KEY POINTS:
In a harsh and hostile environment, they made the most of what they had.
Each Anzac lived in a metre-wide space within his trench. He became adroit with a pick, digging a 3m deep hole to create his home away from home - sometimes fashioning a roof from
branches, sandbags and corrugated iron.
Water was scarce most of the time. While ships brought in water stored in tanks on the beaches, getting it to the trenches was not easy. Troops sank wells and grabbed water bottles off dead bodies. Others put jam tins on string to dangle over the lip of the trenches into water pockets in the gullies.
The terrain was harsh and the weather extreme. In summer, the sun blazed; in winter it would snow. In late November, a huge storm hit the peninsula flooding trenches and sweeping away possessions. Some men drowned.
The men were occasionally allowed to return to Anzac Cove to wash in the sea, and search for lice entrenched in the seams of their uniforms and crush them between their fingernails. Their army-issue blankets were alive with lice.
Plagues of flies bombarded the trenches, breeding in the dead bodies of no man's land. "The flies here are a curse; they argue for every bite one eats," wrote Trooper James "Will" Harvey of the Wellington Mounted Rifles. Disease raged - enteric fever, paratyphoid, jaundice and dysentery. The stench of rotting bodies pervaded everything.
Food was limited in choice, ranging from bully beef, bacon, tinned beans, hard tack (a rock-hard biscuit) and jam.
Empty jam tins were recycled at Anzac Cove to make bombs filled with Turkish shrapnel, razor blades and barbed wire.
"We get half a loaf of bread per man every second day and two spoonfuls of lime juice three times a week. Rum used to be issued to us every night; now we only get it on special occasions or when sapping," Harvey wrote in July, 1915 (six weeks before he died from battlefield wounds).
"People seem to think it's socks we want. it's handkerchiefs that's needed, and an odd cake or two of chocolate."
Online link: The Auckland War Memorial Museum has a Book of Remembrance on its website for people to post messages on to remember those who served and died in war.
