Pebble returns to foreign fields

Richard White takes the precious stone on the RNZAF 757 this week, bound for Gallipolli. Picture / Mark Mitchell

When World War II veteran Richard White, 80, of Gisborne, stands on the beach at Anzac Cove on the Gallipoli Peninsula at dawn on Monday, clutched in his hand will be a small, brown pebble taken from the blood-soaked peninsula in 1915.

It was found in the uniform pocket of his father, H. M. White, who landed at Gallipoli with the Otago Mounted Rifles, by a nurse on the hospital ship which evacuated the soldier after he was wounded on Chunuk Bair, and has been in the family for nearly 90 years.

Richard White, one of 35 New Zealand veterans on the way to Turkey for the 90th anniversary of the Anzac landings, has a decision to make: should he return the pebble whence it came or simply rub it on the ground at Chunuk Bair and take it back home.

"I think I'll take it home again," he told me at 36,000ft over India on Thursday on the RNZAF aircraft taking the New Zealand party to the Anzac commemoration.
"After all, it's a family treasure and I'd like to see it passed on from generation to generation to keep dad's memory alive."

Like so many of his brethren who served at Gallipoli, H. M. White refused to his dying day to talk much about it, and his sons and daughters know only that a sniper's bullet caught him in the stomach and he was still receiving treatment for the wound when he was repatriated in 1916 after months in hospitals in Lebanon and Britain.

With Richard White will be another 80-year-old World War II veteran, James East, whose niece, RNZN Lieutenant Danielle East, 25, is in the ranks of the New Zealand joint services honour guard. Lieutenant East is the daughter of Richard's brother, David, of Botany Downs, and for her it will be a double remembrance. A great-grandfather, Kenneth Woodcock, served at Gallipoli, too - an infantryman who later served on the bloody fields of Flanders.

She cheerfully admits to being an "autumn leaf". "My mother," she explains, "is 20 years younger than my dad."

James East's father served in the ambulance unit of the Wellington Battalion as a stretcher-bearer and left with the main body of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. He received a shrapnel wound to the head in the battles fought to take and hold Quinn's Post and lay on the beach for three days because he was thought to be dead.

But he managed to raise a single finger which was noticed and he was evacuated with other wounded to the Greek Island of Lemnos, jumping off place for the Gallipoli invasion, and then to hospital in England.

"My father became a schoolteacher after he came home, but for the rest of his life he carried bits of shrapnel in his head and from time to time had fits," said Mr East.

The New Zealand contingent for the commemorations was due to land at Istanbul yesterday after a stopover in Dubai. The party then travels by bus to Canakkale, the city on the Dardanelles nearest to the Gallipoli Peninsula, just across the infamous Narrows, where the party will stay for the Turkish, British, Australian and New Zealand official services which are spread over tomorrow and Monday.

Prime Minister Helen Clark, after visits to Thailand and Poland, was due to join the party at Canakkale early last evening.

Apart from the dawn service at Anzac Cove at 5.30am on Monday, which it is New Zealand's turn to present, the principal New Zealand service will be at Chunuk Bair that afternoon at 12.30, following the Australian service at Lone Pine at 10.30am and the Turkish service at 57th Regiment at 11.30.

The programme set down for the New Zealand visitors, veterans, servicemen and women, Maori concert party, young essay winners and media is punishing.

Tomorrow, our day starts at 6am. We are on the move on the peninsula for 12 hours; and on Monday our day starts at 3am and ends, after four commemorative services, at 4pm.

But I wouldn't miss it for the world.