ANZAC Day Chunuk Bair Service

E nga mate, nga aitua, o koutou, araa o matou, ka tangihia e tatou i tenei wa.  Haere, haere, haere.

To the dead and to those being mourned, both yours and ours, we lament them and farewell them.

Tatou te hunga ora, tena tatou katoa.

To we, the living, greetings to all of us.

This part of the Gallipoli peninsula will live forever in the hearts of New Zealand. 

This hilltop was the zenith of the Gallipoli campaign.  It was here that soldiers from New Zealand captured the heights, and for a brief moment could see the Dardanelles in the distance.  It was a scene of profound drama and of tragedy.

In August 1915, the New Zealanders were ordered to spearhead the breakout from the stalemate of the Gallipoli trenches.  Further down the ridge, the Australians staged a costly diversionary attack at Lone Pine, losing more than 2,000 men drawing the Turks away from the New Zealand front.  The New Zealand troops, meanwhile, were struggling through scrub and gullies.  The newly arrived Maori Contingent and the Mounted Rifles cleared the way.  But by the time the New Zealand Infantry Brigade were in a position to attack on 7 August, it was already daylight, and the chance of surprise was gone.  Three companies of the Auckland Battalion were nevertheless ordered to attack, losing half their men in a matter of minutes.

At first light on 8 August, the Wellington troops overran the summit of Chunuk Bair, which was lightly held.  The Wellingtons tried to dig trenches and prepare defensive positions.  But the Turkish counterattack was not long in coming.  First sniper fire, then waves of Turkish infantry assaulted the New Zealand line.  They were driven back by repeated bayonet charges, but each time there were fewer New Zealanders left to meet the attack. 

It was a blistering hot day.  And as the casualties mounted on both sides, one soldier remembered:

Soon the ravine was full of wounded.  Two hundred of us, maybe more.  It was terrible, terrible.  No water and no attention and nobody could do anything.  We were being shelled too as we lay there.  Men were all smashed up, and getting smashed up even more, and bleeding away.  They knew they were dying.  They were brave men.  That's all you can call them.  Brave.

All the combatants were brave men.  Too many were sacrificed.

By evening, men of the Otago battalion and the Mounted Rifles fought their way through to reinforce the New Zealand line.  But by that stage the Wellingtons had been virtually destroyed.  After the battle there were only 70 fit men left of the 700 who captured Chunuk Bair that morning. 

On 9 August the few remaining New Zealanders were withdrawn from the line, and replaced by fresh and inexperienced British battalions.  The next day the Turkish commander, Mustafa Kemal, led his troops in a charge which overran the position.  Chunuk Bair was lost.  As a New Zealander said:  "It was all over.  From then on we knew there was little hope of victory on the peninsula, and that all the suffering had been in vain."

For New Zealand the suffering and death had added poignancy.  New Zealanders had nothing to gain from the fight at Gallipoli. It was someone else's war.  Turkey was not our enemy.

But Chunuk Bair was New Zealand's battle.  In it, the New Zealanders showed all the spirit and tenacity learned in their own country.  Ormand Burton, who fought at Gallipoli, was to write later:  "How men died on Chunuk Bair was determined largely by how men and women lived on the farms and in the towns of New Zealand." 

It was men like that who came close to doing the impossible at Chunuk Bair.  Who soldiered on through the long heartbreak of the Gallipoli campaign.  Men "from frosty South Island sheep stations, from dank North Island bush country, from goldfield and gumfield, coal mine and timber mill, office and factory".  It was such men who endured bullets and shells; dysentery, which killed more men than the Turks did; malnutrition; the ever-present lice and flies; the stench of death.  When the New Zealanders were finally evacuated from Gallipoli in December, one new arrival thought they resembled the survivors of an earthquake. 

The survivors could not talk about their experience back in New Zealand.  A private from Otago recalled:  "I got sick to death of people when I got home from Gallipoli.  People seemed so stupid, so smug and lucky, asking their silly questions.  They had no idea what we'd been through.  No idea at all."

But they never forgot the friends they left behind on Gallipoli.  A Canterbury veteran said:  "What do I remember most?  Me mates.  Nothing much more  All gone.  That's what I dwell on.  Those good mates all gone."  A medical orderly from Invercargill remembered five friends from Bluff, killed in the first half-hour ashore on Anzac Day.  "One I used to play cricket with.  A cousin I used to row with.  A chap I used to work with on the Bluff waterfont.  Another I boxed with.  It was a great blow." 

Behind us on the hill is the New Zealand memorial, which records the names of 852 New Zealand soldiers who fell in battle for Chunuk Bair and have no known grave.

Was Gallipoli worth all that suffering?  The 2,721 New Zealand soldiers dead?  The 4,752 wounded?  That was the question most old soldiers asked when they looked back.  "What did we win?  What did we gain?"  We still ask the same question now.  None of us can really imagine the suffering those soldiers endured.  We cannot offer glib words of comfort to explain this tragedy.  The words which might have been used then - Empire, honour - seem empty now, devoid of meaning.

Gallipoli was no victory, nothing to celebrate. It stands out in our past as a brutal and desolate moment of violence and suffering.  And yet, it is part of us.  Part of all of us.  Part of our nation.

Each of us has to find our own meaning in the way these men lived and died.  We owe them that much.  Not to try to understand their sacrifice, but to acknowledge it.  To remember it.  To mourn for it.  They came from a different era, the soldiers who fought here, and yet, when you listen to their words, they were very like us.  They were, unmistakeably, New Zealanders. 

That is why we are here today.  To greet our ancestors.  They went before us into darkness, but they have not been forgotten.  Their sacrifice has helped form the nation we are today - strong, independent, and peace-loving.  They live in our hearts and in our memories.  They are with us forever - as we gather here, we New Zealanders, once again standing together on Chunuk Bair. 

No reira, tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa.