Anzac Day: Monash Centre marks Australia role on the Western Front

Soldiers of the 1st Australian Division on the Western Front, near Hooge, in Belgium. Picture: James Francis “Frank’’ Hurley/Australian War Memorial

For many people World War I is as distant as the battles of Napoleon or Nelson. Its memory is shaped by culture, not politics or power relations — hence its enduring perception as an incomprehensible descent into slaughter without meaning.

To a large extent, British and Australian recollection is entrenched by two epic tragedies — the first day of the Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916, when 60,000 casualties were taken, and the Gallipoli landing of April 25, 1915, that inaugurated a doomed expedition for a hopeful young country. These events overwhelmed the public imagination and brought forth a platoon of moving and tragic poets.

In A Farewell to Arms,published in 1929, Hemingway has his hero, Frederic Henry, say that in the end “only the names of places had dignity … abstract words such as glory, honour, courage or hallow are obscene”.

Wars are judged by the peace that follows and the 1919 settlement at Paris proved a monumental failure. The Great War killed almost nine million soldiers, with 21 million wounded, and stood doomed before history — “the war to end all wars” left the German problem unresolved and bequeathed an even deadlier World War II. It is no surprise that its historical memory is dominated by culture.

The scale of human misery and assumed absence of strategic dividends led to pervasive conclusions — it was a pointless conflict devoid of moral justification. The story that mattered in film, novel and painting became monstrous sacrifice that shook human understanding.

In The Long Shadow, British historian David Reynolds quotes from Sebastian Faulks’s novel Birdsong. When the character Elizabeth, whose grandfather fought in France, visits Sir Edwin Lutyens’s gigantic Thiepval Memorial on the Somme, with its multiple arches inscribed with 73,000 British names, it’s “as though the surface of the sky had been peppered in footnotes”.

“Are these men who died in this battle?” she asks.

“No,” a custodian replies. “The lost, the ones they did not find. The others are in the cemeteries.”

So these are “just the … unfound”, she gasps. “From the whole war?” The man shakes his head: “Just these fields.”

Elizabeth slumps on the steps of the monument. “My God, nobody told me.”

The encounter with a memorial implanted on an old battlefield is lasting — it forces the mind towards a confrontation with what happened. Yet much cultural depiction of the war has been a psychological retreat; witness the 1969 British film musical Oh! What a Lovely War.

The zenith of such sentiment came in the late 1960s with the fused impact of the youth revolution and revulsion at the Vietnam war. It is no surprise that the poetry of Wilfred Owen underwent a revival in the 60s, nor that in Australia the notion of “ fighting other people’s wars” was given another spin by the rising local generation of cultural lions.

As Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan said, the convenient idea arose that the Great War “was nobody’s fault or everybody’s (fault)”. So began a bizarre cult — we didn’t talk about who started the war or, incredibly, even who won the war. Such core truths were repressed in popular accounts so they hardly seemed to matter against the narrative of useless slaughter.

Accounts of the war faced a difficult stumbling block — how to handle the embarrassment of 1918, the victory of Allied armies and the historically substantial contribution of Australians. The cultural doctors had an easy solution: don’t mention 1918.

The patronising subtext was that those who enlisted were well-meaning but dupes, as they went to the defence of empire, colonialism and racism. Indeed, revisionist accounts of the war often insisted on moral equivalence.

What was the war about? It was about who would rule Europe — and since in those days Europe ruled much of the world, it was about global power and dominance. For Australia, any German victory over the British Empire would have had vast and manifold damaging consequences.

There was, of course, a far larger influence that corroded war memory. The Great War never recovered from the most powerful narrative of the century — World War II, with its moral clarity, enshrined legitimacy and decisive victory. Resisting Hitler became a cause that few could dispute, and once the Nazi death camps were opened and the world learned of the Holocaust, the 1939-45 war was vested with a justification rarely equalled in history.

By comparison, the reason for Britain’s (and by extension Australia’s) entry into World War I — defending the neutrality of Bel­gium — seemed pathetic despite its validity.

In the end, there was no substitute for total victory. In 1945 the Allies including the Soviet Union conquered, occupied and remade the political systems of Germany and Japan. Trials were held and condemned war criminals were executed. The fascist edifices were purged from the earth.

By comparison, the armistice at the end of World War I stood exposed for flaws that satisfied nobody — it meant no future German government would have legitimacy without repudiating the terms of the Versailles Treaty. The fearful French knew, in the words of Marshal Ferdinand Foch: “This is not peace; it is an armistice for 20 years.” The British, in Churchill’s words, lived “from hand to mouth, from day to day”, clinging to the deluded ritual of ­appeasement.

The war was denounced as a generals’ war. Yet it was a people’s war to a far greater extent. In 1914 it was embraced by the masses in most countries, fired by nationalism and expectations of quick victory. A feature of the war was the strength of the home fronts for so long and acceptance of conscription, though not in Australia.

Russia broke at home in 1917; France faced troop mutinies; and Germany broke in 1918. There were peace movements but the bigger picture is that soldiers and civilians were far more pledged to their cause than the cultural historians admit.

Australian memory of the war is shaped by Gallipoli — the idea of sacrificial proof of the new nation’s worth. The great Labor Party split suggests a legacy of bitter division. It was bitter, but again the bigger story was the extent of ongoing support for the war despite the magnitude of domestic political convulsion and the drying up of ­recruitment.

The origins of the war are complex, less so its ending. The war in the west was fought on the soil of France and Belgium because, as British historian David Stevenson says: “At the root of everything that followed was Germany’s decision to march two million men westward across industrial and rural landscapes that had known decades of peace.”

Within eight weeks of the war’s outbreak, Germany, while denied Paris, moved to create fortified positions on French soil. It had come to stay. Far from being nobody’s fault, this had no legitimacy or moral sanction.

In 1914, the option for Britain was not war or peace; permitting Germany to dominate Europe would have been a strategic and moral folly. Thinking the militaristic Germany of 1914 would have delivered an early version of the EU is laughable.

As Geoffrey Blainey says, there was no issue for Australia at the outbreak of war. This was because successive governments had already decided our political, economic, strategic and cultural life was tied to Britain, and this judgment was overwhelmingly accepted by the public by instinct, kinship and self-interest.

After the war, Anzac Day became more important than Remembrance Day, which marks the war’s end on November 11. Australian governments were far slower and more reluctant than those of Britain and Canada to honour their lost and dead with Western Front memorials.

The meaning of the Sir John Monash Centre in France lies in its correction of these failures. Its practical and symbolic function is to better allow the Australian people to recognise and appreciate this decisive chapter in our history and let more light of truth illuminate the Western Front story.