Many lied about their age to enlist. Small wonder that Gallipoli claimed the youngest Australian soldier to die in battle. When Jim Martin's father was rejected for military service, the strapping 5'6" Victorian lad said: "Never mind dad, I'll go instead." A Turkish bullet killed him three months short of his 15th birthday. Typical in later life was the reflection of one veteran: "I was a silly boy and should have had my bottom smacked." ------------- Campbell, who died at his Hobart nursing home, spent less than a month fighting in Turkey. He didn't get there until late November 1915, and by December 20 he was gone in the grand evacuation that ended a military disaster. He was spared the horrors of the western front. He was too sick with enteric fever to fight and was invalided home. Not that he didn't do his best to get there. Like many other diggers, he lied about his age and enlisted as a 16-year-old in Launceston. "In those days if you were big enough you were good enough," he recalled years later. "They didn't really care about your age." Mr Campbell, nicknamed The Kid at Gallipoli, continually proved to be a late bloomer in other facets of his life. After the war he became a builder and a top public servant; he gained an economics degree in his 50s, sailed six times in the Sydney-Hobart yacht race, circumnavigated Tasmania, sired the last of his children at the age of 69, worked for the Heart Foundation until he was 80 and was still driving a car at 95. He remembered an "incredible hail of bullets" on landing at Gallipoli, where he was set to work ferrying water in the trenches, sleeping in a "cold, damp hole in the ground". "People were always getting hit," he remembered, though he was pleased not to have killed a single Turk. "I enjoyed some of it; I didn't enjoy some of it. "I'm not a philosopher. Gallipoli was Gallipoli. That's all there was about it." Mr Campbell's return visit to Turkey in 1990 proved almost as dangerous as his first tour. "I reckoned I knew where my sap (covered trench) was located and started looking for it," he said. "Next thing I fell into it and had to be hauled out. It was mine all right but it had been covered with heavy brush." Mr Campbell is survived his second wife Kath, nine children, and at last count 33 grandchildren, 35 great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren. İAAP 2002 Mr Campbell, who was born in Launceston, lied about his age so he could enlist at the age of 16. He landed at Gallipoli with the 15th Battalion on November 2, 1915 and for about six weeks braved heavy fire to carry ammunition and water from the boats to the front line. He became ill and was evacuated to Egypt and finally Australia, where he was medically discharged.