This haunting image of skulls and bones scattered across Gallipoli speaks to the unspoken aftermath of battle.

 This haunting image of skulls and bones scattered across Gallipoli speaks to the unspoken aftermath of battle.

It mattered little whether the remains were Turkish, British, French, or ANZAC—the entire peninsula had become a vast, silent graveyard.

In late 1918, when Lieutenant Cyril Hughes and his graves registration unit arrived at ANZAC, bones gleamed from a distance, streaking down the ravines like pale reminders of the carnage. Of the 12,000 Allied soldiers who fell in that sector, nearly half lay unburied, their remains scattered across ridges and gullies.

The task of burial was overwhelming. Winter rains had washed away shallow graves, wild dogs prowled the battlefield dragging limbs, and dense scrub and wildflowers concealed skeletons, leaving death exposed to both the elements and scavengers.

When Charles Bean’s Australian Historical Mission returned in 1919, they found the Nek still littered with human remains. Official war artist George Lambert sketched the scene, sitting silently among the bones that glinted in the dawn light. He described a ‘rotten’ despair, a mournful gloom that clung to the battlefield, broken only by the night-time chorus of jackals.

More than a century later, Lambert’s iconic painting of soldiers storming ANZAC Cove endures as one of Gallipoli’s lasting images. Yet the scenes he did not—and perhaps could not—paint remain: the pitiful bones, the scattered dead, and the haunting futility that lingered long after the guns fell silent.