Lone Pine: For evermore …

On the day of the Gallipoli landings, Australians briefly held a part of a plateau with a notable feature: a single pine tree. The place became known as Lone Pine, named after the popular song The trail of the Lonesome Pine. The tree was destroyed during the campaign; the name stuck, but the Australian hold on the position did not. Between May and August, Lone Pine became a Turkish stronghold, which they knew as Bloody Ridge. Richard Longstaff and his older brother William from the coastal town of Kiama in New South Wales were both at the landing. Richard was killed at Quinn's Post on the 4th of May 1915. William survived long enough to fight in the August Offensive, the last-ditch effort to break out of the Anzac beachhead. The offensive began with the Battle of Lone Pine. The fighting at Lone Pine was ferocious. An intense naval and land bombardment fell on the Turkish lines before the assault. Then at 5:30 pm on the 6th of August, 3 whistle blasts signalled the beginning of the attack. Men of the 1st Brigade climbed out of their trenches and from an underground sap dug into no man's land, and charged toward the Turkish trenches. They quickly discovered sections of the Turkish front line were protected by a covering of logs, timber and earth, which had not been destroyed by the bombardment. Some Australians dropped through the gaps in the covering, but most ran onto the rear trenches, fighting there or working their way back to the front line. They scrambled to defend the newly won trenches. The fighting was close and pitiless. Groups of men separated by hastily erected sandbag barricades hurled bombs at each other. Soldiers dashed around corners firing at the shapes of the enemy. Men with quick hands caught Turkish bombs, threw them back or smothered them with half-filled sandbags. But a shorter fuse might mean the bomb exploding as it was caught, causing dreadful wounds, blowing men's hands off, blinding or killing them. The Australians threw their own improvised jam-tin bombs manufactured down at the beach where old jam tins were packed with barbed wire, scraps of metal, nails and gunpowder. The fighting at Lone Pine was hand-to-hand. Men killed with bayonets and entrenching tools through a maze of trenches. The Australians identified each other in the confined dark trenches by white armbands and calico patches on their backs. The Battle of Lone Pine was a diversion to draw Turkish reinforcements from the main Anzac assault further up the heights on the Sari Bair range and British landings to the north at Suvla Bay. By the 10th of August, the Turkish counterattacks at Lone Pine had ceased, their reserves now directed to repel the main Allied assaults. The Battle of Lone Pine ended in an Australian victory, but the offensive was a failure. Lone Pine remained in Australian hands until the evacuation in December, but the Turks never relinquished the high ground. Australian casualties amounted to more than 2,000. The Turkish had lost an estimated 7,000 killed or wounded. Seven Australians were awarded the Victoria Cross for their actions in the battle, a testament to the ferocity of the fighting. Lone Pine had been so brutal and fought in such confined spaces, that while the battle raged, the dead could not be removed nor the wounded carried to the rear. They lay together, thick on the ground, piled one on the other. Men were forced to walk on the bodies of fallen comrades. The sheer number of dead and the difficulty in conducting burials meant many remained forever missing. William Longstaff was among them, though his family had been informed only that he was wounded. In September, his father wrote to the Army seeking information. ‘Was his wound serious? Has he recovered from it? Or is he still in hospital? If so, what hospital is he in? Will he be fit for the front again when he recovers? I received wire informing me that he was wounded, but I've had no further information on the subject.’ In 1916, the Australian Red Cross Missing and Wounded Bureau launched an investigation into what had happened to him. As they did for 10s of 1000s of others throughout the war, Bureau staff collected reports from veterans of the battle to try to establish William's fate. Corporal Harold Fawcett reported that after the Lone Pine fight, he heard that William had been seen lying dead on the parapet. Though he had not seen the body himself, Fawcett believed there was no doubt William had been killed. ‘As for the missing part, this is easily explained. Dozens of those men never had a disc or paybook taken from them but had dirt heaped on top of them.’ When the Graves Registration Unit returned to Gallipoli at the end of the war, the landscape itself had changed. Shrubs had grown back, covering some graves. Many of the wooden crosses, which were dotted across the peninsula at the end of 1915, had disappeared, having been used as firewood. Lieutenant Cyril Hughes led the GRU's Australian section, working primarily in areas where the Australians had fought. Hughes was a surveyor and civil engineer before the war and a veteran of the Gallipoli Campaign. The people who worked to build the cemeteries at Gallipoli were a diverse group, including Australians and New Zealanders, Turks, Greeks, Russians and Britons. They faced the same challenges of climate and terrain as those who had fought in the campaign. The steep ridge lines that had made the movement of casualties, food, water and equipment difficult during the campaign also posed problems in the construction of the cemeteries. Dry summers made it difficult to establish the trees and gardens that are an essential element of all Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries. Water had to be carried up to the heights in petrol tins on donkeys. In his design, architect Sir John Burnett addressed his concerns about the potential impact of erosion by consolidating the burials that were at risk into larger permanent cemeteries. These were protected by stone-lined ditches and wide belts of trees to hold the ground firm. The Lone Pine battlefield cemetery became permanent, incorporating graves from nearby sites that had to be brought to this central location. Among them, Brown's Dip cemetery, located off Artillery Road at the head of Victoria Gulley, behind what had been the Australian trenches between April and August 1915. The Brown's Dip plot can still be seen today at the western end of the Lone Pine Cemetery. As the construction of the cemeteries at Gallipoli continued, attempts to try to locate and identify the graves of the missing, including William Longstaff, went on. In 1921, the Australian Imperial Force Base Records Office contacted William's father, John. The Grave Services Unit had been unable to find any trace of William. They asked if he had any correspondence surrounding the circumstances of his son's death, which might assist in the search. John replied, ‘I know nothing as to the last resting place of my dear son, W.D. Longstaff. I have been waiting all these years in the hope that some information would come from your office. But now I see the mystery must go unsolved to the end of time.’ William Longstaff's grave was never found. He is commemorated with a special memorial in Lone Pine Cemetery, which records that he is believed buried in the cemetery. The personal inscription chosen by his family reads, ‘He fell that others might be free’. His brother Richard Longstaff also has no known grave and is among the more than 4,900 Australians and New Zealanders commemorated on the Lone Pine Memorial. The memorial stands on the site of the fiercest fighting at Lone Pine. The Longstaff family shared the grief of so many others whose loved ones were listed as missing. Theirs was a story of both loss and an enduring uncertainty. Knowledge of the last resting place of those who are today commemorated on memorials had vanished in the chaos or aftermath of battle.