The anti-war crowd are mercifully absent as they are most years, the public for the most part having enough sense to recognise the day as a commemoration of sacrifice rather than a celebration of war and perhaps the backlash such commentators would receive for inappropriate dialogue on such an occasion leaves them with the reasonable assumption that they would be hounded down and publicly berated. Reason enough to stay quiet.
The main problem I have with those who seek to comment on Anzac Day is that most look through the prism of the 21st century to view an event which took place a nearly one hundred years ago when attitudes and ideals, indeed the very make up of this nation was vastly different to what it is today.
Many people seem to wonder why a nation of four million people, situated as it is on the Pacific rim would seek to send hundreds of thousands of it’s physically finest young men to a war in Europe which turned out to be nothing more than a giant meat grinder when, on the surface, from their perspective, it really had nothing to do with Australia. That is the biggest misnomer of all.
Of course, none of the great powers who lit the powder keg in 1914 ever assumed the war would turn into the bloody slugfest which followed. Nationalism, imperial envy, jingoism, naivety and ignorance all played a part in the slide to conflict.
Britain had not fought a European enemy for seventy years and the Franco-Prussian War which saw the humiliation of France and the creation of the German state had finished in 1871. The generals of these great nations who held commands in 1914 had been trained in the tactics of the Napoleonic wars. Unfortunately, the science of war had moved on and it would cost the lives of millions of men on the Western Front before attitudes and opinions, strategies and tactics ingrained since Wellington won the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 would be readdressed and reconfigured.
So much had changed in such a short time. Magazined rifles, machine guns and massed artillery had changed the face of warfare. The ability to get millions of soldiers to the front line and feed and clothe and otherwise supply them had improved beyond measure since the last major European conflict. Earthworks and the ability to maintain them had improved. The science of war had outpaced the art of war. And a blood bath followed.
Australia had only existed as a nation for 13 short years at the beginning of the Great War. A largely homogeneous entity populated mainly by the Anglo-Celtic descendants of English and Irish convicts and free settlers who had been arriving on these shores ever since Arthur Phillip and the First Fleet sailed into what became Sydney Harbour in 1788.
The average Australian of 1914 considered himself British first, Australian second and had been brought up believing in the sanctity, righteousness and Imperial greatness of the British Empire and believed if the British must fight then Australia, as the Motherland’s big right toe, must fall in and answer the trumpet call. Even the Irish Catholics, many of whom had no cause to love the King, signed up in droves and died as such in the muddy fields of France and Belgium.
The rush to arms by men from Australia and other Dominions in the aftermath of the declaration of war by Great Britain should really be seen as no surprise. They were loyal and patriotic. Patriotic to King and country. They believed the propaganda. Just as we do today. They weren’t so different to us.
Australians who first enlisted and found themselves in sprawling camps in the Middle East soon began to realise after mixing with soldiers from other nations, that they were in fact different to their Imperial brethren. They spoke differently. Thought differently. Acted differently. Laughed at different things. A national consciousness was being born.
As such, although Australians had fought in the Maori Wars, the Sudan and the Boer War, these young men felt that for the first time their nation was being put on the international stage. As their troop carriers heaved to off the coast of Turkey in the early hours of Sunday, April 25 1915, they realised what was at stake. Honour, pride and a place in history Read their diaries and their recollections which are readily available in books and national collections and one realises that these young men wanted to put Australia on the map. And they did so with their blood and sacrifice on that Turkish shore.
This is the reason it was important to Diggers on the Western Front on April 25 in the years following that the sacrifice and national consciousness which had been found on the killing fields of Gallipoli should be commemorated and eventually Anzac Day became a national holiday some years after the end of the Great War. The sacrifice of the Western Front had only added to the Australian nation’s perceived glory.
330 000 Australian soldiers served overseas in the Great War. They suffered a casualty rate of 65%, the largest in the British Empire. Three of every five men who served were killed or wounded. Every person in Australia lost a family member or knew someone who had. The war memorials that dot the smallest towns are a living reminder of a brutal sacrifice. A visible scar on the landscape which has never completely healed or from which the country has ever completely recovered. Is it any wonder Anzac Day became a point of reference for those who had seen the horrors of war and a day of remembrance for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t forget?
To put it in perspective, applying the same figures to modern Australia would see over a million men under arms and a death toll of 300 000 men and hundreds of thousands more whose lives would be wrecked, physically or mentally by war on such a scale. Sobering.
Unfortunately Australian manhood had to rise to the challenge yet again in 1939 and again they fought with courage and conviction for a cause that for once was right. And they died in their droves again. More impetus for remembrance on Anzac Day.
So, on this Anzac eve I ask that rather than paying lip service to the glory and sacrifice of the Anzacs, you pick up a book and read of those magnificent men “from shearing shed and cattle run, from Broome to Hobson’s Bay”, who left home and hearth to do what they thought was right. They are average Australians. They are just like us. Ordinary yet extraordinary. And I thank them for their service.
Lest we forget.
Strange Notations From a Laborious Life 