By WARREN GAMBLE at Chunuk Bair
Trooper Frank Clark was well remembered yesterday.
On a marble pillar at Gallipoli, his great-niece Helen Clark placed a red poppy by his name.
Trooper Clark lasted only 12 days before he was killed in the battle for Hill 60, a low rise at the northern end of the Anzac area of operations.
Helen Clark said his final letter home on August 21, 1915, was probably written just before the fierce seven-day battle for the hill began.
He was listed missing seven days later. His body was never found.
During her visit, the Prime Minister saw graphic reminders of the ferocity of the assault on Hill 60.
In an overgrown trench marking the Turkish line, a large white piece of bone lay exposed, while one of her party also found a bullet.
Helen Clark said the battle was a futile single bid by the Anzacs to break out through the Turkish lines.
"When you look at what they were ordered to do ... Charge over pretty open space into the Turkish lines, they had nowhere to go. They were systematically mown down."
One hundred and eighty-two New Zealanders are commemorated in the Hill 60 cemetery. It overlooks green wheatfields, scattered with red poppies. Inland is the imposing ridge of Chunuk Bair, the highest point of the peninsula.
New Zealand soldiers took Chunuk Bair only days before Trooper Clark's death, but the Allies failed to hold it.
Anna Chartres, one of the five New Zealand students whose essays earned them trips to Gallipoli, summed up her feelings: "The horrible thing is we just spent a week with the Army guys, and they were just the same as here. Singing and dancing and going off to war. A lot of them were so young."
Sergeant Marty Fitchett, maintenance technician on the Air Force Boeing that carried the official New Zealand contingent, fulfilled a lifelong ambition to visit the battlefield where his grandfather fought.
In the deathly silent scrub covering the hills, he said: "It's hard to comprehend the terror and ferocity of the fighting, and you still get an eerie, strong feeling of the losses that happened here."
Sergeant Fitchett was one of up to 20,000 New Zealanders and Australians making the Anzac Day pilgrimage.
"Those guys had no chance," he said as he explored trenches on Chunuk Bair.
His grandfather, Private Wilfred Brian Fitchett, was one of the few to survive the campaign without major injury, although with thousands of others he succumbed to dysentery and fever.
Even more remarkable, he survived the killing fields of the Somme, although the effects of mustard gas finally saw him invalided home in 1917.
Private Fitchett's detailed Gallipoli diary was never found, but from extensive other writings it is known that he was with the troops who helped repel a Turkish attack at Walker's Ridge on May 18, 1915.
Historians describe the attack as a "supreme test of discipline" for the thin line of Anzac defenders.
The Anzacs waited until the charging Turks were only eight metres away before jumping out of their trenches and opening fire.
Other servicemen to make the trip included Major Peter Flint, from the New Zealand Defence Force contingent in Bosnia, who had one of the most roundabout journeys.
From his base in Banja Luka he and 11 other New Zealand soldiers hitched rides on a British helicopter, a Greek Hercules, and a Macedonian bus before driving to Turkey.
His grandfather served in the Otago-Southland infantry regiment during the campaign.
"It's a New Zealand pilgrimage," he said of his desire to come.
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