GALLIPOLI BATTLEFIELDS.

Taranaki Daily News, 14 October 1922, Page 10

GALLIPOLI BATTLEFIELDS.

WHAT A FIRE ’ REVEALED. CHUNUK AND THE FARM. In the concluding series of articles to The Times, a correspondent at Gallipoli contributes some vivid impressions of the battlefields as they are to-day. “It seems obvious enough,” he reflects as he stands on Chunuk Bair, “that an army holding’ this ridge of Sari- Bair would hold the key to Gallipoli. Scarcely a fragment of land, from Annafarta to Helles, from the Aegean to the Dardanelles, is hidden from its two chief peaks, Koja Chemen Tepe and Chunuk Bair. Yet, notwithstanding this, notwithstanding that powerful troops were holding it, that deep ravines and inaccessible slopes were its features, our soldiers in the August attack, with one wild rush, scaled to this crest of Chunuk Bair, and gazed for thirteen precious hours on victory. “Now they sleep, most of them, in the cemetries of Chunuk and The Farm; others where neither cross nor mound reveals their resting place, and still others scattered on the slopes and in the bed of Aghyl Dere, a gully twisting from the base of Chunuk to the sea. Reflecting on this, these graves known and unknown, my memory is flung back to the greatest catastrophe of the Gallipoli campaign. Standing on the summit 1 of Chunuk Bair, a point which might almost be described as the pivot of that offensive, I am assailed by curious emotions. Who could resist them? In vivid panorama the whole battlefield is stretched’- before me, from Suvla to Helles, from one sea to another. Asleep and unknown the heroes He on the crest of Chunuk Bair; on the shrubcovered, treacherous foothills; in gullies twisted and gnarled; wherever a man may rest his head and die—Englishmen, Australians, New Zealanders, Indians, a very noble company. REVEALING FIRE. “I descended the precipitous western slopes of Chunuk Bair, and skirting The Farm (no longer such), I entered the dejjp gully of Aghyl Dere, that, in common with many another watercourse, was a means, poor enough, Heaven only knows, for the approach of Sari Bair’s assaulters. A fire had lately passed along this gully, revealing all that scrub and grass had hidden for so long. In all there must have been, scattered within a radius of forty yards, the remains of some twenty or thirty British soldiers; all have now been collected and placed at last with their comrades in The Farm.

“Until that day these bones were not known to have existed, although for two years a graves’ registration unit was stationed here to search for missing bodies, and when they left in December, 19*20, the whole of the Anzac area was handed over to the Imperial War Graves Commission, as having been completely scoured. Approximately one thousand bodies have been found by the War Graves Commission, and others are yet expected, particularly on .Sari Bair and about Lone Pine. Having observed the vigorous and intelligent searching of the Imperial War Graves Commission stationed in this area, I am convinced that at length, though the task is not one they had anticipated, they will have found at least most of the bodies that now lie uncared for in gully and ravine, and will have placed them in cemeteries destined to last for generations—spots for ever England, no matter what the tide of war or politics.”