Visit Gallipoli

On a northern spur of the Sari Bair Range, Bean found evidence of the fate of one group of Australian soldiers. These men had taken part in the 4th Brigade’s attempted attack on 8 August 1915 on Hill 971–Kocacimentepe:

	Here at once we came on groups of our dead, some with the colours of the 14th battalion on their sleeves. One group lay as far up the ridge as Hill 100 - Australians and Turks together; one had the badge or colour of the 14th Battalion, and one a small Bible with the name ‘H Wellington’ on the fly leaf.
	[C E W Bean, Gallipoli Mission, Canberra, 1948, p.238]

On Chunuk Bair the relics of the desperate battle of 6-10 August 1915 affected mission members. Human remains lay everywhere around that peak and on the slopes leading to it. Bean wrote:

	For some reason the dissolution of the human remains in that lofty area was not quite so complete as at Old Anzac; and the number that must have been trapped, and the hopelessness of the situation on those steep ridges when once they were caught there, did not bear thinking of.
	[C E W Bean, Gallipoli Mission, Canberra, 1948, p.234]

On Chunuk Bair today is the New Zealand National Memorial. Part of the memorial inscription remembers those who came from so far away to participate in the Gallipoli campaign but the words seem appropriate for all who fought at Anzac between April and December 1915:

FROM THE UTTERMOST ENDS OF THE EARTH.

Nearby is the New Zealand Chunuk Bair Memorial on which are recorded the names of 856 New Zealand soldiers who died, mainly in the August battles at Chunuk Bair, and who have no known grave. In the Chunuk Bair Cemetery are the remains of 677 soldiers; only ten are identified by name. Among those ten is Private Martin Persson, Wellington Infantry Battalion, killed on 8 August 1915, the day the Wellingtons captured Chunuk Bair. Persson was perhaps one of those who, in the words of the English poet John Masefield, ‘beheld the Narrows from the hill’:

	They came from safety of their own free will To lay their young men’s beauty, strong men’s powers Under the hard roots of the foreign flowers Having beheld the Narrows from the hill.
	[John Masefield, ‘On the Dead in Gallipoli’, quoted in C Pugsley, Gallipoli – The New Zealand Story, London, 1984, p.271]

Also on the heights of Chunuk Bair is a bronze sculpture of Colonel Mustafa Kemal. On the morning of 10 August 1915, when Kemal’s men drove the British from the peak, he was hit by a piece of shrapnel but a pocket watch saved him from injury. In 1923 Kemal became the first President of the Republic of Turkey and he was eventually named ‘Ataturk–Father of Turkey’. On Gallipoli he is remembered for his brave and determined leadership at decisive moments, summed up in Kemal’s own description of the fighting qualities of his men:

	Everybody hurled himself on the enemy to kill and to die. This is no ordinary attack. Everybody was eager to succeed or go forward with the determination to die.
	[Kemal, quoted in R R James, Gallipoli, London, 1999, p.168]

From Chunuk Bair to the south-west, the view takes in North Beach and all the slope back towards the Australian positions at the Nek in August 1915. At the Nek, Bean was confronted again with the tragedy of the 8th and 10th Australian Light Horse Regiments on 7 August 1915:

	We found the low scrub there literally strewn with their relics .... When Hughes came to bury the missing in this area, he found and buried more than three hundred Australians in that strip the size of three tennis courts. Their graves today mark the site of one of the bravest actions in the history of war.
	[C E W Bean, Gallipoli Mission, Canberra, 1948, p.109]

Hughes’ burials were made in the Nek Cemetery. This cemetery is virtually a lawn, for by far the largest number buried here were never identified and no markers of any kind were placed above the plots where they were laid to rest. There are only five identified graves and five special memorials to men believed to be buried in this cemetery.

Where the Turkish trenches had stood at the Nek, Bean noticed a Turkish memorial. This memorial–and other reminders of the Turkish soldiers’ sacrifice at Anzac–brought from the Australian official historian this tribute:

	I saw now, with something of a shock … a monument put up by the Turks to mark the spot [at Lone Pine] at which they had stopped the terrific August thrust. Away on the ridges nearly a mile beyond it, at The Nek where also we had been stopped, we could see another monument (and we afterwards noted a third at North Beach). Obviously the Turks were very proud of their achievement. And, we reflected, those who stopped the invading spearheads on Gallipoli well deserved commemoration as soldiers and patriots.
	[C E W Bean, Gallipoli Mission, Canberra, 1948, pp.48—49]