In the original dustsheet. Black cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

• F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

A biography of Ian Hamilton, chiefly famous for the devastating failure of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915.In this riveting new biography, John Lee shows that this distinguished soldier in fact had a far more successful and influential military career than history has so far related. In the years before the First World War, Hamilton was widely acknowledged as possibly the most experienced soldier in the world, noted for his advanced ideas in both social and military affairs. All this was to be shattered by Gallipoli. Through painstaking study of archive material and contemporary sources, John Lee reveals that Gallipoli was a doomed exercise almost from the start and that Hamilton, though largely exonerated by the Dardanelles Commission which investigated the campaign, deserves to have his entire career re-assessed. A soldier’s Life is a fascinating and long overdue account of a remarkable man and a brilliant soldier.

General Sir Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton, GCB, GCMG, DSO, TD (16 January 1853 – 12 October 1947) was a senior British Army officer who had an extensive British Imperial military career in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Hamilton was twice recommended for the Victoria Cross, but on the first occasion was considered too young, and on the second too senior. He was wounded in action at the Battle of Majuba during the First Boer War, which rendered his left hand permanently injured. Near the end of his career, he commanded the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force in the Gallipoli Campaign of the First World War.

Sea access to Russia through the Dardanelles (in yellow)

The Gallipoli campaign, the Dardanelles campaign, the Defense of Gallipoli or the Battle of Gallipoli was a military campaign in the First World War on the Gallipoli peninsula (now Gelibolu) from 19 February 1915 to 9 January 1916. The Entente powers, Britain, France and the Russian Empire, sought to weaken the Ottoman Empire, one of the Central Powers, by taking control of the Ottoman straits. This would expose the Ottoman capital at Constantinople to bombardment by Entente battleships and cut it off from the Asian part of the empire. With the Ottoman Empire defeated, the Suez Canal would be safe and the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits would be open to Entente supplies to the Black Sea and warm-water ports in Russia.

In February 1915 the Entente fleet failed when it tried to force a passage through the Dardanelles. The naval action was followed by an amphibious landing on the Gallipoli peninsula in April 1915. In January 1916, after eight months’ fighting, with approximately 250,000 casualties on each side, the land campaign was abandoned and the invasion force was withdrawn. It was a costly campaign for the Entente powers and the Ottoman Empire as well as for the sponsors of the expedition, especially the First Lord of the Admiralty (1911–1915), Winston Churchill. The campaign was considered a great Ottoman victory. In Turkey, it is regarded as a defining moment in the history of the state, a final surge in the defence of the motherland as the Ottoman Empire retreated. The struggle formed the basis for the Turkish War of Independence and the declaration of the Republic of Turkey eight years later, with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who rose to prominence as a commander at Gallipoli, as founder and president.

The campaign is often considered to be the beginning of Australian and New Zealand national consciousness. The anniversary of the landings, 25 April, is known as Anzac Day, the most significant commemoration of military casualties and veterans in the two countries, surpassing Remembrance Day (Armistice Day).