High above Anzac Cove on the Gallipoli peninsula is a place where few visitors stop because there is so little to see: a tiny war cemetery called The Nek at Russell’s Top, up Walker’s Ridge.
Most Australians and New Zealanders knew of the bloodstained Walker’s Ridge once. It was as famous and familiar in battlefield despatches as the Dardanelles campaign itself.
Today you don’t have to climb the ridge to get to The Nek. You can drive there, taking a small turn-off from the road that now snakes its way along the front lines between the battlefields halfway up the Sari Bair Range.
You can walk much of this road in less than an hour. Famous names like Lone Pine and Quinn’s Post are marked, other stop-off points, and you stride on from them, up the hill past The Nek, to the bushy bumps known as Baby 700 and Battleship Hill, and then on further up to the commanding hump of Chunuk Bair. Everything is so close here. Chunuk Bair is only a few kilometres from where the first Australians landed at the Cove on 25 April 1915, way down there below the wrinkled crevices and to the left.
The Anzacs’ front line here was reached from North Beach below by the long and dangerous climb up this rough and jagged spur. Men toiled up and down here constantly with food, ammunition and water. Or they waited it out, simply existing in shallow burrows and on ledges on the sides of Walker’s Ridge. They were under constant threat by snipers hidden in the crags around them and by sudden, vicious bursts of exploding shrapnel, as they waited their turn to go up, yet again, and fill the trenches facing the Turks only a matter of metres away at the top.
At the end of that first day, 25 April, there were 2,000 men dead or wounded, and on the beach the gravel and the rocks were slippery with their blood.
By the end of eight-and-a-half months of the Gallipoli campaign, nearly 60,000 men would have lived on the heights, the slopes and the valleys here, like rodents, scuttling along the maze of trenches and saps, with the flies forming a constant blue-green spread on their food to match the colour of the swollen corpses in No Man’s Land. A trench life of bullets and bombs, snipers and shrapnel, blood and bayonets, diarrhoea and enteric fever.
When you’re here alone, it is not hard to feel you are with the spirits of the Anzacs on Gallipoli. Walk the battlefields, climb the ravines, scramble up the crumbling gullies … then stop.
Sometimes you feel there is someone walking beside or behind you. You look around – nobody.
Yellow gorse blazes. There is the smell of wild thyme. Tiny birds twitter in the prickly undergrowth. A hawk hovers over the nearby Sphinx.
Nobody.
Then silence again, deep brooding silence. And sadness. It envelops you like a blanket.
Once there was chatter and chiacking, laughter here too, 90 years ago. Along with the shriek of shellfire, the stutter of rifle fire, the snicker of machine-guns, the thud of homemade bombs. The screams and cries for help of the dying and wounded. Now only stillness.
The first thing that strikes any new visitor to Gallipoli is how very small and rugged the whole killing ground is. English names have been given to all these gullies, ledges, dips and valleys – Turkish features so insignificant to farmers and fishermen until war came here.
Walker’s Ridge, for instance, should really be Serce Tepesi, which means ‘Sparrow Hill’, after the little birds that again dart and chatter uninterrupted in the bushes growing over the holes that were once dugouts and the furrows that were trenches.
Here on top of Sari Bair, part of the Kocacimen Tepe range that joins a spine along part of the peninsula, the distance between the Australian and Turkish trenches was little more than today’s two-lane stretch of winding bitumen. Easy then for a quick throw of a handmade jam-tin bomb or a pot shot by a sniper with a spotter looking over the parapet through a hand-held periscope. The cemetery at The Nek is built over this short corridor – No Man’s Land, as it was 90 years ago. It measures only 25 metres by 33 metres. There are only ten raised grave markers in its springy turf, set in two clumps of five, separated by the grass where a few small wild mauve anemones glow in the spring sunshine.
A low stone wall surrounds the cemetery. Its raised and simple main memorial is common to all 31 cemeteries here, made from clean Turkish limestone, carved with a cross and the words ‘Their Name Liveth For Evermore’. Around the cemetery are carefully planted flowerbeds with purple irises bursting out of bud, and there is the scent of wild thyme and rosemary in the air. The soil is crumbly, brownish yellow, half clay with small round pebbles. There is a glorious view to the north, over the prickly oak bushes that cover the ridge, down to the blue Aegean Sea and a flat white shimmering salt lake that points the way to Suvla. To the left and right of this narrow cemetery the land falls away down steep and wild razorbacks, places where only goats could carefully pick their way without falling.
There are no clues in the grave markers to tell us what happened here. Five of the graves honour those who are known to be buried in this cemetery; the other five mark special memorials to those only believed to be buried here. Only one grave has an epitaph:
TROOPER H.E. STANLEY 8LH. AGE 20
ANOTHER HERO’S PART IS DONE
ANOTHER SOUL GONE WEST
Trooper 857 Stanley. Young Bert Stanley was only nineteen years and three months old when he enlisted in 1914, riding away from the property called ‘Mount Cole’ near Ararat in far-western Victoria, where he worked as a farm labourer and orchardist. His enlistment papers show he was nearly 5 feet 9 inches tall, weighed 151 pounds, and had light brown hair, a fair complexion and grey eyes.
Bert’s father was dead so, on 9 November 1914, it was his mother, Janet, who scrawled in ink on a piece of lined note paper: ‘I freely give my consent for my son Herbert Stanley to volunteer for service.’ Almost exactly a year later Janet would begin receiving a pension of £1 a week from a grateful nation, in recognition of her son’s death, and in 1921, she was given a memorial scroll and a message from King George V.
Then, on Anzac Day 1922, a message was sent from Australia House in London to the Department of Defence in Melbourne. Bert Stanley’s identity disc had been picked up outside The Nek Cemetery, Anzac, ‘separate from any remains with which it might have been connected’, and the Imperial War Graves Commission (as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission was then known) had ‘intimated that it is their intention to add Tpr. Stanley’s name to the “presumed to be buried roll” for the cemetery’. His mother received the worn identity disc two months later. His grave could now be marked with the epitaph that she chose.
And so Bert Stanley lies up here beyond Walker’s Ridge on top of a scrubby peak in Turkey, the only Australian light horse trooper really personally remembered here.
Behind the cemetery’s main memorial is a grove of pine trees where the wind sighs. Beneath the tree nearest to the road is a bronze plaque, modelled and placed there by an Australian called Ross Bastiaan, who has dedicated himself to remember the fallen in foreign fields. But the plaque is now weathered dull by the severe Gallipoli winters and the harsh summer sun, so much so that the words (in both English and Turkish) are sometimes hard to make out. ‘The Nek’, reads the heading, almost half covered by pine needles and crusted with bird droppings. Below it there is the following inscription:
This key position defended vigorously by both sides saw repeated attacks across this narrow ridge. The Anzac trenches were located close to the cemetery. The Turkish trenches originated near the bare raised memorial stone on your right and went in 8 tiers to the top of the next hill (Baby 700).
A courageous but futile attack by the Australians was made on August 7, 1915 when over 300 men were killed immediately in front of you.
In fact, 326 soldiers of the British Empire, some from earlier fighting, lie here, in six rows under the turf, from a battlefield area that could be covered by just three tennis courts. Most are the men of the 3rd Australian Light Horse Brigade.
Just after dawn on that day in August 1915, some 600 men charged across this tiny space in four lines that followed one after another, 150 men at a time. They did not hesitate as they ran to their deaths wearing ragged shorts and worn flannel shirts, with roughly stitched white patches on the back and white armbands – for the purpose of recognition during the expected hand-to-hand fighting with the Turks.
The Australians were armed with rifles, but with no bullets in the breech. Only fixed bayonets. And they were mown down like wheat before a combine harvester. Flattened by the hailstorm of enemy rifle fire and the torrents of lead from machine-guns that hosed this tiny battlefield, back and forth, back and forth, from the eight tiers of trenches on the rising hillock of Baby 700 ahead. It was a massacre.
The Turks had also charged down this hill and across the same piece of ground, just five weeks earlier, in another feat of heroic madness. They’d lost at least as many soldiers, probably many more. The Turks now call this place Cesarit Tepe (‘Hill of Valour’).
Their memorial is half hidden in the pine grove, where their trenches began, almost discreetly veiled away from the bare Australian plot. Here each March they celebrate the Battle of Çannakale, the glorious victory of 1915 when Mustafa Kemal – later the legendary Atatürk, creator of modern, secular Turkey – took on the might of the invading Allies, sunk half their navy and, after a long and bitter land battle, forced the invaders to abandon the peninsula and go home.
It cost the Allies over 141,000 casualties, but the Turks nearly 214,000 men, including 86,000 dead or missing.
Most of their fallen have no known graves. In fact, there are very few Turkish burial grounds, the majority of the dead having tumbled into abandoned trenches and tunnels or over cliffs. The bone shards are still washed to the surface after the winter rains, brittle as teacher’s chalk or crumbly like feta cheese. Turk or Australian, New Zealander, Briton or Frenchman, there is no difference when the bones are washed up. It is not hard to find them.
And with the bone shards comes the detritus of battle. A brass bullet casing now verdigris green, the firing-pin imprint still marking a definite full stop on the detonator cap; squares of shell casing like Scrabble tiles; thin Turkish bullets and fatter Australian bullets lying like sullen lead slugs in the yellow-brown dirt; wafer-thin rusty slivers of bully beef cans; brown shards of shattered stone rum jars; and, occasionally, uniform buttons that still gleam when washed and polished.
During the eight-and-a-half months of the Gallipoli campaign, about 1,000,000 men from both sides fought here. Between one-third and a half of that figure became casualties.
Some 60,000 Australians, the majority of them very young, came to fight on Gallipoli against an enemy that most had never heard of when they rushed to join up eight months before. A total 8,709 were to be killed in action or died of wounds.
The dead – the identifiable dead – were buried in the 31 cemeteries that sprinkle the beaches, the valleys, the ridges and the plains, with their flat, identical concrete markers pushing up through the well-tended turf like orderly rows of flat grey mushrooms. So many of the dead were never identified.
The remains of those who died on No Man’s Land that dreadful day on The Nek were not found until 1919, when the ridge was visited by the Australian Historical Mission and the Imperial War Graves Commission.
‘We found the low scrub there literally strewn with their relics,’ wrote Australia’s official war historian C.E.W. Bean in his account of the mission’s work. His companion, artist George Lambert, insisted on going back there one morning so he could feel the atmosphere, and to draw in the dawn light in which the charge at The Nek had been made. The famous painting that resulted now hangs in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Below it, there are display cabinets full of pieces they collected: a water bottle pock-sieved with bullet holes, a frayed dark-stained canvas fragment, a pile of sharp-pointed, spent bullets …
‘Very cold, bleak and lonely,’ wrote Lambert in his diary, ‘the jackals, damn them, were chorusing their hate, the bones showed up white even in the faint dawn and I felt rotten … the worst feature of this after battle work is that the silent hills and valleys sit stern and unmoved, callous of the human, and busy only in growing bush and sliding earth to cover the scars left by the war-disease.’
The silent hills and valleys still sit stern and unmoved today. The scars are still there, zigzag depressions under the prickle bush where men once lived and died in the trenches.
The bodies of some of those who died at The Nek on 7 August, those who died of their wounds in the trenches or whose bodies were hauled in by grappling hooks thrown out afterwards, are buried elsewhere. The epitaphs of these men were supplied by their loved ones and added to the markers when the Imperial War Graves Commission had finished its work. They scream out today across the decades, rage against the sadness and futility of war.
Just a short stroll from The Nek is another small cemetery on Walker’s Ridge, where a further 92 men are buried or remembered. The graves are separated into two plots by an old trench line that runs through the middle.
There in the second row, grave C4, lies Trooper Harold Rush, aged 23, of the 10th Light Horse. He was originally an apprentice clothier, born in Suffolk, England, who sailed off to Australia to start a new life, free of class distinction, as a farmer in Western Australia. He would have spoken with the soft singing burr of the English countryside, yet he spoke in the words of an Australian.
Trooper Rush died at The Nek. Back in Britain, his father, in service at Broome Hall (the large country house later to be the seat of the descendants of Lord Kitchener), chose the epitaph etched on his son’s headstone:
HIS LAST WORDS
‘GOODBYE COBBER
GOD BLESS YOU’
Each year, growing numbers of pilgrims come to this remote peninsula over 300 kilometres from the great city of Istanbul with its ancient mosques, minarets and sultans’ palaces. They come here for Anzac Day, the anniversary of that moment in time – 4.18 am on Sunday, 25 April 1915 – when the first boats grounded in Anzac Cove and the struggle began. It is commemorated each year by the thousands of people who shiver for hours wrapped in sleeping bags and flags, awaiting the dawn service. They pause and they cry as they read the words of Kemal Atatürk on the massive concrete memorial erected here by the Turks:
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,
Yours 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.
The pilgrims today are mostly young. They have established a new tradition. The first real pilgrimage back here was in 1925, when 400 survivors and relatives came aboard the Ormonde for the unveiling of the New Zealand Memorial on Chunuk Bair.
A year later Stella d’ltalia sailed in with 300 passengers. From 1936, however, the peninsula became a Turkish military zone again and for 30 years visitors were required to have formal permission to enter, with a military escort.
Then things began to change. Film-maker Peter Weir visited in 1976, discovered relics in Shrapnel Valley, and said he ‘felt like an archaeologist wandering through the ruins of some earlier Australian civilisation’. He was inspired to make the moving film Gallipoli, which created enormous interest – a yearning, even – especially in the young, to see the peninsula for themselves. Interest was boosted further in 1990 when a specially equipped Qantas Boeing 747 flew the last remaining 100 Anzacs to Turkey for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the landing, and again in 2000 when 10,000 Australians came to Gallipoli to commemorate the eighty-fifth anniversary with Prime Minister John Howard.
Today, visiting Gallipoli at this time has become an established rite of passage. Australians and New Zealanders make their way to their own Mecca, trying to explore their own kind of national legacy, the hard-to-explain words of the Anzac legend, the mystery of its mantra: fortitude, friendship, kindness, humour and irreverence.
Who were these Anzacs exactly? Why did they come here? What happened to them? Again and again the questions are asked as the young roam the cemeteries before and after the Anzac Day ceremonies, reading the family inscriptions, absorbing the grief, learning of an age altogether foreign to Australia today. It was an age when men went off to war to fight for God, King and Empire; when Australians were British. But it does relate to today because the men who fought were the same ages as many of today’s pilgrims, and they left mothers, sweethearts, wives and families back in their remote island home so very far away.
The Anzacs came here as part of a large Allied expeditionary force that was landed on the Gallipoli peninsula in the second year of the First World War as a strategy to break the trench-warfare deadlock on Europe’s western front. The aim was to secure the important straits of the Dardanelles, cause a Turkish surrender at Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), and then open up a new southern front against Germany and its allies.
But the Gallipoli campaign was ill-planned and an almost total shambles from start to finish, soon getting itself bogged down itself into a stalemate interrupted by desperate hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches. The only real success occurred when the Allies were eventually forced to evacuate, and the top-secret withdrawal operation resulted in just a handful of casualties.
In between the landing and the evacuation was the August Offensive, when a series of co-ordinated actions were launched to try to break out of the impasse. Although it was only one of a number of failed actions at that time, there was nothing sadder or more futile than the charge of the 8th and 10th regiments of the 3rd Australian Light Horse Brigade at The Nek. It was heroic but it could have been stopped. In the words of Lieutenant Colonel Noel Brazier, commanding officer of the 10th, it was sheer bloody murder as well.
The regiments were completely shattered. Those who did survive were affected for the rest of their lives. Few wanted to talk about it, even to their loved ones. Those responsible closed ranks and later blamed each other. Reports of the action were censored or held up. Officialdom rather hoped that The Nek would go away and be forgotten. It was all a ghastly mistake, a tragedy, a failure, to be eclipsed in historical memory by the lasting glory and the nobility of the seven Victoria Crosses won in the victorious action at Lone Pine, which had begun the previous evening at a place across from Walker’s Ridge.
On 15 August 1915, eight days after the charge at The Nek, Charles Bean, official correspondent with the Australian Expeditionary Force (and later official historian, of course), filed a despatch back home reconstructing what had happened at The Nek. Under the headline ‘Gallant Australians’, the report only appeared in The Argus on 28 September.
There are no Victoria Crosses, there are no Birthday Honours; but for sheer self-sacrificing heroism there was never a deed in history that surpassed the charge which two Australian Light Horse regiments made in the first light of Saturday, August 7, in order to help their comrades in a critical moment of a great battle.
And as for the boys – the single-minded, loyal, Australian country lads who left their trenches in the grey light of that morning to bivouac in the scrub that evening the shades of evening found them lying in the scrub with the wide sky above them.
No official list of the total casualties at The Nek has yet been found. The official war historian’s best estimate compiled from several sources says that the 8th Light Horse suffered 234 casualties – including 154 dead – out of 300 men. In the confusion before and afterwards, there could have been more.
The 10th suffered 138 casualties including 80 dead. Like the 8th, they were the flower of their state’s manhood, cut down in their prime and scattered on this godforsaken ridge like dead weeds.
This book is an account of some of the men, mostly from the 8th and the 10th regiments, and their great adventure as they set out from Australia into the unknown, to fight for King and Country. It is offered, humbly, to their immortal memory.