On the Centenary of the
Gallipoli Landings 25 April 1915
Today is Anzac Day. And not just any Anzac Day. It is the
centenary today of the Gallipoli landings in the Dardanelles. This centenary is
a big moment in Australian history. But what it means is debatable. We have
been told by certain voices in the military that Australia became a nation
there, that we grew up there, that our blood spilled was the evidence of a
proud adult nation in its own right. We have watched the RSL attempt to own the
Anzac myth and to fashion it according to the image of its erstwhile President
Bruce Ruxton. We have seen the glorification of war in some quarters,
celebrating military life, its ranks, its ordinance and its uniforms. We have
seen business and commerce try to have piece of the Anzac tradition, selling
everything from tins of biscuits to tea-towels. We’ve seen right-wing
nationalists try to appropriate the tradition conflating it with their myopic
view of what it means to be Australian such that if you’re not wearing a flag
around your shoulders on Australia Day, you’re un-Australian. We’ve seen it
linked with gambling. The two-up tradition. Drinking. Parades. Bands. Laughter.
Shouting. Pubs. Joy. ‘Anzacery’, it has been called.
But I think now that we have the perspective of one hundred
years, we should be able to discuss the Anzac legend, this event that changed
Australia, minus the myths, the glorification and the political spin that have
attached themselves to the campaign ever since the early part of the twentieth
century. These are my thoughts and I make no claim to expertise or rightness.
First, let me say that for me, talking about Gallipoli means
talking about two groups of people:
- The men who fought and died there on the beaches; and
- The men who put them there.
I have enormous respect for the people in Group 1 for their
unbelievable bravery and courage, their unmatched dedication to their mates and
their willingness to ‘go over’ despite the utter futility and stupidity of the
strategy and the certain knowledge that they would die. I cannot imagine how
this must have felt. Eight thousand men died there in such circumstances in
eight months. On average, that’s 1000 a month or 250 a week or almost 36 men
every day for eight months. I shake my head in incredulity and anger at these
figures.
I have little respect for the old men in Group 2 for their
willingness to put young men into such a desperate situation and to go on
sacrificing them when it was obvious that the strategy was a disastrous
failure.
But first, the big picture. Gallipoli was only small fry
compared to the main campaigns of the Western Front in WWI. So we have to
contextualise the whole thing. Australians lost 46,000 young men on the Western
Front, first, tortured by living in mud, and then death, along with 132,000
wounded. It was an unspeakable horror. A war of attrition on both sides. An
abomination.
World War 1 was a waste. It was a waste of human life and it achieved little. It did not change the world to the same extent as did WWII, but merely hastened the demise of the old world empires, Ottoman, Habsburg, and Hohenzollern. It was not fought against a clear human evil such as Nazism in the WWII. It was a cross between an intentional war and an accidental war.
Australian historian Christopher Clark’s 2013 book, The
Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, examines the way the alliances
set up between the various powers saw the whole thing just run out of control.
Serbia was upset with Austria because she thought Austria wanted to curb her
independence. Austria was upset with Serbia for wanting greater influence.
Germany thought Austria was the right horse to back as Germany was already a
power in Europe but wanted to be a great power and her own sphere of influence
to be increased and not contained, especially by France and Russia, who
supported Serbia. France certainly didn’t want a powerful expansionist Germany
on her doorstep, and Russia fully agreed with that sentiment, as Russia and
France had been allies. Russia also didn’t want Austria to gain influence over
Serbia. Britain didn’t want Germany to become the dominant nation in Europe
especially since Kaiser Wilhelm II was becoming increasingly bellicose. What’s
more, Britain had promised to protect Belgium, so when Germany attacked France
and Belgium, Britain too, and her dominions, went to war on principle. None of
these powers thought it would be a big war. None of them thought it would be a
long war. None of them remotely contemplated that it would disintegrate into
chaos and become a world war. The leaders of these nations were all wrong. That
is exactly what it did. But it is more complex than even this and historians of
the period to this day still debate the causes of the Great War.
World War I caused the deaths of over 16 million people with
20 million people wounded. Australia was a nation of five million people and we
lost 62,081 lives, about 1.24% of our whole population. In today’s figures,
1.24% of our population of 23,800,000 people in 2015 would be 295,120 deaths.
1.24% is an enormous statistic for fatalities. Such a vast number changes a
nation. And it did Australia. After WWI, Australia was in mourning. There is
scarcely a town, city or hamlet anywhere in the country that does not have a
WWI memorial that lists the names of the region’s fallen. No-where was left
unaffected. The whole of Australia was in grief. So many lives lost. So much
youth and beauty and promise wasted. Like Britain and her other dominions, not
a drop of blood was spilled here in Australia. This war did not happen here.
Our young men died in foreign fields and never came home.
The English poet Rupert Brooke, who himself died in 1915,
rather romanticised this sentiment in his poem The Soldier.
“If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England”.
But shot into pieces lying dead in a field on the other side
of the world is not romantic. It is quintessentially tragic. This is the
heaviness at the heart of visiting these battle fields; we identify ourselves
and our loved ones with the young men who never came home and it cannot but
bring tears. I felt it myself in the United Nations cemetery in Pusan in South
Korea where I read the ages of twenty and twenty one year old Australians who
never came home from the Korean War. Tears came. Awful. Heavy.
World War I was a waste. Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Dulce et
decorum est’ more rightly captures the waste. Translated loosely, ‘it is a
sweet and right or glorious thing to die for your country’. The final stinging
lines:
“My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori”.
Owen understood the lie about war. He understood the
filth of the ‘war is glorious’ sentiment. His poem Futility speaks not only of
the futility of this particular soldier lying in a field hospital, but also of
the vast numbers of the dead, the hollow shells of men who survived and
returned home and the futility of the whole war itself. It still affects me
every time I read it. The wounded half dead soldier gets pushed out into the
sun with the nurse saying:
“Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once”.
Not any more.
The futility of the Great War is something that is
inescapable. And it is in this chaos of mass homicide that Gallipoli occurs. It
was Winston Churchill’s great plan to take the Dardanelles from Germany’s ally
Turkey and force their way to Constantinople where it was believed the Turks
would then surrender. The German commander’s uncle, Moltke the Elder, is quoted
way back in the Prussian Wars as saying, “no battle plan ever survives contact
with the enemy”. That aphorism could have been written about Gallipoli. It was
an unmitigated calamitous disaster. You will recall that I divided the men into
two groups. For Group 1 above, I have the utmost respect: for the men, the
Anzacs and British and others, who were ordered into the middle of the hellfire
that became Gallipoli. I lament their unspeakable tragedy. But I do not respect
what was asked of them by their superiors; political and military alike.
Since then, we have been told by conservative politicians
mostly and the military that Australia was born on the beaches of Gallipoli, or
that Australia came of age on the beaches of Gallipoli. Neither of these
propositions do I support. In 1914, Australia was a teen-ager and still part of
an Empire. We still thought of England as home. We were still very much a
British outpost. We were only at war because Britain was at war; no other
reason. We were not being attacked. Britain wasn’t even being attacked. Britain
had signed a European treaty ensuring Belgium’s neutrality and even German
Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, not expecting Britain to join the
fight after Germany violated the neutrality, exclaimed mockingly that he
couldn’t believe Britain would go to war “over a scrap of paper”.
Our young men were just young guys. They were 1914’s
equivalent of young hipsters now. They were working, partying, getting into relationships,
drinking, hanging out with their friends; no different to what young twenties
do now. They ‘joined up’ with the AIF with fun, travel and maybe a bit of glory
in their minds. They were products of their time. The rallying cry was “For
God, King and Empire”. It wasn’t “For Australia”.
Young men to this day join the Armed Forces for fun and
travel and comradeship and outdoorsy stuff where you get to play with little
guns and big guns. It plays right into the model of masculinity that says boys
are tough and love guns and fighting. They are easy picking for a willing
military. We still see ads on tv for the Navy with great warships pounding
through waves and young men and women doing their thing to ‘further their
career’, firing off torpedoes and plotting courses on high tech maps. Very
exciting stuff. Even I think so. The belief in personal invincibility that
occasions youth is still strongly operative, but like the diggers in 1918 who
were lucky enough to survive and come home, many young defence persons return
from active duty deeply traumatised; all notions of fun and travel long dissolved.
Chris’ great grandfather survived and returned from WWI and
never spoke of his experiences in the war to anyone nor would he go to Anzac
Day marches. He was not alone. Not only was Australia awash in grief after this
war, it was also awash in mental illness. Post-traumatic Stress Disorder can be
one of the most debilitating of all mental illnesses, potentially robbing
people of their ability to live and function back in society. Many diggers
self-medicated with booze to try to anaesthetise the suffering, as the Army
didn’t have a clue how to look after them.
I do not see that Australia was born at Gallipoli any more
than I see her born on the Western Front. Such a model is a military model, a
military way of looking at life; something I actively eschew. Such a model only
makes sense in a military junta, not in a pluralistic democracy founded on
responsible government. There is some notion that a nation is not a nation
until it has been blooded; like a young greyhound getting the opportunity to
chase a live rabbit and kill it so that it will be truly tested and its mettle
seen to stand. Then and only then is it real. I find this notion obscene. It is
not in ANY military operation that Australia imputes to itself nationhood or
adulthood. We did that in peace. And we should be proud of that. It may not be
as exciting to the young gung ho adversarialists, but it is in fact so much
more adult in every way.
We have become a nation in increments. After an inglorious
and bloody start with Australia’s indigenous people, a history we still have
not owned fully, there came a peaceful growth of nationhood in a series of
growth spurts that continues today. We federated the separate colonies, our
states, into one commonwealth in 1901 only thirteen years before the Great War
and we did it without a revolution, without blood being spilled; one of the few
countries in the world to do so. We rejected conscription to the armed forces
twice, in 1916 and 1917 in two referenda, after Britain started pressuring us
to send 5,500 men per month in 1916 and 7000 men per month in 1917. Both
referenda were defeated and put another nail in the coffin of Australian subservience
to the British Empire and thus repudiating the belief of Empire devotees here
in Australia that it was right and proper for us to continue to stock Britain’s
armies with our youth.
The Statute of Westminster was enacted in 1931 establishing
legislative independence from Britain for all her colonies and dominions and we
signed our Statute of Westminster Adoption Act in 1942 making it law here and
forever excluding the Parliament of Great Britain from having a say in our
affairs. In 1986 we passed the Australia Act forever denying UK governments
from having a say on any matter in Australian governance as well as denying Australians
the right to appeal Australian court judgments in the UK. So no more appeals to
the Privy Council in London. Our own High Court of Australia is our highest
court, above which there is no other. We continue to untie the nursery strings
from the mother with foreign policy as well, charting our own way, and no doubt
making our own mistakes too. These days, we are so far from the old sentiments
of Empire and England, that we favour our region for trade over the UK and
eventually I think, we will become a republic throwing off an anachronistic
monarchy and more than likely changing our ambiguous flag. The separation from
parent continues even in 2015 as we witness the public reaction to Tony Abbott
bringing back knights and dames and then awarding one of them on Australia Day
to the Duke of Edinburgh; an act that most Australians found offensive to some
degree.
Anzac Day is undoubtedly a special day. This is what I think
it should be about. It reminds us all of the terrible price we paid for
Europe’s great powers to have their squabble and then have it deteriorate into
a world conflagration. We remember the unbelievable courage of the diggers and
we mourn the loss of young life and the futures that they never got to live. We
mourn too for the loved ones back here in Australia. Barely a family left
untouched. My own grandfather was a Light Horseman, although he never saw
active service, and one of my grandmother’s brothers, Will, went to the Western
Front. We remember the lives destroyed left hollow as empty shells of those who
survived and came home. We should remember to not be quick to get into
violence. Let us not glory in the marches and the pomp and military pageantry
and the stories of bravery, for this bravery need never have been forced upon
these men. Anzac Day should also be about the lesson that comes out of fighting
someone else’s wars. Australia should never again just sign up willy nilly to
other people’s wars. It is a lesson we still have not learned, for we allowed
John Howard to sign us up for America’s hasty invasion of Iraq, where other
former British dominions, Canada and New Zealand, did not.
Some obscene blood sacrifice was not the birth of our
nation. But I do acknowledge that such tragedy forges a bond and a solidarity
among us without doubt. It is the bond of the ‘grief of death’, not the bond of
‘the joy of birth’. The plea of Australia's last Anzac, Alec Campbell, not long
before his death in 2002 was: "For God's sake, don't glorify Gallipoli –
it was a terrible fiasco, a total failure and best forgotten."
To finish this short essay, I want to post a wonderful piece
by Professor Bruce Scates, who holds the Chair of History and Australian
Studies at Monash University and is the director of the National Centre for
Australian Studies. He is also the author of several books on Gallipoli. I
think this is the most worthwhile newspaper article I have read on Gallipoli
and the Great War. It is well worth your time. And if you bothered with my
piece above, many thanks indeed. Best wishes on this important Anzac Day -
Stuart
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