Gallipoli

The documentary narrated by Jeremy Irons, not the motion picture starring Mel Gibson. The fact that I would bother making the distinction tells you that I think highly enough of the product to want it disambiguated from confusable yuck.

Things I learned by listening to Mr. Irons:

1. Because he was one of three vainglorious, politicking dicks who planned the debacle, Winston Churchill got his portly ass fired, and rightly so.

2. In the most deplorable conditions, men can behave civilly toward each other; when one man gains an advantage, he will protect it by means of the grossest barbarism.

3. Bully Beef is so bad that when the Australian and New Zealand companies threw extra rations between the trenches as an offering to the Turks, who were starving, the Turks tasted it and promptly threw it back. (Below, some poor soldier eats his Bully Beef.)

4. Never underestimate human foolishness. How can it possibly make sense to expect to win a campaign by committing troops but no munitions or medicine? Will they box their way to victory and avoid dysentery by abstaining from water? Folks is dumb all over.

5. A map of Hellas looks thusly:

But maps prove to be of limited use when trying to visualize mine fields, because, really, what are the odds the mines will be equidistant from one another?

6. If you imagine Chris Rock narrating the same material, you will find that the movie achieves an entirely different, but not necessarily inferior, emotional register.

7. Poets really don't matter in the grand scheme of things, because in a two and a half hour documentary, our narrator never mentions poor Rupert "New Byron" Brooke, the fair-haired Apollo who expired, like his idol before him, decidedly not liberating Greece from the nasty Muslims.

8. The world is better for poets not mattering in the grand scheme of things.

9. Elegy is no consolation for loss.

10. Even genocide and the horror of mechanized war cannot clear the Etch-a-Sketch in my head of petty tennis-related trauma. What's wrong with me? Clearly, I need more rabbits.