31 AUGUST 1929, Page 3

General Liman von Sanders General Liman von Sanders, whose death

is announced, deserved most of the credit for the memorable Turkish defence of Gallipoli. He went to Turkey in 1913, to reorganize the Turkish army on the German model. He met with plenty of opposition from unwilling Turkish Officers, but in the main he succeeded. He has put on record his disagreement with the official British view that Bulair was not the right spot for the principal British attack on Gallipoli. No doubt he was influenced by his soldier's eye for country, which is necessarily different from the seaman's eye for depth of water and a lee shore. It was, indeed, the impossibility of bringing ships near enough to the beach at Bulair which caused the rejection of all idea of attacking at that point. At the end of the Dardanelles campaign he tried to save Palestine, which was in mortal danger owing to the failure of Enver Pasha's crack-brained scheme of conquering Egypt by way of Palestine. It was impossible for him to succeed; the Turkish resistance crumbled away under his eyes. He will be remembered as a daring and brilliant soldier, but much less favourably in his quasi-political capacity, though even in that matter he was only the servant of Kaiserism.