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By Root 1816 0

grandeur. To the officers planning the campaign it was obvious that they also constituted a formidable obstacle which could not be tackled head on. They would have to be outflanked. The ideal landing place was far further north on the Gulf of Saros, near Bulair at the neck of the peninsula, where the waters of the Dardanelles began to open into the Sea of Marmara and where an isthmus of land only a few miles wide divided them from the Aegean shore. If the Army could seize the isthmus the Turks in the peninsula would be cut off and trapped, the Army would be in command of the Dardanelles, and long before Turkish reinforcements could possibly arrive from the north, the Navy would be in Constantinople and Turkey would have thrown in the towel. It was obvious. It would be equally obvious to the Turks – and it was precisely because they would be ready to meet an attack that the idea of landing at Bulair was rejected.

The plan was cleverly conceived to deceive the Turkish Army, and it envisaged more than a single landing. Streaming ashore from an armada of shallow-draught lighters and cutters, troops would be punched into the blunt southern nose of the peninsula and advance to capture Krithia village and beyond it Achi Baba. Then forces previously landed on the western beaches north of Cape Helles would link up to widen the advance as it swept across the narrow ankle of the peninsula to the straits beyond. They were under no illusion that it would be easy. All along the coast, in places where the cliffs were lower and the ground beyond was easier to cross, tell-tale streaks of newly turned earth showed that the Turks were busy digging trenches, and banks of new barbed wire shone bright when they caught the sun. After one reconnoitring voyage aboard the battleship Queen Elizabeth Sir Ian Hamilton reported in a letter to Lord Kitchener, ‘Gallipoli looks a much tougher nut to crack than it did over the map in your office.’

The only available maps of the Gallipoli Peninsula were old and rudimentary. They were also inaccurate. They gave no impression of the precipitous terrain, no hint of the deep gullies, the dried-up water-courses, the narrow razor-edged ridges, the deep chasms beyond. And they gave no idea of the thorny, impenetrable scrub that covered the ground and which looked attractively green and lush seen from a distance. It grew thick on the slopes that rose sheer from the sea above a small cove that was nameless before the landings. One day they would call it Anzac – and before long it would be as well known in Australia as the names of Sydney and Melbourne.

The men of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who went ashore at Anzac Cove were not intended to land there at all and they were never intended to scale the heights that soared up from the beach. They should have been landed on the wide and sandy expanse of a beach, code-named X beach, a mile to the south, where easier country ran north of Achi Baba across the peninsula to the waters of the Dardanelles. But the small boats that carried the soldiers from the big ships were cockleshell-light and no one had realised that once they had cast off and were making for the shore, the undertow of the swift current would carry them well to the north. The moon had set. A faint phosphorescence gleamed on the water. Once or twice, as distant search-lights on the Asian coast routinely searched the Dardanelles, the outline of the land ahead flickered momentarily into view, but the darkness was inky black. With no light to guide them and with the treacherous current dragging at their hulls, it was almost inevitable that the leading boats of the covering force should drift to the wrong beach. And once the men of the covering force had landed and were scrambling up the heights that loomed directly ahead, once they had come to grips with the enemy and the main body had landed to reinforce them and daylight revealed the full measure of the misfortune, it was far too late to bring them back.

Captain Herbert Kenyon was one of the first men ashore. He was not an Australian, but