There are frequent foreshadowings: "Later Walter was to recall nearly everything Hurst said." The artful mannerism of the writing is often at odds with the brutality of its subject matter.
Highly elaborate similes alternate with bland generalizations about the characters. Billy's weapons, sharpened on rough experience, could do their work swiftly." McDonald's background as a poet emerges in the nature of his highly mannered, self-conscious prose. Walter plans to become a writer: "If it came to a fight," McDonald tells us, "Walter's only weapon, words, would be next to useless. Billy is the larrikin, successful if sometimes brutal with women, unintellectual, a lethal sniper in the war but basically unsure as to what he is doing there. Walter and Billy are carefully conceived as opposites.
The two young men go, a socialist school teacher Tom Larsen suggests, because they are simply bored and attracted by the prospect of adventure. War relieves the young men of the difficult business of dealing with women and sexuality.
England is thought by some to be the Mother Country, inherently superior, though no one (including the novel's heroine Frances) is quite sure why both she and her best friend Diana, plump for the un-English sides of their ancestry when pressed. McDonald seems to be setting out quite consciously to question the mythic status of Gallipoli, pondering as to why the country's young men signed up so eagerly in the war though without coming to any definite answers.
Walter is a prisoner of the Turks Billy has returned to Australia with a head wound that confines him to a lunatic asylum. The two central characters, Billy McKenzie and Walter Gilchrist, enlist within a few months both of them are out of action but terminally scarred. The title is a reference to Australia's entry into World War I at the battle of Gallipoli, now seen as a watershed in the country's history and the origin of many of its myths of nationalism. Roger McDonald established a considerable reputation within Australia as a poet and editor before turning to fiction with 1915, a novel which was an immediate commercial and critical success.
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