Up the valley towards Lone Pine they rode, until they came to the Turkish victory monument erected on the site of the famous Australian salient. Then over to Koja Chemen Tepe, to stand in silence where British soldiers had never stood before. This was the moment of triumph: this was the prize for which we had striven in 1915, and now, after all these years, the prize was ours--on the one hand the great forts and Point Nagara running out into the rushing waters of the Narrows; on the other side the great panorama of the Aegean Sea--Samothrace and Imbros in the distance; the Salt Lake and the fatal plains of Suvla; away South, the forbidding hump of Achi Baba; and closer in, the Anzac beaches, Russell's Top, the tangled steeps of Walker's Ridge, The Farm, and the ridge of Chunuk. These men of the Canterbury Mounted Rifles were the triumphant victors, but slowly they rode down the winding ways of dry watercourses looking for the last resting places of brothers and comrades-in-arms. Never a yard but somebody stopped and silently searched for an identification disc. [Illustration: RHODODENDRON SPUR FROM THE APEX. Notice the luxuriant growth of thistle in the old trench lines.] [Illustration: THE PROMISED LAND: THE COUNTRY BEHIND KOJA CHEMEN TEPE.] And here on the Nek was the great monument erected by the Turks in honour of their victory in December, 1915! Down the Aghyl Dere where the gallant Overton rests under the shade of the Turkish trees; out to Hill 60 where the white bones lie in heaps; along to Ari Burnu where the graves are thickly crowded; and so to Anzac Cove itself. Here, pathetic beyond words, were the skeletons of old barges and boats--rotting in the smooth white sand once pockmarked by thousands of hurrying feet; here on the sandy beaches the Turk paid the men of Anzac the greatest compliment, for they had wired the beach against another landing! Did not the daredevils say they would come back? Was it not wise to prepare for possibilities? But the soldiers who went so quietly away in December, 1915, chose to come another way as victors. This is the end of the Gallipoli campaign. The men of New Zealand were there at the start--here they are as the victors at the end. * * * * * And now that the struggle is over, now that the great guns of Chanak are silent, and the hillsides once peopled with busy men are again given over to the song birds and the wandering Turkish shepherds--what is the gain to the world? What is the gain to New Zealand?