Two or three times a day, he ran the gauntlet, dodging shrapnel and Turkish snipers up the aptly named Dead Man's Gully.
"Each time I have been sniped at, but fortunately without being hit. One day a bullet just grazed my tunic ... My mules have saved me on a number of occasions," he wrote in a letter home to his parents, published in the Herald on July 30, 1915, while the bloody stalemate wore on.
On one occasion, Bitossi and two other mule drivers, named in the letter as Wilson and Patterson, were ordered to take five mules each up the gully and give them a drink at a trough halfway up.
Bitossi's mules decided to stop moving forward at a critically dangerous point.
Cursing, the frustrated driver decided to turn around.
Another driver, Wilkinson, was tasked to help him.
No sooner had they set out than shrapnel started to rain down.
"Six shells burst one hundred yards in front of us and the bullets flew all round us," Bitossi said.
"One of my mules got a bullet in the fetlock, and was shot by the major later on. We raced down this valley with the shrapnel following us. My, how those mules did gallop home."
But Patterson wasn't so fortunate. He was shot through the heart and killed. Three mules also died.
Bitossi signed off his letter by paying tribute to his mules, saying he probably owed them his life.
He spent seven months at Gallipoli before being permanently invalided home with a sudden eye failure, the RSA article reported.
Bitossi's great-nephew Leigh Ivan Quintellio Bitossi, a 38-year-old teacher who lives in Tokyo, told the Herald he is proud of his relative's exploits.
However, he accepts his story has "an air of sadness to it".
He wonders whether Bitossi felt an obligation to be a soldier given that his father, Antonio, fought in Garibaldi's army during the Italian revolutionary wars before migrating to New Zealand.
"Being named after such a renowned folk-hero in Italy along with his father's part in that war must have had some effect on him," Leigh Bitossi said.
