ANZAC Day: Remembering
On this day when the first ANZACs came ashore at Gallipoli in 1915, remembering the sacrifice of Australian and New Zealanders on many battlefields from Gallipoli to the Western Front and beyond.
It is apt to recall that sacrifice in the words of one of those original ANZACs who served at Gallipoli, Leon Gellert.
The Last to Leave
The guns were silent, and the silent hills
had bowed their grasses to a gentle breeze
I gazed upon the vales and on the rills,
And whispered, “What of these?’ and “What of these?
These long forgotten dead with sunken graves,
Some crossless, with unwritten memories
Their only mourners are the moaning waves,
Their only minstrels are the singing trees
And thus I mused and sorrowed wistfullyI watched the place where they had scaled the height,
The height whereon they bled so bitterly
Throughout each day and through each blistered night
I sat there long, and listened – all things listened too
I heard the epics of a thousand trees,
A thousand waves I heard; and then I knew
The waves were very old, the trees were wise:
The dead would be remembered evermore-
The valiant dead that gazed upon the skies,
And slept in great battalions by the shore.Leon Gellert, Australian Gallipoli veteran, 1924
New Zealanders in France 1918
Gallipoli: The Dead of Gallipoli
More than 220,000 British, Commonwealth and French troops were casualties at Gallipoli; Turkish casualties were at least a quarter of a million, although some estimates put the true figure at many more than that. The British buried their dead but many bodies remained unburied at the time of the evacuation in 1916. When British parties returned in 1919 they found several cemeteries desecrated, and in the majority of cases the final resting place of British and Commonwealth dead could not be ascertained.
This image dates from 1919/20 and shows a ‘collection of bones & skulls’ – whether these are British and Commonwealth, French or Turkish, is impossible to say but they show the huge problem facing the burial parties that returned after the war and in this ANZAC week the image offers us a sobering insight into the sacrifice made in Turkey – by all sides – in 1915.
Gallipoli: Anzac Day 1923
Today is Anzac Day – the day in 1915 when Australian and New Zealand troops landed alongside British and French troops at Cape Helles in the Gallipoli Campaign. The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) had been formed in Egypt and Gallipoli was their baptism of fire. Despite the fact that more French troops died at Gallipoli than Australian, it has become something of a national obsession for Australia – and to a lesser sense New Zealand – with many thousands observing today as a day of remembrance at home in Australia and New Zealand, on the battlefields in France and Flanders, in Great Britain and also with a Dawn Service in Gallipoli itself; attended by an increasing number of people.
The very first Dawn Service at Gallipoli was on 25th April 1923, pictured here on this image that comes from a small collection of Australian images I have. A crowd of Anazc Gallipoli veterans along with some families of those who had died in the campaign assembled on the beach where the Australian landings had taken place. This was the birth of the service performed earlier this morning but this image captures in time men for whom the experience was not even a decade old. Out of shot in the background was even a Gallipoli war horse; a horse from the Light Horse that had been brought from Australia and was still owned by the officer who had ridden it during the war.
Australia and New Zealand paid a mighty price for their service in the Great War; Gallipoli was only the start, with more men from both countries dying on the Western Front in the remaining years of the war. While Anzac Day connections us to Gallipoli, it is right and proper we remember them all, as many thousands of Anzac descendants will be doing across the globe today.
Arras: British Dead at Bullecourt 1917
The fighting at the village of Bullecourt to the south of Arras did not start until two days into the battle and 95 years ago today men of the 62nd (West Riding) Division and Australian troops assaulted the Hindenburg Line at Bullecourt with limited success. The fighting at Bullecourt continued into May with the West Ridings and Australians losing heavily on 3rd May 1917; the deadliest day of the Battle of Arras.
This image is from a German photograph and shows British dead from the 62nd (West Riding) Division left behind in the German trenches after one of the failed attacks. These Yorkshire Territorial troops took heavy casualties in the fighting of both April and May 1917. Among those who fought at Bullecourt with the division was author Henry Williamson, who later wrote the classic Tarka The Otter.
