Culture

Expended in An Hour, Gallipoli!

Wikipedia defines Anzac Day as “a national public holiday in Australia and New Zealand, and is commemorated by both countries on 25 April every year to honour members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) who fought at Gallipoli in Turkey during World War I”. The Australian War Memorial adds that it is “probably Australia’s most important national occasion” and that the “Australian and New Zealand actions during the [Gallipoli] campaign bequeathed an intangible but powerful legacy. The creation of what became known as the ‘ANZAC legend’ became an important part of the national identity of both nations. This shaped the ways they viewed both their past and future”. These two explanations, one from an international user-driven “free encyclopaedia” and the other from a government institution positioned in Australia as one of the official voices for Anzac Day, certainly capture its contemporary status in the antipodes. But what was it about the First World War and the Gallipoli campaign that marked both these events so indelibly in the Australian and New Zealand psyche? More specifically, how did it affect the people who did not the fighting but the waiting: the parents, partners and children left behind at home while their sons, husbands and fathers fought so far away?

While Australians and New Zealanders are about to acknowledge Anzac Day in the many ways encouraged through official and popular channels, it is important to look beyond modern perceptions and to review what our ancestors thought and felt about the events which ultimately led to this national annual remembrance. One way to do this to re-visit what people living through the First World War actually wrote in local Australian newspapers and for this I turn to the unpublished annotated bibliography, Frontier Literature: Australian Prose and Poetry of the First World War. In 1996, my first postgraduate contract was as a research assistant for Professor Richard Nile through the Australian Studies Centre (University of Queensland) and it involved collating over 1,200 poems penned during the period 1914 to 1922. These for the most part existed in the microfilmed holdings of Australia’s major and minor newspapers and included the Bulletin, Town and Country Journal, The Lone Hand, Sydney Mail, Smith’s Weekly, The Queenslander, and The Australian Journal, to name just a few. The bibliography is an extensive archive and provides a provocative entry-point into the public mindset during the Great War as expressed through letters, poems and diary extracts. What follows are a selection of extracts and, though only a small indicator of the bibliography’s contents and themes, they provide a range of compelling reasons why Australians and New Zealanders never forget.

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“Next of Kin: Mother”
Poem, Arthur H Adams
Bulletin, 13 May 1915

Mother of him, so piteously young
To be to death thus mercilessly flung,
Who with his boyish laugh
Looks innocently from his photograph,
And whose brief, bitter fame
Is but his published portrait and his name –
Mother, whose tears yet blind
The pride and courage that you yearn to find,
Put on the guilty murderers their sin,
Accuse them, though they lie;
The criminal war-plotters of Berlin
Decreed your son should die!

Mother who watched him from your fond arms grow
Into a man, and proudly let him go –
No tears! — to serve his king,
When he was but a tiny, stumbling thing
The Potsdam plotters grim
Conceived the callous plan that dug for him
His lonely grave afar.
You little guessed you nurtured him for war!
Watching you tend him, from his first weak breath,
They marked your pretty baby down for death.
His death, a million deaths, the assassins planned,
What mattered it to them …

An extraordinary epitaph, capturing some of the emotion a mother feels on the news of the death of her son, this poem is a frank self-examination of the ideals and circumstances which brings a mother, or any parent for that matter, into this situation.  Consolation is deemed to lie in the thought that one’s son died for a cause: “Happy to know he saved you, though he died.”

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“A Soldier’s Letter”
Prose, KJ Fourdrinier
Sydney Mail, 16 June 1915

It makes one wild to think that for two and a half days one should live in the midst of a perpetual hailstorm of bullets, shells (explosive bullets as well, and then when leading an attack on a splendid position to be knocked out. Still, it’s all in the game. It was a remarkable experience. I only felt one bullet. I knew it was in the back somewhere. I had just turned around to call my men. They were a mixed lot of about 400 New Zealanders and Australians. What splendid fellows they are! No hesitation – the same spirit animating everyone to get to the best place to kill the enemy. We got really callous of their shrapnel …

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“Gallipoli”
Poem and Prose, Walter D White
Sydney Mail, 18 August 1915

Write it in letters of flame,
Splendid Australia’s Name!
Blazon it over the sky,
Out where the eagle’s fly,
Stirring her story,
Deathless her glory -
Honour Australia’s Name …

A stirring patriotic piece, the Sydney Mail adds:

The now memorable charge of the Australians at Gallipoli is inscribed upon the imperishable records of British history. The Australians achieved the seemingly impossible. They have made history …

A major theme I read into this poem and the Sydney Mail introduction is that prior to the Gallipoli massacre, all Australian history was British history; that once Australian-born blood was shed, Australia began to have a history of its own which thereby permitted the recognition of a name of its own: “Splendour and glory – / Honour Australia’s Name!” Certainly, the last stanza is a pledge not to Empire (which found favour in a lot of earlier poetry centred around a “Call to Arms for the King”) but to the south-sea nation:

This be Australia’s boast:
EVER INVIOLATE OUR COAST
From York to the Tasman Sea;
EVER THIS LAND SHALL BE FREE!
We, of the Blood and the Race,
Will fearless our foemen face,
And die for Australia!

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“Crosses in Gallipoli”
Poem, Ella McFadyen
Sydney Mail, 8 December 1915

Gallipoli, how many are the graves
That in your barren furrows we have sown,
The broken rifle fashioned to a cross
For witness that the Lord may know his own!

What costly spending saw the world in this;
Youth, courage, high adventure, loyalty,
Boy lives of poets, leaders, teachers, saints,
Expended in an hour, Gallipoli!

Aye, so we made you ours in pride and grief,
Renewed our right with every life we paid;
Gay heroes in the battle of the faith,
The boy battalions of a late crusade.

Though duty’s path proved steep beneath their feet,
The way wound steeply once from Nazareth;
And meet our loveliest are for sacrifice,
While stands the Cross for victory — and death!

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“The Cost”
Poem, Malcolm Arnold
Bulletin, 6 April 1916

What was it brushed by the gate just now,
As I lie here, counting the cost?
Not Frank or Hall, those lads o’ mine –
They’re dead and lost.
Some husband passed to some wife a nest,
With her babies at home and her heart at rest.

Singing a snatch of a song of war,
I hear it now, floating away.
I used to sing … I, lying here! …
If I could pray!
Did you hear, Christ? Did you laugh just then
At the woes of war and the songs of men?

Twenty-odd years since those lads o’ mine,
My Frank and Hal, hung at this breast …

Though not printed in full here, in my view this poem is one of the most powerful, emotive pieces ever penned about the First World War.  Its simple theme — the “cost” of waging war — turns the obvious on its heels, away from the business matters usually associated with war’s expense and instead focuses on the national indifference displayed towards the real cost of war.  That is, not the legions of heroic dead nor youth’s blood spilt on faraway lands (these are public costs) but the personal cost, the loss of one’s kin to the battlefield, indicted by a few names printed on a public death list: “Frank and Hal … dead and lost”.

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“Trench Gospel”
Poem, J Alex Allan
Bulletin, 31 August 1916

Christ!
Talkin’ of ‘Im, I’m wonderin’
Just what ‘E thinks of all this mix –
This world of ‘umans sacrificed,
Of bombs an’ blood an’ fallin’ bricks
Us blokes are scrappin’ in!
If ‘E’s the C.O. (if ‘E’s not,
‘Is name’s the name we’re workin’s by!),
Why don’t ‘E lift ‘Is ‘and an’ just
Block this old game of ‘dust to dust,’
Shovin’ ‘Is kybosh on the lot?
If ‘E would fill the public eye
Why don’t ‘E stop it, if ‘E can,
‘Oo once was Man …

Despite the colloquial phrasing, this is a perceptive poem, attacking the very heart of a social philosophy pushing to war, naming the invocation of a deity’s name in support of the War Cause.  Though the expression is simple, it questions the ethics of those “usin’ ‘Is name”.  It is thought-provoking and undermines the theological manoeuvring made by religious leaders to sanction “this world of ‘umans sacrificed”.

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“The Men Who Fought in Flanders”
Poem, P Airey
Bulletin, 21 September 1916

The men who fought in Flanders they were frequent on the swear,
Their morals were a trifle loose as well;
The men who fought in Flanders they were devils on the tear,
But when they charged the foemen there was a tempest in teh air,
And half the land was lost in half of Hell.

When Marlbro’ was in Flanders with his bulldog scallywags
They passed the night a-sleepin’ in the fogs;
Their uniforms were builded up of mud and Flemish bags,
But nothing damped their speerits — they were such a lot of wags
They found a sort of humour in the bogs …

A tribute to the men in Flanders being of “a different sort of seed”, this poem explores the unique character traits of the Australian fighting breed, casting a legendary air over those that “ate their share o’ powder and faced the bitter gale, / And never left a comrade in the lurch”.  In this respect, despite references to their indifference to religious powers (“bothered not a bit about the church”) and lingual etiquette (“they were frequently on the swear”), the men of Flanders were a brave and loyal lot who “grin and go it daily for the honour of the breed, / And perish for the glory of the game”.

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“The Verdict of History”
Poem, Arthur H Adams
Bulletin, 12 October 1916

The Future will each nation’s worth acclaim;
For we, with bloody piles of murdered men
Are building History. The time comes when
Posterity will summon each by name.
What will that grim historian of fame
Write as his verdict of Australia then?
Will he a paean of her glory pen,
Or a brief foot-note of her bitter shame?

Shall she stand with her sire in equal pride,
The ranks of Right preeminent among?
Or, worse than neutral, shall she stand aside,
Flunking the fury of the last attack?
Australia, who with splendid gesture flung
Her gallant gage, and meanly snatched it back? …

As writing during the latter half of 1916 began to reveal doubts about the merit and national worth of sending Australia’s sons to what was for most an unimaginable theatre of slaughter, this poem hedges discussion in both directions, for and against pro-war philosophies, with a perceptible lean away from “building history” on misplaced virtues and thoughts of posterity.

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“The Charge”
Poem, J Atkin
Sydney Mail, 18 October 1916

“Fix bayonets, and o’er the parapet!”
Our captain said. And into hell we dash’d.
Ten thousand quivering lights went up, and flashed
Upon our whitened faces. Blood and sweat
Ran from us; into gaping shell-holes wet
With crimson stains we stumbled; shrapnel lashed
Our panting ranks. Hell’s high explosive crashed
In blackened earth, and God and heroes met!

Dread morn of Death! Here in this ward again
I hear the mad machine-gun bullets hiss;
See white steel splashed with red; hear shattered men
Shrieking for white-haired mothers’ lips to kiss.
These heaps of bricks are ours; those trenches three,
Corpse-strewn and battered,
And this riddled tree.

Composed in a French hospital, this poem is the narrative of a charge. Brutal and emotive, it relates the bloody horrors of a battle as indicated by the formidable line: “With crimson stains we stumbled; shrapnel lashed  / Our panting ranks.” The futility of wounded soldiers, impotent in hostpital and maimed so far from home, is referenced in the tragic line: “shattered men / Shrieking for white-haired mothers’ lips to kiss.” Like other poems, there is an immutable link between God’s elite and the Australian fighters: “In blacked earth, … God and heroes met!”

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“An Unknown Soldier”
Poem, HC Mck
Smith’s Weekly, 19 November 1921

Rest in your grave, great heart, untouched by stir
Of pealing organ or of blaring band.
banner and streamer flaunting in the air,
Flamboyant speech and snug applauding hand;
Only across the gulf the lonely cry
Of those you loved can reach you where you lie.
God send that kindly Death may blind your soul
To bitter sequel of the hero’s part;
The wounded comrade on starvation-dole,
The little mother with a broken heart,
While the war-wealthy, that you died to save,
With empty honours decorate your grave …

This is perhaps a general epitaph for all of Australia’s unknown soldiers, killed on foreign soil, and is aimed especially not at celebrating their deaths but at criticising the negligence of the post-war Australian community in repatriating their soldiers. In this respect, there are references to: the growing establishment in society of a sector made rich by war (“the war-wealthy, that you died to save”), the empty lip service paid by many to the dead but by little to the living (“the bitter sequel of the hero’s part”) and the plight of the returned soldiers on sustenance payments (“starvation-dole”).

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“Gallipoli 1915”
Poem, Laurie Foster
Bulletin, 2 December 1915

The sun flares down
And comes the night with its deep sleep
And sweet forgetfulness.
It matters not how went the fight,
Or if they won or lost;
But here and there, lit by sad stars,
A sleeping boy stirs restlessly,
And smiles, and dreams again
Of rain-green hills.
Under the burning sun they fight and fight.
The struggling line strains ceaselessly.
It breaks …
And forms again.
And all the time, along that valiant line,
Too-wearied boys drop down like flies,
They lie there in the sun.
And underneath soft southern skies,
Where half the world seeks peace in sleep,
Now and again a mother starts
And wonders why she woke.

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