"And into this deadly crevice they fed their heroic, young obedient populations"

 Personally, and coming from an old Australian family that had more than a few members serve during World War I, I think Paul Keating's 2013 "controversial" Remembrance Day speech was one of the finest ever given on the awful human disaster that robbed Australian of so many young men,  and left us saddled with an Imperial War debt in the hundreds of millions of pounds. And for what?

Paul Keating, November 11, 2013:

Nine months from now, one hundred years ago, the horror of all ages came together to open the curtain on mankind's greatest century of violence the twentieth century.

What distinguished the First World War from all wars before it was the massive power of the antagonists.

Modern weaponry, mass conscription and indefatigable valour produced a cauldron of destruction the likes of which the world had never seen.

The statesmen who had set these forces in motion had never assumed that their conflict might be limited only by the scale of their young populations. They failed to understand how developing industrial organisation, railways, science and rising productive capacity rendered almost inexhaustible the ability of each to deliver the death blow and keep on delivering it.

The generals, especially the Allied ones, knew through military training that not since the Napoleonic Wars had frontal attacks been effective certainly not against the foil of barbed wire fortified by the modern machine gun. Yet, a line of trenches was dug, from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps - a front which denied commanders the opportunity of that classic military manoeuvre - the turning flank and encirclement. This denied, the line was fortified by major cannon and howitzers, while
the generals fell back on the only policy left to them - the policy of exhaustion.

And into this deadly crevice they fed their heroic, young obedient populations.

The First World War was a war devoid of any virtue. It arose from the quagmire of European tribalism. A complex interplay of nation state destinies overlaid by notions of cultural superiority peppered with racism.

The First World War not only destroyed European civilisation and the empires at its heart; its aftermath led to a second conflagration, the Second World War, which divided the continent until the end of the century.

But at the end of the century, from the shadows, a new light emerged. Europe turned its back on the nation state to favour a greater European construct. Individual loyalties are now directed from nationalist obsessions toward an amorphous whole and to institutions unlikely to garner a popular base. It is difficult to imagine these days, young Europeans going into combat for the European Commission, or at a stretch, the European Parliament.

This advent means that European leaders are no longer in a position to ask or demand the sacrifices which once attended their errant foreign policies. A century beyond Armageddon, young men and women are now freed from that kind of tyranny.

The virulent European disease of cultural nationalism and ethnic atavism not only destroyed Europe, it destroyed the equilibrium of the world.

While a century ago Australia was an outreach of European civilisation, here we had set about constructing an image of ourselves, free of the racial hatreds and contempts which characterised European society.

Though White Australia institutionalised a policy of bias to Caucasians; within Australia we were moving through the processes of our federation to new ideas of ourselves. Notions of equality and fairness suffrage for women, a universal living wage, support in old age, a sense of inclusive
patriotism.

And our sense of nation brought new resonances; Australian stories, poetry and ideas of our Australian-ness. We even developed a celebratory decorative style in our architecture and named that Federation. We had crystallised a good idea of ourselves and had begun to break free of the dismal legacy of Europe's ethnic stigmatisation and social stratification.

By 1915 we had no need to re-affirm our European heritage at the price of being dragged to a European holocaust. We had escaped that mire, both sociologically and geographically. But out of loyalty to imperial Britain, we returned to Europe's killing fields to decide the status of
Germany, a question which should earlier have been settled by foresight and statecraft.

Those bloody battles in Flanders, on the Western Front and at Gallipoli nevertheless distinguished us, demonstrating what we were made of. Our embrace of a new sense of human values and relationships through these events, gave substance to what is now the Anzac tradition. For whatever claims Britain and its empire had on those who served and died on the Western Front and at Gallipoli, the primary claim remained Australia's.

Those Australians fought and died not in defence of some old world notion of competing empires and territorial conquests but for the new world the one they belonged to and hoped to return to.

This is why Australia was never in need of any redemption at Gallipoli, any more than it was in need of one at Kokoda thirty years later. There was nothing missing in our young nation or our idea of it that required the martial baptism of a European cataclysm to legitimise us.

What the Anzac legend did do, by the bravery and sacrifice of our troops, was reinforce our own cultural notions of independence, mateship and ingenuity. Of resilience and courage in adversity. We liked the lesson about supposedly ordinary people; we liked finding that they were not ordinary at all. Despite the fact that the military campaigns were shockingly flawed and incompetently executed, those ordinary people distinguished themselves by their latent nobility.

The unknown Australian soldier interred in this memorial reminds us of these lessons as much as he reminds us of the more than 100,000 Australians lost to us by war.

I regard as a singular honour, the decision by the Council of the War Memorial to permanently display an engraving of the oration I gave as Prime Minister at the funeral service of the unknown Australian soldier on 11 November 1993. And to have some words from that oration inscribed
on that hallowed tomb. My time as Prime Minister spanned the period of the Pacific War, 1941 to 1945, fifty years on. It caused me to visit the sites of our military action from Papua New Guinea through to Thailand. It made me think much and write about the various episodes of conflict,
of the bravery and suffering of Australian service men and women during the Second World War.

This context sharpened the memory and essence of the Anzac legend, within which it was decided to inter an unnamed, unknown Australian soldier in the Memorial's Hall of Memory.

Indeed, the War Memorial's then director, Brendan Kelson and his deputy, Michael McKiernan, were instrumental in the process that led to the interment of the soldier.

The words the Memorial enshrines today were written for that occasion.

When Don Watson and I first discussed the writing of it, we both felt the poignancy of the occasion. My uncle, William Keating, had died in 1945 on the death march from Sandakan to Ranau, while Don Watson's grandfather was twice wounded in Flanders after being infected with Spanish flu. He returned to Australia, never recovering from it.

The history of those two theatres of war had haunted each of our lives in differing yet similar ways.

I thought it important that the speech express with clarity, simple notions of understanding and appreciation that went in personal terms, such that we might have been speaking of a relative who had died in some contemporary calamity. Hence the notion that he was all of them yet one of us.

By his interment, I thought it important to say that this unknown Australian soldier would serve his country yet again. That his presence would give us a deeper understanding of what it means to be Australian as well as serving to remind us of the sacrifice of the more than one hundred thousand men and women who never came home.

As Prime Minister, I was particularly pleased to bring these episodes of our history, especially the First and Second World Wars, into sharper relief. To remind us that the deeds of our men and women at war give us an opportunity to renew our belief in the country, while renewing our appreciation of their faith, loyalty and sacrifice.

The soul of a nation is the richer for it having been warmed by its stories and traditions. Yet its stories and traditions should not stifle or constrain its growth as it needs to adapt.

I am greatly heartened that so many young Australians find a sense of identity and purpose from the Anzac legend and from those Australian men and women who have fought in wars over the last hundred years. But the true commemoration of their lives, service and sacrifice is to understand that the essence of their motivation was their belief in all we had created here and our responsibility in continuing to improve it.

Homage to these people has to be homage to them and about them and not to some idealised or jingoist reduction of what their lives really meant.

One thing is certain: young Australians, like the young Europeans I mentioned earlier, can no longer be dragooned en masse into military enterprises of the former imperial variety on the whim of so-called statesmen. They are fortunately too wise to the world to be cannon fodder of the kind their young forebears became: young innocents who had little or no choice.

Commemorating these events should make us even more wary of grand ambitions and grand alliances of the kind that fractured Europe and darkened the twentieth century. In the long shadow of these upheavals, we gather to ponder their meaning and to commemorate the values that shone in their wake: courage under pressure, ingenuity in adversity, bonds of mateship and above all, loyalty to Australia.

There is a lot more to be said about Australia's role, and sacrifice, in World War I, and boy, are we sure going to hear about it this year. All year long.

NINE months from now, one hundred years ago, the horror of all ages came together to open the curtain on mankind's greatest century of violence the twentieth century.

What distinguished the First World War from all wars before it was the massive power of the antagonists.
Modern weaponry, mass conscription and indefatigable valour produced a cauldron of destruction the likes of which the world had never seen.
The statesmen who had set these forces in motion had never assumed that their conflict might be limited only by the scale of their young populations. They failed to understand how developing industrial organisation, railways, science and rising productive capacity rendered almost inexhaustible the ability of each to deliver the death blow and keep on delivering it.
The generals, especially the Allied ones, knew through military training that not since the Napoleonic Wars had frontal attacks been effective certainly not against the foil of barbed wire fortified by the modern machine gun. Yet, a line of trenches was dug, from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps - a front which denied commanders the opportunity of that classic military manoeuvre - the turning flank and encirclement. This denied, the line was fortified by major cannon and howitzers, while the generals fell back on the only policy left to them - the policy of exhaustion.
And into this deadly crevice they fed their heroic, young obedient populations.
The First World War was a war devoid of any virtue. It arose from the quagmire of European tribalism. A complex interplay of nation state destinies overlaid by notions of cultural superiority peppered with racism.
The First World War not only destroyed European civilisation and the empires at its heart; its aftermath led to a second conflagration, the Second World War, which divided the continent until the end of the century.
But at the end of the century, from the shadows, a new light emerged. Europe turned its back on the nation state to favour a greater European construct. Individual loyalties are now directed from nationalist obsessions toward an amorphous whole and to institutions unlikely to garner a popular base. It is difficult to imagine these days, young Europeans going into combat for the European Commission, or at a stretch, the European Parliament.
This advent means that European leaders are no longer in a position to ask or demand the sacrifices which once attended their errant foreign policies. A century beyond Armageddon, young men and women are now freed from that kind of tyranny.
The virulent European disease of cultural nationalism and ethnic atavism not only destroyed Europe, it destroyed the equilibrium of the world.
While a century ago Australia was an outreach of European civilisation, here we had set about constructing an image of ourselves, free of the racial hatreds and contempts which characterised European society. Though White Australia institutionalised a policy of bias to Caucasians; within Australia we were moving through the processes of our federation to new ideas of ourselves. Notions of equality and fairness suffrage for women, a universal living wage, support in old age, a sense of inclusive patriotism.
And our sense of nation brought new resonances; Australian stories, poetry and ideas of our Australian-ness. We even developed a celebratory decorative style in our architecture and named that Federation. We had crystallised a good idea of ourselves and had begun to break free of the dismal legacy of Europe's ethnic stigmatisation and social stratification.
By 1915 we had no need to re-affirm our European heritage at the price of being dragged to a European holocaust. We had escaped that mire, both sociologically and geographically. But out of loyalty to imperial Britain, we returned to Europe's killing fields to decide the status of Germany, a question which should earlier have been settled by foresight and statecraft.
Those bloody battles in Flanders, on the Western Front and at Gallipoli nevertheless distinguished us, demonstrating what we were made of. Our embrace of a new sense of human values and relationships through these events, gave substance to what is now the Anzac tradition. For whatever claims Britain and its empire had on those who served and died on the Western Front and at Gallipoli, the primary claim remained Australia's.
Those Australians fought and died not in defence of some old world notion of competing empires and territorial conquests but for the new world the one they belonged to and hoped to return to.
This is why Australia was never in need of any redemption at Gallipoli, any more than it was in need of one at Kokoda thirty years later. There was nothing missing in our young nation or our idea of it that required the martial baptism of a European cataclysm to legitimise us.
What the Anzac legend did do, by the bravery and sacrifice of our troops, was reinforce our own cultural notions of independence, mateship and ingenuity. Of resilience and courage in adversity. We liked the lesson about supposedly ordinary people; we liked finding that they were not ordinary at all. Despite the fact that the military campaigns were shockingly flawed and incompetently executed, those ordinary people distinguished themselves by their latent nobility.
The unknown Australian soldier interred in this memorial reminds us of these lessons as much as he reminds us of the more than 100,000 Australians lost to us by war.
I regard as a singular honour, the decision by the Council of the War Memorial to permanently display an engraving of the oration I gave as Prime Minister at the funeral service of the unknown Australian soldier on 11 November 1993. And to have some words from that oration inscribed on that hallowed tomb. My time as Prime Minister spanned the period of the Pacific War, 1941 to 1945, fifty years on. It caused me to visit the sites of our military action from Papua New Guinea through to Thailand. It made me think much and write about the various episodes of conflict, of the bravery and suffering of Australian service men and women during the Second World War.
This context sharpened the memory and essence of the Anzac legend, within which it was decided to inter an unnamed, unknown Australian soldier in the Memorial's Hall of Memory.
Indeed, the War Memorial's then director, Brendan Kelson and his deputy, Michael McKiernan, were instrumental in the process that led to the interment of the soldier.
The words the Memorial enshrines today were written for that occasion.
When Don Watson and I first discussed the writing of it, we both felt the poignancy of the occasion. My uncle, William Keating, had died in 1945 on the death march from Sandakan to Ranau, while Don Watson's grandfather was twice wounded in Flanders after being infected with Spanish flu. He returned to Australia, never recovering from it.
The history of those two theatres of war had haunted each of our lives in differing yet similar ways.
I thought it important that the speech express with clarity, simple notions of understanding and appreciation that went in personal terms, such that we might have been speaking of a relative who had died in some contemporary calamity. Hence the notion that he was all of them yet one of us.
By his interment, I thought it important to say that this unknown Australian soldier would serve his country yet again. That his presence would give us a deeper understanding of what it means to be Australian as well as serving to remind us of the sacrifice of the more than one hundred thousand men and women who never came home.
As Prime Minister, I was particularly pleased to bring these episodes of our history, especially the First and Second World Wars, into sharper relief. To remind us that the deeds of our men and women at war give us an opportunity to renew our belief in the country, while renewing our appreciation of their faith, loyalty and sacrifice.
The soul of a nation is the richer for it having been warmed by its stories and traditions. Yet its stories and traditions should not stifle or constrain its growth as it needs to adapt.
I am greatly heartened that so many young Australians find a sense of identity and purpose from the Anzac legend and from those Australian men and women who have fought in wars over the last hundred years. But the true commemoration of their lives, service and sacrifice is to understand that the essence of their motivation was their belief in all we had created here and our responsibility in continuing to improve it.
Homage to these people has to be homage to them and about them and not to some idealised or jingoist reduction of what their lives really meant.
One thing is certain: young Australians, like the young Europeans I mentioned earlier, can no longer be dragooned en masse into military enterprises of the former imperial variety on the whim of so-called statesmen. They are fortunately too wise to the world to be cannon fodder of the kind their young forebears became: young innocents who had little or no choice.
Commemorating these events should make us even more wary of grand ambitions and grand alliances of the kind that fractured Europe and darkened the twentieth century. In the long shadow of these upheavals, we gather to ponder their meaning and to commemorate the values that shone in their wake: courage under pressure, ingenuity in adversity, bonds of mateship and above all, loyalty to Australia.
- See more at: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/policy/paul-keatings-remembrance-day-commemorative-address/story-e6frg8yo-1226757270589#sthash.16vxOzMf.dpuf

NINE months from now, one hundred years ago, the horror of all ages came together to open the curtain on mankind's greatest century of violence the twentieth century.

What distinguished the First World War from all wars before it was the massive power of the antagonists.
Modern weaponry, mass conscription and indefatigable valour produced a cauldron of destruction the likes of which the world had never seen.
The statesmen who had set these forces in motion had never assumed that their conflict might be limited only by the scale of their young populations. They failed to understand how developing industrial organisation, railways, science and rising productive capacity rendered almost inexhaustible the ability of each to deliver the death blow and keep on delivering it.
The generals, especially the Allied ones, knew through military training that not since the Napoleonic Wars had frontal attacks been effective certainly not against the foil of barbed wire fortified by the modern machine gun. Yet, a line of trenches was dug, from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps - a front which denied commanders the opportunity of that classic military manoeuvre - the turning flank and encirclement. This denied, the line was fortified by major cannon and howitzers, while the generals fell back on the only policy left to them - the policy of exhaustion.
And into this deadly crevice they fed their heroic, young obedient populations.
The First World War was a war devoid of any virtue. It arose from the quagmire of European tribalism. A complex interplay of nation state destinies overlaid by notions of cultural superiority peppered with racism.
The First World War not only destroyed European civilisation and the empires at its heart; its aftermath led to a second conflagration, the Second World War, which divided the continent until the end of the century.
But at the end of the century, from the shadows, a new light emerged. Europe turned its back on the nation state to favour a greater European construct. Individual loyalties are now directed from nationalist obsessions toward an amorphous whole and to institutions unlikely to garner a popular base. It is difficult to imagine these days, young Europeans going into combat for the European Commission, or at a stretch, the European Parliament.
This advent means that European leaders are no longer in a position to ask or demand the sacrifices which once attended their errant foreign policies. A century beyond Armageddon, young men and women are now freed from that kind of tyranny.
The virulent European disease of cultural nationalism and ethnic atavism not only destroyed Europe, it destroyed the equilibrium of the world.
While a century ago Australia was an outreach of European civilisation, here we had set about constructing an image of ourselves, free of the racial hatreds and contempts which characterised European society. Though White Australia institutionalised a policy of bias to Caucasians; within Australia we were moving through the processes of our federation to new ideas of ourselves. Notions of equality and fairness suffrage for women, a universal living wage, support in old age, a sense of inclusive patriotism.
And our sense of nation brought new resonances; Australian stories, poetry and ideas of our Australian-ness. We even developed a celebratory decorative style in our architecture and named that Federation. We had crystallised a good idea of ourselves and had begun to break free of the dismal legacy of Europe's ethnic stigmatisation and social stratification.
By 1915 we had no need to re-affirm our European heritage at the price of being dragged to a European holocaust. We had escaped that mire, both sociologically and geographically. But out of loyalty to imperial Britain, we returned to Europe's killing fields to decide the status of Germany, a question which should earlier have been settled by foresight and statecraft.
Those bloody battles in Flanders, on the Western Front and at Gallipoli nevertheless distinguished us, demonstrating what we were made of. Our embrace of a new sense of human values and relationships through these events, gave substance to what is now the Anzac tradition. For whatever claims Britain and its empire had on those who served and died on the Western Front and at Gallipoli, the primary claim remained Australia's.
Those Australians fought and died not in defence of some old world notion of competing empires and territorial conquests but for the new world the one they belonged to and hoped to return to.
This is why Australia was never in need of any redemption at Gallipoli, any more than it was in need of one at Kokoda thirty years later. There was nothing missing in our young nation or our idea of it that required the martial baptism of a European cataclysm to legitimise us.
What the Anzac legend did do, by the bravery and sacrifice of our troops, was reinforce our own cultural notions of independence, mateship and ingenuity. Of resilience and courage in adversity. We liked the lesson about supposedly ordinary people; we liked finding that they were not ordinary at all. Despite the fact that the military campaigns were shockingly flawed and incompetently executed, those ordinary people distinguished themselves by their latent nobility.
The unknown Australian soldier interred in this memorial reminds us of these lessons as much as he reminds us of the more than 100,000 Australians lost to us by war.
I regard as a singular honour, the decision by the Council of the War Memorial to permanently display an engraving of the oration I gave as Prime Minister at the funeral service of the unknown Australian soldier on 11 November 1993. And to have some words from that oration inscribed on that hallowed tomb. My time as Prime Minister spanned the period of the Pacific War, 1941 to 1945, fifty years on. It caused me to visit the sites of our military action from Papua New Guinea through to Thailand. It made me think much and write about the various episodes of conflict, of the bravery and suffering of Australian service men and women during the Second World War.
This context sharpened the memory and essence of the Anzac legend, within which it was decided to inter an unnamed, unknown Australian soldier in the Memorial's Hall of Memory.
Indeed, the War Memorial's then director, Brendan Kelson and his deputy, Michael McKiernan, were instrumental in the process that led to the interment of the soldier.
The words the Memorial enshrines today were written for that occasion.
When Don Watson and I first discussed the writing of it, we both felt the poignancy of the occasion. My uncle, William Keating, had died in 1945 on the death march from Sandakan to Ranau, while Don Watson's grandfather was twice wounded in Flanders after being infected with Spanish flu. He returned to Australia, never recovering from it.
The history of those two theatres of war had haunted each of our lives in differing yet similar ways.
I thought it important that the speech express with clarity, simple notions of understanding and appreciation that went in personal terms, such that we might have been speaking of a relative who had died in some contemporary calamity. Hence the notion that he was all of them yet one of us.
By his interment, I thought it important to say that this unknown Australian soldier would serve his country yet again. That his presence would give us a deeper understanding of what it means to be Australian as well as serving to remind us of the sacrifice of the more than one hundred thousand men and women who never came home.
As Prime Minister, I was particularly pleased to bring these episodes of our history, especially the First and Second World Wars, into sharper relief. To remind us that the deeds of our men and women at war give us an opportunity to renew our belief in the country, while renewing our appreciation of their faith, loyalty and sacrifice.
The soul of a nation is the richer for it having been warmed by its stories and traditions. Yet its stories and traditions should not stifle or constrain its growth as it needs to adapt.
I am greatly heartened that so many young Australians find a sense of identity and purpose from the Anzac legend and from those Australian men and women who have fought in wars over the last hundred years. But the true commemoration of their lives, service and sacrifice is to understand that the essence of their motivation was their belief in all we had created here and our responsibility in continuing to improve it.
Homage to these people has to be homage to them and about them and not to some idealised or jingoist reduction of what their lives really meant.
One thing is certain: young Australians, like the young Europeans I mentioned earlier, can no longer be dragooned en masse into military enterprises of the former imperial variety on the whim of so-called statesmen. They are fortunately too wise to the world to be cannon fodder of the kind their young forebears became: young innocents who had little or no choice.
Commemorating these events should make us even more wary of grand ambitions and grand alliances of the kind that fractured Europe and darkened the twentieth century. In the long shadow of these upheavals, we gather to ponder their meaning and to commemorate the values that shone in their wake: courage under pressure, ingenuity in adversity, bonds of mateship and above all, loyalty to Australia.
- See more at: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/policy/paul-keatings-remembrance-day-commemorative-address/story-e6frg8yo-1226757270589#sthash.16vxOzMf.dpuf

Peter Jackson Considers ANZAC Movie For 100th Anniversary Of Gallipoli

Movie maker Peter Jackson (Lord Of The Rings, Lovely Bones) has a lot of movies to finish in the next few years. There's his producing and scriptwriting duties on The Hobbit Parts 1 & 2, and his directorial work on Tin Tin, for starters. But as the 100th anniversary of Gallipoli draws closer, Jackson finds himself thinking about his grandfather, who was there and won a distinguished service medal, and the numerous cinematically untold stories of Australians and New Zealand teenagers fighting together, on the other side of the world.

Here's Peter Jackson on The 7.30 Report :

"I went to Gallipoli in 1990 for the 75th anniversary. That was the amazing year where 50 diggers were taken along, 50 of the original diggers were there. And so, you know, watching the dawn parade with 50 of these old men - the youngest was 92, the oldest was 103 and they were all sitting in these chairs as light came up....

"As the sun rose or the sky started to get light...thee old guys...they weren't interested in the speeches, they were all turning round looking at the hills. And it was an amazing experience to see them all looking at this landscape that most of them hadn't seen since 1915, hadn't seen it for 75 years.

"And I was standing right beside them as they were all turning around and looking behind and up at the sphinx and all the ridges....

"....to me (Gallipoli has) been a remarkable part of our history. And Peter Weir obviously made a great movie, but Peter's movie was set around events of August 7th, August 8th, 1915. I mean, you know, the Gallipoli was a seven or eight-month-long campaign. And that story is yet to be told on film. So I'd like to do that."

You Can Watch The Interview With Peter Jackson Here

The following is rare footage restored by Peter Jackson of the ANZACS fighting at Gallipoli :



And if you're wondering what a Peter Jackson World War I movie might look like, here's the captivating trailer for a short film by Jackson and Neill Blomkamp called Crossing The Line. It was shot on March 30 and 31, 2009, as a test for the Red digital camera system.



And no, I have no idea where you can see the full version of that short movie. If you manage to find it online, please let me know.



.

Harry Patch : War Is "The Calculated And Condoned Slaughter Of Human Beings"



Harry Patch, the last veteran of World War One's European slaughter has died, aged 111.

Here was a man who knew better than most that war is about one thing above all else - depopulation, of all sides.

From Your New Reality, July 2007 :

Harry Patch remains haunted by the Battle of Passchendaele, where three thousand young Britons were killed or wounded every single day, for almost 100 days straight.

Harry Patch's comments should be etched in the stone of every war memorial :

"Too many died. War isn't worth one life," said Mr Patch.

He said war was the "calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings".

During the three months of fighting Harry Patch experienced in France in 1917, the heaviest rains in 30 years churned mud so thick, men and horses drowned in it.

Mr Patch also paid his respects to the tens of thousands of young Germans who died in the same fields as his friends.

"The Germans suffered the same as we did," he said.

Harry Patch commenting during a ceremony at a Flanders field war cemetery, July 2007:

“Any one of them could have been me. Millions of men came to fight in this war and I find it incredible that I am the only one left."

And now there are none.

Harry Patch's Memories Of The Flanders Battlefield

What It Meant To Be An Australian In 1914

"They Clung To The Principle Of Standing By The Weaker Brother"

(Note : I have run this story before on this blog, and I'll run it again next year as well)

C.E.W. Bean's essential history of Australians at war during World War 1, Anzac To Amiens, includes some invaluable insights into Australian society, in the cities and in the bush, in the year before the war broke out.

In amongst all the talk today of what it means to be an Australian, it was with great interest that I found within Bean's book an encapsulating description of Australians and Australian society in the years just before the "War To End All Wars" broke out.

In only a few pages of his book, Bean manages to nail down an Australian identity rarely discussed today, or even widely recognised as an identity Australians once had and happily shared.

In many ways, the Australian society he describes in the first chapter of Anzac To Amiens - as he sets the scene for the inspiring and shocking story that follows - was never to be the same again.

The war, its crippling financial costs and its monumental casualty take shattered the width and breadth of the Australian society, from sparsely populated country villages to the tram-noisy chaos of Sydney, as it tore away (in Bean's words) "husband from wife, son from mother, (and) savings from those who had spent a lifetime in patient thrift."

How near to the optimistic heights dreamed of by those Australians, then only 14 years after Federation, have we soared in the 94 years since?

How close to their utterly essential "basic creed" and ideal of what defined an Australian do we now stand today?

Here are some excerpts from the first chapter :

In 1914, Australians were only 126 years from their first settlement in this continent...we were only 101 years from the first crossing of the Blue Mountains, only 63 (years) from the first gold rush, 58 (years) from the first establishment here of democratic self-government. Some Australian who went to the war had ancestors still alive who could remember some of the first generation of countrymen; many had grandparents or great grandparents who could tell them of the gold rush, the bushrangers, the later explorers and the imported convicts.

Yet, though many of the older men and women had actually lived in them, the colonial days were, by 1914, almost as extinct of those of William the Conqueror.

The people of the six colonies, which had federated only fourteen years before, regarded themselves as being in the forefront of human progress, and indeed, in some not unimportant respects they had reason to do so.

When emigrating from Britain most of their ancestors had half-consciously tried to cast off what they vaguely felt to be elements of inequality and injustice in the inherited social systems of Europe.

They were disrespectful of old methods, eager to try out new ones. They had of late deliberately changed the whole basis of their wage system, in an effort to adjust it to the public conscience in place of the uncontrolled results of supply and demand.

They had made many mistakes, due to vague thinking and inadequate study, but they had achieved something.

They had established at least one very great and successful industry - that of wool production - and had managed to so spread its profits that real wages were then possibly higher in Australia than anywhere else in the world; at all events the life of the ordinary man, woman and child contain probably more healthy recreation than anywhere else.

Public education then compared favourably with that of any people except perhaps those of Scandinavia; in the enjoyment of such modern material benefits as telephones and electric light Australians were ahead of the British though behind the Americans.

Probably nowhere were the less wealthy folk more truly free, or on such terms of genuine social equality with the rich, in dress, habits and intercourse....

It is true that in one respect living conditions in Australia - as in most newly-settled lands, even the United States - differed widely from those in older countries; a vast gap existed between the conditions in country and city. In the cities life was not markedly different from that of any great European or American town; but country life was in many parts still set in almost pioneering environment.

Yet the outback homesteads often contain surprising evidence of culture. It was much more than a superficial sign that the women who drove in to meet the mail train at a distant siding often dressed in the fashion of Paris, London, or New York.

And if in the bars and hostels even of the big cities at racetimes and on holidays there was sometimes evidence of the Wild West, there was little inferiority complex about the people of this particularly free country.

Its universities were in many ways progressive; its governments were launching into social experiments. Its business and political leaders thoroughly believed in its future and, with only 4 1/2 million white people (and perhaps 100,000 Australian blacks) in the continent, they borrowed freely from overseas to launch into industrial and social enterprises.

Many young Australians tended to condemn the English immigrant for his comparative slowness and lack of confidence in dealing with the unknown men and conditions, and were irritated by his certitude as to the superiority of the methods of the "old country".

The Australian ballad writers, Gordon, Lawson, Paterson, Ogilivie and others, were constantly read and quoted. The people were not formally religious, but there was a marked comradeliness in their outlook, and no degree of economic pressure could induce them to abandon it.

The people, newly federated, were at this stage very consciously intent upon building themselves into a great nation.

Without giving the matter much thought, most Australians assumed that the development of their country would be similar to that of the United States.

...with easy optimism, Australian anticipated that within a century or so her 5 million people would be increased to 60 if not 100 million.

The historian, who tries to to discover what motive most powerfully moved the Australian people at that interesting stage, will probably come to the conclusion that tradition - such as is consciously or unconsciously handed down in almost every word or action by parents and teachers to children, by priests and pastors, professional trades and business men to their successors, by witters to readers, even by older children to younger - was immensely strong and enduring.

The tradition was largely British...But with the British standards were mingled those of the pioneers - the backwoodsmen, and the men of the great ruins and the mining fields.

It was to these last that Australians owed their resourcefulness and readiness to grapple with their objectives even against authority, and also their basic creed, in industry as in war, that a man must at all costs stand by his mate.

...they clung to the principle of standing by the weaker brother.

* * * * * * * * *

Almost one in every twelve Australians alive then served in some capacity during World War 1; in Europe, the Middle East or at home.

A force of 417,000 was raised from a total population of just under 5 million people.

Some 331,000 "took the field" during the four years of WWI1.

59,342 were killed or died as a result of wounds suffered during fighting.

Another 152,000 Australians were wounded.

Of all who "took the field" during the war, 64.8% were killed or wounded.

By the start of World War 2, in 1939, more than 2000 men remained hospitalised for physical and mental injuries resulting from the war twenty years previous.

In 1939, some 50,000 veterans of the first world war visited hospitals or AIF-related medical facilities for ongoing treatment and rehabilitation.

* * * * * * * *

C.E.W Bean devoted decades of his life to writing the full story of the Australian Anzacs, and his official history, encompassing twelve volumes and millions of words, has proved invaluable to every modern chronicler of the war that consumed many of the very best of two generations of Australians, and left it deeply in debt to Britain and the United States.

Bean was no public servant, back in Australia combing official reports and daily casualty lists to compile an official history that met with official approval. Bean was there, he wandered many battlefields and had the experiences of Australians at war during WW1 carved into his soul.

Remarkably his own photos of the battle at Lone Pine detail the early edition I'm now reading.

Unfortunately, Anzacs To Amiens doesn't appear to be for sale online, outside of collector's copies which start at about $160.

ANZAC Day : "90,000 Men Never Came Back Here"


The following are quotes from an interview with Peter Casserly, by the Australians At War Film Archive. Casserly was the last surviving Australian veteran of WW1's Western Front. Casserly served with the 2nd, 5th and 16th Railway Transport Units in France and Belgium, transporting ammunition, working almost constantly within range of German heavy artillery. He also spent many dangerous days with British forces fighting German forces in Amiens and Ypres :

Peter Casserly : The (ship) I was on...I was only two miles away from Melbourne, my mother...and I couldn't see her so as soon as we pulled anchor off, I went down below and wrote a letter to my mother. I put it in a bottle. I put it over the side and my mother got it again. It was washed ashore down around Esperance somewhere so I called it ocean post.

Q: How important were your mates during the war?

A: We were all like brothers together, all like brothers together.

Q: Was a good sense of humour important?

A: Well you really needed it, you really needed it but we were a crowd together. I never knew of any trouble in between us at all. All good mates right through. If you went out somewhere, if you had twenty francs and the other bloke never had any, you'd give him half of it.

Q: What did you think of the Germans?

A: Well just the same as our own blokes. Whatever you were, that's what you were but I had no great grudge against the Germans or anyone else. We were there to do that job and that's what we did and they were doing the same thing for their country, only they got sick of it at the finish.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

A : Look, I don't think you could understand really what a warfare frontage looked like. I don't think you could quite understand it, no matter what I told you, about all I told you.

Q: How did you wash, did you wash?

A: Well sometimes you might chuck your shirt into something or hang it out somewhere... Had the same clothes when we come home as when we went there I think but it's very hard, very, very hard to explain to anybody what warfare's really like unless you see some of it, unless you see some of it.

Q: You were singing a cheery song earlier...

A: I was singing one about the warfare.

"Up to your waist in water, up to your waist in slush,
Using the sort of language that makes the Sergeant blush.
Who wouldn't be a soldier, tiddly I- di-i.
Pity the poor civilian, sitting beside their fire.
Oh oh oh it's a lovely war.
What do you want with eggs and ham,
When you've got plum and apple jam?
As soon as reveille has gone, you feel just as heavy as lead,
Until the Sergeant brings your breakfast up to bed".

Q: That's a beauty. Is there another one that you can sing?

A: There's plenty of them man, plenty of them. Like that one I sang here earlier, the French Tattooed Lady.

"I paid ten francs to see a French tattooed lady.
She was a sight to see, tattooed from end to knee.
On her left jaw was the Anzac Flying Corps,
Down her back was the Union Jack and a good old kangaroo
And right across her bits was a fleet of battle ships
And on her deaf and dumb was the digger's rising sun.
Right on her kidney was a bird's eye view of Sydney.
Around the corner, the jolly lorner, was my home in Tennessee".

Q: What did you do on Armistice Day, Peter?

A: Armistice Day? I've got a good one about that. We got on the bus. We had a night, a real night out round, just around our camp area and I seen a feller named Dave Thomas. He was a New South Wales feller, sitting down with his legs stretched out in front of him and I thought "What the hell's wrong with Dave?" and I went over to see him. I said, "What's wrong Dave?" He said "Don't stand on them Cass, don't stand on them." I looked down and he had a return of the swallows. He coughed up his teeth on the ground. Yeah, "Don't stand on them Cass." Anyhow, I had the nice job of sorting them out and cleaning them up and giving them back to him, yeah. That's on the night the Armistice was on...

Q: What does Anzac Day mean to you, Peter?

A: Nothing any different, only that I've never been to any Anzac Day turnout. I've never been to any but they're just their parades and everything just the same, their parades and everything just the same.

Q: It's not an important day?

A: Well it gives you a bit of back thinking to what went on and all the bloody millions of bloody men. There's 90,000 men, Australian men are still in France. They're the things you've got to think about...between there and Gallipoli, 90,000 men never come back here...

Casserly died in 2005. Here's his obituary.

You can read the rest of the interview with Casserly, completed shortly before he died, at the Australians At War Film Archive.

1916 : Diggers Were Told To Open Fire On Their Irish 'Cousins'

A little known story of what happened to Australians in Ireland on leave from the Western Front, during World War 1, has emerged. And it's a remarkable, troubling tale :

THE year was 1916. Australian soldiers involved in the brutal fighting on the Western Front had been granted leave and went to Ireland for a break.

But instead of catching up with relatives and resting up, the Australian troops found themselves reluctantly pressed into more action by the British — to help crush the Easter Rebellion in Dublin.

Some of the Anzacs involved in this little-known episode were Gallipoli veterans prized by the British for their sharp-shooting skills.

One group was ordered onto the roof of Dublin's Trinity College to snipe at Irish dispatch riders delivering messages to the the headquarters of the rebels, whose leaders included Michael Collins.

Barrister and historian Jeff Kildea has researched the episode and described the colonial soldiers' dilemma in a new book, Anzacs and Ireland..

"For soldiers who enlisted to fight Germans, it was not a happy time," Mr Kildea said.

These veterans of Gallipoli went to Ireland on leave but found themselves once again in battle, he said. "(They were) given a rifle and, in effect, told to shoot their Irish 'cousins'."

...when the fighting erupted in Dublin, many of the soldiers on leave were rounded up by British officers in hotels and clubs and at the local railway station and had rifles thrust back into their hands.

Mr Kildea found the diary of Private Davis, who described how the soldiers made the best of a bad job — "but we would prefer to be anywhere but this unenviable city".

Davis and a friend were ordered to join 70 men taking arms and ammunition to Dublin Castle and described how a volley of rifle shots rained down on the party from buildings the rebels occupied. "Around us bullets pinged and broken glass clattered onto the footpath.

"The horses bolted and vanished into the darkness and the troops did likewise."

The British military aristocracy of the World War I era saw little difference between Australian diggers and Irish revolutionaries. They were all just human pawns for them to pit against their enemies, or in this case, each other.

No doubt amongst the Diggers in Ireland there were those who refused to kill their Irish 'cousins' and those who were threatened with a bullet to the head from British sergeants for refusing to obey orders.

Those who ran away didn't necessarily do so simply because they were scared.