The trail from Anzac Cove to Lone Pine is a grueling, relentless climb of a mile of compacted mud as the sun shines down on you.
This was tough enough with my injured knee, but imagine climbing an even steeper route with a rifle, 20kg gear and maybe a bullet in your arm as artillery shells whiz overhead.
Every Australian and Kiwi knows the story – 20,000 soldiers landed at Gallipoli at dawn on April 25, 1915, and despite being hacked to pieces by Turkish defenders, gained a foothold to wage a bloody campaign that ended in a defeat.
But one look at the sheer cliffs overlooking Anzac Cove, let alone trudging for hours at Lone Pine and Chunuk Bair, a strategic hill and site of a bloody battle late in the campaign, makes you wonder how anyone got off the beach in the first place come. .
Complete silence reigns as the Last Post is played during the morning service at Anzac Cove
Australians and Kiwis rose early for the moving service in Gallipoli
The morning service starts just before the beach at 5:30am, the grounds hidden by the pitch black of the night with some rain only adding to the atmosphere.
The celebrations are much larger than last year, when just 600 showed up after the previous two anniversaries were canceled by Covid, thousands arriving on tour buses as early as midnight and waiting in sleeping bags and space blankets against the nighttime cold.
An eerie blue light illuminates the fog, rain and lapping waves as the names of fallen Anzacs are read aloud, accompanied by eerie black and white photos of their youthful faces before they left home, never to return.
Slowly as the service progresses with the story of a father’s fruitless search for the body of his son – one of thousands whose remains have never been found – and other soldiers who remain buried a world away from home, dawn reveals the shocking reality of the sacred ground.
The beach, from the water to the cliff, is barely six feet wide and even with the ground leveled in front of it to host the annual service, the steep slope begins immediately.
The slope was so steep that once they crossed the sand they had to stick their bayonets in the ground to hoist themselves up.
Look the other way and sheer cliffs emerge from the darkness where thousands of Turkish sharpshooters picked up the invading Anzacs before many of them even made landfall, and there’s 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 Allied and Turkish forces
No sane person would pick this spot, and the other landing sites more than a mile up the bay, for an invasion—it was a military planning disaster of the highest order.
That only 10 percent of the young men who stormed the beaches that day died or were injured 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 terrifying Last Post is played.
As with the entire service, when no one on stage is speaking, no one in the audience is speaking. Only the birds, seemingly on command, chattered in song.
After a minute’s silence, the Rouse was played while the Australian and New Zealand flags were raised from half to full mast. The wind picked up suddenly, giving them life for the first time after hanging limp for an hour.
This was repeated four hours later at the Australian service at Lone Pine, where the Allies won a rare victory in holding their lines against waves of Turkish counter-attacks in the closing weeks of the campaign.
The scorching sun had meanwhile taken the place of the intermittent rain, just as it probably did on the August summer days of the savage battle.
The minute’s silence was observed so well that the only sounds were the rustling of leaves in the lone pine tree in the center of the cemetery that gives the place its name, and again the chirping of birds.
That the Anzacs made it to Lone Pine at all – up the seemingly out of reach hills as snipers and machine guns hunted them – is testament to their heroism in the face of almost certain death.
An Australian soldier stands after playing his pipe at the morning service
People attend a memorial ceremony at the Lone Pine memorial site
It’s courage that can’t be fully understood without walking the paths they took, seeing the remains of trenches in which they lived and died for months – still visible a century later – and seeing firsthand how much more difficult the task was than your history teacher ever let you know.
This is why even their enemies have such a deep respect for what the patchwork of colonials tried to accomplish in the spring and summer of 1915.
A century later, trees and shrubbery are finally growing thick and tall in a landscape once stripped of all vegetation after decades of struggle to recover – just like us.
The Anzacs are still here, and we are still proud of them.