At dawn on 10th August, the enemy on the crest line above the position of the 9th Worcesters opened fire and commenced a bombing attack. Great bombs were rolled down to burst in our lines. Then the enemy came over the crest of the ridge in wave after wave of densely packed troops. Firing as rapidly as possible, the 9th Worcesters held their ground, meeting and repulsing the enemy’s rushes. For some three hours a desperate struggle raged. By 7 am Colonel Nunn had been killed. Captain Rolph, mortally wounded, fired his revolver up the slopes as he lay dying. At last, when nearly all the officers and most of the men were down, the remnant of the 39th Brigade fell back to the more sheltered position in the dead ground at the head of the ravine.

Lieutenant Colonel Mervyn Nunn (Sp.Mem.7), commanding officer of 9/Worcesters, was killed on 10 August during the Turkish counter attack, and rests today in this cemetery, one of the few marked graves. Born in 1864 and educated at Harrow, he began his military career in 1886, seeing service in the Nile Expedition of 1897 and during the Boer War in 1902. Having retired from the army in 1906, he rejoined the regiment at the outbreak of war. His epitaph reads: “I have fought a good fight”. Bean wrote of his visit here in 1919:

We could see the bones of men on two hills ahead of us, somewhat as in the above sketch, and (so we) cut across the valley intervening. We found on both the further heights (they were steep, lofty spurs, leading to the crest of the range just north of Chunuk Bair) the remains of the Worcestershire Regiment and a few South Lancashires. Those at the very top seemed to have been attacking a Turkish trench or redoubt on the hilltop. None had gone quite to the top, but we found them very near to it, and some of those on top had bombs, old jam tin bombs, lying near them. Hughes came across what seemed to be a colonel’s [probably Nunn’s] coat; and the buttons showed that he belonged to the Worcestershire Regiment ... I have nowhere, except at The Nek, seen the dead lying so thick as on these slopes and those of The Farm. We searched for signs of the general [Baldwin] but could not find any.45