Anzac Day: when we remember glorious defeat
April 25, when we commemorate the World War I catastrophe at Gallipoli, is part of the long tradition of lament and pride in sacrifice across civilisation
The dawn light, the old Diggers, the wondering kids. What a strange ritual it is that Australia uses to commemorate the sorrow and the pity of war with this memorial to a British military blunder that killed so many golden boys for God knows what, for God knows why. What did Ezra Pound write?
“These fought in any case / Some believing / pro domo, in any case … / Died some, pro patria / Walked eye-deep in Hell … / There died a myriad, / And of the best, among them, / For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization.”
And whatever the civilisation was worth, World War I was not a battle over fundamentals. Remember the Germans had values like us: think of the Jews wearing the Iron Cross who marched with pride to the trucks that would carry them to the concentration camps. But the bloodiness and massacre –– the worst war the world has seen on the Western front –– put paid to the civilisations we knew: to the German monarchy, to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to the possibility of increased democracy in tsarist Russia, to Home Rule in Ireland and ultimately, though people only whispered it at first, to the British Empire itself.
Still, we celebrate this symbolic catastrophe at Gallipoli in 1915, beginning with the landing on April 25, as the central myth of a sporting nation that has always, perhaps as an extension of the idea of sport, wanted to see itself as a warrior nation. Is it madness to commemorate defeat? Not really. The first and greatest epic poem in the Western tradition, The Iliad of Homer, ends with the words, “Such was the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses.” That Trojan war story is about the sorrow of war for everybody: for Hector, slain; for Achilles, crazed with grief, crazed with rage for his beloved Patroclus, dead; for Priam, who begs for his son’s corpse.
It is fitting, it is just, to celebrate the terrible nature of war. And Anzac Day, which looms on Sunday, when we join hands as a band of brothers and sisters with the New Zealanders, is in the longest possible tradition of lament and pride in sacrifice.
Remember the 300 Spartans who died at Thermopylae? “Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.” It is in the shadow of the valley of death that we define ourselves and it is definingly in the starkness of defeat that we can acknowledge the idea of valour most fully.
Waltzing Matilda with its intimation of the ghost that can be heard around the billabong; Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life with its wonderful opening, “Unemployed at last!” — all capture parts of the Australian ethos, but who would mock the flat RSL voice as it recites:
“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
“Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
“At the going down of the sun and in the morning
“We will remember them.”
Lines written by Laurence Binyon who translated Dante and received advice from Pound and worked at the British Museum.
But the shapers and speakers of the words of lamentation and reverence are likely to be improbable. Paul Keating was an improbable person to deliver the great “Unknown Soldier” speech. Just as his antagonist, John Howard, was an improbable person to go into East Timor willing to defend our old comrades in war from the threat of the Indonesians. Though Howard’s willingness to support East Timor with boots on the ground got the approval of Greens-voting women in Carlton and inner Sydney, just as the words Don Watson crafted for Keating are applauded by the hardiest conservatives.
That’s what a national ethos means in a country that is inclined to despise nationalism even as it allows it to frame almost every question we ask. And there were always dissenting voices about World War I. Think of Daniel Mannix, the turbulent Catholic archbishop of Melbourne, who provoked the rage of prime minister Billy Hughes by opposing conscription and actually won the battle.
Behind that considered and nuanced voice of dissent that was opposed by patriotic and pro-empire Catholics such as the great-grandfather of Lucy (Hughes) Turnbull ––there was Mannix’s detestation of what the British had done to his native Ireland. But when it came to the memorialising of the Great War it’s fascinating to reflect on how intensely and with what care Australians set about turning the memory of war into a kind of secular religion that would transcend the sectarian divisions of Protestant and Catholic in the name of the nation.
It’s worth remembering that Federation had come less than 20 years before Gallipoli. Anyone who wants to follow through the ways in which we translated the remembrance of war into a unifying thing should read the wonderful archaeology of this subject by Ken Inglis, Sacred Places, about how the Anzac story became a civic religion.
Inglis, a historian with a history of left-wing affiliation, could recognise the deliberate cultivation of a mythology and an ideology when he saw one. He notes the cult of a visible and ascertainable thing from the shrines in every country town or suburb. But it is manifest anyway.
Think of the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. Was it Robert Hughes who called it a monumental and improbable use of cubism? What would be clear to any alert Martian a thousand years hence is that it was a temple of some kind and that the faith it proclaimed was a faith in a nation that was made sacred by sacrifice.
It’s fascinating, too, that the Australian impulse to enlist in World War I ––which thousands of boys from farms and cities did–– was an impassioned impulse to defend Mother Britain, the great empire of which we were one of the mighty dominions, and of which we were still subjects and for a long time citizens.
But there was always a counter-whisper in all this. Gallipoli was an act of British folly –– on Winston Churchill’s part in the first instance –– and there was always a voice inside the egalitarian Australian breast that saw us as lambs to the imperial slaughter.
There are touches of this in Forty Thousand Horsemen, the Charles Chauvel film with Chips Rafferty that celebrates the Australian Light Horse; and it’s central to Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli, written by David Williamson and with the young Mel Gibson at his starriest. It is, of course, a mateship movie with a lyrical intensity about the dark-haired boy and the blond boy who can run like a leopard. It’s a lament for doomed youth and it’s an indictment of British folly.
It’s a theme that runs through all the depictions, and even the pride Australians take in the high and mighty generalship of John Monash, arguably the greatest of World War I commanders, is a kick at the British. And there’s probably an element of pride here too in Monash’s Jewishness because, like that of Isaac Isaacs, the first Australian-born governor-general, it indicates an independence from the British way of arranging the world.
It would be a rewarding enterprise to look at the different images we’ve created of World War I. Ernest Hemingway believed that the greatest novel it inspired was by an Australian: Frederick Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune (which is also known as Her Privates We) plays on an obscene pun from Hamlet; that is, the idea that war and being a soldier is a c..t of a thing.
The images of World War I range from David Malouf’s poetic novel Fly Away Peter to Russell Crowe’s The Water Diviner (the one where the Turkish actors beat the Australians hands down.) But the turning away from Britain became a necessity in World War II after the fall of Singapore and a lot of baby boomers will have distinct memories of hearing their parents rage about how the British let us down in the war.
It was certainly a historic moment when wartime prime minister John Curtin — by common consent one of Australia’s greatest — says that we must turn to our “great and powerful friend”, the United States.
The beginnings of the resurgent republican movement in the 1990s — spearheaded by Keating and championed unsuccessfully by Malcolm Turnbull — took part of its inspiration from the fact Britain had forsaken us in World War II.
There was even in Keating, and in eminent journalists such as Paul Kelly, a touch of Irish truculence and turbulence to this.
Australians who lived through World War II remembered the bravery of their countrymen who had been the rats of Tobruk in Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery’s North African fight against that great German general, Erwin Rommel (who ultimately turned against Adolf Hitler).
They remembered, too, the myth that the Anglophile Bob Menzies supposedly had been willing to cede Queensland to the Japanese and they took pride in the fact that American general Douglas MacArthur ran the Pacific War from his headquarters in Brisbane. And the GIs in the streets of the Australian cities, taking out Australian girls, highlighted for Australians the way they were not simply British.
And the Anzac spirit — whatever it means — is written all over the history of Australia and New Zealand in World War II. An account of that would encompass everything from Nevil Shute’s novel A Town Like Alice to that great memoir of war and of fighting behind enemy lines Peter Ryan’s Fear Drive My Feet. It would also take into account Cameron Forbes’s Hellfire: The Story of Australia, Japan and the Prisoners of War. And — as is always the case in war — so much of what predominates is the sorrow and pity of the thing.
I had a great-uncle who was gassed on the Western front and who had a son to a lady down the road who he could not marry, and he was torn with grief when his son was conscripted in World War II: he would rather have gone back to war himself. His son was killed and a few years after the war his father shot himself.
My grandfather was in Changi, the notorious Japanese PoW camp in Singapore, where he dwindled from 11 or 12 stone to something like 8 stone (50kg). I’m not sure if he was an alcoholic before the war but he was certainly one after it.
But think of the stories of the PoW camps and of Weary Dunlop acting like a saint and operating with sharpened sticks like the great surgeon, and more than surgeon, that he was.
It’s appropriate that this man of healing, this man of moral courage in the face of ghastly affliction, should be central to what we reverence about Anzac Day and what matters about all this blood and iron and heartbreak.
When I was a child there was a nonfiction bestseller by Russell Braddon, The Naked Island, and recently Richard Flanagan had a literary bestseller, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, on the PoW predicament.
Lest we forget. How did Kipling put it?
“The tumult and the shouting dies; / The Captains and the Kings depart: / Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice, / An humble and a contrite heart. / Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, / Lest we forget — lest we forget!”
It is easy for young Australians to forget the suffering that people went through in time of war for whatever dream they had about the nation that constituted our world.
Andrew Peacock, who died last week, was a great friend of Papua New Guinea, which he helped bring to independence, and it was New Guinea together with East Timor which, as Malouf said once, were sacred to us for a single reason. On Anzac Day it’s worth remembering that they were sacred to us because of the bonds of war: their people died for us.
When I was a boy I read war books — at a time when boys did — generally about that last great just war, World War II. I remember a caption from back then by Field Marshal William Slim, the British general who became governor-general of Australia in the 1950s.
He said he’d seen war in all the quarters of war, and had fought with and against every kind of soldier. Then he said: “But never have I seen such men as these men of the Anzac.”
Just at the moment when some Australian soldiers seem to have done at least very dodgy things in Afghanistan, it’s worth remembering that reputation. Surely we can still take pride in Slim’s remark. The wide-eyed kids and the flat-voiced Diggers in the dawn light are there to remind us that people fought and died for something. Those men and women of the Anzac.
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