Muddy scars at a sacred place

Buses line the road to Chunuk Bair for the New Zealand Anzac Day service. Picture / Mark Mitchell

GALLIPOLI - The roadworks at Anzac Cove, done by the Turks at the request of Australia, have left huge muddy scars on the landscape. But it's by no means the first time the topography has been changed.

In the weeks it took the Anzacs to secure their beachhead, Anzac Cove underwent a transformation. Corporal Francis Hardey, of the Canterbury Battalion, described it in a letter home in 1915: "We made roads, dug saps, and any pick and shovel work that was going. Sometimes we would work all night to work unobserved."

A few years later, those tracks were the little sign remaining of that raw Anzac engineering. So it will be with this new road.

Within a few years the grass and scrub will have reclaimed the ground and hidden the scars, and few will be any the wiser.

There is no doubt the new road and associated parking areas had become pressingly necessary.

Yesterday and throughout the weekend tens of thousands of people, carried in hundreds of buses, travelled the length and breadth of the battlefields. There are no traffic jams because the Turkish Army and highway police are efficient (if somewhat rude and autocratic) and keep everything under control.

But there are inevitable delays as the traffic builds up to a volume for which the narrow, twisting roads of the peninsula are inadequate.

The huge crowds and the volume of traffic naturally detract from the experience of visiting this sacred place that is engraved on the psyche of New Zealanders.

I would rather there was no one else here but me so I could listen to the Anzacs as they skylarked in the bay while swimming naked, rinsing their clothes and doing their best to get rid of the lice - while ignoring the shrapnel and odd bullets that whizzed past their ears. Instead I pick up a flat brown stone from the beach and slip it into my pocket.

Perhaps one day if I rub it hard enough those voices will come to me.

Like that of a 17-year-old mounted rifleman, whose gravestone sits among many in the cemeteries here, and which is inscribed: "He died a man and closed his life's brief day ere it had scarce begun."

He is one of those of whom President Kemal Ataturk wrote in his famous tribute in 1934, inscribed on one of the several memorials at the cove: "Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives are now in our bosom and at peace [and] have become our sons, too."

I praise God for that.