It just felt true.

It was a classic "catchy tune". The melody's beauty was its predictability, making it instantaneously familiar. The first time you heard it, you liked it, the second time, you loved it. It sounds exactly like what a trumpeter might choose to play while watching the sun set over the turquoise Aegean.

When I first heard it, I knew I would have to find this Gallipoli trumpeter.

"There was a magnificent sunset (tonight). They all are here - just simply glorious ... God, they are just magnificent" - Sergeant Cyril Lawrence

One of the contradictions of Gallipoli is just how beautiful it is there. It has the same light as Australia. It is a like a twin of the Western Australia coast, with the same clear blue sea reflecting the setting western sun. The battle may have been hell, but it was fought on the same paradisiacal shore, famous from antiquity:

"This country is pretty about May. There are many wildflowers, birds and insects ... The sea is smooth and warm, easily one of the best bathing places in the world. (There) were fig trees and orange palms ... peaceful little farms and old men tilling the soils with the same old wooden plough and two bullocks ... The nights were beautifully mild and warm, and if we weren't on duty, we used to gather in little bunches and sing and yarn by the hour. The Indians used to hold concerts on their own and make a most unearthly noise. The Turks' concerts in their trenches were even worse, like our fellows they had their concerts in bomb-proof shelters. I used to like to sit on top of the hills behind us by myself. In the firing line one would hear occasional shots fired at imaginary targets and the muffled explosions of (shells, and then) you could hear someone singing "I wonder if you miss me." Soldiers are peculiar in their selection. They either sing those songs which make you cry, or those make one feel very much at home." - George Cloughley, New Zealand.

When I was a boy I adored my father's mother, who we called Granny B. It was like a great love affair between this small child and this charismatic 80-year-old lady, who loved to hear him sing. Her real name was Beryl Churchill, and she had spent a year on the Western Front as a Red Cross volunteer in a French hospital run by suffragettes. She started there the day before the Somme campaign and was deeply traumatised by the experience of losing a third of her ward each night, reliving it for years afterwards in terrible nightmares. She was Winston Churchill's second cousin, and through that connection, I became drawn into exploring how music might help to heal the sorrows of that war, to repair what hubris had wrought through acts of beauty.

I immersed myself deeply into both the history of Gallipoli, and the myth, and five years in, a chance search turned up the following account from the Australian War Memorial by Colonel James McKinley:

"There was a trumpeter in one of the West Australian battalions ... stationed right at Quinn's Post. Every night as the sun used to sink down, he used to play his trumpet. The firing on both sides came to a standstill when this happened, ... Silent Night was one of his long things, and he'd let everybody around hear it just as the sun went down. Of course, the Aussies never fired, neither did the Turks, and on one occasion I happened to be passing along through the (trench) just as he was about to play and I thought, 'I'll have a look over and see what the Turks are doing.' Through a peephole in the side of the thing I noticed the Turks, when he finished, clapped their hands above the parapets, or else belted tins just to show how much they appreciated him ... ."

I finally had a confirmation from an Australian source. Thirty books and another three years later, a West Australian source led me to the Eastern Goldfields where they told of a trumpeter called Ted McMahon who played in a concert held at Gallipoli, the night before Lone Pine. Finally in mid-March this year, Ted's step- granddaughter Kerry Everett sent me his description of his time there:

"On arriving on Gallipoli we found conditions rather tough, and lacking of any amenities for the troops. So naturally it was left to ourselves to make our own way in providing a little relaxation between our spells of duty in the lines. I would sit in my dugout in Reserve Gully at night and play my trumpet to the boys with a handkerchief in the bell to drown the sound."

For me, it was the smoking gun. After eight years of searching, I had finally found the Gallipoli trumpeter.

When the New Zealand infantry forces landed at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915, each of the four battalions had a band. Once they had dug in two days later, there were enough musicians left for one band. In the battlefield they served as unarmed stretcher bearers. They would not be reunited with their instruments until late in the campaign.

Sergeant David Keay wrote home: "If hell is any worse than what we experienced during that time, then I have no desire to go there, because working as a stretcher bearer was the most unnerving work I've known."

Corporal John Gallishaw, of Newfoundland, on May 19, 1915, wrote that "the hopelessness of (Gallipoli) seemed clearer that evening than any other time we had been there. Simpson, 'the stretcher bearer with the Donkey', had been killed that day. After a long period in which the stretcher bearer seemed to be impervious to bullets, a stray bullet had caught him in the heart on his way down Shrapnel Valley with a consignment of wounded."

th: Hand grenades and bombs doing terrible damage. Continuous cry of "stretcher bearers". Whilst attending to a wounded man on the parapet, struck on shoulder by a shrapnel pellet. Thought I was done. Knocked me clean out for half an hour; nasty gash in shoulder. After getting my arm dressed, and having a rest, went at it again. Some terrible sights; wounded everywhere. This is more like hell than earth. ... Had a look through periscope; saw hundreds of dead Turks ... This has been a terrible day."

Again on August 8: "there were a good number hit; it was a wonder we were not all killed. You could feel the bullets burn your face and body as they ripped past. ... I never ran so hard in all my life; it was simply hell. I never thought war could be so bad ... I will never forget this day as long as I live."

Finally on August 9: "about 12pm I finally laid down but could not sleep; my nerves were just about gone. I could still hear the constant cry of "stretcher bearers".

On August 4, 1915, Anzacs, Gurkhas and Indian troops massed on a sheltered slope behind their trenches called Reserve Gully. They would go on to take Lone Pine and charge disastrously at the Nek. Ted McMahon recalled that "we were expected to cross the peninsula during these operations".

Someone suggested a campfire concert would be good for morale. The gully the troops were sheltering in created a natural amphitheatre for a varied program of songs and recitations - even a magic show. McMahon said of the Kiwi singer Corporal Wilson, who sang Airlie Dix's moving song The Trumpeter – "during my professional travels since the war I have never heard a finer baritone singer".

He went on: "Our troops and the Turks carried on as usual during the concert with rifle and machine gun fire … during the first verse of The Rosary with me on the cornet, the firing was more rapid, ... in the second, one could hear only spasmodic shots ... during the third and final verse, not a sound could be heard ... At the conclusion there was a tremendous outburst of applause from all listeners, including those in the trenches above us, and then everyone settled back down to the grim business of war."

At the end of the concert F.W. Crane played Lead Kindly Light on the cornet. He wrote, "Throughout the playing of the hymn the troops stood and joined in singing the words. It was most touching and inspiring, for one could sense that thoughts, were, for the moment, swept right back to the shelter of hearts and prayers in a far-off land – a gleam amongst the murk and foul decay of the battlefield."

Charles Bean famously stated there were "No Songs on Gallipoli ... there was no concert party ... the one place on earth' that he 'could not remember connecting with any tune or song".

It is now clear that he was incorrect. Singing at night was a strong innate mechanism on all sides to help recover from the traumas of the day. Corporal Gallishaw documented the change in their songs. "It was strange to see week by week the psychological change that had come over the men. Most of all I noticed it in the songs they sang. At first the songs had been of a boisterous character that foretold direful things that would happen to the Kaiser and his family 'As we go marching through Germany'.These had all been replaced by songs that voiced … the longing for home that possessed us, we voluntary exiles."

As the Gallipoli campaign went on, it gave birth to its own "trench song", a reworking of the Irish folk tune The Mountains of Mourne, entitled Old Gallipoli's A Wonderful Place. It is nostalgic, ironic and speaks to the truth at the centre of the myth. The final lines, "but if war lasts till Doomsday I think we'll still be, where old Gallipoli sweeps down to the sea" turned out to be true for more than 112,000 Ottoman and Allied troops killed in the campaign.

Gallipoli's steep hills were the most difficult aspect of the battlefield but they also helped to protect troops from massed artillery fire. Some soldiers even felt safer in the front lines than in the rear because of this. After the August offensive, casualty rates dropped dramatically, and by the end of the campaign there was a sense that these dusty trenches had become some kind of home for the Anzacs. That great maze of trenches, burrowing into the hills, stretching kilometres in every direction, housed and protected almost 1 million men on both sides over the course of the battle. Those impassable hills saved thousands of Australian troops from the flat slaughtering fields of France and Flanders, utterly dominated by massed artillery, for nine long months.

We lost nearly as many Australians in 16 days at Pozières as at Gallipoli.

On Sunday, April 12, at the High Court of Australia, in association with the Australian War Memorial and the National Library, Re-sounding Gallipoli, the first in a series of 25 concerts over four years called The Flowers of War, will bear witness to how music helped to heal the wounds that left no marks - how music sustained the human spirit in the battlefield.

Ted McMahon spoke of that "fascination of music soothing the breasts of war-hardened men". The trumpet usually is the voice of war. In this concert, its tenderness will prevail.

Chris Latham, ANZAC fellow, director, The Flowers of War. The first concert, Re-sounding Gallipoli, will be held on April 12, 1.30pm, at High Court of Australia. Participants: Paul Goodchild cornet, Alex Knight baritone, Anton Wurzer accordion, Canberra Camerata Brass, Alan Hicks piano, Ibrahim Karasli singer, Yakou Mbaye percussion, Geoff Gray conductor, Chris Latham violin and director.

Footnote: The watercolours, used on this online article with permission from the State Library of NSW are by Lieutenant Leslie Hore. He joined the 8th Light Horse and was wounded during the disastrous charge at the Nek, one of the few survivors. He served in France, winning the Military Cross at Pozieres, and like Ted McMahon, survived the war.