The rehearsal before Gallipoli's main event

By Tony Wright
Updated April 25 2014 - 10:08am, first published 9:40am
Ali Gul and his wife Gulumser Gul,Turkish farmers display their collection of military artifacts. Photo: Joe Armao
Ali Gul and his wife Gulumser Gul,Turkish farmers display their collection of military artifacts. Photo: Joe Armao
Australian soldiers on the beach at Gallipoli on the day of the landing. Photo:  Philip Schuller.
Australian soldiers on the beach at Gallipoli on the day of the landing. Photo: Philip Schuller.

Ninety-nine years after Australian and New Zealand soldiers splashed ashore at Anzac Cove, the Gallipoli Peninsula continues to disgorge the bitter harvest of 1915.

As thousands from Australia and New Zealand were preparing for Friday's dawn service, Turkish villagers on the peninsula prepared for another day tilling their crops, knowing the relics of the old war lie just beneath the ground.

Every ploughing season or after rain, Ali Gul and his wife Gulumser Gul pick from the soil bullets, the remnants of explosive shells, balls of shrapnel and more personal reminders that men fought and died on their little farm.

The have found buttons, they say, some of them from Australian uniforms, a hair comb, a cut-throat razor, a spoon and fork – so many artefacts that for years they gave them to museums, but now simply store them in their home. They and their neighbours sometimes find unexploded shells and dump them in a deep well.

Their farm, where they grow beans and onions, lies close to one of the loneliest graveyards of the Anzac sector, the 7th Field Ambulance Cemetery, out of earshot of the dawn service.

Several kilometres north of Anzac Cove and named for the 7th Australian Field Ambulance unit, the cemetery is rarely visited, even as the Anzac Day crowds jostle for space among the better-known fields of the dead at Shrapnel Valley, Brighton Beach, Lone Pine and The Nek, and crowd into the gated commemorative site on North Beach.

The quiet Field Ambulance Cemetery tells a small story of the Gallipoli campaign. Of the 433 graves there, 21 are known to be of Australian men, 20 came from New Zealand and 130 are British. But 262 are so anonymous even their nationalities cannot be determined. And then there are the 47 Australians and the 160 Britons who are no more than believed to be buried in this isolated outpost.

It is, perhaps, this mysterious quality, the stories that will never be told properly, that continues to draw great flocks of visitors from the other side of the Earth to commemorate what was a defeat a year short of a century ago.

Some search for evidence of the past as tangible as the relics unearthed every other day by the local farmers.

As Australian, New Zealand and Turkish officials worked feverishly this week to prepare the site above the beach for the dawn service – a rehearsal, really, for the much more elaborate service next year, a century since the landings – boatloads of visitors sailed a hundred metres offshore to gaze into the shallows at the remains of an old landing craft sunk in 1915 off what was known as Embarkation Pier.

Others found themselves, as are visitors every year, swept by sudden emotion. Kay Maund, of Sydney, was one of many who wept as she read the famous words of Kemal Ataturk, the commander of Turkish troops who prevented the invaders from capturing more than a small fraction of the peninsula in 1915, engraved upon stone above Anzac Cove. "... you, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well".

"I'd never read those words," Mrs Maund said. "I had two great-uncles who fought here and they both came home and I'm glad I'm here, learning what the Australians faced, but I didn't expect to be so moved."

School groups from across Australia and New Zealand picked their way silently among the gravestones, and some of the students read eulogies to great-great grandfathers they never knew and whose names are chiselled into headstones and on the long wall at Lone Pine where those without a known grave are commemorated.

Veterans Affairs Minister Senator Michael Ronaldson will tell Friday's crowds of the losses to Australia and the impact on regional communities like those of his own in Western Victoria when so many young men did not come home, or who came home broken.

Next year the Prime Minister will give the dawn address and the Leader of the Opposition will attend, and the Anzac sector will find itself locked within the tightest security since Kemal Ataturk refused the Anzacs passage across the peninsula in 1915.

As if to emphasise the point, Turkish authorities draped a giant depiction this year of Ataturk on a charging horse across a hillside beyond the heights the Anzacs were never able to gain or hold.

Many of those who came this year said they knew they had little chance of winning a ticket to next year's ceremonies in the ballot designed to restrict numbers to 10,500, and had chosen to make the journey a year ahead.

"I felt I'd have no chance in the ballot so I didn't even enter," said Roger Solomon, of Adelaide, who served 41 years in the Royal Australian Navy. "But I'm pretty emotional now I'm here."

Senator Ronaldson met senior Turkish government ministers in Ankara this week to discuss next year's event, and said he'd found them determined and united in their commitment to the centenary. The Turkish cabinet decided on Monday to establish a special agency to co-ordinate Turkey's contribution.

Three heavily-protected security checkpoints on the single entry road would ensure no one without a ticket would be able to reach the site on Anzac Day, 2015, Senator Ronaldson said.

Meanwhile, authorities in the nearby city of Canakkale are considering setting aside public space and erecting large TV screens to accommodate flow-over crowds determined to travel to the Gallipoli area without balloted tickets.

The farming families of the Gallipoli Peninsula, however, require no entree to reverent dawn services or access to big screens to remind themselves of the old war.

They need only plunge their hands into the soil. For the villagers, whose families suffered immense loss in 1915 and whose cemeteries were unmarked mass graves, the harvest of a war is always just beneath the ground.

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