the nek

August battles on 7th August. In four successive lines, they were ordered to attack an impregnable Turkish position, consisting of 7 lines of trenches, over an open space only 30 m wide and not bigger than a couple of tennis courts. Within half an hour, of the 600 men and officers who went over the top, 234 were killed and 138 more were wounded. Partly also as a result of Peter Weir's film 'Gallipoli', which ends with the attack, this episode of the Gallipoli Campaign is generally considered to be one of the strongest examples of the insanity of war in general.

Information reproduced from the "Gallipoli" website of the late Jul Snelders, a true "Gallipolian".

On the morning of August 7 the pre-conditions for the charge at the Nek no longer existed. Birdwood and Godley knew this before 4.30 am. They knew the New Zealanders were short of Chunuk Bair, yet they let the attack go ahead. In his autobiography, a book of surpassing shallowness, Godley wrote that the attack at the Nek fulfilled its object of drawing the enemy’s reserves away from the main attack. Godley didn’t know much but, like Enver, he knew the rhetoric one falls back on to dress up defeat as victory, the words that make murder sound like an act of statecraft.

"Gallipoli", (Sydney 2002), Les Carlyon, p. 401

The narrow saddle connecting Russell's Top to the lower part of Baby 700, between Malone's Gully and Monash Valley. Here the allied advance in a northern direction was eventually checked in the evening of 25th April. After a stalemate that lasted until summer, the place became famous for the suicidal attack of the 8th and 10th Australian Light Horse, as a diversion during the