A rock opera in twelve acts.

In 1915 the Allies tried to break the deadlock of the Western Front by forcing the Dardanelles and knocking the Ottoman Empire out of the war. When the fleet failed, the infantry landed on 25 April. The Australians came ashore at a place that became known as Anzac Cove. Eight months of trench warfare followed, in which the line never moved. The best-executed operation of the whole campaign turned out to be the withdrawal. The twenty-fifth of April is still a public holiday in Australia and New Zealand.

The album tells that year through two men: a twenty-year-old Australian private who had never been further than the next district before he enlisted, and a British sergeant with twenty years' service. It opens with a recruiting song in Cairo — six bob a day, six weeks to Constantinople, four hundred yards from the boat to the sand — and a year later it ends with the same song. In between there is digging, flies, nine hours of truce, and the seven minutes by which the guns fell silent too early at the Nek.