by Mark Baker
The football was an old-fashioned Turkish bomb about 10.5 inches in diameter with 2-inch thick sides that was ignited by a gunpowder fuse in a wooden plug. Four of them had been fired from a nearby Turkish trench. Shrapnel from one landed very close to where Schuler and Dexter were sheltering, but the only harm done was to a case of tinned jam. The pair had many more adventures during the six weeks that Schuler was at Anzac Cove. They often headed out together to take photographs in the forward trenches. Schuler’s pictures became some of the most famous and haunting images of the campaign.
Walter Dexter had landed at Gallipoli on 15 May. He did not step off that fatal shore until the second last day of the Anzac evacuation in December. The relentless procession of funerals for men he knew and loved had tested Dexter’s faith. In the hours before the evacuation, the padre carefully prepared maps of all the burial sites that would assist the later work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. As he wandered the gullies and the rough graveyards for the last time, he scattered wattle seeds sent by the father of a soldier from Adelaide. ‘If we have to leave here, I intend that a bit of Australia shall be here,’ he told his diary.
On July 26 Schuler and Bean visited the New Zealand positions on the left flank. In the relative calm before the coming storm, Bean pondered their status as civilians in a war zone:
It was like a walk in the country. The Post was taken up about three weeks after we came here. At that time there wasn’t a trench outside of it—now the whole place is fortified and entrenched. We saw one Turk with his black head and shoulders over the trench top. Paddon of Otago M.R . . . asked me if I would like a shot any time—but my job is not to shoot—I am not a combatant—and I will not do so.6
Schuler had reached Gallipoli just in time to witness the most important battles of the entire campaign. The stalemate that had settled over the Anzac front in June and early July, and the failure of British and French forces at Cape Helles to break through despite a sequence of pitched battles, convinced Hamilton and his masters in London that a major new offensive was needed to try to break the impasse. By the end of June it was resolved that five extra divisions would be sent to Gallipoli. The plan was for an intense, three-pronged attack to overwhelm the Turkish defences, seize control of the peninsula and at last enable the navy to get through the straits and on to Constantinople. A key new element was a fresh wave of landings at Suvla Bay, immediately to the north of the Anzac positions, to outflank the Turkish trenches across the heights at the centre of the peninsula. A simultaneous breakout was planned from the Anzac bridgehead to make a frontal assault on the Turkish positions across the formidable Sari Bair ridge and the heights of Chunuk Bair, starting with a feint at Lone Pine. At the same time, a new attack would be launched by the British and French at Cape Helles to tie down the Turkish forces there. Central to the success of the strategy would be the element of surprise at Suvla, and the speed with which the fresh troops could overrun the lightly defended Turkish positions in the nearby foothills. What should have been the easiest of the three prongs of attack would be the one most poorly executed.
Before the war the hills above Anzac Cove had been covered by a forest of pine trees. By early August the interminable shelling and the insatiable demand for fuel and trench reinforcement material had left just one of the Aleppo pines standing. The Anzacs had christened the place Lonesome Pine, after a popular song of the time. It would soon be immortalised in Australian folklore as Lone Pine. On the afternoon of 6 August, Australian troops quietly crowded the forward trenches across a 200-metre front. Phillip Schuler was with them:
At 5.30 came the avalanche. The artillery ceased. A whistle sharply blown was the signal prearranged. A score or more other whistles sounded simultaneously. The officers, crouching each with his command under the parapets, were up then and with words like ‘Come lads, now for the trenches!’ were over our parapets, and in a long, more or less regular line the heavily-laden men commenced the dash across the dead ground between.7
Despite the intense bombardment that had preceded the attack, the Turkish machine-gunners appear to have been caught off guard. The first line of about 150 men from the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Battalions reached the Turkish trenches with relatively few casualties. The subsequent waves were not so lucky, but within half an hour the Australians had captured the Turkish front line and were soon resisting a withering counterattack. The battle then descended into a maelstrom of hand-to-hand fighting that would last several days and claim thousands of Australian lives. Seven Victoria Crosses were won at Lone Pine and the reputation of the Australian soldier for courage and tenacity was committed to legend.
In his reporting Schuler was justifiably in awe of what the Australians had achieved. But he did not sugarcoat the appalling cost of the battle in dead and terribly wounded men—on both sides:
The second in command told me of a tragic discovery which is a tribute to both the Australians and the Turks. Along one of the common trenches the enemy fled, but turned and made stand after stand against the wild attackers as they came cheering on. After the battle this officer discovered, facing one another with but a score of yards between them, two heaps of bodies—the Australians, six of them, lying one on top of the other, the sixth man with his rifle still pointing towards the foe. On the other side, the Turks lay piled in exactly the same fashion. It had been a fight to the death. Man after man must have crawled up and fired over the dead bodies of his comrades until they had filled the trench. Nothing can ever convey the awfulness of the trenches after attacks of this kind . . . As I walked down the trenches it was impossible to avoid the men who had fallen. They were lying on the parapets, and their blackened hands hung down over our path.8
Schuler also respected the courage and humanity of the Turkish troops. ‘I have referred more than once to the bravery of the Turkish soldier. The fight he put up on the Lonesome Pine trenches would establish that reputation were there not other deeds to his credit,’ he wrote in the same dispatch soon after the Battle of Lone Pine. He had met a prisoner captured during the fighting, a 43-year-old farmer from Adani who had been an orderly for one of the Turkish colonels:
The previous day’s action had killed many men and when operations started on the 6th the Turks crowded into their tunnels and were unable to come out in time before the Australians were on them. He had quite expected by this time to be home with his family; he had never expected he would come so far on the peninsula. It was Kismet, the will of Allah, that they should be taken.9
If Lone Pine had been a bloodbath, a worse one was immediately to follow—and from this one there would be no gain to salve the huge sacrifice of lives. The Nek was one of the most forbidding positions on the battlefields of Gallipoli. Held at this time by the 3rd Light Horse Brigade under Brigadier General Hughes, it was a critical and precarious toehold in the Anzac front line, as Schuler would describe:
It was barely 120 yards wide. The Turkish trenches were scarcely 80 yards away from our line. They sloped backward slightly up the ridge to the sides of Baby 700 and Chunuk Bair. On the right of this narrow causeway was the head of Monash Gully, a steep drop into a ravine, and across it, Pope’s Hill and Quinn’s Post. On the left the sheer precipices fell away down into the foothills of the Sari Bair ridge. Row after row one could see of the enemy trenches—Chessboard Trenches; the name significant for their formation.10
Lone Pine had been a feint that overachieved. The Nek was a central element of the main battle that failed dismally—but through no fault of the soldiers and the junior officers who went with the hundreds of men to their deaths. Once more, Phillip Schuler was there as the attack was launched before dawn on 7 August, positioned in a forward observation post. His dispatch would be the first to recount the story of a battle that would become fixed in the minds of generations of Australians as symbolising both the heroism and the horror of Gallipoli. It would also confirm Schuler’s place as one of the finest Australian war correspondents:
The battle line was s
pitting red tongues of flame all along the Nek while at Quinn’s Post occurred every few minutes terrible explosions of shell and bombs from either side. A gun a minute was booming constantly—booming from the heart of Anzac. The destroyers, the rays of their searchlights cast up onto the hill, swept the top of Sari Bair ridge with the high-explosive shell from their 6-inch guns. Fearful as had been the night, the dawn was more horrible still, as an intense bombardment commenced on the Chessboard Trenches on the Nek.11
The suicidal task of storming the Turkish trenches fell first to the men of the 8th and 10th Light Horse Regiments. Their orders were to charge at 4.30 a.m. with their rifles unloaded. The commanders did not want the charge to be slowed by men stopping to aim and fire. Just the bayonets fixed on their .303s were deemed sufficient to confront the enemy and defend themselves, should they make it through the hailstorm of Turkish machine-gun fire. Schuler had heard a remark by Lieutenant Colonel J.M. Antill, the brigade major, which underscored the odds against success. Antill had said that with their artillery barrage ahead of the battle, the Australians had gone along the whole of their battlefront ‘ringing a bell’ for the Turks. ‘Then, when that had tolled and sounded, were the Light Horse to face their certain death,’ Schuler grimly added.
The attack was to be made in four lines, 150 men in each. The Victorians of the 8th Light Horse were to form the first two lines. As well as scaling ladders to enable them to climb into the enemy trenches, the soldiers were required to carry empty sandbags, food supplies and plenty of ammunition: ‘But they were not to fire a shot. They had to do their work with the cold steel of the bayonet.’ The men of the 8th Light Horse were to be followed by two further lines of the 10th Light Horse. The last of those lines was to carry picks, shovels, bombs, water and large reserves of ammunition to consolidate the presumed victory of those who had gone before. As the seconds ticked towards 4.30 a.m., the constant thump of bullets hitting the sandbags as the Turkish machine guns traversed from end to end of the short line suggested otherwise. Despite the intensity of the Australian bombardment, the Turkish front trenches remained largely unscathed.
In three lines of trenches, their bayonets fixed, standing one above the other to get better shooting, resting on steps or sitting on the parados of the trenches, the Turks waited the coming of the Light Horsemen. The trenches were smothered in a yellow smoke and dust from the bursting lyddite from the ships, that almost obscured from our view the enemy’s position. It was a bombardment the intensity of which had never been seen yet on Gallipoli; the hill was plastered with awful death-dealing shells. Just at 4.25 the bombardment slackened significantly. Immediately there began to pour a sheet of lead from the Turkish trenches. Musketry and machine guns fired incessantly. Could anything live for a minute in it? At the end of three minutes our guns ceased.12
The 8th Light Horse was led by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander White. When the war was declared, White had left the family malting business he ran with his brother Joe in the Victorian hill town of Marysville to enlist. As a commanding officer, White was expected to remain behind, directing operations while his men attacked. But he was a man, his family would say, ‘who wouldn’t ask of people who worked for him to do anything he wouldn’t do’.13 Around his neck, White wore a locket with a picture of his wife Myrtle and his infant son, also named Alexander. In his pocket, tucked inside a small New Testament, was a poem:
Let me be a little braver
When temptation makes me waver
Let me strive a little harder
To be all that I should be
Let me be a little meeker
With the brother that is weaker
Let me think more of my neighbour
And a little less of me.
In Alexander White’s mind, there was no question of what he must do. Phillip Schuler recorded the moment:
White elected to lead the men he loved. He made a brief farewell to his brother officers. He shook them by the hand and went into the firing line. He stood waiting with his watch in hand. ‘Men,’ he said, ‘you have ten minutes to live.’ And those Light Horsemen of his regiment, recruited from the heart of Victoria, knew what he said was true. They waited, listening to the terrible deluge that rained against the parapets of their trenches. ‘Three minutes, men,’ and the word came down from the far end of the line, did the order still hold good? It was a sergeant who sent it, and by the time he had received the reply passed back along the waiting line, the whistle for the charge sounded. With an oath, ‘—him’ he leaped to the parapet of the trench; he fell back on his comrade waiting below him—dead.14
White was one of the first over the parapet in his section of the trench. He had not gone ten paces when he was cut down, riddled with bullets. His body would never be recovered. Later that night a sergeant would crawl out under cover of darkness and retrieve the colonel’s fob watch, grazed and blackened by a bullet. White’s men, spurred on by his gallantry, maintained the charge into the barrage of fire from the Turkish positions.
The first line of 150 men melted away ere they had gone half the distance to the trenches, and yet the second line, waiting and watching, followed them. One small knoll alone gave a little protection for a few dozen paces to the advancing line from the Turkish machine guns, that rattled from a dozen different positions along that narrow front, and swept from the right flank across from the enemy trenches opposite Quinn’s Post. Adding to the terror of it all came the swish of the shells from the French ‘75’ guns that the Turks had captured from the Servians, and which were now firing ten shells a minute on to the Nek. The parapets were covered with dead and dying. Stretcher-bearers rescued men where they could from just above the parapets, and dragged them down into the trenches, while over the same parapets went other men, doomed like their magnificent comrades.15
Only a handful of men managed the reach the Turkish line on the far right of the Australians’ position. Others made it across the fearful no-man’s land only to be killed when they reached the enemy trenches. Among the few that did make it across alive, one was rumoured (a rumour later challenged) to have raised a small yellow and red flag, the pre-arranged signal for the second part of the attack to be launched. As Schuler ruefully wrote, ‘It were better those gallant men never reached that position.’ The third line, the men of the 10th Light Horse, was ordered to charge. Only after most of them had surged forward to their deaths was the murderous attack finally called off. The flag seen over the enemy’s trench soon disappeared, the fate of those who erected it never known. Late the next night, Schuler reported, a private named McGarry had crawled back from beneath a parapet of the Turkish trenches where he had feigned death all day. He described ‘a forest of Turkish steel’ arrayed in a series of three trenches ranged one behind the other—the impossible obstacle that hundreds of young Australians had been sent to overrun.
Thus in a brief fifteen minutes did regiments perish. Only an incident it was the greatest of battles ever fought in the Levant, but an imperishable record to Australia’s wounded: 50 men killed, 170 wounded and 181 missing: and those missing never will return to answer the roll call—435 casualties in all.16
More than 8700 Australians would die during the eight-month Gallipoli campaign but the slaughter at the Nek would assume a pre-eminent place in Anzac folklore. To many Australians, it was proof of the extraordinary bravery of their soldiers and, therefore, the intrinsic courage of the nation. Equally, it was proof of the heartless incompetence of those who ordered so many of those brave men to pointless deaths. Modern Australian perceptions of the entire campaign would be heavily influenced by Peter Weir’s iconic 1980 film, Gallipoli, a fictionalised story that focuses on the Battle of the Nek and takes significant liberties with the historical record. In the movie, the principal villain is a colonel who insists the Light Horsemen must charge and keep charging despite overwhelming evidence of the mayhem and the futility of the attack. He wears a monocle and speaks with a plummy accent—an almost laughable caricature of a c
allous, condescending, class-obsessed British officer. In fact, it was an Australian officer who insisted that the Light Horse charge despite the failure of the preceding artillery barrage to weaken the Turkish front-line trenches, and who insisted that the attack continue after the annihilation of the first two waves. It was the same officer Schuler had recorded saying before the battle began that the barrage had been like a bell alerting the Turks to what was coming.
Lieutenant Colonel Jack ‘Bull’ Antill was a regular Australian soldier. As brigade major of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade, he was second in command to Brigadier General Frederic Hughes, who left control of the attack at the Nek to his deputy. Antill was a renowned bully with a swaggering self-assurance equal to any British officer of such disposition, but his bravado was all home grown. The further tragedy of Colonel Alexander White’s selfless decision to join the first wave of his men when they charged to their deaths meant there was no officer left in the forward Anzac trenches senior enough to order a halt to the bloodbath when the impossibility of the task was manifest. It was Antill’s call and he was back at the brigade headquarters out of sight of the mindless slaughter.
What happened at the Nek, however appalling and great the waste of lives, cannot be viewed in isolation. The frontal assault on the Turkish lines from the Anzac bridgehead that began with the Battle of the Nek and the simultaneous charge by the 1st Light Horse Brigade near Quinn’s Post that same morning was a central element of the August offensive. Even if the immediate objective proved impossible and the slow realisation of that fact a dreadful failing by the military leadership, the attack—and the success of the Battle of Lone Pine the day before—ensured that the commander of the Turkish forces, the German General Otto Liman von Sanders, could not afford to redeploy substantial numbers of troops to help answer the attacks being launched simultaneously from Suvla Bay and Cape Helles. And a disaster far greater than the Nek, if not for the Australians then certainly for the fate of the Gallipoli campaign, was unfolding that day at Suvla.