Visit Gallipoli

Charles Bean left Gallipoli on 10 March 1919. He never returned. His personal memorial to those who fought, suffered and died there is The Story of Anzac, volumes one and two of the Australian official history of World War I. Bean’s account of the Australian Historical Mission–Gallipoli Mission–did not appear until 1948. By then the British Empire graveyards and memorials on Gallipoli had long been completed. The statistics of the dead of Gallipoli point up Bean’s description of Anzac as ‘one great cemetery’. Over 44 000 British Empire soldiers were either killed, died of wounds or died of disease during the eight and a half months of the Gallipoli campaign–21 200 British, 8700 Australians, 2700 New Zealanders, 1300 Indians (which includes Gurkhas), and 49 Newfoundlanders. The French, who fought exclusively in the Helles area, suffered an estimated 10 000 dead. In the defence of their homeland at least 86 000 Turks gave their lives. Over 261 000 of all sides were wounded.

In 1948 Bean wrote of his hopes for the future of Gallipoli:

	The graves of Gallipoli, exquisitely maintained, where Anzac folk can walk amid thousands of names as familiar as those along Collins or Pitt Streets, do call for visitors.
	[C E W Bean, Gallipoli Mission, Canberra, 1948, p.346]

Today those visitors come in their thousands. They come especially around Anzac Day–25 April–to participate in the many services of remembrance held at various memorials. Australians are naturally drawn to the beach at Anzac Cove. At Beach Cemetery many discover and, like Sir Roden Cutler VC, are moved by the grave of Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick, 3rd Field Ambulance, who spent his first hours ashore on 25 April 1915 helping the wounded at North Beach:

	I looked down and found myself standing at the grave of Simpson, the man with the donkey. It is a moment I will take to my grave.
	[Cutler, quoted in Peter Bowers, Anzacs, Australia Post, 2000, p.38]

Australians generally move on to the cemeteries of what Bean called ‘Old Anzac’, that southern section of the Anzac position held by Australians and New Zealanders, with support from British and Indian Army units, between 25 April and 6 August 1915. At Old Anzac the most arresting monument is the memorial to the missing–those with no known grave–at Lone Pine.

As with Chunuk Bair for the New Zealanders, the choice of Lone Pine as the site for Australia’s major memorial on Gallipoli was an obvious one. During the days of the Battle of Lone Pine, 6-9 August 1915, the 1st Australian Division suffered over 2000 casualties, many of whom were killed. Charles Bean estimated that the blow dealt to the Turks at Lone Pine was a ‘terrible’ one and that for three days the Australians had tied down enemy reserves, thus holding them back from the crucial action at Chunuk Bair.

The Lone Pine cemetery contains burials from every part of Anzac. This was a battlefield burial ground and by December 1915 there were 46 graves here. In the 1920s Colonel Hughes and his Imperial War Graves team brought in a further 940 bodies from burial sites scattered throughout the Anzac area. Of these graves, 499 are, in the words of the cemetery register, ‘men whose unit in our forces could not be ascertained’–unknown soldiers in the true sense of that phrase.

The dates on the gravestones at Lone Pine are a chronology of the Gallipoli campaign as it unfolded at Anzac. Private Henry Riekie, 11th Battalion, of Walter Street, Gosnells, Western Australia, killed on 25 April, the day of the landing, lies in Row O, Grave 14. Was he one of those who survived the 11th’s scramble up to Plugge’s Plateau from North Beach only to die later in the day? Many stones carry dates between 6 and 9 August 1915, the days of the terrible diversionary attack. As the cemetery register shows, the soldiers of Lone Pine were born and raised in every state in Australia. Among them also are many English, Irish and Scottish immigrants who joined the first detachments of the AIF.

The Lone Pine memorial itself is a monument to the ‘missing’ of Anzac. On Gallipoli there were three categories of ‘missing’–those who were buried but not identified, those whose remains were never found, and those who died in the nearby hospital ships and transports and were buried at sea. On the memorial, panels list the names of the missing–4228 Australians and 708 New Zealanders. The name of Corporal Alexander Burton, 7th Battalion, of Euroa, Victoria, recalls the intense, close-quarters fighting in the trenches of Lone Pine. On 9 August 1915, during a Turkish counter-attack, Burton, assisted by Captain Fredrick Tubb and Corporal William Dunston, constantly re-erected a barricade while the Turks attempted to destroy it with bombs. Burton was killed in this action. Along with Tubb and Dunstan, Burton gained the Victoria Cross, one of seven awarded to Australian soldiers at Lone Pine between 6 and 9 August 1915.

Considering the tragic loss of life so evident at Lone Pine, what today’s visitor should remember was the point of it all–that the main attack on Chunuk Bair might succeed and the Gallipoli campaign be brought to a swift and victorious end. Other names on the memorial recall that overlooked and costly struggle between 6 and 10 August 1915 away to the north on the heights and slopes around Kocacimentepe. Here, among the missing of the 14th Battalion, is Sergeant Joseph McKinley and others who disappeared on 8 August 1915 during the 4th Australian Brigade’s attack towards Kocacimentepe. Here, too, are Lieutenant Wilfred Addison, Private Joseph Walden and many others of the 18th Battalion who died at Hill 60 on
22 August 1915.

As visitors from Australia and New Zealand wander the Anzac cemeteries and gaze upon the names, they bring something of their distant homelands to those who lie there forever. As Bean well understood, for as long as they keep coming, what happened at Gallipoli in 1915 will continue to matter. Their very presence also gives continuing life and purpose to the lines of Anzac poet Lester Lawrence:

	Some flower that blooms beside the Southern foam May blossom where our dead Australians lie, And comfort them with whispers of their home; And they will dream, beneath the alien sky, Of the Pacific Sea.
	[Lawrence, quoted in C E W Bean, Gallipoli Mission, Canberra, 1948, p.385]