Soldiers, not Saints
ANZAC DAY has … evolved over the last dozen years, and
started to swell in size and significance.
When I was a kid, some WWI veterans still marched, and the most of the
kids involved were the Scouts holding the unit signs at the head of the
march. Now there are no WW1 veterans,
and there are legions of school kids within and around the march.
My local ANZAC Day has grown to over a thousand people. When I first started as a councillor, it was
a couple of hundred residents.
How did it evolve?
ANZAC Day was once an annual day for the returned soldiers who could
never reconcile that they had survived, while worthy others were left on Gallipoli
or in Flanders fields.
As the WW1 veterans slowly then suddenly disappeared, we
elevated the day to also celebrate the values they exhibited – mateship,
endurance, courage, good humour.
That is fitting, but it is now moving beyond that. We are giving the day a national spiritual
dimension. Don Watson wrote a very
perceptive article in the latest Monthly magazine
about the growing deification of ANZAC Day.
He asked are we giving it a “religious sort of meaning?”
Then:
“ we appear to be in the presence of a default
state religion.”
There’s a jolt of recognition from me. He’s right.
For anyone of standing or ambition in communities 100 years ago, you
could not miss church on Sunday. The
same unbreakable obligation now applies to missing local ANZAC Day
commemorations.
Australians all: the ANZACs should always be remembered, but
not worshipped.
Don’t forget, most of the ANZACs were 19 or 20 year old boys
overseas for the first time. They were
young men having the most memorable and intense experience of their lives.
Ever heard about the Wasser riot in Cairo on Good Friday
1915? That’s when the young Australian
troops nearly wrecked the red light district of Cairo. After months of seemingly pointless training
in Egypt, tensions and frustrations boiled over.
Here’s what one historian wrote:
“… when the story
spread that some soldiers had been stabbed in a brothel, a crowd of men
gathered, threw prostitutes and standover men from several houses into an
alley, piled beds … and everything else portable … into the street, and set fire to them. At least one building was incinerated, and
the mud walls … of several others were pulled down.”
“British military
police arrived on horseback and attempted to disperse the rioters by firing at
them. They wounded several soldiers, but
in return were bombarded with rocks, beer bottles, lengths of fire hose, and
abuse, and wisely withdrew. A few men
then took to looting nearby shops …”
Whew. You won’t see
that event in the list of ANZAC Centenary commemorations. If you want to see that, I am informed that
an Australian bus tour of Oktoberfest in Munich is the closest thing.
The historian who wrote this (not the Oktoberfest bit) was
Bill Gammage, in a book called The Broken
Years. It is a great book all
Australians should read.
The book recounts the experience of the men from World War
1, using their own words. Gammage
absorbed the diaries and letters of over a thousand soldiers, and let them
speak for themselves.
You can find incidents of incredible bravery, genuinely
funny accounts of larrikinism, and tales of desertion and ill-discipline in The Broken Years. It gives a balanced account that fills in the
less pleasing aspects you won’t hear from archbishops and politicians.
When reading The
Broken Years, you see these were extraordinary men, but you wonder if it is
the proper thing to sanctify these men.
Still, it is something we have been doing ever since
Australian men were crowned with the slouched hat, as I found when I did my Honours thesis on Australia in WW1.
I found we assigned saintly virtues to soldiers as soon as they donned
the khaki. And we were surprised when they acted like,
well, young men.
Picture this: 15,000
men encamped around Brisbane in the early days of the war. A total of 60,000 encamped during the war at
Enoggera, Chermside and Bowen Park during WW1.
You can guess what happened.
I discovered reports of a lot of drunken soldiers and
“serious trouble” on Brisbane streets at night.
Between November 1915 and June 1918, there 1,360 charges of drunkenness
laid against soldiers. The Secretary of
the YMCA would collect drunk soldiers who missed the last tram or train to
Enoggera and drive them there.
There was a social panic that loose women were” camped”
around Enoggera. There were strident
shrills that these immoral women would lead these men astray, or sap the
martial virtues of these Queensland soldiers.
It builds the picture of hordes of fit young men in 1914 and
1915, imbued with the sense they were off on a big adventure.
ANZAC Day should be important, and we should remember how it
seemed our national character emerged when these same fit young men were under
fire at Gallipoli.
But let us not raise these young men to be a fixture behind
an altar.
Let us remember what the original ANZAC Days were like. Streets were filled with returned servicemen,
drinking and catching up with their mates.
It may not have been a family atmosphere on ANZAC Day in the 1920’s.
It was a day of grief, remembering, and coping. It was rawer, without the hushed ceremonies
of set format and phrases we have today.
Bill Gammage best expresses what drove the original ANZAC
Days. He wrote that “[t]he living would never forget the dead, for war and men had bound
men closely, till their united brotherhood contained everything
worthwhile.” ANZAC Day was their
day, not ours.
And now ANZAC Day should belong to us, not cardinals and Cabinet
members. After all, the WW1 Diggers were
ordinary Australian men, probably not different to the young Australian men who
walk the streets today in hoodies and caps.
Like young Australian men today, they cannot be denied a
good time. And like young Australians
today, they would show exceptional qualities when placed under almost
unimaginable duress.
They were ordinary Australian men who had the chance to
shine in an extraordinary time.
