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The Hill 60 fighting, in which they played a prominent part between 21 and 28 August, also saw the collapse of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles. The Mounteds had landed on Gallipoli 2700 strong. By the end of August, they were down to 365 men.

Five days later, another attempt was made to seize Hill 60. At night on 27 August the Australian 9th Light Horse was led into the trenches with instructions to bomb their way towards the Turkish positions. In a night battle at close quarters in the trenches, they were unable to drive the Turks back. Among the 9th Light Horse’s dead that night was their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Carew Reynell of Reynella, South Australia.

On the afternoon of 28 August, General Alexander Godley personally visited the camp of the 10th Australian Light Horse, the unit which had suffered so severely at The Nek. Taking the officers aside he told them that he wanted them to take a trench on the summit of Hill 60. During the night of 28–29 August, the men of the 10th Light Horse, in a fierce bombing battle with the Turks, inched the Australian line a little closer to the summit of Hill 60. Between midnight and dawn, the light horsemen, in a captured Turkish trench, held off repeated enemy attacks. Hundreds of bombs hurled into the Australian positions were promptly thrown back and Turkish frontal assaults were beaten off with determined rifle fire. Prominent in this action was Lieutenant Hugo Throssell of Cowcowing, Western Australia. Throughout the night, although wounded, Throssell refused to leave and kept up the spirits of his men. The doctor who attended him later described Throssell’s condition after this night of death, fear and endeavour:

	He took the cigarette but could do nothing with it. The wounds in his shoulders and arms had stiffened, and his hands could not reach his mouth … [his] shirt was full of holes from pieces of bomb, and one of the ‘Australias’ [shoulder badges] was twisted and broken, and had been driven in to his shoulder.
	[Captain Horace Robertson, quoted in Snelling, VCs of the First World War – Gallipoli, Stroud, 1995, p.225]

Throssell was awarded the Victoria Cross, the last to an Australian soldier on Gallipoli, but others who had stood with him that night deserve to be remembered. One of these was Corporal Henry Ferrier of Casterton, Victoria, who reputedly flung over 500 bombs that night. Shortly after dawn, a Turkish bomb, which he was attempting to throw back, exploded in his hand, blowing his arm off at the elbow. Ferrier walked to an aid post but died ten days later on a hospital ship. Ferrier’s name is listed among the dead of the 10th Australian Light Horse on the Lone Pine Memorial to the missing.

The 10th Light Horse’s bombing attack on Hill 60 was the last action of the battle. It was believed, wrongly, that the summit had been captured at a cost of over 1100 casualties. Today it is hard to see what real advantage was gained, although the enemy was pushed back slightly. Charles Bean, careful as always in his assessments, concluded that this sacrifice had allowed the Anzacs ‘a position astride the spur [Hill 60] from which a fairly satisfactory view could be had over the plain.’ Perhaps the best summing up of the British Empire’s struggle for the Sheepfold of the Little Rock came from a New Zealand soldier, Corporal James Watson of the Auckland Mounted Rifles:

	We gained about 400 yards [366 metres] in four days fighting, 1000 men killed and wounded. Land is very dear here.
	[Watson, quoted in C Pugsley, Gallipoli – The New Zealand Story, London, 1984, p.327]