To be the sort of man who would give way when his mates were trusting to his firmness; to be the sort of man who would fail when the line, the whole force, and the allied cause required his endurance; to have made it necessary for another unit to do his own unit's work; to live the rest of his life haunted by the knowledge that he had set his hand to a soldier's task and had lacked the grit to carry it through - that was the prospect that these men could not face. ... Standing upon that alone, when help failed and hope faded, when the end loomed clear in front of them, when the whole world seemed to crumble and the heaven to fall in, they faced its ruin undismayed.
- Charles Bean, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-18, Vol. I
A central day in the Australian calendar is Anzac Day, which commemorates the landing of Australian and New Zealand troops on the Turkish peninsula of Gallipoli in the First World War. It is said that here, where the diggers of ANZAC made a futile stand against overwhelming force in the defence of the Empire, is where the Australian spirit was forged and a nation thrust into adulthood. The veterans and the fallen of Gallipoli hold a special rank in Australian folklore - select representatives not just of Australian military valour, but of the sacred values of duty, perseverance, and mateship.
There are many tales of Gallipoli, such as Simpson and his donkey, which so exemplify this "Anzac spirit" that they will live in the Australian consciousness forever. The Lone Pine is a story which has lived on in another, quite different way.
The Battle of Lone Pine
The initial landings at Gallipoli, on April 25, 1915, were planned as a precision strike. The men of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, fresh from training in Egypt, were to land under cover of darkness and secure high ground in preparation for a British invasion ten miles to the south. In the event, several ships of the landing force drifted badly off course, and the ensuing confusion saw the entire landing trapped under Turkish fire. What followed was eight months of pitched trench warfare. Reinforcements were flooded into both sides; neither force could advance. Casualties on both sides were horrific.
On August 6, three months into the stalemate, the Australian 1st Infantry Brigade launched an attack on Turkish positions on the hill they called Lone Pine. This was a low ridge at the southern end of the Allied line, a hundred yards from the beach, and it did, indeed, bear a solitary Aleppo pine on its slope. The attack was a diversion for a mass landing to the north at Suvla Bay, in hope of breaking the Turkish line there.
At five thirty in the evening, the entire brigade, half over open ground and half in prepared tunnels, left their trenches and charged the Turkish front. The Australians found the Turkish trenches covered with pine logs and earth, leaving them exposed to enemy fire while they fought for openings. Within half an hour, with heavy casualties, they had succeeded in opening and overrunning the trenches, laying waste to the Turkish infantry in mostly hand-to-hand combat. By nightfall, Lone Pine Ridge was secured.
Turkish troops made major assaults on their lost positions for six days, at great expense and with no success. While the advance from Suvla Bay failed, Lone Pine remained under Allied control. The Battle of Lone Pine cost some two thousand Allied and seven thousand Turkish lives.
By the time of the last Allied evacuations in January of 1916, one hundred thousand men were killed at Gallipoli.
The tree, also, perished.
The Lone Pine in Australia
The memory of Lone Pine lives as a heightened image of Australia's Gallipoli experience. It stands both as a testament to bravery - seven of the nine Victoria Crosses awarded to ANZACs were for service at Lone Pine - and as a measure of the monstrous brutality suffered by the soldiers of the Great War. However, there survives in Australia today a wholly more remarkable legacy of the battle: living Aleppo pines grown from seeds of the original tree on Lone Pine Ridge. Like the poppies of Flanders, they are a tangible and moving link to the past - a living symbol of the dead.
The Lone Pine trees of today have their beginnings in pine cones souvenired from the battlefield by diggers. Some were brought to Australia; no-one is ultimately sure how many and by whom, but conventional legend credits two men with the origin of what is now a hallowed genetic line. The stories of these men are historically sketchy and clouded by myth, but the ancestry of the pines themselves is unquestioned.
The first man was one Sergeant Keith McDowell of the 24th Battalion, who kept a cone in his knapsack and gave it to his aunt, Emma Gray, on his return. Twelve years later, Mrs Gray planted seeds from the cone on her property at Grassmere, near Warrnambool in Victoria. Five seedlings grew. Of these, one was replanted in May 1933 in Wattle Park, Melbourne; another at Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance in June of that year; another, also in June, at The Sisters, a small town northeast of Warrnambool; and another the following January in Warrnambool Gardens. The fifth seedling died.
The second man was Lance Corporal Benjamin Smith of the 3rd Battalion. He and his brother Mark, of the 4th Battalion, were part of the initial charge on Lone Pine; Mark fell there. Benjamin sent a cone home to his mother, Jane McMullin, in Cardiff, New South Wales. This cone lay for thirteen years before Mrs McMullin planted its seeds; they yielded two seedlings. In 1934, she donated one to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. It was planted by the Duke of Gloucester on October 24, accompanied by a plaque with this inscription:
After the capture of the Lone Pine ridge in Gallipoli (6 August 1915), an Australian Soldier who had taken part in the attack, in which his brother was killed, found a cone on one of the branches used by the Turks as overhead cover for their trenches, and sent it to his mother. From seed shed by it she raised the tree, which she presented to be planted in the War Memorial grounds in honour of her own and others' sons who fell at Lone Pine.
A month later Mrs McMullin gave the other seedling to the town of Inverell, New South Wales - her sons' childhood home - where it was planted in Inverell Park.
The seeds and progeny of these six trees have since spread across Australia, into town memorials, public parks, and schoolyards. Each one is treasured as a war monument; every Anzac Day and Remembrance Day, they are a focus for memorial services. Since 1965, responsibility for the distribution of Lone Pine trees has been taken by Legacy, a war-widows' charity which is active all over Australia.
With the oldest Lone Pine trees now in their seventies, some are dying and some are already dead. These trees are felled and their wood is used in buildings and monuments dedicated to the commemoration of war veterans. In their stead, new Lone Pine trees grow.
The Lone Pine Memorial, Gallipoli
The Gallipoli peninsula bears 31 graveyards. In these are 22,000 graves, of which 9000 are identified. Five more monuments stand in memory of the missing majority of the dead. By permanent agreement with the government of Turkey, these are overseen by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The Gallipoli Historical National Park protects the sixteen graveyards around Anzac Cove.
The Lone Pine Cemetery stands on the site of the Battle of Lone Pine. In it lie the graves of 471 Australians, two New Zealanders, fourteen Britons, and 499 men of unidentified origin: 986 in all. At the eastern end of the cemetery, atop the former Turkish trenches, stands the Australian National Memorial, a 14-metre limestone tower raised in 1926 to commemorate the missing ANZACs. An inscription on its screen wall reads:
To the Glory of God and in lasting memory of 3,268 Australian soldiers who fought on Gallipoli in 1915 and have no known graves, and 456 New Zealand soldiers whose names are not recorded in other areas of the Peninsula but who fell in the Anzac Area and have no known graves; and also of 960 Australians and 252 New Zealanders who, fighting on Gallipoli in 1915, incurred mortal wounds or sickness and found burial at Sea.
Before the Memorial, amid the graves, there stands another monument: a solitary Aleppo pine, vigorous and ten metres tall, grown from the seed of the Lone Pine in Canberra.
The Lone Pine Cemetery is the site of an annual pilgrimage: every Anzac Day, thousands of Australians, New Zealanders, Turks, and others congregate here for a memorial service. Until recently, these were veterans and the families of veterans, but since the mid-1990s, they have been joined by increasing numbers of teenagers and twentysomethings. Even as the number of First World War veterans dwindles, the Anzac Day Services at Gallipoli are gaining popularity as a rite of passage among the young. Some come to honour lost relatives. Many come simply to pay the respects they feel they owe. As with the heritage of the Lone Pine, remembrance passes from generation to generation and lives on.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We shall remember them.
- Laurence Binyon, For The Fallen
| 
