Beach stones trodden by thousands of Anzac troops during the fruitless Gallipoli campaign of World War I will be built into a memorial to Aucklanders who served their country overseas.
The stones are to be built into a cairn in the Auckland Domain to honour Auckland soldiers who served and who
died in more than 21 campaigns since the late 1890s.
The Auckland Regiment has spent the past eight years organising the stones, which arrived in two crates in Auckland this week.
The two tonnes of stones came from Anzac Cove, where the New Zealand and Australian troops landed on April 25, 1915, in a campaign to take the Gallipoli Peninsula from the Turks and open the way to the Black Sea for the Allied navies.
Eight months later, when the Allied forces withdrew, the casualty figures had reached nearly 400,000, including more than 130,000 dead from both sides, 2701 of whom were New Zealanders.
Blake Herbert, from the 3rd Auckland Regimental Association, said a traditional cairn about 1.7m high would be built in the domain near the grandstand and would include all the battle honours of the regiment, including the Boer War in South Africa, Gallipoli, and the Solomon Islands in World War II.
Captain Herbert said the stone from Anzac Cove was chosen because of the meaning Gallipoli held for all New Zealand.
"Those rocks have been rolled over and trod over by thousands of feet - Kiwis, Aussies and probably Turks as well, trying to figure what was going on."
The cairn would also bear an inscription of the words of Mustafa Ataturk in 1934 when he said the heroes who lost their lives were now lying in the soil of a friendly country and rested in peace.
"There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehemets to us where they lie side by side in this country of ours.
"You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears, your sons are now lying in our bosoms and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they become our sons as well," Ataturk said.
Several years ago a piece of rock from Chunuk Bair, the ridge top where hundreds of New Zealanders died, was mounted in a memorial to Anzac troops in the Wellington Cathedral
- NZPA
