Choose language

Choose language

The Anzac Walk

12.The Nek – Nek Cemetery

Audio commentary | Right click to download
5 min 24 sec – 5 MB – mp3 format
Click here for link to download all audio commentaries and for more information

Directions:

After leaving the Turkish Soldiers Memorial turn left and head up the paved road past the 57th Regiment Memorial on your right until you come to a fork in the road. The paved road leads up to Chunuk Bair but you should turn down left along the unpaved road. Following this road you will pass a Turkish memorial (Sergeant Mehmet’s Memorial) on your right and soon to your right will be the Nek Cemetery. Enter the cemetery and make for the special memorial headstones to your right in front of the cemetery cross.

And so perished the 8th Light Horse

A view looking across the Nek in February 1919
Enlarge (image opens in a new window) photo: see caption below
A view looking across the Nek in February 1919 taken by Charles Bean’s Gallipoli mission photographer, Captain Hubert Wilkins. Wilkins has positioned himself in the old Australian front line of 1915 and in the middle distance, standing where the Turkish front line was, is the memorial known as Sergeant Memhet’s Tomb. Notice the human thigh bone in the foreground. Bean described the area in 1919 as ‘strewn’ with the human remains of the men of the Light Horse who had charged the Turkish lines on 7 August 1915 and of Turkish soldiers. [AWM P0361.228]

Those words were written by Captain Leslie Hore of the 8th Light Horse Regiment from western Victoria. Look at the date on four of the Special Memorials in front of you – 7 August 1915. On that day at this spot between 4.30 and 5.15 am, 234 Australian Light Horsemen from Victoria and Western Australia were killed and a further 138 were wounded. They were casualties in the action depicted in George Lambert’s famous painting which hangs in the Australian War Memorial – The Charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek, 7 August 1915. The 3rd Light Horse Brigade consisted of the 8th Light Horse Regiment from Victoria, the 9th from South Australia and the 10th from Western Australia. Only elements of the 8th and 10th Light Horse took part in the action at the Nek on 7 August.

 The charge was also depicted in the last minutes of Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli which featured Mark Lee and Mel Gibson as two young Western Australian Light Horsemen. Lee, in the role of Archie Hamilton, dies as machine gun bullets rip across his chest while he runs full pelt across no-man’s-land without his rifle, his body thrusting forward towards the enemy. After the war the remains of many of the dead of the Nek, most of whom could not be identified, were gathered into this cemetery and they lie all around you here.

‘The Charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek, 7 August 1915’, by George Lambert
Enlarge (image opens in a new window) painting: see caption below
This painting by George Lambert – ‘The Charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek, 7 August 1915’ – hangs in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. It is one of three actions which Bean brought Lambert to Gallipoli with him in 1919 to record, the others being the landing of 25 April 1915 and the advance of the 2nd Infantry Brigade, AIF, at Helles on 8 May 1915. The result of the charge, and Lambert’s reaction to it, is self evident from the painting. Lambert felt the Nek was a ‘wonderful setting to the tragedy’ and that he himself, in trying to bring to the Australian public a sense of what had happened there, was acting in the role of the ‘artist historian’. [AWM ART07965]

What happened? The charge, planned for 4.30 am on 7 August 1915, was part of a number of diversionary actions. These diversions were aimed to tie down Turkish troops to the Anzac position while Allied units to the north (Australians, British, New Zealanders, Gurkha's and Indians) tried to storm the heights of Chunuk Bair and Hill 971. Go to the edge of the cemetery and look at the scene to the immediate north and north-east. The main attack of the so-called ‘August Offensive’ went through these steep gullies and ridges. It began on the night of 6 August and by dawn on 7 August New Zealand infantry were supposed to have reached the high point way up to your right known as Chunuk Bair. The Australian Light Horse charge was planned for the very moment when the New Zealanders were supposed to have been taking Chunuk Bair, and the Turks in their trenches at the Nek were supposed to be distracted by the possibility of attack from the rear.

Unfortunately, by 4.30 am the New Zealanders had failed to reach their objective and had halted on Rhododendron Ridge below the summit of Chunuk Bair.

Any attack across the narrow section of land known as the Nek, directly at heavily defended Turkish trenches, was regarded as suicidal unless the enemy line was collapsing from the rear. Although that could not now happen, the Light Horse were ordered in anyway on the grounds that everything must be done to assist the New Zealanders to make the main attack on the heights. An artillery and naval bombardment on the enemy trenches inexplicably ceased minutes before the Light Horsemen were due to go. When the first wave – men of the 8th Light Horse – rose from the trench the Turkish soldiers, who had time to take up positions again in the lull after the bombardment, cut them down within seconds. A second wave of the 8th was similarly destroyed. There was a pause. An officer questioned the value of sending more men to certain death but the Light Horse were ordered to press on. Next rose the first wave of the 10th Light Horse:

Identity disc of Corporal George de Mole, 10th Light Horse Regiment
Enlarge (image opens in a new window) photo: see caption below
This identity disc belonged to Corporal George de Mole, 10th Light Horse Regiment. De Mole enlisted in Perth, WA, in January 1915 and was killed in the third wave of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade’s charge at the Nek on 7 August 1915. He was later buried in Shrapnel Valley Cemetery but in an unknown grave and his disc was returned to his family. It was subsequently found in a backyard of a house in Unley Park, South Australia, which had belonged to De Mole’s parents. [AWM REL28595]

The 10th went forward to meet death instantly, as the 8th had done, the men running as swiftly and as straight as they could at the Turkish rifles. With that regiment went the flower of the youth of Western Australia …

[Bean, Story of Anzac, Vol 2, p 617]

A fourth wave of Western Australians also charged before the attack was finally called off. Charles Bean called this event ‘one of the bravest actions in the history of war’, each man in those waves which rose after the first going forward in the full knowledge that he was unlikely to survive. How the Nek must have looked on that morning as the day lengthened has been described in these words:

At first here and there a man raised his arm to the sky, or tried to drink from his water bottle; but, as the sun of that burning day climbed higher, such movements ceased: over the whole summit the figures lay still in the quivering heat.

[Bean, Story of Anzac, Vol 2, p.633]

One of the bravest actions in the history of war
An aerial photograph of The Nek Cemetery, Anzac, taken on 25 June 1923
Enlarge (image opens in a new window) photo: see caption below
An aerial photograph of The Nek Cemetery, Anzac, taken on 25 June 1923. The cemetery wall and cross are in course of construction. What is still visible is the open nature of the ground and the opposing trenches. The memorial in the background, Sergeant Mehmet’s Tomb, stands roughly on the Turkish front line and it is easy to see here why Charles Bean described the area in which the charge of 7 August 1915 in these words:
When shortly after our visit [February 1919] Hughes [Lieutenant C E Hughes, Australian attached to British Graves Registration Unit, Gallipoli] 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 one of the bravest actions in the history of war.
[Charles Bean, Gallipoli Mission, Sydney, 1990, p 109] [AWM H18635]

In our first day’s work, with Howe as guide, Lambert had been over the ground both of the Landing and (though that had been a much later event in the campaign) of the charge of the Light Horse – indeed he obtained his bearings there with me on the day we reached Anzac. Lambert was, I think, more sensitive than the rest of us to the tragedy – or at any rate the horror – of Anzac. At The Nek, in the last effort to seize Baby 700 or part of it, four lines of Australians charged successively to practically certain death in order to pin the attention of their opponents to that supposedly vital point, and so give the New Zealand infantry, then climbing the just visible heights of Rhododendron Spur, 1200 yards away, the supreme chance of winning the real goal, Chunuk Bair summit, and with it, possibly, the campaign. Unfortunately the New Zealand leaders, whose tired men by a wonderful effort then had the summit almost within their grasp and practically unoccupied, allowed the chance to slip. But that was unforeseen by the Light Horse who flung themselves across the narrow strip of The Nek in face of the seven or eight Turkish trenches that rose, tier after tier, across it and up the face of Baby 700 beyond. We found the low scrub there literally strewn with their relics and those of earlier Turkish attacks over the same ground. When shortly after our visit 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.

[Charles Bean, Gallipoli Mission, Sydney, 1990, p.109]

So perished the 8th Light Horse

We had about one hundred yards to go, the first line starting from saps which are trenches in front of the firing line leading in the enemy’s direction. At twenty five minutes past four we stood up on the banquettes of our trenches and in a few minutes the crackle of musketry turned into a roar. Never have I [Captain Lelsie Hore] heard such an awful sound and no wonder. We knew they had three machine guns trained on the Nek and quite possibly there more. Their trench must have had at least two hundred men. Judging from the number we had in ours more likely two hundred and fifty. Now a machine gun firs at top speed six hundred rounds per minute and a rifleman fifteen rounds per minute. So we had concentrated on a piece of land say two hundred yards long and one hundred yards deep no fewer than five thousand bullets per minute.

Major Thomas Redford, 8th Light Horse Regiment, of Warnambool, Victoria
Enlarge (image opens in a new window) painting: see caption below
Major Thomas Redford, 8th Light Horse Regiment, of Warnambool, Victoria, died shortly after dawn on 7 August 1915 during his regiment’s famous charge at the Nek. Redford had kept a diary at Gallipoli and it was returned to his family with an addendum on his death penned by an unknown man in his unit:
Our gallant major, whilst lying facing the enemy’s trench in the front of his men received a bullet through his brain as he raised his head slightly to observe. He died with a soft sigh and laid his head gently on his hands as if tired. A braver and more honourable man never donned uniform.
[Quoted in Peter Burness, The Nek, Kenthurst, 1996, p 102] [AWM P04051]

Out went the first line and we waited for our word, by the time they had gone the first forty yards they were down to a man. What could one hundred and seventy five men do against that volume of fire? We saw our fate in front of us but we were pledged to go and to their eternal credit the word being given not a man in the second line stayed in his trench. As I jumped out I looked down the line and they were all rising over the parapet. We bent low and ran as hard as we could. Ahead we could see the trench aflame with rifle fire. All round were smoke and dust kicked up by the bullets. I felt a sting on my shoulder and remember thinking it could not be a hit or it would have hurt more. It bled a lot afterward but was only a flesh wound.

I passed our first line all dead or dying it seemed and went on a bit further and flung myself down about forty yards from the Turkish trenches. I was a bit ahead of my men having got a good start and traveling lighter. I looked round and saw them all down mostly hit.

I did not know what to do, the dirt was spurting up all around like rain from a pavement in a thunderstorm. Some bigger spurts near me were either bombs or pom poms. I could notice they were much bigger. The trench ahead was a living flame, the roar of musketry not a bit diminished. I was protected by a little, a very little fold in the ground and by a dead Turk dead about six weeks. I had looked round again and reckoned I could get about six men to follow and it would have been murder to take them on.

Lastly the supports had not started and if they had, they were only one hundred and seventy five for the whole line, absolutely and totally inadequate. I made up my mind and started to shove myself backwards on the flat of my stomach. After going a few yards I felt a hard sting in my right foot but so long as my arms and chest were right I didn’t mind. I passed through our dead and fell into one of the saps and managed to limp out into one of the back trenches and lay down wondering how on earth I got out of it. My three subalterns were killed and I should say about seventy percent of my men. There were no live men near me when I started back except one who did the same as I did and I hope got back.

Our Colonel was killed, one Major killed the other wounded, the only Captain (myself) wounded and ten subalterns killed and three wounded leaving two officers not hit, and about five percent of the men. And so perished the 8th Light Horse.

[Captain L F S Hore, 8th Light Horse, letter, quoted in Cameron Simpson, Maygar's boys: a biographical history of the 8th Light Horse Regiment AIF 1914-19, Moorooduc, 1998]