Walker's Ridge Cemetery

You are standing at the Walker’s Ridge cemetery, which is where Walker’s Ridge links up with Russell’s Top. Beyond Russell’s Top it moves up to the high ground of Baby 700, which was as far as the Anzacs got on the day they landed. 

During the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, this ground became very important because if the Anzacs lost it they would have been driven back into the sea. So it was consolidated first by the Wellington Infantry Battalion under Lieutenant-Colonel William Malone on the 26th of April 1915. You can find New Zealanders in this graveyard from that fighting. 

On the 26th this area was the New Zealand front line. The front line was then pushed forward to the Nek by Colonel Russell, after his arrival on the 12th of May. The push forward was only partially completed by the 19th of May when the Ottoman Army mounted a major counterattack. New Zealanders who died in that counterattack are buried in this cemetery.

And two New Zealanders – Captain Alfred Bluck and Sergeant-Major Joseph Marr, Bluck’s company Sergeant-Major – are buried here. Bluck is interesting because Lieutenant Spencer Westmacott of the Auckland Infantry Battalion, a New Zealand hero on the 25th of April, was with Bluck on a territorial course in New Zealand when war broke out. Bluck immediately rang his wife to tell her he was enlisting. Westmacott just happened to be passing, and he heard Bluck talking on the phone to his wife. Then there was a pause and he heard Bluck say, ‘are you crying?’ And, of course, all her fears were realised in May 1915.