Once the Gallipoli invasion was a known fact in the Hood Battalion in January 1915, Brooke expressed pleasure at the destination, adopting the trope of crusader in his letters to friends. Again he was better informed than most soldiers in his position, as Violet Asquith had leaked that ‘Ian Hamilton is going to command you’. She claimed that this was her father the Prime Minister's idea, and that Lord Kitchener had instead suggested alternatives, but warned that this was another ‘deadly secret’.

Brooke's one reservation was that he would be far away from what he considered to be the war's main theatre. Most of his training in England had been undertaken with French and Belgian trenches in mind. All of his ideological attempts to contextualise his and Britain's participation in the war based themselves not on the Imperial, but on proximate, European concerns, namely on the much-publicised accounts of ethical and cultural outrages in Belgium, the excessive military force against civilians, and sympathy with France as an invaded and occupied nation at the mercy of ‘Prussian militarism’. Brooke accepted the common motif of defence of England being defence of ‘Civilisation’, and subsequently wrote in semi-seriousness to Jacques Raverat that, ‘I shouldn't like to get killed in Turkey. I don't mind killing Turks to begin with, but I'd like to puncture a German, before I finish’.

He alleviated these concerns through a series of practical reassurances. In contrast to the bland stasis of camp, it was thrilling finally to be moving somewhere. He tried to prepare by learning a little practical Greek, practising phrases like ‘How far …?’, ‘sugar’, ‘cup’, ‘tea’, and statements anticipating discussions of ‘After … the end of the war’. Despite his desire to experience battle, he was not above admitting some (illfounded, as it turned out) relief at his posting; he wrote comfortingly to Cox, at least ‘it's [Gallipoli] not as dangerous as France’.