The Charge at The Nek

The charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek, 7 August 1915

George Lambert, 1924

On 7 August 1915 the Australians and Turks faced each other over a narrow strip of open ground on Gallipoli; the Australians were met with a torrent of gunfire and four out of five who took part in the assault were killed or wounded. In its futility, if not for its scale, this charge was one of the tragedies of the First World War. The attack was made against a small section of the Turkish line at Gallipoli. Through an error in timing, the preliminary bombardment of the enemy lines ceased seven minutes before the assault, allowing the Turks plenty of time to prepare for the Australians. The fighting was over within an hour. More than 300 Australians died in this brief, savage encounter, and it does not seem that the charge caused the death of a single Turk.

The action is best known through its depiction in the film Gallipoli (1981). The dead were not buried until after the war. In this painting George Lambert (1873-1930) includes a kneeling, hatless figure, centre right, facing away from the direction of the attack. The diagonal lines in the work converge on this figure, giving it prominence. The figure symbolises the sacrifice of young life in the futile attack, and the bullet wound in the man's right hand recalls the stigmata of Christ. In 1920 the Memorial commissioned Lambert to produce this large painting along with Anzac, the landing 1915. These are two of the most dramatic of Lambert's war paintings, and among the best known works in the Memorial's collection.


Portrait of 490 Warrant Officer Robert Melville, Regimental Sergeant Major (RSM), 1 Battalion, sitting in a dugout. On his tunic sleeves RSM Melville is wearing white bands, which were used by Australian soldiers at Lone Pine and the next day at the Nek to help identify friend from foe.	Members of the 9th A.L.H. Regiment in a machine gun post on Turks Point, Anzac to the left of Walkers Ridge. The spot is only 120 yards from the enemy position across the Nek. Note the helmets worn by the 3rd A.L.H. Brigade on Gallipoli. The man wearing the cap is thought to be Lieutenant Arblaster. (Image from AWM & Mr. S. Sayers.)

Peter Weir's film Gallipoli, which was first shown in 1982, is undoubtedly the best known portrayal of the Australian Gallipoli experience for a modern audience. Its finale – the charge of the Australian light horsemen on 7 August 1915 – has become THE image associated with the seemingly wasteful slaughter on Anzac.

Years earlier, Charles Bean had realised, long before the era of the modern feature film, that this charge was one of the defining moments of Australian courage – the willingness of the men to go forward into what was almost certain death. In 1919, he instructed George Lambert to create a large war painting of this incident for hanging in what Bean saw as Australia’s new war museum. This museum eventually became the Australian War Memorial and Lambert's ‘The Charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek, 7 August 1915’ is among the Memorial’s most treasured items. Once again, part of the agenda for this panel was that there should be somewhere on Gallipoli where these images were available to the public in the surroundings where the charge took place.

The Nek lies on Russell’s Top not far from where Walker’s Ridge runs out on to the top of the Sari Bair range above North Beach. Bean and Lambert walked all around the area while Lambert did sketches for his painting. In Gallipoli Mission Bean described Lambert’s work on the painting:

‘Descriptions are all too true,’ wrote Lambert to his wife. ‘Evidence grins coldly at us non-combatants … from the point of view of the artist-historian the Nek is a wonderful setting to the tragedy’. The grim, rather beautiful landscape of distant ridge-tops surrounding this upland would be his background, his foreground the patch of level scrub with the line of charging men shown at the moment when, a few yards out from their trench, the full force of the Turk’s rifle-fire struck them.

As he says, he regarded himself in these works as the artist-historian, and he purposed in this picture to show the reaction of different types of Australian to this shocking experience. There was to be the larrikin; and the gently-bred type; the fair-haired Scandinavian Anzac; the lean countryman, and so on. You see them all in the picture which he painted some years afterwards in Australia from the landscape studies begun that morning on Plugge’s Plateau and The Nek.

[Charles Bean, Gallipoli Mission, Canberra, 1948, p109]