans about Suvla), but in my opinion, these attempts could never match any factually correct war memories (like e.g. "Gallipoli Diary" by J.Gillam). Moreover, novels of this kind often suffered from an exaggerated dose of romanticism, so fashionable in that post-war decade, when more tempered hindsight was not yet possible.

On the other hand, there was the name Stanton Hope. I knew the man as one of the driving forces behind the 1934 pilgrimage to the Old Battlefields. On his return home, he privately published "Gallipoli Revisited" which I liked a lot. Apart from that, he certainly was a very peculiar fellow : after five years as a penniless world-traveller, lumberjack, seaman, gold-digger, artist, journalist and some more exotic occupations, he finally got a commission in the Royal Naval Division, stayed in Gallipoli till the last day, got wounded at the Somme and sat out the rest of WWI in Mesopotamia. And he certainly had the ability to write a good story.

In "Richer Dust", a title which obviously refers to Rupert Brooke's poem, the reader follows the adventures of Rodney Wilmot, a young subaltern in the fictitious 'Vernon' Battalion of the Royal Naval Division. After some short introductory chapters to get us acquainted with the main character, the unit sails to Helles at the end of May 1915, a month after the original landings, to remain there throughout the book, until the final day of the evacuation.

From the moment of their arrival, one is submerged in the daily trench-life at the Helles front. In fact something funny happens : Stanton Hope's descriptions are so rich in detail, the feelings of his characters are so accurately rendered that it soon becomes impossible to read this as just another work of fiction. Pretty soon this stops being a novel : you are there in the middle of the Campaign, living history from day to day. If Rodney goes to another part of the front, every position he passes is given by name, in such detail that it his perfectly possible to follow his journey on an old trench-map. Every bit of food is real to the last biscuit crumb.

This should not be so surprising, as Stanton hope indeed passed six months on the peninsula himself. The wealth of historically correct detail which  he smuggles into his narrative, is so immense however, that one can hardly believe he wrote the story from recollection only. He must have had pretty good diary notes to be able to do this. And that is of course the difference with comparable books : it is impossible to write about dysentery the way he does, if you have not suffered from it yourself. In this novel, the main character is terribly shaken by the loss of his elder brother. It is perhaps interesting to know that Stanton Hope suffered the same experience when his own brother died as an aviator on the Western Front.

So the question remains : 'Why opt for the fictitional content and not for an ordinary diary?'

I think there are two good reasons : first of all, this book stands apart in so far that this author had the literary talent that is most often absent in so many diaries, that often suffer from endless repetition. Another important factor is that he had the space to expand his narrative and delve deeper into the psychology of his characters, something - for obvious reasons - impossible in a small notebook.

The most important explanation for his choice is however the freedom it offered him in a structural way : it enabled him to cover the entire Gallipoli way of life, by guiding his main character step by step through different experiences. In each chapter he focuses on another aspect of trench-life : a trench raid, fatigues, illness, hierarchy, being under artillery fire, loss of friends and so many more. This methodical approach is impossible in an ordinary diary.

It is this fact that is responsible for the real quality of the book : it is a splendid diary, real-life experience restructured by the author to convey his feelings in a more poignant way. Apart from that, this novel certainly has literary qualities, sometimes even bordering on real poetry. But perhaps a short extract says more than anything else. This is a text fragment containing his feelings about the evacuation :

"Not only Rodney, who had fair imagination, but the most phlegmatic of the waiting front-line troops sensed the tragedy as night drew down upon the campaign. Dead were all the bright hopes of morning; memories only the sacrifices of the noontide heat. A phantom army rose from out the hallowed earth and peopled the trenches by the waiting troops, and marched beside the columns already converging on the beaches - the army which would forever remain a Permanent Guard upon a field of heroism, fortitude and self-sacrifice worthy of the tradition of the Empire."

A last fact that might be mentioned here is the surprisingly modern approach of the author  to history as such. In an era when all attention went to strategy, large-scale reporting about the war and factual objectivity, Stanton Hope focused on everyday life of the simple soldier, on the mentality of people undergoing the events that were decided high above their heads. And the impotance of that, is precisely what modern-day historians have only recently discovered.

There can be only one conclusion : if you are interested in Gallipoli, this is a 'must-read'. It ranks among the most interesting texts ever published about the 1915 campaign, non-fiction works included.

Ref : Richer Dust - A story of Gallipoli by Stanton Hope.

Originally published by Jarrolds Publishers, London, 336pp

Reprint by Naval & Military Press Uckfield UK, 2003, 336 pp, ISBN 1843425688