Revisiting ANZAC

Dr Christopher Pugsley, internationally recognised military historian who has specialised in studying Gallipoli and other First World War campaigns involving the New Zealand Forces, recalls his first visit to ANZAC Cove in December 1980.

It was winter with snow patches in Shrapnel Valley and Monash Gully. Turkish conscript soldiers still manned an outpost on the beach below where the museum now stands, and the Peninsula itself was still under military control with many places important to the Gallipoli campaign, such as the fort at Sedd el Bahr and ‘W’ Beach out of bounds.

I was the sole visitor, my company, two Turks; Sabri, one of the few in Eceabat who could speak English and the taxi driver who I hired for the week.

Arriving by bus from Istanbul in the late afternoon, I immediately took a taxi to ANZAC Cove. I was the only business, but the driver had his own view on where a tourist should go at ANZAC and wanted to take me to the Lone Pine Memorial. Sitting in the back seat, with repeated cries of “Yok Yok” – “No, No,” I insisted, to his disgust, that we drove along the coastal road. Map reading from the car, I stopped at the first memorial that I could see and found myself at Hell Spit Cemetery on the southern boundary of a tiny beach enclosed by two headlands – ANZAC Cove. Nothing prepared me for how small it was or the emotion that would flood over me as I looked out to sea and then up onto the scrub-covered slopes around me – the impatient driver watched bemused as I burst into tears.

For the rest of that week I walked ANZAC. Sabri would wait in the car while the taxi driver slept. I told Sabri my route, rendezvousing at certain times and places, so that should I fall in a trench or shaft, someone knew my path. I retraced the New Zealand route at the landing, climbing up Ari Burnu headland over Plugges Plateau, scrambled down into Reserve Gully, fought my way through the scrub up Monash Gully onto Popes and The Nek. Walked across the maze of trenches below the Chessboard and along the front line south from Quinn’s Post, detouring as I went into the trenches and tunnels on either side as I worked my way down to Lone Pine. I explored the New Zealand outposts along Ocean Beach and walked in over Old No.3 Outpost, scrabbling up the clay slopes onto Tabletop and then up Rhododendron Ridge to Chunuk Bair.

Despite the reading I had done beforehand and the detailed trench maps I had brought with me, I was conscious of how little I knew. All around me was the debris of battle, the shredded bullet jackets by the handful at Popes; the rusted clumps of rifle clips in the trenches at The Nek; the clay covered tarpaulins that crumbled in one’s hands and beneath them the floor of bully beef tins with the bayonet imprint still evident in them on the Wellington Terraces below the Sphinx. It was if someone had blown a whistle 65 years before and simply stolen away and left the battlefield as it was. Most evident of all were the bones of the dead. The skull that had obviously fallen out of the trench wall at the Nek, the bone shards that littered the ground like crushed sea shell where the Otagos attacked at Popes in early May; the disturbed tumble of bones in Monash Gully at the foot of Quinn’s Post where a mass grave had been rifled by those looking for scrap metal to salvage and sell.

“ANZAC overwhelmed me. There was such a New Zealand feel to the landscape and yet it, was a story I knew nothing about. I have been back many times, each time learning a little more. Each visit makes me conscious that the battlefield I visited in 1980 is less and less a battlefield and more and more a national, or rather international park.

	New Zealand artillerymen with their gun at Gallipoli. Courtesy of the Australian War Museum.

Change is inevitable. On my first visit, the Turkish memorial with Ataturk’s words had been built on the beach, where the first boatloads of Australians touched below Ari Burnu. During my visit, labourers planting pine seedlings were cutting down the native scrub and throwing it in the trenches, erasing a record that had lasted since 1915. That erasure continues. Turkish memorials and ‘graveyards’ now match each of the ANZAC cemeteries along the old front line. Car parks cover the maze of trenches that once so fascinated me at Turkish Quinn’s and over part of the ANZAC front line at The Nek. Pine planting, periodic fires and the need to cater for thousands of ANZAC tourists from Australia and New Zealand, now matched by the hundreds of thousands of Turkish visitors, who come to explore Turkey’s one outstanding victory of the First World War which made the name of the man who would create the modern Turkish state – Kemal Ataturk.

The mass of ANZAC Day pilgrims has forced the creation of a new Dawn Service site at North Beach and now word has come of the road widening along the stretch of road from Brighton Beach to the Dawn Service site. When I last visited five months ago, the precarious nature of the beach road within ANZAC Cove was evident. The winter seas constantly eat away at these shores and restorative work was needed. Friends tell me however, that the widening has been significant and has cut into the slopes changing what had been unchanged since the road was first developed during the formation of the memorials and cemeteries from 1919 on. The road network along the coast and winding up No Man’s Land between the trenches linking each cemetery and memorial was superimposed on the battlefield trenches. A veteran returning in the 1920s would have been conscious of those changes but accepted them in terms of what had taken their place – the memorials that recorded the names of those he had served with and mourned.

I understand that the road from the Museum to Lone Pine and up to Chunuk Bair is also going to be widened, inevitably encroaching over what were the front lines on either side. There is much that can be lost, but what can one do but hope that the line of the road, marking as it does the ANZAC front line, follows its existing route with the minimum impact on what remains of the trenches.

The changes will continue. This is inevitable because a visit to Gallipoli has become part of the rites of passage both for Australians and New Zealanders, and for Turkish families as well. The growth of Turkish memorials was a natural response to a landscape populated largely by monuments of the invader. One should remember that the ANZACs who returned to briefly garrison the Peninsula in late 1918 at the end of the First World War made a point of destroying the Turkish monuments and memorials that had been erected on the battlefield. The number of monuments will continue to grow, as will the car parks alongside them.

Someone such as myself, who first saw Gallipoli 65 years after, will mourn the changes. But I know that any New Zealander visiting Gallipoli for the first time this ANZAC Day will also experience the overwhelming emotional intensity that I felt 25 years ago. They will look at the landscape and see home. They will read the names under the embossed fern leaf and want to know more. They will stand on Chunuk Bair and see what Malone and his men fought and died to hold, and sense their presence. One cannot stand unmoved at ANZAC Cove or at the outposts along Ocean Beach or at the New Zealand Memorial on Chunuk Bair and not be conscious of where we have come from and whom we are. This will never change.

Dr Pugsley is a renowned New Zealand military historian and a senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy (RMA) Sandhurst. He is a former New Zealand infantry officer and retired as a Lieutenant Colonel to become a freelance military historian in 1988 after 22 years service in the New Zealand Army.

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