SERENE SYMBOL BELIES TRAGEDY
THE Nek was a boneyard when Australians returned to the battlefield to bury the dead in 1919.
About three tennis courts, war correspondent Charles Bean wrote, for the loss of 300 men. They fell like rag dolls in the spray of at least four Turkish machineguns.
The Nek explodes in the popular imagination.
Yet there were bloodier killing fields at Gallipoli.
About 3000 Turks had died in a single night, May 19.
They kept charging Quinn’s Post, only a short stroll today from the Nek.
One Anzac soldier likened it to shooting wallabies.
Yet this massacre was not the worst of the killing, either.
The Battle of Lone Pine broke months later.
The attack aimed to draw attention from more important charges in the heights.
It worked, too, if more than 9000 casualties in all can be called a win.
Private John Gammage of the 1st Battalion saw bodies piled three and four deep.
Some were wounded, until bombs finished them off.
‘‘ Their pleas for mercy were not heeded…” he said.
‘‘ Some poor fellows lay for 30 hours waiting for help and many died still waiting.”
Lieutenant Colonel Harold “Pompey” Elliott was well placed to quantify the carnage.
Early on August 9, many of his officers were dead; others ought to have been.
The dead, “in dreadful num- bers everywhere, lay thickest at Tubb’s Post, earlier known as Goldenstedt’s and Jacob’s Trench…” Lt- Col Elliott wrote.
It is quiet now, this piece of shrubbery.
It is off to the back of the Lone Pine Memorial, next to the loop road that runs through the national park, near toilets being readied for Saturday’s commemoration.
Back then, this patch of ground ran with shrieks and shouts and groans.
One of Elliott’s men, Dick Gardiner, smothered hand grenades with an overcoat here. The bombs showered ‘‘ by the dozen’’, he said.
His brother Alf climbed a post to fire, and Gardiner never saw him again.