On this day in 1915, the Anzacs (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) landed at Gallipoli. Eight months later, 8000 had died, but the battle was lost. Today, as people throughout Australia and NZ attend dawn memorial services (Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance drew a record crowd of 35,000) and parades, 8000 Australians and Kiwis - many of them young people - are commemorating the event at Gallipoli, as many as the lost. What's going on? Why, when the "diggers" (as the Australian boys fighting in WW1 were known) have long passed away, is it such a big deal, let alone getting to be a bigger deal each year?Anzac Day is one of the aspects of Australian culture my sister told me was hardest to understand. I can't claim to get it either. It's as surprising as the fine millinery of the Melbourne Cup and the popularity of "Big Brother." Gallipoli was lost but WW1 was won - so it's not like the American South remembering its glorious losses. WW1 was won but Gallipoli was lost - so it's not about victory either. This land's machismo is irreverent and convivial, not military - is that what Gallipol's about? There's both realism and fatalism here: w
ar's terrible but an apparently inescapable part of life. Look at this purple prose from an editorial in The Age:War harvests death and, in its combatants, the crop is always the young. War needs the young: for they are the fittest to fight; the fittest to kill; the fittest to die. The two world wars were the great scythe in each generation's youth. Subsequent wars, such as Korea and Vietnam, were if not scythes then bloody instruments that cut into the lifeblood. Australia's military casualties in World War I totalled almost 62,000; another 137,000 were wounded in action; in World War II, more than 39,000 died and 23,000 were wounded in action. The second conflagration took its toll in POW statistics: almost 29,000 captured with 8000 dead compared with 3600 in World War I and 109 dead. In the Korean War, the death toll was almost 340, and in Vietnam 520.
War is hell. Its language is crimson violence, spoken with the stutter of guns. ... Today thousands of people will gather for a minute's silence. They will pause to remember the tremendous cost war can extract from life; and that sometimes there is no rhyme or reason for the sacrifices people are ordered to make and that sometimes there is. That is the real pity, and the exalted poetry of a nation's flesh and blood.
The language isn't about Our Great Land or the Great Sacrifices that have been made to protect Our Way Of Life, defending Freedom and Civilization against their enemies (though this was surely the language at the time); even the masculine Virtues of our Great Heroes aren't the main thing. It's about "mateship" in the face of meaningless death. It is a cult not of victory or defeat but of war as a part of life, a cult of death.
The number of Aussies lost in WW1 as a percentage of population, and in a young country, is staggering. One in five who went perished, and as many again died of wounds in the next dozen years. Many of the lost died thousands of miles away in unknown lands and have no graves. Their sacrifice isn't mentioned in the history books in those distant lands where they died, or in the distant lands for whom they fought. How do you mourn that?At the Shrine of Remembrance there was an exhibit on Avenues of Honour, the avenues of trees planted in 250 Victorian towns as their boys set off for war; each tree bore a name. Nearly a century later many of the Avenues are still there. The huge trees outnumber the populations of some small towns. With photographs the exhibit included several paintingds by a landscape painter named David Porter. The one above, of the enormously long Avenue of Honour at Ballarat, is called "Roots in the Earth," but looks more like skeletal arms coming out of the earth - protectively or menacingly?
(The two photos are details of the Shrine of Remembrance.)
