Carlyon is not the first to trudge with such care and attention over the Anzac battlefields; Charles Bean did that in 1919, and told the story in Gallipoli Mission. Nor, of course, is he the first to give a general account of the campaign. That process began immediately with John Masefield’s apologia Gallipoli (1916), followed by the Official Histories, the personal memoirs and the scholarly reassessments. Two of the best known of these, Alan Moorehead’s Gallipoli (1956) and Robert Rhodes James’s Gallipoli (1965), remain in print, reissued in popular editions. Michael Hickey’s is another respected overview, published as recently as 1995, again titled simply Gallipoli.

So, what is the point of yet one more Gallipoli? For anyone familiar with the considerable literature on the subject, Carlyon’s book inevitably goes over the same territory. The same anecdotes appear, the same quotations form epigrams on wasted lives and opportunities. Moreover, Carlyon does not display the felicitous style of Alan Moorehead; nor does he offer the shrewd political analysis of Robert Rhodes James. Indeed, it could be argued that Carlyon misses the truly relevant Gallipoli story, namely: what is behind the growing Australian obsession with all things Anzac?

As Carlyon himself points out, in 1984 barely 300 people attended the Dawn Ceremony on 25 April at Anzac Cove. Last year, 15,000 pilgrims made the trip, led by the prime minister. What is going on? Nothing has changed at Gallipoli, but much has changed in the nation’s attitude to its war dead. That this book doesn’t examine this phenomenon more deeply is something of a lost opportunity.

Perhaps that will be Carlyon’s next project. In any case, it is probable that for many readers this will be their first book on Gallipoli and, notwithstanding the reservations just stated, Carlyon’s account has a great deal to recommend it.

To begin with, the author immediately dispels the Australian chauvinism that over the years has ignored, or at least forgotten, that Gallipoli was a combined Allied operation. Carlyon will have none of this. He reminds the reader that as many French died there as Australians, that the British lost almost three times as many troops, including one of their best divisions, and that the New Zealanders kept grim pace with the rate of Australian casualties. Carlyon goes on to tell us that some of the most familiar names of the Anzac battlefield are named after New Zealanders: Plugge’s Plateau, Malone’s Gully and Russell’s Top. Importantly, he frequently makes the journey to the other side of the trenches, describing much of the action from the Turkish perspective.

Carlyon is one of the first of the general chroniclers of the campaign to engage seriously with Charles Bean, the Australian war correspondent and, later, Official Historian. This is partly Carlyon’s Australian perspective coming through, but it is also testament to the increased prominence of Bean in recent decades. It is not all admiration, however. Carlyon picks up the vulgar Darwinism of Bean’s racial theories, and his blindness to issues of class.

Character is the predominant trope in Carlyon’s writing. He is fascinated with the aloof and mysterious Lord Kitchener, and with the audacious and lucky Turkish Colonel Mustafa Kemal, later to become president of his country. The author whimsically imagines the inner thoughts of the indolent and retiring Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stopford, whom he largely blames for the fiasco of Suvla Bay.

Carlyon loves a dramatic interview; he relishes the often-bizarre exchanges between British soldiers and statesmen like Churchill, Kitchener, and General Sir Ian Hamilton, the affable but ineffective Allied commanding officer. We are treated to the painful silences and non sequiturs of etiquette and protocol that so ruptured Allied communications. We are invited to gape at the inexcusable vanity of men promoted beyond their capacity. At times, Carlyon cannot contain his contempt for those in command, but his sarcastic asides spoil the reader’s chance to draw their own conclusions.

Each step of the campaign is treated like a mini-story in itself. This gives a freshness and momentum to the writing, in contrast to many other war books which flag under the weight of detail. The downside is that the author is inconsistent in his assessments, and often criticises one officer for behaviour that he praises in another. For example, he marvels as Kemal leads his exhausted troops in a mad bayonet charge that sweeps the enemy out of their trenches, only, on the next page, to chastise Hamilton for still believing in ‘courage, will, character and sacrifice’ – precisely what had won Kemal his victory. He quotes Bean under fire at Anzac, describing a rose-pink sunset over the Aegean Sea; ten pages later, he editorialises that, ‘You do not admire sunsets when standing in a charnel house.’ These sorts of contradictions crop up more regularly than they should – never too serious in themselves but possibly evidence that the author has not entirely resolved his judgments.

There is also much repetition, such as the half dozen or so times we are told that the hill of Achi Baba appears to command the Straits but doesn’t. Elsewhere, the land in the northern Anzac sector is described as a ‘wilderness that would cripple a goat’, and is ‘so useless it wouldn’t feed an anorexic goat’. These and other passages are exactly the sort of indulgences that an experienced editor like Carlyon would cut unhesitatingly from someone else’s copy.

Where other writers engage with the landscape simply as the background to the story, Carlyon takes his reader all over it. He treads the beach at Anzac Cove. He walks the four spurs of the broken plain below Krithia, where the British and French fought at Cape Helles. He climbs Chunuk Bair with the New Zealander Malone and his doomed Wellington Battalion. He takes his reader along as companion in the second person: ‘You are out to sea on the northern side of Anzac Cove’; ‘You lurch on legs of jelly, your ribcage rising and falling like a bellows.’ Finally, Carlyon sums up the utter confusion of the landscape for his imagined battlefield prospector: ‘You now know one thing: the books on the campaign, the maps, the written orders – all are meaningless.’

What you do know is that, despite all the other published accounts, this Australian book will find its audience. In the opening chapter describing the Anzac Day 2000 crowd at Gallipoli, Carlyon tells us, ‘the Australians murder a few slabs of beer, and the New Zealanders murder a few vowels’. It is not scholarly, but it will sell copies.