bhutocracy

Last Gallipoli veteran dies


Australia's last Gallipoli veteran, Alec Campbell, died in Hobart, aged 103.

His granddaughter, Jo Hardy, said Mr Campbell died in a nursing home shortly after 6pm (AEST) Thursday.

His wife Kate was with him when he died, Ms Hardy said.

Of the million-plus soldiers who fought in Gallipoli - 68,000 of them Anzacs - not one is believed to remain.

For Australians the passing of Campbell completes the transformation of a battlefield into a sacred site.

It closes the final curtain on a generation of innocents who paid with their lives while forging a name that still stands for all those things war historian Charles Bean said it meant: "reckless valour in a good cause, enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship and endurance that will never admit defeat".

What a potent legacy from such a bloody disaster.

It began at 4.29am on Sunday, April 25, 1915, as the first great adventure for the flower of the world's youngest nation - soldiers who "for physical beauty and nobility of bearing surpassed any man I have ever seen", according to British poet John Masefield.

It ended eight months and 130,000 lives later in a miraculous evacuation which was the military high point.

Throughout 11 nights a force of 35,000 men stole away with just one casualty, duping the enemy with rifles rigged up by their absent owners to keep firing.

But in between times there was so much pointless slaughter - 11,400 cobbers died amid the muddy, bloody, lousy, fly-blown trenches on those few hectares of barren Turkish hillside.

And they achieved precisely nothing.

It is difficult now to understand why they clamoured to get there; and why, once there, they would offer five pounds for another man's place in the fighting line.

But they were the eager days of king and empire, when politicians like Andrew Fisher pledged to stand behind England "to the last man, the last shilling".

The original Anzacs travelled further from home than any other soldiers at Gallipoli; they were away the longest, suffered the highest rate of casualties, and were all volunteers.

In their owns words, it began as a lark and a stunt.

"Struth, I was dead scared when I went to join up," one recalled. "Scared it would be all over before I got there."

It was common for men to weep if deemed unacceptable through physical disability.

Many lied about their age to enlist. Small wonder that Gallipoli claimed the youngest Australian soldier to die in battle.

When Jim Martin's father was rejected for military service, the strapping 5'6" Victorian lad said: "Never mind dad, I'll go instead."

A Turkish bullet killed him three months short of his 15th birthday.

Typical in later life was the reflection of one veteran: "I was a silly boy and should have had my bottom smacked."

Their innocence was among the first casualties. Two thousand died on the first day alone, and the heights they achieved then would never be reclaimed.

chodadog

Saw that on the news today.. That guy's life spanned 3 centuries..

Milton

he have fucked his girls in his life we are also dead soon..give us 100 year we all are dead here

Wildman

* looking for online translator *