The Anzac Walk: Gallipoli in a day

Welcome to The Anzac Walk

This walk is designed for the Australian visitor who has little time but who can devote one day to exploring the main area held on Gallipoli by the ANZAC — men of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps — and others from 25 April to 20 December 1915. These men were to become known as the 'Anzacs' and the area they held was known as 'Anzac', or eventually 'Old Anzac' once more territory to the north had been captured after the August Offensive. Old Anzac embraced a strip of scrub-covered treeless land about 2 km long and less than 1 km wide, deeply indented by steep valleys and eroded gullies. Due to the steepness of the ground, you should only attempt stops 6 to 8 of this walk if you are physically fit.

This walk is a brief introduction to a huge and fascinating subject for Australians. Of necessity, it has little to say about the thousands of others who fought at Gallipoli — British, French, Nepalese, Indians and, of course, their Turkish opponents — but it acknowledges their presence. It is hoped that other walks of this kind will be developed in the future to more fully embrace the many human stories of this beautiful but tragic landscape.

North Beach - Stop 1

Directions

Your Anzac Walk begins at the Anzac Commemorative Site at North Beach. Walk to the inscription ANZAC on the wall above the beach and take the opportunity to look at the remarkable landscape around you, including the ridge above.

The Sphinx

From that day it was the Sphinx

Charles Bean, whom you will meet many times on this Anzac Walk through the words he wrote as Australia's official war correspondent and later as official war historian, described this spot:

The ridge led down to the sea in only two places — at either end of the semicircle — by the steep slopes of Plugge's [Plateau] on the right, and by a tortuous spur (afterwards known as Walker's Ridge) on the left. Between the two, exactly in the middle of the semicircle of cliffs, there had once been a third spur, but the weather had eaten it away. Its bare gravel face stood out, for all the world like that of a Sphinx, sheer above the middle of the valley … To the Australians from that day [25 April 1915] it was the Sphinx.
[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vol 1, Sydney, 1935, pp 267—8]

So the Anzacs on 25 April 1915, arriving almost straight from their training camps in Egypt beneath the Pyramids and the Sphinx, claimed Gallipoli for themselves by naming its physical features. Admittedly, they knew little of the local Turkish names. Walker's Ridge they named after Brigadier General Harold Walker, who took over the command of the New Zealand Infantry Brigade on the day of the landing. To the Turks it was Sparrow Hill, and the Anzacs built a road, long since disappeared, up its sides to the trenches on the ridge. Plugge's Plateau (Cruel Hill to the Turks), the high flat-topped hill to your right, was named for Colonel Arthur Plugge, commander of the Auckland Battalion, who had his headquarters there.

The Sphinx was really an outcrop of the Sari Bair range that runs all the way up from the beach south of Anzac Cove to Koja Temen Tepe (Hill of the Great Pasture), the highest point on this part of Gallipoli. The Sphinx was Yusuk Tepe, High Hill, and the yellow eroded slopes all around it were known as Sari Bair (Yellow Ridge). The Anzacs used the name Sari Bair for the whole range to Koja Temen Tepe. Of all the names given by the Anzacs to the features hereabouts only that of the Sphinx is still used by local people today.

In January 1919, Bean returned to Anzac with the war artist George Lambert. He wanted Lambert to paint a huge canvas showing the landing and, fortunately for them, they had a guide — Lieutenant Hedly Howe — who knew exactly what had happened to him on that historic morning and where the events had taken place. Howe was now working with the Anzac Section of a British Graves Registration unit. But as Private Howe, on 25 April 1915, he had come ashore in a Royal Navy rowing boat, along with most of the 11th Battalion from Western Australia, on the beach to your right, just beneath Plugge's Plateau. In one boat was a young Royal Navy Midshipman — 'a red-headed slip of a boy' — who, as his boat grounded, pulled out his revolver and, clambering over the backs of the astonished Australians, shouted 'Come on, my lads'! After he was a way up the beach he pulled himself up, realising it was his duty to go back out to the transports with his boat.

Howe led Bean and Lambert back to that very spot on North Beach where he had landed. Then they climbed, just as the men of the 11th Battalion had done, up towards Plugge's Plateau. Bullets had then been landing around them from the heights and Howe remembered seeing two men — Turks — silhouetted against the growing dawn on the plateau. As they came out on to its flat top after about 15 minutes climb, Turkish soldiers were running back off it down into the valley beyond. And so Lambert painted that scene — the West Australians, some wounded and falling back, others pulling their way up the scrub-covered slope of Plugge's, with the dawn breaking and the coming light touching the yellow earth of the Sphinx.

Lambert's painting Anzac, the Landing 1915, inspired by the grandeur of the scene here at North Beach and the story of the first minutes of the 11th Battalion's experience at Anzac, hangs today in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. A reproduction of it can be seen in one of the history panels at the Anzac Commemorative Site. These panels are located on the wall opposite you at the top of the pathway. Read the text in these panels before you set out on the rest of the Anzac Walk. They will provide you with a good general account of the whole Gallipoli campaign at Anzac.

After the so-called Battle of the Landing that lasted until 3 May 1915, North Beach became a relatively quiet spot. Men came down here to swim from the frontline trenches on the ridge above at Russell's Top and the Nek. Those positions, and others further north at the so-called 'outposts', were held for most of the campaign by New Zealand units and Australian Light Horse men. The outposts marked the northern limits of the 'old Anzac' area and they were reached from the northern end of Anzac Cove through a long, deep trench that cut across the back of North Beach, known as the 'Big Sap'.

Such a trench was necessary as Turkish snipers could fire on much of the North Beach area. After the 'August Offensive' of 6—10 August 1915, a large area of the range to the north of North Beach fell to the British Empire forces. North Beach then became a major base area with mountains of stores, a post office and a tent hospital. Two piers, Williams' Pier and Walker's Pier, were built to handle the unloading of barges and other small craft. Williams' Pier ran offshore virtually opposite where the commemorative wall now stands, and it was from here, on the morning of 20 December 1915, that the last Australian soldiers left Anzac at the final evacuation. From first to last the Sphinx had witnessed it all.

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A Post Office, eh - North Beach, November 1915

What are those white things on the hillside under Walker's Ridge? Not tents surely; but yes they are. Tents on Anzac; golly, things must be good. We are not headed for Anzac Cove but round the point on North beach. Are we going to land here? Why, when we went away it was quite unsafe to wander round the point; evidently Suvla has improved matters for, now where it was unsafe to tread, I see tents, dugouts and a pier. We are making for the latter. Ah, he's missed the pier. There is a banging of changing clutches — a rattle of rudder chains — and out we go again. The same conglomeration of noises and in we come. This time he runs fair and square alongside. It does not take long to get our gear off and on to a little truck.

Once more on old Anzac. What a change! Why, when we left there was hardly anything round this side of the Cove. It was not safe. Now there are tents and a Y.M.C.A. and what is this great sandbag mansion going up directly in front of us? A Post Office, eh. Eighty feet long, twelve feet high and twenty-four feet wide. Some building! Windows, doors and a counter, too. Crikey, they are coming on in these parts.

[The Gallipoli Diary of Sergeant Lawrence, Sir Ronald East (ed), Melbourne, 1983, pp.110—111]

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No kick! No kick! - Working on the Big Sap

To get troops quickly and secretly from Anzac to the outposts and to the foot of the deres [valleys] up which the assaulting columns must approach the Turk, it was necessary to widen the communication trench known as the 'Big Sap'. This trench had been evolved as the outposts were established, and at many places could be enfiladed by the enemy on the heights; and nowhere was it wide enough to take troops two abreast. The pack mules use it by day, and though the soldier cared little for Turkish shells, he lived in fear of the donkey's steel-shod hoofs; it was no uncommon sight to see the soldier, disbelieving the warning 'No kick! No kick!' of the Indian muleteer, climb out of trench and risk a bullet rather than encounter a transport mule. Partly the way was through the sandhills — here the necessary width of 5 feet was easy to attain; but in the harder clay, the pioneer working parties had been content to make a narrow slit, leaving the hardest work still to do. All through July the men of No. 4 Defence Section toiled at their Herculean task — the Australian Infantry of the 4th Brigade, the N.Z. Mounted Rifles and the Australian Light Horse from Walker's Ridge, and the best workers of all, the Maori contingent from No. 1 Post.

Man is naturally a lazy animal. When men work hard, there is always some incentive. The Maori soldier, picked man that he was, wished to justify before the world that his claim to be a front-line soldier was not an idle one. Many a proud rangitira served his country in the ranks, an example to some of his Pakeha brothers. Their discipline was superb and when their turn came for working party, the long-handled shovels swung without ceasing until, just before the dawn, the signal came to pack up and get home. Where the trench was liable to enfilade fire, its direction was altered, and here and there overhead protection was built with some precious timber and sandbags. At every few hundred yards a recess was cut to enable troops to stand aside while mule trains or passing troops moved up or down. Leaving nothing to chance, infantry parties, two abreast, marched through the trench from end to end to ensure that nowhere would there be a check.

[Fred Waite, The New Zealanders at Gallipoli, Auckland, 1921, pp.192—193]

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Faithful souls of the working parties - Making the Beach Road

Night after night the troops who were 'resting' crept with their picks and shovels along the beach, to make the necessary road. This after-dark activity is most trying — each man working as silently as possible with his rifle at his elbow. Any noise is a magnet certain to attract machine-gun fire. Even in daylight it takes careful management to collect working parties and the necessary transport at the right spot, but in the darkness and in a region where enemy scouts and snipers roamed as soon as daylight failed, the difficulties were increased a hundredfold.

Sand makes a poor road. To get a reasonable result it was necessary to collect the big stones of the seashore and carry them to the shore edge of the beach and place them as a foundation; on top of this, clay was deposited — carted from the hillside near by in the mule carts of the Indian transport service; the whole was top-dressed by the sand of the beach, and finally, the hard-worked soldiers carried petrol tins of water from the sea and poured it over the surface to make the material set. So, harassed by the splutter of machine guns night after night, the faithful souls of the working parties steadily carried the road from Anzac Cove along the North Beach towards Suvla Flats.

[Fred Waite, The New Zealanders at Gallipoli, Auckland, 1921, pp.192—193]

Mass after mass of foam - North Beach, November 1915

[Today, 17 November 1915 ] there was a fairly strong wind rising in the hills. You could see the breakers rolling in, white, three deep, all along the beach … The seas were breaking over the whole length of the Milo, our breakwater ship, flinging themselves against the stern, and then plowing their foam over the whole length of the pier. Williams' pier (on North Beach) was fairly right. But the little Walker's Ridge Pier north of it was gone, all except the piles. The water was over the beach right up to the Naval Transport Officer's door.

I went along the beach where natives and big fatigue parties of Australians and the old Navy's Corps … were lined up and helping to haul occasional relics out of the water … Dead mules were being washed up. Further north, near Fisherman's Hut, several bodies buried shallow in the sand had been half uncovered. Around in Anzac Cove the beach was simply a litter of the trestle of old piers, old barges half broken up sawing and bumping about like elephants dancing some slow side step on the water's edge. The beach was littered with the big debris of the piers over which the waves were bursting in mass after mass of foam. One man was nearly carried out by the waves — fatigue parties here, too, were carting the stores to higher levels but lots of ammunition boxes were still half in the water; and the shell cases (now worth 10/- each) about 10000 of them, were in imminent danger of being buried altogether. Further on the AMC [Army Medical Corps] dug-outs had been protected against the sea by piles of boxes, but every seventh wave washed in and threatened to carry them out to sea altogether.

[Kevin Fewster, Frontline Gallipoli: C E W Bean, diaries from the trenches, Sydney, 1990, pp. 179—181]

Ari Burnu - Stop 2

Directions

From the Anzac Commemorative Site at North Beach, walk back up to the road. Turn right and walk for about a quarter of a kilometre to Ari Burnu Cemetery, at the head of the bay (or you can also reach the cemetery by walking along the beach from the Commemorative Site). The cemetery is to the right off the road and down an approach path. Go through the cemetery to Ari Burnu point and look out to sea.

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Come on boys, they can't hit you

If you had gazed out to sea from Ari Burnu (Bee Point) in the predawn gloom of 25 April 1915 you would have seen the assembled British invasion fleet which had made the 100 km trip through the night from the Greek island of Lemnos. Facing you would have been a collection of Royal Navy warships — battleships and destroyers (sometimes referred to as torpedo boats) and behind them large transport ships. In these ships were the Anzacs — soldiers of the 1st Australian Division and the New Zealand and Australian Division. Each man who was to land at dawn in the first wave had been inspected to ensure that he had all his equipment — rifle, pack, two empty sandbags, a full water bottle, 200 rounds of ammunition in his ammunition pouches and two little white bags containing an extra two days ration (a tin of bully beef, a small tin of tea and sugar and a supply of hard coarse biscuits).

At 3.30 am, thirty-six rowing boats in groups of three, each group being towed by a small steamboat, left the battleships Prince of Wales, London and Queen and headed towards the coast. In the boats were about 1200 soldiers from the 9th, 10th and 11th Battalions of the 3rd Australian Infantry Brigade. These men were to be the first ashore and they would be followed in closely by the remainder of their battalions and the 12th Battalion.

The landing was supposed to take place on a beach about a kilometre and a half further south from Ari Burnu and north of the promontory of Gaba Tepe. However, in the dark the battleship tows lost direction, bunched up and converged on Ari Burnu point. As the boat carrying Captain Leane of the 11th Battalion neared the shore he called out and pointed upwards — 'Look at that'. Charles Bean described the moment:

The figure of a man was on the skyline of the plateau above them. A voice called on the land. From the top of Ari Burnu a rifle flashed. A bullet whizzed overhead and plunged into the sea. A second or two of silence … four or five shots as if from a sentry group. Another pause — then a scattered irregular fire growing very fast. They were discovered …
[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vol 1, p. 252]

As the boats grounded all around Ari Burnu point, men jumped into the water. Some were hit and drowned; most scrambled ashore soaking wet and made for the cover of the sandy banks of the beach. It was quickly realised that they had landed in the wrong place. 'What are we to do next, Sir?' someone asked the commanding officer of the 11th Battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel Johnstone. 'I don't know, I'm sure. Everything is a terrible muddle.' But the orders had been drummed into this, the 'Covering Force': 'You must go forward … you must get on, whatever the opposition'. Lieutenant Talbot-Smith, the leader of the scouts of the 10th Battalion from South Australia, yelled at his men, 'Come on boys, they can't hit you' and then led them straight up the hill towards the Turkish gunfire. Soon there was a general rush by hundreds of Australians up the slopes of Ari Burnu and on up towards the top of Plugge's Plateau. It was steep enough and hard going with full kit and rifle. Men dug their bayonets into the ground to haul themselves along or grabbed the roots of plants. Halfway up, two 11th Battalion men stumbled upon a Turkish trench. Bean has the story:

A single Turk jumped up like a rabbit, threw away his rifle and tried to escape. The nearest man could not fire as his rifle was full of sand. He bayoneted the Turk through his haversack and captured him. 'Prisoner here!' he shouted. 'Shoot the bastard!' was all the notice they received from others passing up the hill. But as in every battle he fought in the Australian soldier was more humane than in his words. The Turk was sent down to the beach in charge of a wounded man.
[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vol 1, pp. 258—9]

At Ari Burnu the Covering Force faced only a small garrison of Turks, who had orders to conduct a fighting withdrawal if confronted by a much larger invading force. Shortly after 5 am, the Australians had reached the height of Plugge's Plateau and taken few casualties. The Turks who had held a trench there were seen retreating back down the steep valley beyond.

Although it seemed successful, this initial landing was only the start of a long and bloody struggle that lasted the whole of 25 April. While virtually the whole of the ANZAC Corps were able to get ashore that day, intense fighting developed along a ridge inland known as Second Ridge and on the slopes leading north-eastward towards the heights of Koja Temen Tepe. Strong and determined Turkish counter-attacks held the Anzacs to the small area described in the introduction of this guide. By the evening of that first day the beach at Anzac Cove just to your left and to the south was crammed with wounded men. Moreover, Turkish artillery fire was bursting shells all over the Anzac area, causing many casualties. Many of the commanders on the spot advised getting off the peninsula as the objectives set for the first day had nowhere been reached and Turkish resistance was stiffening. The head of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, General Sir Ian Hamilton, however, was told by his naval commanders that a reembarkation from the beaches in the dark would be a disaster. At the same time, he heard that an Australian submarine, the AE2, had broken through the straits of the Dardanelles, so he sent a message of reassurance which ended:

You have got through the difficult business, now you have only to dig, dig, dig, until you are safe.

So the Anzacs dug in and stayed.

Our Heroes of the Dardanelles

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Those men are Australians - The landing, Anzac, 25 April 1915

7.17 a.m. — Some one says there are men on the skyline, and through the telescope I can see them — a few at this point, more of them further along the skyline — why, there are crowds of them. Some are standing up, others moving over the hill, others sitting down, apparently talking. Are they Turks or Australians? The Turks wear khaki, but their attitudes are extraordinarily like those of Australians — something of the stockyard fence about them. Behind them, I think on a nearer ridge, a long line of men is quietly digging on a nearer hill. Time and again I have seen the Engineers digging in the desert at Mena in just such a line. Surely those are the round disc-like tops of our men's caps. There can be no question of it. Everybody knows it now. Those men are Australians, and whilst we are looking for them on the nearer ridges, and especially that shoulder rising from the beach on the right, they were right back there on the further hills. I can't say what a load that has lifted off from one's mind. Well done boys, great work! One has known that relief and elation before — I can't help thinking of it when one has seen a hard fought match pulled off for Australia on the Sydney Cricket Ground. Only there is behind it this certainty — the victory this time has big solid consequences. They will not be finished with a single publication in the evening papers.

There they are, the figures of our men on the furthest hill, and the flags of the signalers busily waving half-way up the hill above the beach. There is no firing at all ashore now. There is no firing either from those guns on the promontory. Apparently they are silenced, even that last solitary one. No! just as a launch with a string of boats in tow, taking men from one of the ships ahead of us, gets in near the beach, the beggar fires again. The four-funnelled warship immediately blazes at it. The gun on the promontory fires only one shot. Presently when another string of boats is on its way the gun fires again. The four-funnelled warship immediately smothers it. Clearly they come out to fire one shot and then dive for their gunpit till the storm is over. Their last shot seemed to be right over some disembarking troops. I wonder if they got any ... The firing on shore has begun again. One can see our men now on the crest of the ridge much further to the left than any were before. The morning is glorious, the sea as smooth as satin, shining in the sun. Far out the blue-gray crags of Imbros and Samothrace hang on the skyline. Nearer in are the great ships and the haze canopy of smoke.

[Charles Bean, Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, 6 July 1915, p.1281]

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Man the boats, men - The landing of the 12th Battalion, 25 April 1915

As we neared the peninsular of Gallipoli, the Captain of the Destroyers gave the order for silence and for the men to stop smoking and thus, in darkness and in silence, we were carried towards the land which was to either make or mar the name of Australia. On either side of us we could dimly see other destroyers bearing the rest of the Third Brigade. I am quite sure that very few of us realized that at last we were actually bound for our first baptism of fire, for it seemed as though we were just out on one of our night maneuvers, but very soon we realized that it was neither a surprise party nor a moonlight picnic. At about 4 am we heard the first sounds of firing and at 4.10 am we first came under fire at about 200 yards from the beach and the Captain of the destroyer gave the order 'Man the boats, men' and without the slightest hesitation the first tow filled their boats took up their oars and started to row for the beach, amid a perfect hail of bullets, shrapnel, and the rattle of machine gun ... There was some delay in the steam pinnace picking up the tow ropes of these boats but eventually they started for the shore.

I turned around to get the second tow ready, when the man just in front of me dropped, hit in the head. This was the first casualty and very soon there were several others hit. There was some difficulty in getting the second tow ready, but eventually when a naval cutter came alongside we got in and started for the beach; 3 men were hit before the boat struck the shore. When she hit the beach, I gave the word to get out and out the men got at once, in water up to their necks in some cases, men actually had to swim several strokes before they got their footing. It was almost impossible to walk with full marching order, absolutely drenched to the skin and I fell twice before I got to the dry beach where I scrambled up under cover of a sand ridge. I ordered the men to dump their packs off, load their rifles, and waited a few seconds for the men to get their breath.

It was just breaking dawn and, as we looked towards the sound of the firing, we were faced by almost perpendicular cliffs about 200 feet above sea level, and as we were of the opinion that most of the fire was coming from this quarter, it was evident that this was the direction of our attack. Therefore, after a minute or two, having regained our breath, we started to climb.

[Lieutenant Ivor Margetts, diary, 25 April 1915, AWM 1DRL/0478]

Anzac Cove - Stop 3

Directions

From Ari Burnu point walk back through the cemetery to the road. To your right here is the Turkish memorial. On it are words sent in 1934 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, President of Turkey, to an official New Zealand, Australian and British party visiting Anzac Cove:

Those heroes that shed their blood, and lost their lives ...
You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country.
Therefore, rest in peace.
There is no difference between the Johnnies
And the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side,
Here in this country of ours.
You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries...
Wipe away your tears.
Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace.
After having lost their lives on this land, they have
Become our sons as well.

In 1915, Kemal was one of the Turkish divisional commanders at Gallipoli and was particularly noted for his fighting leadership during the Battle of the Landing and during the August Offensive.

Your way now leads south around Anzac Cove. You can also head along the beach itself, but when you reach the end it will be a scramble to get back up to the road. Stop by the memorial at the southern end of the cove with the Turkish words 'Anzak Koyu' (Anzac Cove). In 1985, the Turkish Government agreed to the official naming of this place as Anzac Cove. In return the Australian Government named a stretch of Lake Burley Griffin at the end of Anzac Parade in the national capital 'Gallipoli Reach'. A section of Princes Royal Harbour in Albany, Western Australia, was also named 'Atatürk Entrance' in memory of the first convoy that left Australia, in November 1914, for the war in Europe. Many of the men on those ships, Australians and New Zealanders, later became part of the Anzac Corps and landed here at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. These were the original Anzacs.

A little rotting pier

During the Gallipoli campaign there was no better-known place than Anzac Cove. It received this name as early as 29 April 1915, by request of the commander of the Anzac Corps, Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood. Sometime after June 1915, a photograph of the cove appeared in Australian newspapers, a blunder, Bean felt, that would have given 'priceless intelligence' to the enemy artillery officers had it ever reached them! Like no other spot on Gallipoli, Anzac Cove has become the image of Anzac. Something like 50,000 Australians fought at Gallipoli and, although there were other landing places, the great majority of them landed here, particularly those who served between April and August 1915 in the 'old Anzac' area. Consequently, thousands of families all over Australia had a son or husband who knew something of Anzac Cove.

Bean records that some 27,000 Australian, New Zealand, British and Indian troops were put ashore in Anzac Cove between 25 April and 1 May 1915. While the majority of these troops were Australians and New Zealanders there were also units that many in Australia today have never heard of. Among them were the Ceylon Planter's Rifle Corps, the Indian Mule Cart Transport, the Zion Mule Corps, the 7th Indian Mountain Artillery and about 2500 men of the British Royal Naval Division. All of these units fought alongside the Anzacs. Indeed, it was a 33-year-old Englishman, Lance Corporal Walter Parker, Portsmouth Battalion, Royal Naval Division, who gained the first Victoria Cross awarded at Anzac, for his bravery under fire between 30 April and 2 May.

For eight months between April and December 1915, Anzac Cove became, in Bean's words, Anzac 'city':

... it is the complete base for an army, which you can take in with a single glance; stacks of every sort of supply — biscuits, cheeses, fodder, disinfectant, beef, sugar; ordnance stores — clothing, cans, boots, carts, spare wheels, engineer's stores of every sort, great beams and baulks, rails — every one of the great accumulation of things an army wants.
[Charles Bean, Gaba Tepe 28 June 1915, Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, 26 August 1915, p. 1635]

Crawling up the hillsides above the 'city' were the 'business suburbs'. In Anzac Gully behind the beach was Corps Headquarters and the dugout of the Corps commander, Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood. Sir William could be seen most days swimming in the blue waters of the cove like thousands of other men who worked on the beach or who had come down in some 'fatigue' party from other parts of Anzac to carry materials back to their own positions. But Turkish gunners had an almost precise fix on Anzac Cove and many men were killed or wounded in the beach area or in the water by bursting shrapnel shells. Most of these came from a gun battery christened 'Beachy Bill'. It was estimated that during the campaign more than 1000 men were killed or wounded in Anzac Cove by Beachy Bill alone. So constant was it that you had to get used to the shelling and, where possible, even find it funny. Sergeant Cyril Lawrence, 2nd Field Company, Australian Engineers, went swimming in the cove on the evening of 10 June 1915 when Beachy Bill opened up:

There were hundreds on the beach and one of the shells burst over a latrine up on the hillside. The men sit on this, which is just a beam supported at each end over a long hole, like a lot of sparrows on a perch. There is nothing to hide them from the view and they look extremely funny to see all their bare bums in a row … one burst over this latrine. In the scatter that followed, none waited to even pull their trousers up. The roar of laughter that went up could have been heard for miles. It's only these little humorous happenings that keep things going here.
[The Gallipoli Diary of Sergeant Lawrence of the Australian Engineers, Sir Ronald East (ed), Melbourne 1983, pp. 27—8]

So effective was the shelling of the cove that it determined movement by the little transport ships running supplies into Watson's Pier, constructed under the supervision of Major Stanley Watson, 1st Australian Division Signals Company. Approach to the pier by day became an almost suicidal matter, so from early June all reinforcements were landed by night.

After the evacuation of December 1915 Anzac 'city' disappeared rapidly. When Bean visited here in early 1919, just three years later, he found that everything moveable had been cleared by the Turks: 'Now nothing stirred except the waves gently lapping on the shingle and a few of the piles of our old piers gently swaying in the swell'. Two white steel lifeboats used to land troops were also on the beach and Bean had one of them shipped back to Australia, where it is on display in the Introductory Gallery of the Australian War Memorial. Of all the descriptions of Anzac Cove none is perhaps more evocative than that of soldier-poet Leon Gellert. He landed here on 25 April 1915 with the 10th Battalion, South Australia, and was evacuated in July with dysentery:

Anzac Cove

There's a lonely stretch of hillocks:
There's a beach asleep and drear:
There's a battered broken fort beside the sea.
There are sunken trampled graves:
And a little rotting pier:
And winding paths that wind unceasingly.
There's a torn and silent valley;
There's a tiny rivulet
With some blood upon the stones beside its mouth.
There are lines of buried bones:
There's an unpaid waiting debt:
There's a sound of gentle sobbing in the south.

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Hundreds of bathers - Anzac Cove

When the struggle of the Landing had subsided, the Beach on summer days reminded many onlookers of an Australian coastal holiday-place. The shoreline itself resembled rather an old-time port, with its crowded barges (often beached to prevent being sunk), a few short piers, piles of biscuit boxes and fodder stacked behind, the smell of rope, of tar, of wet wood, of cheese and other cargo; but in the water the hundreds of bathers, and on the hillside the little tracks winding through the low scrub, irresistibly recalled the Manly of New South Wales or the Victorian Sorrento, while the sleepy 'tick-tock' of rifles from behind the hills suggested the assiduous practice of batsmen at their nets on some neighbouring cricket-field.

[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Sydney, Vol 2, p. 346]

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The original landing-place

General Birdwood asked that the Beach between the two knolls, being the original landing-place, should be known as 'Anzac Cove'; and the name 'Anzac', till then the code name of the Army Corps, was gradually applied to the whole area. Day and night the Cove was full of the noises and sights of a great harbour — launches with tows moving constantly in and out, the shrill whistles of small crafts, the hoots of trawlers, the rattle of anchor-chains, the hiss of escaping steam. At either end of the Beach was the hospital — the New Zealand station at the north end, the Australian at the south. Colonels Howse and Giblin would not display the Red Cross on their station, crouched as it was among supply depots which the Turks might justifiably shell. Along the middle of the Beach were long lines of picketed mules. Even by day the strand between the growing supply stacks and the water was a crowded thoroughfare. Odd men, parties, strings of animals, jostled through it, lucky if they escaped the kick of a mule. During shell fire the casual hands would quickly disappear behind stacks of biscuit-boxes; but the working parties carried on without regarding it.

[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Sydney, Vol 1 p. 545]

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Popular with all hands - Swimming at Anzac

Swimming was popular with all hands. Early in the campaign we had a Turkish attack one morning; it was over by midday, and an hour later most of the men were in swimming. I think it not unlikely that some of the 'missing' men were due to this habit. They would come to the beach and leave their clothes and identity discs ashore, and sometimes they were killed in the water. In this case there was no possibility of ascertaining their names. It often struck me that this might account for some whose whereabouts were unknown.

While swimming, the opportunity was taken by a good many to soak their pants and shirts, inside which there often was, very often, more than the owner himself. I saw one man fish his pants out; after examining the seams, he said to his pal: 'They're not dead yet'. His pal replied 'Never mind, you gave them a ---- of a fright'. These insects were a great pest, and I would counsel friends sending parcels to the soldiers to include a tin of insecticide; it was invaluable when it could be obtained.

[Joseph Beestson, Five Months at Anzac, Sydney, 1916, pp. 35—37]

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Hell Spit - Stop 4

Directions

From the 'Anzac Cove' sign make your way along the coastal path to Beach Cemetery. Walk through the cemetery and look out to sea. The Anzacs gave the name Hell Spit to this area, the southern point of Anzac Cove. On a clear day you will have directly in front of you the Turkish island of Imroz (Imbros in 1915, as it was largely a Greek island then) and off to the northwest the Greek island of Samothrace. It was on Samothrace that pieces of a statue of Nike, the Greek Goddess of Victory, were discovered. The pieces were reassembled and today form one of the most famous sights of the Louvre Museum in Paris — the headless Winged Victory of Samothrace. The sun sets behind these Aegean islands and during the Gallipoli campaign the beauty of these sunsets produced many lyrical descriptions from Australian soldiers:

Away about fifteen miles off our position are two mountainous islands, Imbros and Samothrace. The sun goes below the sea's horizon just off the northern end of the latter throwing them both, great jagged peaks, into silhouette on a crimson background. The sea is nearly always like oil and as the crimson path streams across the water the store ships, hospital ships, torpedo boats and mine sweepers stand out jet black. God, it's just magnificent!
[The Gallipoli Diary of Sergeant Lawrence of the Australian Engineers, Sir Ronald East (ed), Melbourne 1983, p. 35]

Health to the Navy, that took us there and away

Looking out to sea at Hell Spit we can imagine the activity in the stretch of water between here and the islands during the eight months of the Gallipoli campaign. As the phrase above from Lieutenant Oliver Hogue's poem 'Anzac' suggests, the men of the British Royal Navy and Merchant Marine were a central part of the whole Anzac story. Without them there would have been no landing, no ongoing naval bombardment support, no supply of food and fighting material, no removal of the sick and wounded and no successful evacuation at the end.

At most times the sea between Anzac and the islands was full of warships and other vessels. Standing here after mid-June 1915, you might have seen the little North Sea trawler (fishing boat) which brought fresh bread across from the Australian Field Bakeries on Imroz to Anzac. Wood to fuel the bakery ovens was brought from all over the islands of the Aegean, supplied by Greek contractors, but especially from Mount Athos. At one point more than 14,500 bread rations were arriving every day.

The men of the Royal Navy also turned up at Anzac Cove as members of naval beach parties. At the beach, soldiers could buy food items that were rare on Anzac, such as eggs and condensed milk, from the sailors who were able to obtain them from the islands. The cases of exploded Turkish shrapnel were also used as currency. As Charles Bean observed, 'The man who brought down a shell case, when duty brought him to the beach, knew that it was as good as a loaf to take back again'. The sailors in one battleship, the Prince of Wales, were known for keeping many an Anzac supplied with cigarettes for free.

In charge of the comings and goings of the little ships from the piers was Lieutenant Commander Edward Cater. The Commander could often be heard bawling himself hoarse through a megaphone:

… [directing] the incoming barges to their proper piers and [superintending] the Anzac Beach parties in making them fast — no easy matter, where the only illumination for the whole bay and its foreshores was the light of the stars, or a rare stable lantern swinging in the hand of one of these officers or tucked behind some stack of provisions where work was active.
[Charles Bean, Story of Anzac, Vol 2, p. 352]

In the style of many British officers of the period, Cater wore a monocle. The story goes that Australian soldiers would mockingly approach Cater, 'the Bloke with the Eye Glass', with their identity discs in their eye-sockets. Relishing the joke, he would take his monocle out, throw it in the air, catch it in his eye-socket and respond — 'Do that, you blighters'. Cater was killed by shellfire as he was running out to help the crew of a small steamboat which had been hit and was sinking off a pier at Anzac Cove. His remains lie in Plot 2, Row G, Grave 5 behind you in Beach Cemetery.

Also visible daily from Hell Spit were the hospital ships, painted white and with a Red Cross on their sides. A constant stream of trawlers and steamboats towing rowing boats and barges made regular trips to the hospital ships carrying sick and wounded. Chivalrously, the Turks never usually deliberately fired on these medical vessels, but inevitably many stray bullets found their way out to sea towards the hospital ships. On 11 August 1915, Sister Daisy Richmond, Australian Army Nursing Service, was on the deck of a hospital ship off Anzac:

We are well under fire many bullets coming on the decks. I was speaking to one boy, moved away to another patient when a bullet hit him and lodged in the thigh. I just missed.
[Sister Daisy Richmond, diary, 11 August 1915, Australian War Memorial 2DRL/0783]

Undoubtedly, the most dramatic naval sight to be observed from Anzac was that of a Royal Navy warship shelling Turkish positions. The navy lent regular support to Anzac operations from the very beginning of the campaign and an unforgettable sight would have been a naval bombardment at night using searchlights. If you look down the coast to your left you can see the promontory of Gaba Tepe (Rough Hill). In early newspaper reports the landing of 25 April was referred to as the Gaba Tepe landing. In the darkness, if you had stood at Hell Spit and looked towards Gaba Tepe this might have been the scene:

… just after dusk a destroyer creeps right in upon our flank and lies there, black and silent. Suddenly, without warning, a vivid white streak shoots out from here and stretches across to the shore … Her light travels slowly up and down along the beach and the rising ground with [the Turkish] trenches are behind it; sometimes it stops stationary upon one point for a minute or so; see how plainly everything stands out, trees, sandbags and patches of scrub. Round goes the light until it lights up Gaba Tepe. There is a vivid spurt of flame from the inky blackness; then comes the sharp, 'whouf', 'bang' of the gun, a short and sudden roar, then crash! and up go showers of red sparks from — no, not Gaba Tepe, but the opposite end of their track. Then immediately the light is switched round on to that spot and then click and she is out again. A few more minutes and out it flashes, rests a second or so on a certain spot and then bang! bang! bang! go the guns.

[The Gallipoli Diary of Sergeant Lawrence of the Australian Engineers, Sir Ronald East (ed), Melbourne 1983, p. 124]

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Gigantic guns - HMS Queen Elizabeth

But, on that second day, as it was in the end, it was not so much our own artillery that relieved the situation. It was known over-night that the Australian troops ought to be supported by all the gun-fire available. And off the shore there appeared with the early light the great flagship which the day before had been blowing the forts at Sedhl Bahr in dust clouds right across the toe of the peninsular, to cover the fearfully expensive landing of the British Regulars at some of the beaches there. There is no question that she was needed at the mouth of the Dardanelles to support that British landing, but her appearance off Gaba Tepe next day was exceedingly welcome. We had seven other warships that day — their number varied on different days — supporting us closer in shore. The Queen Elizabeth stood out a little to the south-east, and they gave the Turks all through the day a tremendous obstacle to face in delivering any attack. At intervals brigadiers, or battalion commanders through their brigadiers, would ask for the fire of the ships on some particular point; and almost every time that fire was asked for it came.

At the back of them all was the Queen Elizabeth with her gigantic guns. I do not know how many rounds she fired during the day. It may have been no more than a dozen. We have no direct evidence of what damage they inflicted on the Turks; but she shook the hills with her reports. She flung huge clouds of earth into the air from the shoulder of the main ridge over which the Turks were advancing. One Turkish attack melted away before her there in the afternoon — and little wonder. She put great heart into our men. The Australian from the first has watched the wonders which he sees before him with exactly as much gusto as if he had paid a shilling entrance fee; and the Queen Elizabeth's shells have been one of the marvels. There have been other ships which have been our closer friends and intimates — ships like the Triumph and the Bacchante, which stood by us day in and day out, and on which we never called in vain. Their firing was always a delight to the men that were in a good position to see it, particularly when they fired all their 6-inch guns on one beam in a salvo, but none of them were ever quite such a wonder as these volcanoes of the great flagship.

[Charles Bean, Commonwealth of Australia Gazette 14 July 1915, pp.1328—1329]

Here's health to the Navy

Meanwhile, here's health to the Navy, that took us there, and away; Lord! They're miracle-workers — and fresh ones every day! My word! Those Midis [Midshipmen] in the cutters! Aren't they properly keen! Don't ever say England's rotten — or not to us, who've seen! Well! We're gone. We're out of it all! We've somewhere else to fight. And we strain our eyes from the transport deck, but 'Anzac' is out of sight! Valley and shore are vanished; vanished are cliff and hill; And we'll never go back to 'Anzac' . . . But I think that some of us will!

['Anzac', in Oliver Hogue, Trooper Bluegum at the Dardanelles, London, 1916]

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Shrapnel Valley - Stop 5

Directions

Leave Hell Spit by walking back through Beach Cemetery and to the unpaved road. Turn right and keep going until you meet the main paved road. Turn left back towards Anzac Cove and walk along for a few metres. You will see a sign for Shrapnel Valley Cemetery. Turn right down the track until you arrive at the cemetery, then walk through it and look up the valley.

Shrapnel Valley was the main route up from the beach area to the Anzac front line on the ridge you can see in the distance. Up there were the famous posts — Quinn's, Courtney's and Steele's Posts — which you will reach later in the walk. Further along, the valley splits in two. Off to the right, behind the posts, runs Monash Valley, named after Brigadier General John Monash, commander of the 4th Australian Infantry Brigade.

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A gloomy, narrow valley all tortuous and fissured

Shrapnel Valley (sometimes called Shrapnel Gully) got its name in the early days after the landing. As the Turks realised that this had become the highway to the front, their guns rained shrapnel shells down upon this area. These shells made a particular whistle before they burst, showering those below with lethal pellets. It was said that as the shells could be heard coming, soldiers passing through the valley had the chance to take cover. Confronted with such danger, Bean wrote that men became 'fatalists' and thought that a particular shell had a man's name and number on it: 'Until that shell arrived, it was best to let others see them going proudly rather than flinching'.

On the night of 18—19 May 1915, the men of the recently arrived 5th Light Horse Regiment from Queensland made their way into Shrapnel Valley. The light horsemen filed along a trench leading from the beach through the hills and came out in what Trooper Ion Idriess described as 'a gloomy, narrow valley all tortuous and fissured as it wound through a sort of basin at the bottom of the big, somber hills'. Here they spent an uneasy night making their way forward with shrapnel shells exploding above them and Turkish bullets zipping past: 'we were hurrying somewhere to kill men and be killed'. As they moved forward, the regimental doctor, a Boer War veteran, taught them how to survive. Every so often he would inexplicably duck down and Idriess and others were soon copying him, as he seemed to have a sense of when the shells were on their way:

We all crouched by the roadside, among the bushes, by something solid or in a sheltering hole. A man near me sighed as he found a shallow dugout. For an hour we lived there, clinging to cold mother earth … my body was alertly passive, but the mind was curiously thinking, 'So this is War!'
[Ion Idriess, The Desert Column, Sydney, 1982, p. 8]

Many an Anzac was introduced to war as he moved up these valleys to the ridge. For virtually the whole of the campaign, but especially in the early weeks, Turkish snipers killed or wounded hundreds of men further up Shrapnel Valley where it turned to the right and became Monash Valley. The Turks held the high ground at places like Dead Man's Ridge and the Bloody Angle and were never driven from it. Stretcher-bearers, and soldiers bringing up supplies, rations and water, were in constant danger as they made their way along the valley bottom. This sniping was at its worst during the early hours of daylight when the sun was behind the Turkish marksmen. It was while doing his duty in Monash and Shrapnel valleys on 19 May 1915 that the best-known Anzac of all — 'The Man with the Donkey' — met his death.

Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick, 3rd Field Ambulance, was an Englishman with a thick accent from his home town of South Shields, County Durham. He worked the slopes here bringing wounded men down to the beach on a donkey (he apparently used two beasts known as 'Murphy' and 'Duffy'). He was a hard worker, the war diary of the 3rd Field Ambulance describing how from the day after the landing Simpson had operated 'from early morning till night every day since'. Bean claimed that Simpson became especially fatalistic and paid little attention to the shelling and sniping along his route from the ridge to the beach. On the morning of 19 May, he passed up beyond a water guard post where he generally had his breakfast but, as it was not ready, he pressed on saying, 'Never mind. Get me a good dinner when I come back'. He never came back:

Poor old Scotty Simpson was killed by machine gun bullets in Shrapnel Gully this morning … Scotty Simpson will be much missed with his mates in Shrapnel Gully … his donkeys Murphy and Duffy were taken charge of by some of our 4th Field [Ambulance] stretcher bearers who happened to be near him when he fell. Buried in cemetery to right of Anzac Beach.
[Sergeant James McPhee, 4th Field Ambulance, quoted in Peter Cochrane, Simpson and the Donkey:The Making of a Legend, Melbourne, 1992, p. 43]

Simpson's grave is in Beach Cemetery in Plot 1, Row F, Grave 1. At the time his exploits were not much known beyond the confines of Shrapnel and Monash valleys. Indeed, there were any number of stretcher-bearers all over the Anzac position who daily saved men's lives while constantly endangering their own. Nevertheless, it is the story of Simpson and his work with donkeys in Shrapnel Valley which over the years has grown to be the story which most Australians know about Anzac.

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Shot through the heart - The death of Simpson

When we first arrived at Anzac, there were landed a number of donkeys, which it was thought would be useful in carrying water and food to the firing line. Donkeys will live on a diet of little more than sticks. It was found from the first, however, that the animal for this work out and away the best is the mule. He drinks much less than a horse, and the amount of work he gets through on these steep hills is an eye-opener. The donkeys are the favourites with the men on account of their temper, but there are not many of them now remaining.

It was some time during the first night of our landing that Private Simpson annexed one of these donkeys. He knew the loads they carried in Egypt, and it struck him that they would be especially useful for carrying down men wounded in the line. He put a red cross brassard around the donkey's head, and started business at once. He went off and camped with his donkey amongst the Indians who drive the mules, and fed with them; and all the day and half the night he made continual trips to and from the firing line; every one used to meet him time and again coming down the gully with wounded men sitting on the little animal beside him. You cannot hurry a donkey very much, however close the shells may burst, and he absolutely came to disregard bullets and shrapnel. The man with the donkey became fatalistic — if they were going to hit him they would whatever his precautions.

For nearly four weeks he came up and down that valley — through the hottest shrapnel, through the aimed bullets of the snipers and the unaimed bullets which came over the ridges. When the shells were so hot that many others thought it wiser to duck for cover as they passed, the man with the donkey calmly went his way as if nothing more serious than a summer shower were happening. Presently he got another donkey, and started to work with two of them. He was coming down the gully on the morning of 19th May after the attack, clearing some of our 300 or 400 wounded — the Turks lost twice that many thousand — when he passed the waterguard, where he generally took his breakfast. It happened this morning the breakfast was not ready. 'Never mind', he said to the engineers there, 'get me a good dinner when I come back'. But he never came back. He and his two patients were nearing the end of their journey when he was shot through the heart, and both of his wounded men were wounded again.

[Charles Bean, Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, 23 July 1915, p.1394]

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Expert snipers

May 22nd — A party of us volunteered for a sapping job last night. We left camp at eleven and followed the road, which is the gully bottom, meandering up to the firing line. Across the gully are built sandbag barricades which shield a man just a little from the death-traps along the road. We would bend our backs and run to a big barricade, lean against the bags until we panted back our breath, then dive around the corner and rush for the next barricade. The bullets that flew in between each barricade did not lend wings to our feet for nothing could have made us run faster. A few hundred yards ahead of us and high up is the firing line, perched precariously on a circle of frowning cliffs. The Turks have a special trench up there which commands our 'road'. This trench is filled with expert snipers, unerring shots who have killed God only knows how many of our men when coming along the road.

None of our party were hit. Eventually we reached the farthest bunch of sandbags, stacking higgledy-piggledy on a shallow mound directly beneath the big cliffs by Quinn's Post. It was pitch dark up by the cliffs. On the cliff and hill peaks the rifles fired like spitting needles of flame. The firing was not heavy, but numerous bullets came threateningly close. Our object was to cut a trench from a sap, through the little rise back towards the gully, and thus save the necessity of walking along that particular danger-spot of the tragic road.

[Ion Idriess, The Desert Column, Sydney, 1982, p.10]

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Brighton Beach - Stop 6

Directions

From Shrapnel Valley Cemetery go back to the main beach road. Turn left and walk along this road for about half a kilometre. Ahead of you will be the promontory of Gaba Tepe and to your right the shore known to the Anzacs as Brighton Beach, named after the beach of the same name east of Melbourne.

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Naked as the day they were born

In his official history The Story of Anzac, Charles Bean has a chapter entitled 'Landing at Gaba Tepe'. It reminds us that the Anzac landing was originally planned for this beach stretching southwards from Hell Spit to the promontory of Gaba Tepe, ahead of you. Just before dawn on 25 April 1915, the four battalions of the 3rd Australian Infantry Brigade, known as the 'Covering Force', were to come ashore here and move rapidly inland to positions along what was known as Third or Gun Ridge. The 11th Battalion (Western Australia) would advance up and across the ridges in a north-easterly direction to Battleship Hill; the 10th Battalion (South Australia) would make straight inland to Gun Ridge; and the 9th Battalion (Queensland) would land well south along the beach and split into two groups, one heading inland to the end of Gun Ridge and the other a little inland and then south to charge Turkish gun positions on Gaba Tepe. The 12th Battalion would land just south of Hell Spit and act as a reserve.

Then the 2nd Brigade would land and push along the northern shore and inland to the heights of Chunuk Bair and Hill 971. The objective for the whole force that day was a hill known as Mal Tepe, well inland towards the other side of the peninsula from where they would command the road south towards the forts guarding the Narrows of the Dardanelles. With such a position in their hands the Anzacs would be able to cut off Turkish reinforcements heading south towards the main British landings at Helles, which took place a little after dawn on 25 April 1915.

As we know, for the Anzacs none of this came to pass. They landed further to the north and during that first day's fighting were held by the Turks to the 'old Anzac' area. As you can see, the country facing them inland of Brighton Beach was not as rugged as what they encountered at North Beach and Anzac Cove. The casualties suffered by the 3rd Brigade that day were high. It is thought, however, that casualties would have been even higher had they landed at Brighton Beach. Turkish guns at Gaba Tepe and artillery a little further back at a position the Anzacs later called the 'Olive Grove' could have decimated them as they came ashore.

During the campaign Brighton Beach was really a backwater. Men came down here to swim, always in danger from Turkish snipers and shells as they were at the other Anzac beaches. As Anzac Cove became overcrowded in the days after the landing, a stores depot was established at Brighton Beach at the mouth of Shrapnel Gully. Great stacks of boxes and other stores rose at this position and the space between Hell Spit and the beach was soon strewn with timber, barbed wire and all sorts of other engineering material. The Indian Mule Cart Company, renowned for their transporting of water and other supplies up into the hills on mules or along the shore in small two-wheeled carts, initially established themselves in this area. Shelling became severe but it was decided that this depot must be maintained as a more convenient spot than Anzac Cove to pick up stores for men coming from the southern Anzac trenches. The great stacks of boxes were carefully arranged to hide those working there and to allow some protection from shrapnel.

On 22 May 1915 an extraordinary event occurred on Brighton Beach. At a point about a third of the way along the beach from Hell Spit the 'old Anzac' position came down to the sea. Here was a sandbag wall and, reaching out into the water in front of it, two trip-wire entanglements. On the morning of 22 May, a white flag was seen on Gaba Tepe. The Australians had no white flag but someone quickly brought up a beach towel to serve. Turkish envoys then came along the beach towards the trip-wire, where they were met by Australian officers. They had come to negotiate a truce to allow for the burial of the thousands of Turkish dead whose bodies had lain along the front line since their attack of 19 May. A Turkish officer was eventually blindfolded and led along the beach towards the trip-wires. Charles Bean was watching:

They directed his feet carefully over the first one … They shouted for coats to help him cross the second; but in the meantime someone had a brainwave. There were several Australians bathing … nearby. Someone rushed off for a stretcher — then they called the bathers. Two of these big Australians — naked as the day they were born — took the stretcher round the larger entanglement ... And I got three photographs!
[Bean, quoted in Frontline Gallipoli: C E W Bean's diary from the trenches, Kevin Fewster, Sydney, 1990, p. 112]

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A pitiful sight

The Turks opened with shrapnel, fired in salvoes of four guns, right into the middle of the mule camp. Everybody went to ground as far as possible, but cover was inadequate, and men and animals began to fall. As soon as there was a lull — but not before a good many mules had been knocked over — an attempt was made to shift the camp, and the mules were rushed round Hell Spit Corner, where — out of the enemy's sight — they were picketed again. All was quiet for two or three hours, and the men were sent back to Brighton Beach to fetch the saddlery and gear. There was only a guard of one N.C.O. and twelve men present, when Colonel Lesslie, the Military Landing Officer, came along with the message from headquarters that all animals were to be moved off the beach and kept in gullies leading into the hills. Colonel Lesslie had scarcely given the order, when 'Beachy Bill', as this gun was afterwards called, opened fire again. The guard turned out at once, and — assisted by Australians and New Zealanders who were standing about and at once volunteered for the work — hurriedly unshackled the mules and led them away. They were followed along the beach by the persistent and obnoxious attentions of Beachy Bill, whose fire was more like a violent hail-storm than anything else. The men who had gone to fetch the gear came rushing up, headed by Ressaidar Hashmet Ali, and joined in the rescue. Although the site of our new camp could not be seen by the enemy, they must have known where it was, for the fire was deadly accurate, and before the safety could be reached eighty-nine mules and two horses had been hit; the N.C.O. of the guard was wounded, Driver Bir Singh hit in the head, and other Indians and several Australians were casualties. Many mules were killed outright, and many others lay where they had fallen, unable to rise: those had to be shot, and that evening the beach was strewn with dead animals — a pitiful sight.

[HM Alexander, On Two Fronts, London, 1917, pp.170—171]

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Artillery Road - Stop 7

Directions

About half a kilometre along the Brighton Beach road, on the left, is a directional brown and yellow sign. It points up an unpaved road — Artillery Road, as it was known to the Anzacs — to Shell Green Cemetery. Follow this road uphill, stopping at Shell Green, to Lone Pine Cemetery and Memorial. As you come through a small area of pines at the end of the road, you will find the entry to Lone Pine up to your right.

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Of all the bastards of places

The way up Artillery Road is the way to Second Ridge (the first ridge was considered to be the ridge leading down from Plugge's Plateau to the coast behind Anzac Cove) and the Anzac front line. Behind the ridge and along the side of the road were many dugouts and rest positions where units could be stationed when not in the trenches. The ridge, also known during the campaign as Bolton's Ridge, stretches down to the sea at Brighton Beach and the end of the Anzac line in 1915.

Reinforcements, and men returning from temporary rest camps on Imbros and Lemnos islands, would have walked the same route you have just taken from Anzac Cove to reach units stationed in this area. This is to the right of the 'old Anzac' line held by the infantry battalions of the 3rd Brigade (9th, 10th, 11th and 12th Battalions) and, from early June 1915, the regiments of the 2nd Light Horse Brigade (5th Light Horse, Queensland; 6th Light Horse, NSW; 7th Light Horse, NSW).

As the name Artillery Road suggests, there were also a number of batteries of the Australian Field Artillery stationed in these hills. Originally, the road only reached as far as Shell Green Cemetery. In preparation for the August Offensive thousands of soldiers, mainly British, were brought to Anzac and hidden in newly constructed dugouts on terraces along the hills.

During this period, Artillery Road was widened and extended up the hill to just behind the Lone Pine position on the ridge. The hard work of road building had to be done by the Anzacs themselves, and this daily grind, called 'fatigues', was the reality of war at Anzac:

You must not imagine that life in one of these year-long modern battles consists of continuous bomb fighting, bayoneting and bombarding all the time … [the] chief occupation is the digging of mile upon mile of endless sap [trench], of sunken road … The carrying of biscuit boxes and building timbers for hours daily … the sweeping and disinfecting of trenches in the never ending battle against flies — this is the soldier's life for nine days out of ten in a modern battle.
[Charles Bean, dispatch, Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, 2 December 1915, p. 3058]

The flies were everywhere, breeding in millions in the bad sanitary conditions, amongst piles of food scraps and rotting corpses. The smell was something a veteran never forgot. Trooper Ion Idriess, 5th Light Horse, spent much of his time at Gallipoli here on Bolton's Ridge and the rest positions behind it. Like others, he lived mainly on a diet of tinned bully beef, tea, sugar, biscuits and jam. So hard were these biscuits that it was not uncommon for men to break teeth on them. The easiest way to deal with the biscuits was to grate them and turn the resultant mush into a sort of porridge. Idriess recalled a particularly foul dinner of biscuits and jam:

Immediately I opened the tin the flies rushed the jam. They buzzed like a swarm of bees. They swarmed that jam, all fighting among themselves. I wrapped my overcoat over the tin and gouged out the flies, then spread the biscuit, held my hand over it, and drew the biscuit out of the coat. But a lot of the flies flew into my mouth and beat about inside. Finally, I threw the tin over the parapet. I nearly howled with rage … Of all the bastards of places this is the greatest bastard in the world.
[Ion Idriess, The Desert Column, Sydney, 1982, p. 42]

Behind the names on the gravestones at Shell Green Cemetery, off to your right about half-way up Artillery Road, are many touching stories. In Plot 2, Row G, Grave 23, lies Private Roy Facey, 11th Battalion, age 23, from Subiaco, Western Australia. Roy came to Gallipoli in June 1915 to join his brother Albert Facey, who was already serving in the battalion. Albert, as the older brother, put in a request to move to Roy's company and was looking forward to being with his brother, with whom he 'always got along well'. The reunion never took place. On 28 June 1915, both Roy and Albert took part in an attack and Albert later wrote about what happened:

… on arriving back I was told that Roy had been killed. He and his mate had been killed by the same shell. This was a terrible blow to me. I had lost a lot of my mates and seen a lot of men die, but Roy was my brother … I helped to bury Roy and fifteen of our mates who had been killed on the twenty-eighth. We put them in a grave side by side on the edge of a clearing we called Shell Green. Roy was in pieces when they found him. We put him together as best we could — I can remember carrying a leg — it was terrible.
[Albert Facey, A Fortunate Life, 1984, p. 273]

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A daily duel

From July 13th to 17th, when the bombardments of Steele's were most severe, Browne's battery in the Pimple fought a daily duel with the 75's. The position from which some of them were firing was already known to the Australian artillery as that of the enemy's 'sandpit' battery. Presently, however, it was discovered that at least one of the 75's was firing from some other direction. The infantry detected a flash, apparently of a gun, behind Battleship Hill. On to this Browne on July 17th endeavoured to register a section of his battery. Since only two guns under Lieutenant Edwards were available, and since the 75's at once returned their fire, rapid shooting became necessary in order to 'smother' them. Other gun detachments were ordered to stand by, in order to 'carry on' if either of the crews were disabled. The expected happened. After several high-explosive shells from the 75's had burst on the parapet, another struck the shield of No. 1 gun and blew away its crew. Sergeant Taylor, covered with wounds, struggled to continue firing, but the relieving detachment, which had sprung at once to the gun, forced him, strongly protesting, away from it. 'See after the others', he said, 'I'm only scratched'. Of 'the others' one gunner, Barrett-Lennard, a youngster of twenty-one, lay with an arm and a thigh shattered, but life lingered for a minute or two. 'Look after the sergeant', he insisted, 'I'm all right — I'm done, but, by God, you see, I'm dying hard'. Another, Stanley Carter, part of whose back had been torn away, also regained a brief consciousness before he died. 'Is the gun all right, sergeant?' were his first words. Of such mettle were the men who, under [the] almost insuperable difficulties of Anzac, fought their guns throughout the campaign.

[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Sydney, 1924, pp. 343—344]

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An unburied graveyard

This is the most infernally uncomfortable line of trenches we have ever been in, which is saying some for the regiment. We are in 'reliefs' now, 'resting', about fifty yards back of the firing-trench. For a couple of hours, to rest our nerves, they say. There [are] forty-eight of us in this particular spot, just an eighteen-inch-wide trench with iron overhead supports sandbagged as protection against bombs. We are supposed to be 'sleeping', preparatory to our next watch. Sleeping! Hell and tommy! Maggots are crawling down the trench; it stinks like an unburied graveyard; it is dark; the air is stagnant; some of the new hands are violently sick from watching us trying to eat. We're so crowded that I can hardly write in the diary even. My mates look like shadow men crouching expectantly in hell. Bombs are crashing outside, and — the night has come! If they hadn't been silly enough to tell us to sleep if we could I don't suppose we would have minded. The roof of this dashed possy is intermixed with dead men who were chucked up on the parapet to give the living a chance from the bullets while the trench was being dug. What ho, for the Glories of War.

[Ion Idriess, The Desert Column, Sydney, 1982, p. 42]

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Lone Pine - Stop 8

Directions

At the end of Artillery Road you will reach what was known as '400 Plateau' or simply 'Lone Pine'. You are now on Second Ridge. The path lies through pine trees and out into an open area. Turn right, and walk to the entrance of Lone Pine Cemetery. Once inside, turn left and make your way through the cemetery, go up a small flight of steps and cross to the Lone Pine Memorial. To the south-west, you can see the sweep of Bolton's Ridge leading down to the sea and beyond it the promontory of Gaba Tepe. Looking south, across the flat valley, the land rises again to the hump of Achi Baba in the middle distance. From there, the land falls away to the tip of the peninsula at Helles, where the British landings took place on 25 April 1915.

At Anzac, men could hear the artillery fire from Helles. Despite terrible bloodshed on both sides, the British were unable to break through the Turkish lines and they evacuated the position on 9 January 1916. Australians and New Zealanders also fought with great loss at Helles — in the Second Battle of Krithia on 8 May 1915. The Helles cemeteries contain Australian graves and on the Helles Memorial, at the very tip of the peninsula, are recorded the names of Australian soldiers who died at Krithia and whose bodies either were never recovered or could not be identified at burial. On the Helles Memorial are also listed the units of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) that fought at Gallipoli — the only place where this information is recorded on the peninsula — for the Helles Memorial is the British Empire's tribute to the whole campaign. Yet every year, thousands of Australians go to Anzac, but few visit Helles.

Looking back to the east across the valley, you will see the long low rise of Third or Gun Ridge. Throughout the campaign this was behind the Turkish lines, although a few Anzacs reached it on 25 April 1915. Looking north-east, Second and Third Ridge merge in the near distance and the slope rises up across Battleship Hill and then more steeply to Chunuk Bair. On that height is the New Zealand Memorial.

Look up to the road outside the cemetery. It bends away from here along Second Ridge, past smaller cemeteries that you can pick out in this order — Johnston's Jolly, Courtney's and Steel's Post and Quinn's Post. The Anzac trenches ran along this narrow ridge to the left of the road, while the Turkish line was just metres away on the other side. Bean described his return to Second Ridge in 1919:

Thus as we rode northwards along this road the trenches were never, except where a gully broke them, more than about fifty yards away on either hand … It gave a strange thrill to ride along this space in front of Steele's, Courtney's and Quinn's where three years before men could not even crawl at night. The bones and tattered uniforms of men were scattered everywhere … [Charles Bean, Gallipoli Mission, Sydney, 1990, p. 50]

In the vicinity of the Lone Pine Memorial there stood on 25 April 1915, in Bean's words, a 'single dwarf pine tree'. Within days the tree had been shot away, but not before it gave its name to the position — Lone Pine. Within months, Lone Pine had entered Australia's national story as the site of one of the bloodiest and hardest fought actions of the campaign: the Battle of Lone Pine.

Bare white bones, piled or clustered

Stand on the northern end of the Lone Pine Memorial and look back over the cemetery. Beneath you in 1915 would have been Turkish trenches on the eastern side and roughly at the other end of the cemetery would have been the Anzac lines. If you had been in the Turkish trenches on the afternoon of 6 August 1915 at 5.25 pm you would have had the sun in your eyes and you would have been enduring a fierce artillery barrage from Royal Navy warships offshore and from batteries in the Anzac area.

At precisely 5.30 pm the barrage lifted and, rising from concealed trenches in no-man's-land and the Anzac line, came the men of New South Wales, soldiers of the 1st Brigade (1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th Battalions). They charged straight across the area in front of you, meeting Turkish fire. Then they paused. Instead of an enemy trench to jump down into, they found much of the frontline trenches were covered in sand that was being held up by timbers. Some men ran on over these covered areas and reached the Turkish communication trenches; others found gaps in the covering and leapt down into the darkness beneath. The preliminary bombardment had been so fierce that Turkish soldiers holding the front line had moved back into nearby mine galleries for cover and many fled at the sudden appearance of the Australians. By nightfall, most of the enemy front line was in Australian hands and outposts had been established further ahead in former Turkish communication trenches. The Australian Engineers had also dug safe passage across no-man's-land and reinforcements were able to come over without exposing themselves to Turkish fire. However, the real battle for Lone Pine was just beginning.

Lone Pine was a strong and important position to the Turks. They had not expected such an attack here and the order was quickly given to retake lost positions. For three days and nights Australians and Turks struggled in the trenches and dark tunnels of Lone Pine until the area was choked with the wounded, dying and dead:

The wounded bodies of both Turks and our own … were piled up 3 and 4 deep … the bombs simply poured in but as fast as our men went down another would take his place. Besides our own wounded the Turks' wounded lying in our trench were cut to pieces with their own bombs. We had no time to think of our wounded … their pleas for mercy were not heeded … Some poor fellows lay for 30 hours waiting for help and many died still waiting.
[Private John Gammage, 1st Battalion, quoted in Les Carlyon, Gallipoli, Sydney, 2001, p. 360]

Lone Pine was a battle of bombs, bullets and bayonets fought to defend sandbag walls built by both sides to block up a trench at the forward most point of the advance or counter-attack. The Australians tried to hold what they had taken; the Turks fought equally determinedly to expel them from it.

When it was all over, seven Australians were awarded Victoria Crosses for their outstanding courage at Lone Pine. Many more men received other bravery decorations. The battle which raged here between 6 and 9 August cost Australia more than 2000 casualties and the Turks somewhere in the region of 7000. The whole action had been mounted as a diversion to keep Turkish attention and reserves focused on Lone Pine while the main battle to the north — to capture Chunuk Bair — was being waged by New Zealand, British, Indian and Gurkha forces. While Chunuk Bair did not fall, Lone Pine was a success for the Anzacs — but a success won at great cost.

All of this occurred in the vicinity of the Lone Pine Memorial. Because of the losses incurred here between 25 April and 3 May and during the days of the Lone Pine battle, it was decided to build Australia's principal memorial on Anzac at this spot. To the Turks, Lone Pine was Kanli Sirt — Bloody Ridge — and when, shortly after the end of the war in 1918, an unnamed British visitor came to this ridge he saw everywhere the evidence of the blood that had been spilt here:

On the tumbled soil of the trenches lay the bare white bones, piled or clustered so thickly in places that we had to tread upon them as we passed.
[Visitor to Lone Pine in December 1918, quoted in John North, Gallipoli: The Fading Vision, London, 1936, p. 219]

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Burst in his face - Lone Pine VCs

Tubb had at that position ten men, eight of whom were on the parapet, while two corporals, Webb and Wright, were told to remain on the floor of the trench in order to catch and throw back the enemy's bombs, or else to smother their explosion by throwing over them Turkish overcoats which were lying about the trenches. A few of the enemy, shouting 'Allah!', had in the first rush scrambled into the Australian trench, but had been shot or bayoneted. Tubb and his men now fired at them over the parapet, shooting all who came up Goldenstedt's Trench or who attempted to creep over the open. Tubb, using his revolver, exposed himself recklessly over the parapet, and his example caused his men to do the same. 'Good boy!' he shouted, slapping the back of one of them who by kneeling on the parapet had shot a sheltering Turk. As the same man said later: 'With him up there you couldn't think of getting your head down'.

But one by one the men who were catching bombs were mutilated. Wright clutched one which burst in his face and killed him. Webb, an orphan from Essendon, continued to catch them, but presently both his hands were blown away and, after walking out of the Pine, he died at Brown's Dip. At one moment several bombs burst simultaneously in Tubb's recess. Four men were killed or wounded; a fifth was blown down and his rifle shattered. Tubb, bleeding from bomb-wounds in arm and scalp, continued to fight, supported in the end only by a Ballarat recruit, Corporal Dunstan, and a personal friend of his own, Corporal Burton of Euroa. At this stage there occurred at the barricade a violent explosion, which threw back the defenders and tumbled down the sandbags. It was conjectured that the Turks had fired an explosive charge with the object of destroying the barrier. Tubb, however, drove them off, and Dunstan and Burton were helping to rebuild the barrier when a bomb fell between them, killing Burton and temporarily blinding his comrade. Tubb obtained further men from the next post, Tubb's Corner; but the enemy's attack weakened, the Turks continued to bomb and fire rifles into the air, but never again attempting to rush the barricade.

[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vol 2, Sydney, 1924, pp. 560—561]

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So long, Tom - The attack at Lone Pine

Until the last only one doubt obsessed the regimental officers — whether the men, sick with diarrhoea and strained with lack of sleep and heavy work, could sustain prolonged fighting and marching. But, as the battalions marched to the starting-point and settled themselves to wait for the signal, their officers — as often afterwards in France — watched with intense interest the evidence of qualities which, till the end of the war, never ceased to surprise even those who knew the Australian soldier best. Whatever their present feelings, the actual filling and dumping of their packs, the march through the trenches, and the imminence of the advance after months of trench life, provided an excitement which put new vitality into the troops. As they waited in the crowded bays, there was not the least sign of nervousness in face, speech, or action. The prevailing thought was: 'It's the turn of the 1st Brigade to show what they can do'. The men chafed each other dryly, after the manner of spectators waiting to see a football match. Some belated messenger hurried along the trench to find his platoon, and in passing, recognised a friend. 'Au revoir, Bill.' He nodded, 'meet you over there'. 'So long, Tom', was the answer; 'see you again in half-an-hour'. In the opening in the main tunnel — B5, leading forward from the old firing line to the new underground line — stood Major King, whistle in one hand, watch in the other. At the corresponding opening in the underground line was Major McConaghy of the 3rd, ready to repeat the signal for the attack — three blasts of the whistle. Watches had been twice compared and corrected, and while the officers gave a few last hints to their men they kept one eye on the minute-hand as though they were starting a boat race. 'Five twenty-seven — get ready to go over the parapet', said a young officer crouched in the corner of one fire-step, glancing at his wrist-watch. Almost immediately the order came: 'Pull down the top bags in that recess'. The men of the second line on the fire-step crouched higher against the wall. Those of the third, on the floor of the trench, took a firmer foothold for their spring. A whistle sounded and was repeated shrilly along the front. In a scatter of falling bags and earth the young officer and his men scrambled from the bay. Rifle-shots rang out from the enemy's trenches, gradually growing into a heavy fusillade. One of the men leaving that particular bay fell back, shot through the mouth. From every section of the Pimple, and from the holes of the forward line, troops were similarly scrambling; the sunny square of the daisy Patch and the scrub south of it were full of figures running forward.

[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vol 2, Sydney, 1924, pp. 502—503]

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One mass of dead bodies

The whole way across it is just one mass of dead bodies, bags of bombs, bales of sandbags, rifles, shovels and all the hundred and one things that had to be rushed across to the enemy trenches. The undergrowth has been cut down, like mown hay, simply stalks left standing, by the rifle fire, whilst the earth itself appears just as though one had taken a huge rake and scratched it all over. Here and there it is torn up where a shell has landed. Right beside me, within a space of fifteen feet, I can count fourteen of our boys stone dead. Ah! It is a piteous sight. Men and boys who yesterday were full of joy and life, now lying there, cold — cold — dead — their eyes glassy, their faces sallow and covered with dust — soulless — gone — somebody's son, somebody's boy — now merely a thing. Thank God that their loved ones cannot see them now — dead, with the blood congealed or oozing out. God, what a sight. The major is standing next to me and he says 'Well we have won'. Great God — won — that means victory and all those bodies within arm's reach — then may I never witness a defeat. Just where we have broken into their tunnel there is one of our boys lying with his head and shoulders hanging into the hole; the blood is drip, drip, drip into the trench. I sit watching it — fascinated; the major has just sat down too on the step into the tunnel and it is dripping on his back. I wonder who this poor devil was. I will look at his identity disc. It is under his chin and his face hangs downwards into the trench. Each time I lift his head it falls back; it is heavy and full of dirt and Ugh, the blood is on my hands — a momentary shudder — but one is used to these sights now, and I simply wipe my hands upon the dirt in the trench. Lying right against the trench (I could get him if it was worth while) lies another; his back is towards me, and he is on his side. From the back of his head down his neck runs a congealed line of dark red, but that is not what I notice; it is his hands. They are clasped before him just as though he was in prayer. I wonder what the prayer was. I wonder if it will be answered, but surely it must. Surely the prayer of one who died so worthily (he was right on the parapet of the Turkish trench ) could not fail to be answered.

[The Gallipoli Diary of Sergeant Lawrence, Sir Ronald East (ed), Melbourne, 1983, p. 68]

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Johnston's Jolly - Stop 9

Directions

Go back out of Lone Pine Cemetery and walk down to the main road heading along up the ridge. Turn left and walk to Johnston's Jolly Cemetery, a few hundred metres along the road and to your right. If you had stood here on the morning of 19 May 1915, you would have been surrounded by death. To the Turks this place was Kirmizi Sirt: 'Crimson Slope'.

No sound came from that terrible space

By the first week in May 1915, the Anzac line along this ridge had been fairly well established. The Battle of the Landing had temporarily exhausted both sides. Moreover, the landing had failed, for neither the Anzacs nor the British force at Helles had been able to capture the southern part of the Gallipoli peninsula. That had been the whole point of the invasion — to get through to the Dardanelles and silence the Turkish batteries guarding that waterway. Then, the theory went, the Royal Navy could steam on up to Istanbul and terrify Turkey out of the war.

As the Anzacs worked to consolidate their positions, the Turkish commanders planned to drive them from the ridge and back to the sea. They considered the position along Second Ridge to be the most vulnerable to attack, for here their enemies clung precariously to positions just off the steep slopes of Monash Valley, on the other side of the road opposite Johnston's Jolly. One mighty rush of infantry could send them reeling back down into the valley, and once the Turks commanded the whole ridge, evacuation would be inevitable. So, on 18 May approximately 42,000 Turkish soldiers were massed in the valleys to the east — but aircraft of the Royal Naval Air Service spotted them. At 3.00 am on 19 May, the Anzac trenches were fully manned and awake all along the line in the expectation of a Turkish attack.

Shortly after 3.00 am, the glinting bayonets of Turkish soldiers were observed in the clear night moving in the valley between where you are standing at the Jolly and the next ridge to the north, German Officer's Ridge. The Australians began firing and by mid-morning had poured 948,000 rifle and machine-gun bullets into waves of attacking Turks all along the Anzac line but especially here at 400 Plateau, at German Officer's Ridge and on up towards Quinn's Post.

One Australian likened the whole event to a 'wallaby drive' where the enemy were 'shot down in droves', while another talked of how they had stood virtually on top of their trenches 'shooting as fast as they could' until gun barrels became too hot to touch. Bean's words capture the scene in this area by mid-morning 19 May 1915:

… the dead and wounded lay everywhere in hundreds. Many of those nearest to the Anzac line had been shattered by the terrible wounds inflicted by modern bullets at short ranges. No sound came from that terrible space; but here and there some wounded or dying man, silently lying without help or any hope of it under the sun which glared from a cloudless sky, turned painfully from one side to the other, or slowly raised an arm towards heaven.
[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vol 2, p. 161]

Approximately 3000 Turks had been killed and 7000 wounded. The Anzacs, by comparison, lost only 160 killed and 468 wounded. While the Anzacs had been unable to push forward against the Turks, the failure of this attack indicated that the Anzac line would not fall to a rush of infantry against rifles and machine guns. After 19 May the Anzac soldiers began to see the Turks as fellow sufferers, and respect for their courage and prowess grew.

Within days of the attack the air was heavy with the smell of rotting corpses. A truce was made between 7.00 am and 4.30 pm on 24 May to allow both sides to bury their dead. Prominent in the organisation of the truce was a British officer, Captain Aubrey Herbert, attached to the staff of the Australian and New Zealand Division. On the morning of 24 May, Herbert met and accompanied Turkish officers up the ridge from the beach to 400 Plateau. He found the sight between the trenches and in the gullies 'indescribable'. So awful was the stench that a Turkish 'Red Crescent' official gave him antiseptic wool with scent to put over his nose. The scent was 'renewed frequently'. A Turkish officer said to Herbert:

At this spectacle even the most gentle must feel savage, and the most savage must weep.

Sydney Mail 1915

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Nauseating work

I will never forget the armistice — it was a day of hard, smelly, nauseating work. Those of us assigned to pick up the bodies had to pair up and bring the bodies in on stretchers to where the graves were being dug. First we had to cut the cord of the identification disks and record the details on a sheet of paper we were provided with. Some of the bodies were rotted so much that there were only bones and part of the uniform left. The bodies of the men killed on the nineteenth ( it had now been five days ) were awful. Most of us had to work in short spells as we felt very ill. We found a few of our men who had been killed in the first days of the landing. This whole operation was a strange experience — here we were, mixing with our enemies, exchanging smiles and cigarettes, when the day before we had been tearing each other to pieces. Apart from the noise of the grave-diggers and the padres reading the burial services, it was mostly silent. There was no shelling, no rifle-fire. Everything seemed so quiet and strange. Away to our left there were high table-topped hills and on these were what looked like thousands of people. Turkish civilians had taken advantage of the cease-fire to come out and watch the burial. Although they were several miles from us they could be clearly seen. The burial job was over by mid-afternoon and we retired back to our trenches. Then, sometime between four and five o'clock, rifle-fire started again and then the shelling. We were at it once more.

[Albert Facey, A Fortunate Life, Ringwood, 1984, p. 268]

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As if God had breathed in their faces

We walked from the sea and passed immediately up the hill, through a field of tall corn filled with poppies, then another cornfield; then the fearful smell of death began as we came upon scattered bodies. We mounted over a plateau and down through gullies filled with thyme, where there lay about 4000 Turkish dead. It was indescribable. One was grateful for the rain and the grey sky. A Turkish Red Crescent man came and gave me some antiseptic wool with scent on it, and this they renewed frequently. There were two wounded crying in that multitude of silence. The Turks were distressed, and Skeen strained a point to let them send water to the first wounded man, who must have been a sniper crawling home. I walked over to the second, who lay with a high circle of dead that made a mound round him, and gave him a drink from my water-bottle, but Skeen called me to come on and I had to leave the bottle. Later a Turk gave it back to me. The Turkish captain with me said: 'At this spectacle even the most gentle must feel savage, and the most savage must weep'. The dead fill acres of ground , mostly killed in the one big attack, but some recently. They fill the myrtle-grown gullies. One saw the result of machine-gun fire very clearly; entire companies annihilated — not wounded, but killed, their heads doubled under them with the impetus of their rush and both hands clasping their bayonets, It was as if God had breathed in their faces, as 'the Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold'.

The burying was finished some time before the end. There were certain tricks to both sides. Our men and the Turks began fraternising, exchanging badges, etc. I had to keep them apart. At 4 o'clock the Turks came to me for orders. I do not believe this could have happened anywhere else. I retired their troops and ours, walking along the line. At 4.17 I retired the white-flag men, making them shake hands with our men. Then I came to the upper end. About a dozen Turks came out. I chaffed them, and said that they would shoot me the next day. They said, in a horrified chorus: 'God forbid!' The Albanians laughed and cheered, and said: 'We will never shoot you'. Then the Australians began coming up, and said: 'Good-bye old chap; good luck!' And the Turks said: 'Oghur Ola gule gule gedejekseniz, gule gule gelejekseniz' ('Smiling may you go and smiling come again'). Then I told them all to get into their trenches, and unthinkingly went up to the Turkish trench and got a deep salaam from it. I told them that neither side would fire for twenty-five minutes after they had got into the trenches. One Turk was seen out away on our left, but there was nothing to be done, and I think he was all right. A couple of the rifles had gone off about twenty minutes before the end but Potts and I went hurriedly to and fro seeing it was all right. At last we dropped into our trenches, glad that the strain was over. I walked back with Temperley. I got some raw whisky for the infection in my throat, and iodine for where the barbed wire had torn my feet. There was a hush over the Peninsula.

[Aubrey Herbert, Mons, Anzac and Kut, internet edition, University of Kansas, electronic library, p. 58]

AWM PS1506

Quinn's Post - Stop 10

Directions

Leave Johnston's Jolly Cemetery and turn right. Head up the road past Courtney's and Steele's Post Cemetery until you reach Quinn's Post Cemetery, which will be on your left. Quinn's was named after Major Hugh Quinn, 15th Battalion, of Charters Towers, Queensland. Enter the cemetery and find a position where you can look back down to the sea along Monash and Shrapnel Valleys.

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An epic in itself

The jutting ridge spurs at the end of Monash Valley were seen as the 'key to Anzac'. For virtually the whole of the campaign the Turks held the spur just to the north of Quinn's Post where you are now standing — Deadman's Ridge. From this position, and positions higher up the hill, concealed snipers fired down into the valley below, making movement by day up to Quinn's and the other posts along the ridge a life threatening undertaking. Quinn's was also the last trench in an Anzac line stretching up from Brighton Beach, along Bolton's Ridge, across 400 Plateau at Lone Pine and Johnston's Jolly and along Second Ridge.

Just across from Quinn's is another spur that was called Pope's Hill. The Anzacs held a trench line on this spur. Beyond is Russell's Top and the Nek. The Turkish front line lay on the other side of the road and in certain places approached close to the trenches at Quinn's. Here the Turks had only to advance a few metres, breach the Anzac line and the whole Anzac area could be lost. Up until mid-June, the fighting at Quinn's was of a ferocity and intensity unequalled on any other part of the line. Anzac attacks to push the line forward from the valley crest, bombing duels and aggressive tunnelling below ground from both sides gave the post a fearsome reputation:

Men passing the fork in Monash Valley, and seeing and hearing the bombs bursting up at Quinn's, used to glance at the place (as one of them said), 'as a man looks at a haunted house'.
[Charles Bean, Story of Anzac, Vol 2, p. 91]

The importance of this part of the Anzac line was quickly realised and various small parties held on here against Turkish attacks in the days after the landing. On 29 April, Captain Hugh Quinn arrived here with a detachment of Queenslanders from the 15th Battalion just as the Turks were digging in around the head of Monash Valley and across from Quinn's Post. There now commenced a struggle at Quinn's that was to continue 24 hours a day for eight months. Part of the incessant danger at Quinn's lay in the fact that it was overseen by enemy positions on three sides and to raise one's head here above the parapet of the trench was to invite instant death from ever watch ful Turkish riflemen. Periscopes allowed a brief scan of the Turkish line but these too were quickly shot away if not removed in time. The invention of the famous periscope rifle eventually allowed relatively safe and accurate rifle fire to be directed back at the Turkish positions. Wire nets erected above the trenches also held back many of the enemy bombs (hand grenades).

A feature of the fighting at Quinn's was the bombing. In the early days the advantage here lay with the Turks, as the Anzacs possessed no grenades while the Turks had a seemingly endless supply of cricket ball shaped bombs. An Anzac bomb factory, using explosives packed in bully beef and jam tins, was set up at the beach and although there were never enough of these simple devices, the defenders of Quinn's were at least able to retaliate. If a man was quick enough, Turkish bombs could also be picked up and thrown back. The Turks, however, soon began cutting their fuses shorter and one Australian had his hand blown off before it was realised what was happening. Another method of dealing with the bombs was to throw a thick overcoat over them to stifle the explosion or, if you had real grit, to fall upon the bomb with a half-full sandbag.

A particular bomb duel developed at Quinn's on the night of 13—14 May 1915. The position had just been taken over by the recently arrived 2nd Light Horse Regiment, Queenslanders described by Bean as 'little more than boys'. In reply to their questions about what it was like in these trenches, a man of the tired garrison of the 15th Battalion replied — 'You might get a few bombs'. By nightfall the bombs were falling thick and fast on the startled light horsemen, driving them back and forward along the trenches. Part of the problem was a communication trench leading out into no-man's-land that had been used in a previous Anzac attack. It had been blocked up by a sandbag partition but Turkish bombers had been able to approach close to the Australian line on the other side of the sandbags and hurl their missiles with great accuracy. Eventually, 'a big Queenslander', David Browning, had had enough. Angered by wounds to both sides of his face, in which particles of iron were imbedded, he got hold of an 'armful' of jam tin bombs and went to the Australian side of the sandbag partition. Although, like his mates, he knew little about using bombs, he lit the fuses and began hurling them across the top of the sandbags. The Turkish bombers were driven away and the light horsemen had a more peaceful night.

These few words are a very inadequate account of what it was like to serve at Quinn's Post. As the English historian, John North, wrote:

The story of the defence of Quinn's would make an epic in itself … the struggle to hold it was to continue without cessation, night or day, for eight months.
[John North, Gallipoli: The Fading Vision, Faber & Faber, London, 1936, p. 211]

Quinn was killed here on 29 May whilst reconnoitring for a counterattack against a Turkish force that had broken into the Australian front line. He was buried in Shrapnel Valley Cemetery.

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Sure death to put your head up

This space is called 'Brown's Dip' and is about the centre of our line. From here communication trenches were in all directions to our firing line. It is getting dusk as we arrive here and there were men in the communication trenches who act as supports for those in the firing line during the night. The trenches are totally different to what I had expected. Deep, far over a man's head, with room between the traverses for only three men, the loopholes closed up and observation being carried on with periscopes. Below I have made sketches of these and the trenches.

As regards the trenches they twist and turn every few yards as I have shown. This is to avoid being enfiladed. The men on duty in the trenches eat, sleep and live completely in them during the time, whatever it may be, that they are there — taking it in turns to watch — generally about one hour on and two hours off. They sleep in the trench itself and upon the firing step. In fact at night time it is practically impossible to walk along for men lying rolled up in their blankets. At dusk the sandbag packing is taken out of the loopholes and the men observe through these; but as they are only about two inches by four inches you can't see much. At daybreak these holes are stuffed up again and, as I said, observing is carried on by means of the periscope. In the trenches you can see nothing either to the front or rear but the little length of trench that you happen to be in, and it is sure death to put your head up to look around. Even the periscope mirrors measuring only three inches square at most are picked off one after the other.

[The Gallipoli Diary of Sergeant Lawrence, Sir Ronald East (ed), Melbourne, 1983, pp. 21—22]

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Turkish Memorial - Stop 11

Directions

Leave Quinn's Post Cemetery and go back to the road. Turn left and proceed up the hill until you reach the large statue of a Turkish soldier on your left.

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We respect the Turk

This larger than life-sized representation of the ordinary Turkish soldier, his rifle in hand, faces determinedly downhill. This was how the Turkish soldiers on the day of the invasion of their country — 25 April 1915 — faced the Anzacs coming up these slopes from the beach towards the heights of Chunuk Bair. On the slopes behind the monument leading up to what was called Battleship Hill there was fought one of the most crucial actions of the Battle of the Landing, and it was here that the capability and courage shown by the Turks sealed the fate of the Anzacs.

Before the invasion, the fighting capacities of the Turkish army had not been highly regarded. The power and effectiveness of the old 'Ottoman Empire' had been declining for nearly a century, and in any invasion of Turkey it was thought that British cold steel and determination would soon sweep aside the defenders in a triumphant assault. When the Australians first landed at Gallipoli they encountered small groups of Turks who, after doing what they could, withdrew back over the ridges. The main Turkish forces in the area had been held in reserve to see just where the British Empire troops were going to land on the peninsula. By 6.30 am a report had reached the commander of the Turkish 19th Division, Colonel Mustafa Kemal, that an enemy force had scaled the heights at Ari Burnu. Kemal's troops were at Bigali, a small village off to the east beyond the main range, and he ordered his whole division to prepare to march to the coast. He himself set off riding at the head of the 57th Regiment.

Cast your eyes up along the main road to the very top of the range, the heights of Chunuk Bair. By about 9.30 am Kemal stood there with some other officers. He could see the British warships and transports off Anzac Cove and also, coming rapidly up the hill towards him, a group of Turkish soldiers who had been tasked with defending Hill 261 (Battleship Hill). Kemal spoke to them:

'Why are you running away?' 'Sir, the enemy', they said. 'Where?' 'Over there', they said, pointing out hill 261 … I said to the men who were running away, 'You cannot run from the enemy'. 'We have got no ammunition', they said. 'If you haven't got any ammunition, you have got your bayonets', I said, and shouting to them, I made them fix their bayonets and lie down on the ground' ... When the men fixed their bayonets and lay down on the ground the enemy also lay down …
[Kemal quoted in Robert Rhodes James, Gallipoli, London, 1999, p. 113]

Kemal was later to see this as one of the most crucial moments of the day. The advancing Anzacs had been temporarily halted and he sent at once to have the advance units of the 57th Regiment sent up. For the rest of the day Kemal's men and, in a series of bloody counter-attacks, the soldiers of the 27th Regiment further south at Lone Pine, held back the Anzac attempts to advance. The Anzacs were unable to progress any further than those positions they would ultimately occupy for eight months at Gallipoli. On 25 April 1915, the Anzacs discovered that Turkish soldiers, well led and fighting for their homeland, would stand up to them.

This Turkish steadfastness was revealed at Quinn's Post after the failed Turkish counter-attack of 19 May 1915. On that morning 3000 Turkish dead lay out along the ridge below the Turkish Soldier Memorial and a further 7000 had been wounded. Anzac intelligence interpreters, sensing that the Turks may have been demoralised by the spectacular failure of their attack, called out from the trenches at Quinn's that they would be well treated if they surrendered. The most common response was a bomb or a bullet. On another occasion a surrender message was thrown into the Turkish lines and the reply came back: 'You think there are no Turks left. But there are Turks, and Turks' sons!'

The nature of war meant that the Australian soldiers hardly had any social contact with their enemies. The only ones they were likely to meet were prisoners who were made to labour at times in the Anzac position. While most Turkish POWs were taken to the islands, a POW cage was established in the hills behind Anzac Cove. On one occasion Bean observed prisoners in this cage being subjected to threatening behaviour by one or two Anzacs and he 'wondered why someone hadn't the decency to hit the man who did it straight in the face'. But generally, the Anzacs recognised in the Turk a fellow sufferer and acknowledged his humanity. In his poem 'Anzac' Lieutenant Oliver Hogue wrote:

I reckon the Turk respects us, as we respect the Turk; Abdul's a good, clean fighter — we've fought him, and we know.

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Send us milk

Anyway, near daybreak one morning there came out of their trench at Quinn's a packet tied to a string, thrown so it lobbed near our parapet and lay outside between the trenches. Of course, our sentries waited for it to explode or fizz or burst into smoke or some such devilry. The sergeant near it looked at it very carefully through a telescope. While he was looking Turkish hands must have come up and waved and then a cautious head. A head our side went up too, and gradually a line of heads on each parapet; and before the sergeant knew what was happening the man next him had climbed up on to the parapet and stepped round the netting and into the deadly area between the trenches and was bringing back the packet. It was a small packet of cigarettes. In it, scrawled in indelible pencil and in badly spelt French, were the words, 'A Notre Herox Ennemis ( To our heroic enemies ) … Bully beef non'. Of course some return had to be made, and so our men threw over a tin or two of bully beef. Presently back flew a piece of paper wrapped round a stone. It read 'Bully beef non'. After that we threw some sweet biscuits and a tin of jam. Other cigarettes came back. I have seen some of them. They had on them the same penciled writing, 'Notre Cher Enemi' or 'Femez — probably meant for Prenez — A Vee Plessir' (To our dear enemy … Take with pleasure).

Another reads 'Envoyez Milk' (Send us milk). Then one of them waved down with his hands and shouted 'Fini'. And our men waved back, and down gradually went the two lines of smiling heads, and after a pause of a minute or two the bombs began to fly again. They had begun at half-past 8 and they lasted until about a quarter past 9. The same courtesies repeated themselves next morning.

[Charles Bean, dispatch, Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, 13 January 1916, p. 92]

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You cannot run away

The scene which met our [Mustafa Kemal's] eyes was a most interesting one. To my mind it was the most vital moment of the occurrence. Just then I saw men of a detachment who had been placed on hill Point 261 [Battleship Hill] to the south of Chunuk Bair to observe and cover the shore from there, running back towards, in fact fleeing towards, Chunuk Bair … Confronting these men myself, I said, 'Why are you running away?' 'Sir, the enemy', they said. 'Where?' 'Over there', they said, pointing out hill 261.

In fact a line of skirmishers of the enemy approached hill 261 and was advancing completely unopposed. Now just consider the situation. I had left my troops, so as to give them ten minutes' rest. The enemy had come to this hill. It meant the enemy was nearer to me than my troops were, and if the enemy came to where I was my troops would find themselves in a very difficult position. Then, I still don't know what it was, whether a logical appreciation or an instinctive action, I do not know. I said to the men who were running away, 'You cannot run away from the enemy'. 'We have got no ammunition', they said. 'If you haven't got any ammunition, you have your bayonets', I said, and shouting to them, I made them fix their bayonets and lie down on the ground. At the same time I sent the orderly officer beside me off to the rear to bring up to where I was at the double those men of the infantry regiment who were advancing on Chunuk Bair who could reach it in time. When the men fixed their bayonets and lay down on the ground the enemy also lay down. The moment of time that we gained was this one … It was about 10.00 hours when the 57th Regiment began its attack.

[Robert Rhodes James, Gallipoli, London, 1999, p. 113]

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The Nek - Stop 12

Directions

After leaving the Turkish Soldiers Memorial turn left and head up the paved road past the 57th Regiment Memorial on your right until you come to a fork in the road. The paved road leads up to Chunuk Bair, but you should turn down left along the unpaved road. Following this road you will pass a Turkish memorial (Sergeant Mehmet's Memorial) on your right and soon to your right will be the Nek Cemetery. Enter the cemetery and make for the special memorial headstones to your right, in front of the cemetery cross.

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And so perished the 8th Light Horse

Those words were written by Captain Leslie Hore of the 8th Light Horse Regiment from western Victoria. Look at the date on four of the Special Memorials in front of you — 7 August 1915. On that day at this spot between 4.30 and 5.15 am, 234 Australian Light Horsemen from Victoria and Western Australia were killed and a further 138 were wounded. They were casualties in the action depicted in George Lambert's famous painting which hangs in the Australian War Memorial — The Charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek, 7 August 1915. The 3rd Light Horse Brigade consisted of the 8th Light Horse Regiment from Victoria, the 9th from South Australia and the 10th from Western Australia. Only elements of the 8th and 10th Light Horse took part in the action at the Nek on 7 August.

The charge was also depicted in the last minutes of Peter Weir's film Gallipoli, which featured Mark Lee and Mel Gibson as two young Western Australian Light Horsemen. Lee, in the role of Archie Hamilton, dies as machine-gun bullets rip across his chest while he runs full pelt across no-man's-land without his rifle, his body thrusting forward towards the enemy. After the war the remains of many of the dead of the Nek, most of whom could not be identified, were gathered into this cemetery and they lie all around you here.

What happened? The charge, planned for 4.30 am on 7 August 1915, was part of a number of diversionary actions. These diversions were aimed to tie down Turkish troops to the Anzac position while Allied units to the north (Australians, British, New Zealanders, Gurkhas and Indians) tried to storm the heights of Chunuk Bair and Hill 971.

Go to the edge of the cemetery and look at the scene to the immediate north and north-east. The main attack of the so-called 'August Offensive' went through these steep gullies and ridges. It began on the night of 6 August and by dawn on 7 August New Zealand infantry were supposed to have reached the high point way up to your right known as Chunuk Bair. The Australian Light Horse charge was planned for the very moment when the New Zealanders were supposed to have been taking Chunuk Bair, and the Turks in their trenches at the Nek were supposed to be distracted by the possibility of attack from the rear.

Unfortunately, by 4.30 am the New Zealanders had failed to reach their objective and had halted on Rhododendron Ridge below the summit of Chunuk Bair.

Any attack across the narrow section of land known as the Nek, directly at heavily defended Turkish trenches, was regarded as suicidal unless the enemy line was collapsing from the rear. Although that could not now happen, the Light Horse were ordered in anyway on the grounds that everything must be done to assist the New Zealanders to make the main attack on the heights. An artillery and naval bombardment on the enemy trenches inexplicably ceased minutes before the Light Horsemen were due to go. When the first wave of men of the 8th Light Horse rose from the trench, the Turkish soldiers who had had time to take up positions again in the lull after the bombardment cut them down within seconds. A second wave of the 8th was similarly destroyed. There was a pause. An officer questioned the value of sending more men to certain death but the Light Horse were ordered to press on. Next rose the first wave of the 10th Light Horse:

The 10th went forward to meet death instantly, as the 8th had done, the men running as swiftly and as straight as they could at the Turkish rifles. With that regiment went the flower of the youth of Western Australia …
[Bean, Story of Anzac, Vol 2, p. 617]

A fourth wave of Western Australians also charged before the attack was finally called off. Charles Bean called this event 'one of the bravest actions in the history of war', each man in those waves which rose after the first going forward in the full knowledge that he was unlikely to survive. How the Nek must have looked on that morning as the day lengthened has been described in these words:

At first here and there a man raised his arm to the sky, or tried to drink from his water bottle; but, as the sun of that burning day climbed higher, such movements ceased: over the whole summit the figures lay still in the quivering heat.
[Bean, Story of Anzac, Vol 2, p. 633]

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One of the bravest actions in the history of war

In our first day's work, with Howe as guide, Lambert had been over the ground both of the Landing and (though that had been a much later event in the campaign) of the charge of the Light Horse — indeed he obtained his bearings there with me on the day we reached Anzac. Lambert was, I think, more sensitive than the rest of us to the tragedy — or at any rate the horror — of Anzac. At The Nek, in the last effort to seize Baby 700 or part of it, four lines of Australians charged successively to practically certain death in order to pin the attention of their opponents to that supposedly vital point, and so give the New Zealand infantry, then climbing the just visible heights of Rhododendron Spur, 1200 yards away, the supreme chance of winning the real goal, Chunuk Bair summit, and with it, possibly, the campaign.

Unfortunately the New Zealand leaders, whose tired men by a wonderful effort then had the summit almost within their grasp and practically unoccupied, allowed the chance to slip. But that was unforeseen by the Light Horse who flung themselves across the narrow strip of The Nek in face of the seven or eight Turkish trenches that rose, tier after tier, across it and up the face of Baby 700 beyond. We found the low scrub there literally strewn with their relics and those of earlier Turkish attacks over the same ground. When shortly after our visit Hughes came to bury the missing in this area, he found and buried more than three hundred Australians in that strip the size of three tennis courts. Their graves today mark the site of one of the bravest actions in the history of war.

[Charles Bean, Gallipoli Mission, Sydney, 1990, p.109]

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Never have I heard such an awful sound

We had about one hundred yards to go, the first line starting from saps which are trenches in front of the firing line leading in the enemy's direction. At twenty five minutes past four we stood up on the banquettes of our trenches and in a few minutes the crackle of musketry turned into a roar. Never have I heard such an awful sound and no wonder. We knew they had three machine guns trained on the Nek and quite possibly more. Their trench must have had at least two hundred men. Judging from the number we had in ours more likely two hundred and fifty. Now a machine gun fires at top speed six hundred rounds per minute and a rifleman fifteen rounds per minute. So we had concentrated on a piece of land say two hundred yards long and one hundred yards deep no fewer than five thousand bullets per minute.

Out went the first line and we waited for our word, by the time they had gone the first forty yards they were down to a man. What could one hundred and seventy five men do against that volume of fire? We saw our fate in front of us but we were pledged to go and to their eternal credit the word being given not a man in the second line stayed in his trench. As I jumped out I looked down the line and they were all rising over the parapet. We bent low and ran as hard as we could. Ahead we could see the trench aflame with rifle fire. All round were smoke and dust kicked up by the bullets. I felt a sting on my shoulder and remember thinking it could not be a hit or it would have hurt more. It bled a lot afterward but was only a flesh wound.

I passed our first line all dead or dying it seemed and went on a bit further and flung myself down about forty yards from the Turkish trenches. I was a bit ahead of my men having got a good start and travelling lighter. I looked round and saw them all down mostly hit.

I did not know what to do, the dirt was spurting up all around like rain from a pavement in a thunderstorm. Some bigger spurts near me were either bombs or pom poms. I could notice they were much bigger. The trench ahead was a living flame, the roar of musketry not a bit diminished. I was protected by a little, a very little fold in the ground and by a dead Turk dead about six weeks. I had looked round again and reckoned I could get about six men to follow and it would have been murder to take them on.

Lastly the supports had not started and if they had, they were only one hundred and seventy five for the whole line, absolutely and totally inadequate. I made up my mind and started to shove myself backwards on the flat of my stomach. After going a few yards I felt a hard sting in my right foot but so long as my arms and chest were right I didn't mind.

I passed through our dead and fell into one of the saps and managed to limp out into one of the back trenches and lay down wondering how on earth I got out of it. My three subalterns were killed and I should say about seventy percent of my men. There were no live men near me when I started back except one who did the same as I did and I hope got back.

Our Colonel was killed, one Major killed the other wounded, the only Captain (myself) wounded and ten subalterns killed and three wounded leaving two officers not hit, and about five percent of the men. And so perished the 8th Light Horse.

[Captain Leslie Hore, 8th Light Horse, letter, quoted in Cameron Simpson, Maygar's boys: a biographical history of the 8th Light Horse Regiment AIF 1914—19, Moorooduc, 1998]

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Walker's Ridge - Stop 13

Directions

Leave the Nek Cemetery and turn right down the track until you reach Walker's Ridge Cemetery. From the cemetery observe the view to the north. Below, and to your right, are the valleys and spurs leading back up to Koja Temen Tepe and Chunuk Bair. Straight ahead are the Suvla Plains, with the long mountain ridge of Kirech Tepe in the distance. If you let your eye follow the curving sweep of Ocean Beach it will come to a point — Nibrunesi Point. Between there and another point to the north lies Suvla Bay. A 'cut' in the bay across the sand leads into the Salt Lake. This whole area witnessed a great deal of fighting during the August Offensive in 1915. During that month a last great effort was made to break out of Anzac, capture the heights of Chunuk Bair and bring the campaign to a successful end.

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Ka mate, ka mate! Ka ora, ka ora!

From Walker's Ridge between 7 and 10 August 1915 you would have seen wounded men lying in pain all over the heights and valleys before you. Those capable of walking or crawling made their way to aid posts at the end of the valleys. A grimmer aspect of this scene was recorded by Sergeant Harold Jackson:

From the trench down to the beach, about 4 miles [6.4 kms], is one long line of grey stiff bodies of men who have died trying to get down to the beach unassisted.
[Sergeant Harold Jackson, 13th Battalion AIF, 1DRL/0592, AWM]

Up in one of the valleys Private Ormond Burton, New Zealand Medical Corps, tried to care for this mass of suffering. Nobody appeared to be responsible for them and men lay out in the noonday sun with no food or water. Some, from where they lay dying, could see the whitepainted hospital ships off shore. Burton gave his water bottle to a Turkish officer who lay with some of his men nearby:

He gave every drop to his men and took not a mouthful himself. I saw nothing more dreadful during the whole war than the suffering of those men.
[Burton quoted by Chris Pugsley, Gallipoli:The New Zealand Story, Auckland, 1998, p. 305]

These casualties were the result of the battle to wrest the heights of Chunuk Bair from the Turks. The plan was a complicated one. At Anzac, an Australian attack at Lone Pine (The Battle of Lone Pine) on the afternoon of 6 August was to tie down Turkish reserves to that area and to make the enemy think that a major attempt to break through their lines was taking place there. Meantime, in the dark of 6 August long columns of Australian, New Zealand, British and Indian infantry left the gullies above North Beach, made their way along the beach and then headed up into the hills. The Australians, along with an Indian unit, went a long way north, then swung around virtually out of sight of where you are standing at Walker's Ridge and headed up a distant valley. Their aim was to assault and capture the range's highest summit — Koja Temen Tepe, the Hill of the Great Pasture.

Before the New Zealand infantry could make their way up into the valleys various Turkish positions had to be captured. This job went to the New Zealand Mounted Rifles, and with them went men of the Maori Contingent. The Maoris attacked in traditional style:

The Turks still held this trench further on, and the Maoris could hear their voices. The advance party worked towards them, and Captain Dansey said, 'Let's charge them!' This the little party did. They yelled as they went, with bayonets at the charge,
Ka mate, ka mate!
Ka ora, ka ora!
the ancient Maori battle-song … On they went for those Turks; there was no breath to finish the chant; they needed it to push the bayonet home. The lads hurled themselves at the foe like a band of destroying angels; with bayonet and rifle butt they cleared the trench; only the dead and dying remained. Some Maoris fell, but the victory was with them.
Ka mate, ka mate!

[James Cowen, The Maoris in the Great War, Auckland, 1926, pp. 40—41]

On the morning of 7 August, the New Zealand infantry had reached Rhododendron Ridge and the Apex about 500 metres below Chunuk Bair. From here, on the morning of 8 August, the Wellington Battalion advanced to a position just below the summit from which they could see what the whole Gallipoli campaign was about — the straits of the Dardanelles. For a day the Wellingtons withstood devastating Turkish counter-attacks and Bean described their condition when they were relieved:

Of the 760 of the Wellington Battalion who had captured the height that morning, there came out only 70 unwounded … Throughout that day not one had dreamed of leaving his post. Their uniforms were torn, their knees broken … they could only talk in whispers; their eyes were sunken; their knees trembled; some broke down and cried.
[Charles Bean, Story of Anzac, vol. 2, Sydney 1924, p. 279]

Commanding the Turks at Chunuk Bair was Colonel Mustafa Kemal. Just before dawn on 10 August he prepared his men for a massed bayonet attack to drive the British troops, who now held the old Wellington Battalion's position, from the heights. Kemal later wrote:

The blanket of dawn had lifted. Now was the hour for the attack. I looked at my watch. It was nearly 4.30 am … I greeted the men and addressed them: 'Soldiers! There is no doubt that we can defeat the enemy opposing us. But don't you hurry, let me go in front first. When you see the wave of my whip all of you rush forward together'. Then I went to a point forward of the assault line, and, raising my whip, gave the signal for the assault.

This fierce Turkish rush swept the British troops away from Chunuk Bair. But as the Turks dashed down the slope on the other side towards the sea they were stopped and killed in their hundreds by New Zealand machine guns and the shells of British warships.

The August Offensive failed. The British troops who landed at Suvla Bay on the night of 6—7 August made little progress inland. A Gurkha unit which scaled the heights beyond Chunuk Bair was shot off the hill by artillery as it charged down the other side. The Australian attack further north got nowhere. In a sense, although the British Empire troops hung on here for another three and a half months until the evacuation, this was the end of the Gallipoli campaign.

When you have finished your Anzac Walk, and if time permits, you might like to make your way up the main road to Chunuk Bair. There you will find the New Zealand Memorial and facing it a huge statue of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who in 1923 became the first President of the Republic of Turkey. Gallipoli helped to make Atatürk as it also helped make the Anzac legend for New Zealand. On the New Zealand Memorial are these words:

In honour of the soldiers of the
New Zealand Expeditionary Force
8th August 1915
From the Uttermost Ends of the Earth

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A splendid holiday resort

To the west, across the sea, lay the islands of Imbros and Samothrace. The sun used to set behind Samothrace with all the glory for which sunsets in the Aegean Sea are famous. The view from Walker's Ridge at sundown on a fine day was hard to beat: its peaceful beauty ought never have been disturbed by the din of battle. Anzac would have been a splendid holiday resort in happier times, with its grand climate in the early summer months: fine golf links could be laid out along the beach between the old position and Suvla Bay; there is good sea-fishing, too; and those rugged hills must surely contain some kinds of game, while the sea-bathing is of the very best — the water clear and warm, and deep within a few yards of the shore.

[HM Alexander, On Two Fronts, London, 1917, pp. 166]

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Overlooking North Beach - Stop 14

Directions

Leave Walker's Ridge Cemetery and turn right down the track to the end of the ridge. Be careful here! There are no fences and the drop is almost sheer down to the gully below. Ahead of you the view is back down to where you began your 'Anzac Walk' at North Beach and the Anzac Commemorative Site.

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They made no sound as they walked

If you had gazed down on 13 November 1915 at about 1.30 pm from where you are standing now, you would have seen a tall man in the uniform of a British Field Marshal striding up one of the piers at North Beach. Behind him came a gaggle of generals and commanders, including Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood, for this was Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, Secretary of State for War in the British Cabinet and overall commander of the British Empire's armies in the field. Word quickly got around just who the famous visitor was and soldiers ran to the pier to cheer. Kitchener made his way through the crowd, stopping to chat to this man and that man, all the while telling them: 'The King has asked me to tell you how splendidly he thinks you have done, you have done splendidly, better even than I thought you would'.

With Kitchener in the lead, the entourage now made its way up the 'dusty, precipitous road' to Walker's Ridge and a trench looking out towards the Nek and up to Chunuk Bair. Then he went to a nearby position known as Bully Beef Sap and was shown the Anzac line — Pope's Hill, Quinn's Post and Lone Pine. Kitchener had come to see the situation at Gallipoli for himself. By 3.30 pm he was gone and by late November the British War Cabinet, after hearing from Kitchener, had decided to evacuate the three British positions on Gallipoli — Suvla, Anzac and Helles.

The decision was based on a number of concerns. Winter was coming and early gales had already shown that nature was capable of having a devastating effect on the precarious man-made piers of Gallipoli. On 27 November torrential rain turned the trenches into rivers and this was followed by high winds and snow. Sergeant Cyril Lawrence wrote in his diary:

Just fancy yourself, standing in a trench, a piercing wind roaring along it, the snow driving down it in great gusts. Everyone and everything coated white, your frozen feet over your boot tops in half frozen slush … Your feet and hands are paining you. Someone runs along the trench with your day's rations — a tin of Bully Beef and three hard biscuits. Water is short so you only get a half a cupful of tea with the information that this is to do for the day, as they are unable to land water.
[The Gallipoli Diary of Sergeant Lawrence of the Australian Engineers, Sir Ronald East (ed), Melbourne 1983, p. 118]

Up at the British positions at Suvla, thirty men were found in a trench frozen to death.

The Turkish Army was also preparing for the day when it could crush the Anzac position. At the end of September 1915, Bulgaria entered the war on the side of Germany and Turkey, making it possible to send heavy guns and ammunition overland to the Turks. By the spring of 1916, the Anzac positions, and those of the British at Suvla and Helles, might have been pulverized into submission by siege artillery. In general, it was felt that nothing more could be achieved at Gallipoli, so evacuation plans were drawn up and quickly implemented.

In stages, and at night, more than 41,000 men were shipped quietly away from Anzac. If the Turks had realised what was happening during this time, thousands of casualties might have been inflicted on the departing garrison, so great efforts were made to deceive the ever- watchful Turks that their enemies were merely preparing for winter. The Turks became accustomed to a lessening of activity through so-called 'silent stunts' during which there was no firing from the Anzac line and it might seem that a live and let live policy was being adopted. After 27 November, firing and bombardments were resumed as normal. On the final day of the evacuation — 19 December — various ruses were used. One group was ordered to hang around on Artillery Road, where they should be observed 'obviously loafing and smoking'. Others had a cricket match on Shell Green to convince the Turks that life was proceeding normally on Anzac.

What greatly distressed the Anzacs was having to leave their dead comrades behind. As the evacuation proceeded, little groups of men could be seen tidying up the cemeteries and individual graves. On the final day General Birdwood came ashore to say his personal farewell to Anzac. One soldier, pointing to a cemetery, said to him:

'I hope they won't hear us marching down the deres [valleys]'.

Much of the evacuation was conducted from the piers of North Beach, although Anzac Cove was used as well. Motor lighters took men and equipment out to waiting warships and transports, which then left for the base at Lemnos Island. On the night of 15 December, the men and mules of an Indian Mountain Battery came down to North Beach from the hills to the north:

At once I thought — 'My goodness, if the Turks don't see all this as it goes along they must be blind'. But as I went along behind them I began to notice how silently these mules behaved. They had big loads but they were perfectly quiet. They made no sound as they walked except for the slight jingle of a chain now and then … I doubt if at 1000 yards [914 metres] you could see them at all — possibly just a black serpentine streak.
[Unnamed diarist in Charles Bean, Story of Anzac, vol 2, p. 866]

The fleet that came to take the final parties away on the last two nights, 18—19 and 19—20 December, sailed from Imbros Island. As the warships and transports came in to anchor off the Anzac shore, nobody there could hear the normal rattle of the anchor chains. Instead, these were lowered silently by the sailors.

On the last night of all, small rear parties manned the trenches. Men ran around firing rifles and making enough noise to convince the Turks that the whole garrison was still there. Among the last to leave and head for North Beach was New Zealander Private Joe Gasparich, Auckland Infantry Battalion:

I walked through the trench and the floor was frozen hard … and when I brought my feet down they echoed right through the trench, down the gully, right down, and you could hear this echo running ahead … Talk about empty, I didn't see a soul … It was a lonely feeling … I was on my own at last.
[Gasparich quoted in Chris Pugsley, Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story, Auckland, 1998, p. 341]

At 4.00 am on 20 December there was one steamboat left at North Beach. Waiting beside it were Captain CM Staveley, the Royal Navy Anzac Beach Commander, and Colonel John Paton, commander of the Anzac rearguard, of Newcastle, New South Wales, and other officers. They waited ten more minutes for stragglers then cast off, Paton being the last to leave. Anzac was deserted.

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Here lies a Turk

They were some of our newer Australian soldiers — 17th Infantry — and that is how they regard the Turk and the Turk regards them. The most pathetic evidence that I have heard of is a little wooden cross found in the scrub, just two splinters of biscuit box tacked together, with the inscription 'Here lies a Turk'. The poor soul would probably turn in his grave if his ghost could see that rough cross above him. But he need not worry. It was put there in all sincerity. Some Australian found him and buried him exactly as he would bury one of his own men — with that last little homage to mark the resting place of a man fighting for his country.

[Charles Bean, dispatch, Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, 13 January 1916, p. 92]

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The last to leave

The last medical personnel of the 1st Australian Casualty Clearing Station had been by then ordered to embark. At 3.30 Paton gave to the remaining signal station at North Beach the word to telephone to the wireless operators — who were then alone on South Beach — an already prepared message for transmission to Godley: 'Evacuation completed. No casualties left ashore. One sent aboard'. Captain Watson of the 2nd Divisional Signal Company, however, found that the telephone line was dead. He therefore ran across Ari Burnu to South Beach, and breathlessly ordered the naval wireless operators, A.W. Herbert and A.E. Jones, to send a shortened message: 'Embarkation completed', and then ran back with them to North Beach, arriving to find the troops all on the last lighter, and Captain Littler standing by it on the pier. At about 4 a.m. the lighter sailed, but Paton with his staff officer Wisdom, Captain Staveley, Littler, and one or two others of the staff waited for ten minutes on the beach in case stragglers might arrive. As none came, at 4.10 they embarked in Captain Staveley's steamboat, the last to leave being Colonel Paton himself.

[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, vol 2, Sydney, 1924, p. 286]

AWM P00176.017

Anzac

Ah, well! We're gone! We're out of it now. We've got something else to do. But we all look back from the transport deck to the land-line far and blue:
Shore and valley are faded; fading are cliff and hill;
The land-line we called "Anzac" . . . and we'll call it "Anzac" still!

This last six months, I reckon, 'll be most of my life to me:
Trenches and shells, and snipers, and the morning light on the sea,
Thirst in the broiling mid-day, shouts and gasping cries,
Big guns' talk from the water, and . . . flies, flies, flies, flies, flies!

And all of our trouble wasted! All of it gone for nix!
Still . . . we kept our end up — and some of the story sticks.
Fifty years from on in Sydney they'll talk of our first big fight,
And even in little old, blind old England possibly some one might

But, seeing we had to clear, for we couldn't get on no more,
I wish that, instead of last night, it had been the night before.
Yesterday poor Jim stopped one. Three of us buried Jim —
I know a woman in Sydney that thought the world of him.

She was his mother. I'll tell her — broken with grief and pride —
"Mother" was Jim's last whisper. That was all. And died.
Brightest and bravest and best of us all — none could help but to love him —
And now . . . he lies there under the hill, with a wooden cross above him.

That's where it gets me twisted. The rest of it I don't mind,
But it don't seem right for me to be off, and to leave old Jim behind.
Jim, just quietly sleeping; and hundreds and thousands more;
For graves and crosses are mighty thick from Quinn's Post down to the shore!

Better there than in France, though, with the German's dirty work:
I reckon the Turk respects us, as we respect the Turk;
Abdul's a good, clean fighter — we've fought him, and we know —
And we've left a letter behind us to tell him we found him so.

Not just to say, precisely, "Good-bye," but "Au revoir"!
Somewhere or other we'll meet again, before the end of the war
But I hope it'll be in a wider place, with a lot more room on the map,
And the airmen over the fight that day'll see a bit of a scrap!

Meanwhile, here's health to the Navy, that took us there, and away;
Lord! They're miracle-workers — and fresh ones every day!
My word! Those Midis [Midshipmen] in the cutters! Aren't they
pooroperly keen!
Don't ever say England's rotten — or not to us, who've seen!

Well! We're gone. We're out of it all! We've somewhere else to fight.
And we strain our eyes from the transport deck, but "Anzac" is out of sight!
Valley and shore are vanished; vanished are cliff and hill;
And we'll never go back to "Anzac" . . . But I think that some of us will!

['Anzac', in Oliver Hogue, Trooper Bluegum at the Dardanelles, London, 1916]

Freed of the tension and fear that shadowed them on Gallipoli, the campaign's survivors regrouped in Egypt, and were joined by fresh reinforcements from Australia. In early 1916 they embarked for France and the Western Front, where the sight of green fields made a welcome contrast to Gallipoli's barren peninsula or Egypt's desert sands, and they were issued with new equipment, including steel helmets — but few who made that Mediterranean crossing would survive to see peace in 1918. By war's end, the number of Australians killed or wounded in battle would total more than 200,000.

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Anzac Walk map

Copyright

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