Anzac Day: Anzac Cove to Lone Pine track

The track from Anzac Cove to Lone Pine is a gruelling, relentless climb up 1.5km of compacted mud as the sun beats down on you.

This was tough enough with my injured knee, but imagine climbing an even steeper route with a rifle, 20kgs of kit, and maybe a bullet in your arm while artillery shells whizz by overhead.

Every Australian and Kiwi knows the story – 20,000 soldiers landed at Gallipoli at dawn on April 25, 1915, and despite being cut to pieces by Turkish defenders, gained a foothold to wage a bloody campaign that ended in defeat.

But one look at the sheer cliffs that overlook Anzac Cove, let alone hours of trudging to Lone Pine and Chunuk Bair, a strategic hill and site of a bloody battle late in the campaign, makes you wonder how anyone made it off the beach at all.

There is complete silence as the Last Post is played at the dawn service at Anzac Cove

Australians and Kiwis rose early for the moving service at Gallipoli

The dawn service begins just in front of the beach at 5.30am, the terrain hidden by the pitch black of night with smatterings of rain only adding to the atmosphere.

Celebrations are far bigger than last year, when just 600 showed up after the previous two anniversaries were cancelled by Covid, thousands arriving on tour buses as early as midnight and waiting rugged up in sleeping bags and space blankets against the night chill.

An eerie blue light illuminates the fog, rain, and lapping waves as names of fallen Anzacs are read out, accompanied by haunting black and white photos of their youthful faces before they left home, never to return.

Slowly as the service progresses with the tale of a father’s fruitless quest for his son’s body – one of thousands whose remains were never found – and other soldiers who remain buried a world away from home, the light of dawn reveals the hallowed ground’s shocking reality.

The beach, from the water to the cliff, is barely two metres wide and even with the ground in front of it flattened out to stage the yearly service, the steep incline begins immediately.

The slope was so steep that no sooner had they crossed the sand that they had to stab their bayonets into the ground to haul themselves up.

Look the other direction and sheer cliffs emerge from the gloom where thousands of Turkish marksmen picked off invading Anzacs before many of them even made it ashore, and there is almost no cover.

An Australian soldier lies wounded in the foreground, as hundreds of other soldiers move among the dead and wounded on the beach at Anzac Cove in 1915

Troops land at Anzac Cove during the battle between Allies and Turkish forces

No-one in their right mind would choose this spot, and the other landing sites over the kilometre along the cove, for an invasion – it was a military planning disaster of the highest order.

That only 10 per cent of the young men who stormed the beaches that day died or were wounded is astonishing, and that they got anywhere at all seems impossible.

After all the politicians have given speeches and dignitaries from Germany to Pakistan have laid wreaths, the always-haunting Last Post is played.

As with the entire service, when no one on stage was speaking, no one in the audience is either. Only the birds, seemingly on cue, warbled in song.

After the minute’s silence, the Rouse was played as Australian and New Zealand flags were raised from half to full mast. The wind suddenly picked up, giving them life for the first time after an hour of hanging limply.

This was repeated four hours later at the Australian service at Lone Pine, where the Allies won a rare victory by holding their lines against waves of Turkish counterattacks in the last weeks of the campaign.

Searing sun had by now replaced the intermittent rain, just as it likely did on the August summer days of the ferocious battle.

The minute’s silence was so well observed that the only sounds were the rustling of leaves in the solitary pine tree in the middle of the cemetery that gives the site its name, and, again, the chirping of birds.

That the Anzacs made it to Lone Pine at all – up the seemingly unscalable hills as snipers and machine guns hunted them – is a testament to their heroism in the face of almost certain death.

An Australian soldier stands after playing his pipe at the dawn service

People attend a ceremony to commemorate at the Lone Pine memorial site

It’s courage that can’t fully be understood without walking the paths they took, seeing the remains of trenches they lived and died in for months at a time – still visible a century later – and seeing with your own eyes how much more difficult the task was than your history teacher ever let on.

This is why even their enemies have such deep respect for what the rag-tag-band of colonials tried to accomplish in the spring and summer of 1915.

A century later, trees and scrubs are finally growing thick and tall across a landscape once blasted free of all vegetation after decades of struggle to recover – just as we did.

The Anzacs are still there among them, and we are still proud of them.