"SAME OLD ANZAC"

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 106, 8 May 1933, Page 8

"SAME OLD ANZAC"

SCENES REVISITED

PEACE-TIME CEREMONY

The story of an interesting ceremony that tookl place at Anzac Cove, Gallipoli, on the morning of Anzac Day of last year, is told by Mr. J. C. Waters i) the Melbourne'".Herald." Lieuten-ant-Colonel C. E. Hughes, chief administrative officer of the- Imperial 'War Graves Commission in the- East, described the sceno by radio-telephone from Cairo to Melbourne. He had just returned from a visit to the Peninsula and was ablo to give a picture of Gallipoli as it is today. Colonel Hughes, who is a Tasmanian, spoko from his office, and Mr. Waters from Melbourne, ajid their voices travelled by1 way of London. The ceremony took place near where the first bullets of'the Turks "struck sparks from the shingle," and at a cemetery holding 300 bodies of soldiers who fell in the first hours of the landing. A few Turks, who joined in tribute, were gardeners employed by the Graves Commission. The man who led was another Australian, Millington by name, who fought on Gallipoli, and who,, now is officer-in-chargo of that war graves area. ... "You'll be able to picture it all right," said Colonel Hughes. "-The stretch of beach, deserted now, once packed with the throbbing activity of war; the heights, then honeycombed with dugouts, now overgrown again with the thorn bushes which the Diggers cursed as they climbed.' A dawn, just like the deathlike silence that swept the ourushing boats, when, just beforo the landing, flares were seen and the figure of a man was silhouetted on the plateau. SAME OLD WILD THYME. "I was there the other day. But for the cemeteries and the obelisks on Lone Pine and Chunuk Bair, is the same old Gallipoli; wild, rugged, and with a seeming impregnability that is a challenge to man. It was a sunny day, just as it was in 1915.. I crushed wild thyme as I walked through the scrub. Its smell recalled the early fighting, when many Diggers shuddered involuntarily because it was associated so much with death." Mr. AVaters asked about the young pine that was striking upward from a seed of the old tree that gave Lone1 Pine its name. "It's fl6urishing," Colonel Hughes said. "I can see it now, waving in the breeze among the rosemary bushes, the irises, the poppies, and the anemones that we have planted around and between the rows of 050 Diggers buried there. I stood on the steps of the memorial to the 4000 missing and looked out across it to the Aegean, blue and peaceful, where oncO r»de Britain's battleships pounding the inner heights so unavailingly in efforts to dislodge the Turk." .Colonel Hughes said that all of the 20 cemeteries on the heights and .in tho valleys of \Anzac were cameos of beauty today. Relatives of the 7000 men commemorated in memorial and gravestone would be glad to know that. He ran through a few famous battle names now holding cemeteries of the dead—first Lone Pine, then Johnston's Gully, Quinn 's Post, Baby 700, _ tho Nek, where tragedy stalked so swiftly for those who took part in efforts to gain tho highest ridge, Embarkation Pier, Walker's Ridge, Shrapnel Valley, and Ari Burnu. PEACE OF THE CEMETEKIEB. "Shrapnel Valley!" remarked Mr. Waters. "I remembered a plum or peach tree reaching out from the scrub and wild oats there four years ago. Colonel Hughes told me then that it was a relic of the Digger occupation. It was still there, a strange memorial in the wildnjss of Gallipoli." "The Australian gums we planted a few years ago," Colonel Hughes said, "are doing well, and it will not bo long before they-will be a conspicuous feature on sides of the sheltered ridges. The cypress trees are also coming along nicely around the walls of the cemeteries. As I looked the othSr day I could not imagine anything more beautiful than what has been done by the War Graves Commission to carry out the Empire and national ideal. I stayed there until sundown, in the peace and quietness of it all. Old memories stirred, fanned by* the singing of blackbirds and the swishing of the wings of owls flying low over Chunuk Bair." .