If anybody ever decides to visit the Gallipoli I can totally recommend a retired Turkish professor by the name of Kenan Celic as your tour guide.  He has taken Bob Hawke, Sir William Dean, and Quentin Bryce on personal tours around the battlefield. He received the Order of Australia for combining a profound knowledge of the campaign with an incredible ability to communicate. Sadly we got a Kamal not Kenan. We only met Kenan in the carpark at Chanuk Bair after our tour was over. Next time.

Kemal, our tour guide, spoke a form of Turklish that would have been almost impossible to understand without full concentration and a lot of pre-reading. His strange dialect was, I think, the next-of-kin to some long deceased form of Olde English. There was a lovely Spanish guy who made an unfortunate decision to join this tour because he had nothing to do that day. He lacked both pre-reading and full concentration and as a result he was defeated by the Kamal the Talking Turk soon after the ANZACS had landed

I felt a range of emotions throughout the day and throughout my reading. The reckless and almost criminal incompetence of the British officers is still infuriating, especially in contrast to the wonderful leadership of some of the Turkish units. Information about the poor performance of some of our troops makes tough reading (More than a quarter had caught some form of STD in Egypt.  A number of Australian units headed back to the boats at the first chance. The Aussies became good soldiers but the Kiwis won that test hands down.)

I was amazed to hear and read about the performance of the famous Turkish 57th Batallion – just 160 men opposed our entire landing force for the first two hours. They had no machine guns, – just rifles, bayonets, great leadership – and stacks and stacks and stacks of raw courage.  No wonder the Turkish army has retired that jersey. There has never been another Turkish 57th Battalion since, out of respect for those blokes.

The diminutive size of some of the sites is terrifying. At The Nek (of Mel Gibson fame) nearly 350 West Australians became casualties in a few minutes on a battlefield not much larger than a tennis court.  Lone Pine is not much bigger. You can see from the beach the second ridge where the Australians were ordered to stop for morning tea. Nine months and 8000 deaths later they had essentially gone no further.  The famous healing words of Ataturk are particularly moving when you see them carved into marble at ANZAC Cove, as is the obvious respect the Turks have shown to our fallen.

We didn’t get to Cape Helles, or Suvla Bay, or the French sites on the Asian Side.  There’s only so much emotion that can be expended in a few hours with someone whose words you can’t really understand. But it is a pilgrimage of commemoration that is well worth the effort. On this day I thought a great deal about Bronny and Damion, I also thought a great deal about various Dads -Scotty’s, Maryanne’s, Don’s – and Ted Evans of course. It is impossible not to think of them and be affected when you are in a place such as this – a place where such enormous sacrifices were made.

Lest we forget? I don’t think we could possibly forget.