Tears flow amid the echoes of battle

Some of the thousands of tourists viewing graves at Anzac Cove, Gallipoli. Picture / Mark Mitchell

I shed my first Gallipoli tears on the heights of Chunuk Bair, that scrap of dusty, scrub-clad land whose name holds the ultimate place of honour in our nation's history and has been known to me since I was old enough to read.

Minutes after I arrived at this sacred place - gazing out over Suvla Bay on the one side, the Narrows of the Dardanelles on the other and Hill 461, the peninsula's highest point a few kilometres away - an Army trumpeter, practising for today's Anzac Day service, sounded the Last Post.

I couldn't help it. My throat closed up, the tears gushed out and, as I flicked them from my face, they fell in the dust to join those of many of the hundreds of New Zealanders who fought and suffered and died at this place.

And echoing down the decades I heard the yelling of orders, the screams of the wounded, the grunts as a fatal bullet tore the life out of one of our men, the shrieks as the Turks charged our trenches again and again and again.

I heard the thunder of naval artillery, the crack, crack, crack of a hundred rifles, the stutter of machine guns and the murderous whirr of shrapnel that cut down the flower of a generation of this nation's young manhood.

I smelled the mud and the blood, felt the flies and the fleas and the lice, and could almost taste the putrid miasma of hundreds of bloated, rotting corpses - Turk and New Zealander alike - piled together in heaps, filling the trenches and strewn on the slopes for kilometres around.

And as the haunting strains of the Last Post faded and died, I came back to the present when one of my colleagues asked hesitantly: Are you all right?

I wept a bit again when the practising New Zealand joint forces band played God Defend New Zealand. Moments before scores of Turks had stood and sung along lustily as the band played their national anthem.

My mood was relieved by a group of Turkish teenagers who, with flashing black eyes and ready smiles and laughter, told us in their almost immaculate English that they were pleased to see us. They were there to honour their ancestors, they said, and were happy that we had travelled halfway around the world to do the same.

The site is dominated by two huge obelisks, one for our fallen and one for theirs. And there's a mighty statue of Kemal Ataturk, the revered founder of the Turkish republic, who as a young Army colonel devised the strategy and led the counter-attack that reclaimed Chunuk Bair, then being held by raw British troops who had relieved our New Zealanders.

The two monuments are only metres apart - further, I thought, than the opposing warriors had often been. Ours reads: In honour of the soldiers of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force 8 August 1915.

Below them is the cemetery with just 10 graves of New Zealanders, Britons and Gurkhas. A wall contains the names of hundreds of our fallen and a tribute to those whose fate remains unknown.

I stood in the hip-high, 60cm wide trench that surrounds the perimeter, dug by Colonel William Malone and the Wellingtons, who were first to the top, throwing off a ferociously determined Turkish resistance.

I suspect that when I return to Chunuk Bair, as far as the Anzacs advanced, for the 90th anniversary service today, more tears will flow.

Earlier in the day as I looked out my Canakkale hotel room window I watched a large cruise liner steaming up towards the Narrows.

It was about the size of a World War I battleship and I wondered if any among the thousands aboard it realised they were sailing over the watery graves of hundreds of British sailors who drowned when their ships hit mines and sank - three battleships in one day.

Off the liner's bow was a big fishing boat, about the size of the Turkish minelayers which put down an intricate pattern of explosives to close off the straits and of the British minesweepers that tried unsuccessfully to clear them under heavy fire from two forts and mobile Turkish artillery.

It was the failure of the British Navy to force the Narrows that gave birth to the idea of a land war.

Moored in the harbour at Canakkale are three modern warships, a British missile frigate, a Turkish frigate and a French destroyer. They remind me that this strip of sea has a military history thousands of years long. The ruins of Troy are just down the road.

Throughout Turkey thousands of homes have the Turkish flag hanging out of windows or taped to walls. They are a patriotic people, something perhaps we New Zealanders have forgotten how to be - overtly, anyway.

And Gallipoli anniversaries are obviously very big business in this part of the world. Everywhere there are importunate street vendors trying to sell me everything from jackets and T-shirts to ornaments and knick-knacks, to trinkets to mugs and even urns.

It's as if the entire local economy is built on Canakkale's proximity to the Gallipoli battlefields.