The rehearsal before Gallipoli's main event

Ninety-nine years after Australian and New Zealand soldiers splashed ashore at Anzac Cove, the Gallipoli Peninsula continues to disgorge the bitter harvest of 1915.

As thousands from Australia and New Zealand were preparing for Friday's dawn service, Turkish villagers on the peninsula prepared for another day tilling their crops, knowing the relics of the old war lie just beneath the ground.

Every ploughing season or after rain, Ali Gul and his wife Gulumser Gul pick from the soil bullets, the remnants of explosive shells, balls of shrapnel and more personal reminders that men fought and died on their little farm.

The have found buttons, they say, some of them from Australian uniforms, a hair comb, a cut-throat razor, a spoon and fork – so many artefacts that for years they gave them to museums, but now simply store them in their home. They and their neighbours sometimes find unexploded shells and dump them in a deep well.