CHAPTER 14

Remembrance

The waste of life at The Nek in many ways epitomises the First World War. After Gallipoli the AIF would be presented with further impossible tasks, and again determination and courage would not prevent tragedy or defeats. The losses became part of Australia’s continuing and mounting ‘roll of honour’. At Fromelles and Bullecourt in France, and at the third battle of Ypres in Belgium, the losses were on a vastly greater scale. At Fromelles, on 19 July 1916, an Australian division attacked and was repulsed by the Germans for the loss of 5500 casualties. Yet even when compared against these big battles, The Nek is still remembered for its total futility.

Those who survived the war returned home to try to take up life where they had left off. Many succeeded. Others were invalids or bore mental scars from their experiences; they and their families sometimes suffered decades of torment. The veterans – they were called ‘returned men’ back then – retained a common bond and were a visible part of the population for a further half century. They were never more visible than on Anzac Day each year, when many of them would assemble wearing their medals, to march once again under banners announcing the names of their proud units. But time slowly overcame them until none was left. Lionel Simpson, the last known living survivor of the charge, died in 1991 aged 100.¹

Frederic Hughes lived a long and full life until his death in 1944. After the war he returned to his business affairs, his interest in the turf, and his military club. At the club he was remembered as ‘an attractive conversationalist and with advancing years, he did not commit that intolerable and yet widespread social sin of becoming either a “club bore” or a “Colonel Blimp”’.²

Antill returned to a military post in Australia. He was in New South Wales for a short time, then in 1918 he was appointed Commandant in South Australia. In an interesting twist of fate, he was there in August 1919 to accept the salute of the 9th Light Horse on the regiment’s return from the war. It had been five years since he had been introduced to the unit amid some controversy, but it must have seemed a lifetime. This time he complimented the men on their smart appearance and steadiness. He had been appointed CMG for his war service, and in 1924 he finally retired from the army with the rank of major general.

As an old man Antill bore his disappointments quietly, although he was clearly angered by the Australian and British official historians’ accounts of his actions on Gallipoli. He once told his daughter: ‘Keep your chin up. Have no regrets. Life is made up of disappointment.’³ She must have been aware that controversy had surrounded his public and private life, but claimed that ‘he cared so little for praise or blame’. In his last years he had few close friends but remained active and alert and involved himself in many interests. He retained his enthusiasm for the theatre and with his daughter, Rose Antill de Warren, drew on his family’s history to help write a three-part drama, The Emancipist, which was published in 1936. But he was already a sick man; he died of cancer on 1 March 1937.

The tragedy of war was again visited on the families of some of the central characters of The Nek saga. Reynell’s only son was killed in 1940 while serving with the Royal Air Force. Like White’s son, Alexander, Richard Reynell had grown up with pride in the memory of his brave father but sorrow in not having known him. In the Second World War Alexander White was a medical officer in the 8th Australian Division in Malaya. Elsewhere in this division was Brazier’s son, Arthur, who was a member of Western Australia’s 2/4th Machine Gun Battalion. Both men became prisoners of war of the Japanese following the surrender of Singapore. White survived, but Brazier died in captivity in 1943. His father lived long enough to receive the news of his loss: war had dealt him another bitter blow.

Noel Brazier lived out his life on his property, part of which was broken up for soldier-settlement. A neighbour recalled: ‘Although socially they mixed very little in the district, the Brazier family, like all the established farmers, were very supportive of the Returned Soldier Settlers. The colonel was an aloof man, but his wife was a beautiful and gracious lady, always a leader in any scheme to improve conditions in the district.’⁴ In his later years Brazier remained outspoken and sometimes wrote to the newspapers on matters as diverse as politics, local government and even road manners. He died at his home in September 1947.

After the war Charles Bean spent the next two decades writing his history of the AIF’s exploits. As soon as he could after peace came, he went back to Turkey to walk the abandoned battlefields of Gallipoli. Among those accompanying him on the 1919 Historical Mission were George Lambert the artist and Hubert Wilkins the famous explorer and photographer. Bean wanted to go to familiar places once more to see the battlefields from the Turkish viewpoint, and to solve what he called ‘the riddles of Anzac’. It was an important opportunity for him as a historian and provided a last chance to obtain some relics from the campaign for display back in Australia. Lambert and Wilkins were each required to produce a visual record of the former battlefields.

George Washington Lambert had made his impact as a painter in Australia almost 20 years before the war. He had been living in Britain when war broke out and, in November 1917, he was approached by the Australian government to record some of the work of the AIF. Even while the fighting was still in progress, Bean had formed some ideas for a war memorial museum to be established in Australia as an enduring record of the AIF’s part in the Great War. Now on Gallipoli he discussed with Lambert his wish for two large paintings. One would depict the landing of the Anzacs on 25 April 1915, and the other the charge at The Nek. These paintings would be done later, but the visit to Gallipoli enabled Lambert to study the battle site, its surroundings, and even the morning light.

Bean and Lambert climbed up to The Nek on the first day of the Historical Mission’s visit. Lambert was to say that ‘for the point of view of the artist-historian The Neck [sic] is a wonderful setting to the tragedy’.⁵ Eventually, the loneliness of the whole area, and the remains of so many dead to which teams of war graves personnel were attending, affected Bean and Lambert, and both men were relieved to finally leave in early March on the first stage of their separate journeys back to Australia.

Lambert’s large and graphic painting The charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at The Nek was completed for the Australian War Memorial Museum in 1925. This museum, which exhibited in Melbourne and Sydney, was the beginning of Bean’s dream, which culminated in the opening of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra in 1941. In Sydney the museum’s guidebook drew visitors’ attention to the newly installed painting, and to a soldier’s nearby haversack (‘shot through and through’) which Bean had collected from the site of the battle. The charge was described in the book as ‘that wonderful episode in our country’s history’.⁶

When Charles Bean and his party walked over the old battle site in 1919, it was still littered with the scattered bones and other grisly remains of the dead, abandoned when the allied troops had evacuated four years earlier. They also saw that the Turks had erected a monument to commemorate their efforts in resisting the invader. The place which had been a critical objective throughout the campaign had become one of historical and symbolic importance to both Australians and Turks.

It had already been determined that the empire’s war dead would be honoured by proper burials and that the missing would be commemorated with their names on memorials. In accordance with the Imperial War Graves Commission’s decision concerning the handling of the Gallipoli soldiers’ graves, most of the Australians were buried near where their remains lay rather than being concentrated in one or two large cemeteries. And so graves were made at The Nek and the pathetic remnants of more than 300 men were buried between the old opposing lines. Only ten of these men could be given names.⁷ At Lone Pine a large memorial was built, and here the names of all those whose bodies could not be found or identified were inscribed. Of the 427 names of the missing officers and men of the light horse regiments recorded on the memorial, 161 belong to the 8th Light Horse.

The Nek cemetery is a flat grassed regular plot measuring 25 x 33 metres, contained within a low stone wall. At the head of the plot is a short raised wall embossed with a Christian cross. Within the cemetery there are only five identified graves under a row of modest flat headstones. Another five headstones record graves of men whose exact locations in the cemetery are not known.

One of the sparse headstones bears the name of Trooper Geoffrey Howell, whose mate in the 10th Light Horse later recalled the awfulness of his death. The two men had made the charge from the trench and lay out in no-man’s-land under intense fire. ‘I heard someone calling me and discovered it was Jeff Howell, a particular chum of mine,’ wrote Sergeant ‘Matie’ Hoops. ‘He desired me to shoot him as he said he was settled. It was a rare sight to see the smile on his face all the time – I will never forget it. Poor fellow, he got a bullet through the head a little later.’⁸

The Nek cemetery looks almost empty as the remaining 316 burials lie unmarked in six rows beneath the grass. There are those of Australians and New Zealanders, some of whose deaths date back to the first days of the fighting. However, the majority are of men of the 8th and 10th Light Horse Regiments who were killed on 7 August. The plot is screened on one side by cypress trees, pines and coarse scrub. Only a few metres away traces of old trenches and evidence of collapsed tunnels are still to be found.

Adjoining the Australian cemetery is the Turkish memorial. Following the defeat of the invader, the Turks erected three monuments at Anzac to celebrate their victory. That at The Nek is the only original one remaining, although new monuments have been constructed at various sites. Known as Sergeant Mehmet’s Memorial (Mehmet Çavuş Anıtı), it has become a focus for Turkish commemoration. It is in the form of a monolith and has been improved and enclosed in more recent times, with only the base being retained from the old wartime monument.

It is said that Sergeant Mehmet fought here in the first few days of the campaign, until his death. He is said to have cried ‘I die happily for my country, and you, my comrades, will avenge me.’⁹ Whether the sergeant was real or mythical is less important than the role he fulfils today by representing the ordinary Turkish soldiers’ deeds and sacrifice.

Viewed from far away the old battlefield may not seem to have changed much since the young soldiers of two nations faced each other across this narrow patch of land high on a Turkish coastal ridge. But seen closer up, it is quite different from when it was heavily scarred with trenches and saps. The men of both sides suffered equally, and this was a place of brave deeds and tragedy for all. When the invaders went away, the trenches and tunnels were abandoned. The remains of the dead lay littered about until 1919, even while the victors were building their monument. Eventually, the terrible smell, remembered with horror by the soldiers, was swept away by sea breezes, the trenches crumbled and filled leaving only shallow traces, while the combatants went off to face an uncertain future.

In Australia the action at The Nek has been depicted in paintings, literature and film. It has been described in fact and in fiction. Bean gave a detailed reconstruction in the official history and Lambert had made it the subject of one of his most famous war paintings.

In 1981 interest in The Nek was revived by the release of the Australian film Gallipoli. The film appeared at a strange time. The Vietnam War and the divisions that it had created within the community were still fresh in the public’s mind and old war stories did not seem to be much in demand. Gallipoli was a product of the imagination of Peter Weir, then a young director who, in the previous half dozen years, had established a reputation with a number of visually stimulating and thought-provoking movies. Weir had visited Gallipoli five years earlier and was haunted by what he found. He also drew inspiration from Bean’s writing and from the work of Bill Gammage, a historian who had brought a fresh approach to war history by drawing on preserved accounts of individual’s experiences. Gammage assisted in the production of the film, and the screenplay was written by David Williamson.

Gallipoli reached an enormous Australian audience, was distributed overseas and was even shown in Turkey. Today many Australians draw their images of the 1915 campaign from Weir’s influential film. In the final climactic scene the story’s hero, young Archie Hamilton from Western Australia, is shown running across no-man’s-land. In the words of the screenplay: ‘he has dropped his rifle and is sprinting his last race. Inevitably he is hit by a machine-gun blast but it appears as though he has just breasted an invisible tape.’Weir captured the same fatal moment that George Lambert had presented in his painting.

For a brief time in 1990 the Gallipoli battles again came to local and international attention when some of the old adversaries joined together to mark the 75th anniversary of the campaign. In a remarkable exercise, the Australian government was able to gather together a band of aged veterans to take them back to the small coastal strip in Turkey where they had once risked their lives and lost their youth. Australia watched emotionally as these men, representatives of a vanishing generation, received their salute. From that time on, large numbers of Australians have gone to Gallipoli to mark Anzac Day each year. The last Anzac died in 2002, more than a decade after the passing of the last man to have survived the charge at The Nek.

Despite the passage of time, changing perceptions and the disappearance of the veterans, the Anzac story remains an enduring Australian legend. The charge at The Nek is a central component of this story. It possesses a grand heroic quality, despite also being a testament to the tragedy of war and a reminder of the terrible cost in human lives upon which military legends are built.