Now Australian readers finally get to know that no positions inland were captured on the first day of the landing, and that places like Lone Pine, Quinn's Post and the Nek did not exist. Moreover, this is only logical, when one understands at last that the landing was made south of Gaba Tepe and not some miles north of it, as all the other books about Gallipoli seem to state.

Perhaps Miquel followed Hamilton's example and did not look well at a decent map himself. However, he publishes one in his book (p.80). Among other new information, it contains names like "Oja Tchemen" (Kocachimen Tepe), "Tchounouk" (Conk Bairi), Laia Baba (Lala Baba), and for the French sector a name he must have read at least a thousand times while studying his subject : "Kevéres Dere" (Kerevis Dere). Gaba Tepe does not seem to exist at all, which could explain something.

If one thing must be said about Miquel, it is that he knows how to tell a spectacular story. For the August offensive, he describes in vivid detail how "The Australians swiftly climbed the rocks to attack the infamous position at Lone Pine." (p.129) Very strange indeed, when one knows there are no rocks at all at Lone Pine and that the 400 Plateau there is extremely flat terrain. Such minor details do not seem to bother our writer at all. A few lines later "The hill of  Rhododendron is captured after ferocious fighting." (p.129) Well, well. A hill I did not know.

It would be too easy to continue like this. The book simply teems with blatant inaccuracies of this nature. One might wonder instead how something of the kind is possible : Miquel after all is one of France's leading WWI historians, isn't he?

A few things should be clear. First of all, he's never been to Gallipoli, to have a look at the place he was writing about. Apart from that, there is another dicovery to be made : Miquel does not understand one single word of English. When one has a look at his bibliography, there is only 1 reference to an English work about the Balkans. For Gallipoli, he does give the translated memoirs of Ashmead-Bartlett and Churchill, not the two most trustworthy sources on the subject. For the rest he has read nothing at all about the English-Anzac side of the campaign. Original material is beyond his possibilities and he therefore prefers second or third hand material of dubious quality.

I know, it might be too harsh to condemn an author because he did not go to Turkey to have a look himself. Not consulting -at least- the official histories of the Gallipoli campaign is already a different matter. What is entirely unacceptable however, is the fact that he simply fills in the gaps in his knowledge with pure fantasy. Not only is this a procedure for which you fail in your first year at university, it is simply a lack of respect towards the reader and history itself. Call it an arrogant way of using one's reputation as a historian (?), call it laziness or making a perverse use of the innocence of French readers, the result is there. When reading Miquel's pulp fiction, I can't help wondering how naive one must be as a historian, to think that nonsense of this kind might go unnoticed.

On the back cover of the book, the publisher declares : "This less well-known episode of the Great War is here told with devotion and passion by Pierre Miquel, whose publications about WWI have been a reference for years." Let's hope that last part is only a commercial statement by Les Editions Fayard who clearly don't check the historical content of the material they publish. If not, it might be an insult to serious historians.

Unless one is interested in fairy tales or science fiction, this is easily one of the worst Gallipoli histories ever published.