juliet | Anzac Day

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Anzac Day

Last Saturday was Anzac Day, which is very roughly speaking the Australia/New Zealand version of Remembrance Day. I went down to the Cenotaph on Martin Place in Sydney for the dawn service.

The idea of a dawn service was the first difference I noticed - I'm used to Remembrance Day services being around 11:00 (for known reasons). Not that it was actually dawn (4:15 - 5:00, and sunrise was maybe 6:00). There were a surprisingly large number of people down there, given the hour -- Cityrail put on special trains from the far suburbs to get people there on time. Also a noticable number of people in uniforms -- I'm told Sydney has a fair concentration of service-people. (Although having said that, I've never been to the central London service at the Cenotaph to compare.)

The service itself was much the same as I'm familiar with. Flag parties, hymns, a brief address, a reading of For the Fallen (3rd and 4th stanzas both, though, rather than just the 4th). I was slightly surprised when we got the UK national anthem[0] at the end, though (written on the programme as the 'Royal Hymn', without the words printed), before the NZ and Australian anthems (words printed, which was good as it meant I could join in!).

When I talked to

damned_colonial and

chrisf afterwards, both of them felt that Anzac Day has a stronger feeling of memorial than it does of glory. (I have complicated issues around the ideas of glorification of war that I feel do tend to make part of Remembrance Day at home, although I also feel very strongly that the memorial part is very important.) I'm not sure how much that came across in the service itself: possibly a little. But I'm not sure that it's *possible* to take that aspect out of a fundamentally military service.

There's also the idea of Anzac Day as a sort of birth of the Australian nation, which perhaps encourages some idea of glorification? (The ideals of mateship and a 'fair go' are the ones that I've seen referred to.)

It's very hard for me to comment on the extent to which the general Australian awareness of / attitude to Anzac Day is the one that's reflected in, say, "And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda". Both my sample Aussies :) were certainly very aware of the 'total hideous mess' aspect of Gallipoli (apparently the soldiers had the bullets removed from their bayonets before going over the top, in case they accidentally shot each other in the back. Presumably in the handful of seconds before the Turks shot them in the front), and also the colonialism aspects.

(It occurs to me that I'm not sure to what extent the 'hideous mess' aspects of the Europe part of WWI are general knowledge at home. I mean, the carnage, yes, but *is* it general knowledge just how unbelievably, criminally ignorant and incompetent those[1] in charge were? Or is it seen as a tragedy without direct responsibility, or with more complicated responsibility?)

I think perhaps the dawn aspect of the service lends itself to slightly more contemplation than does a daytime service, and that did make things feel slightly different. More about memorial, and empathy, and fellow-feeling; less about the uniforms and militarisation. (Despite the presence of uniforms and flag parties and so on.) And that is something that I find far preferable.

I'm afraid this is a slightly rambly post. This is an issue I have confused feelings about (possibly more so since Pete's and my visit to Flanders last year), and I don't think I've gotten much further with sorting out those feelings. (I probably wouldn't have gotten around to posting this at all, except that I promised

damned_colonial I would. On which note, see her post on the subject.)

One final thing: on Anzac Day it is legal to gamble on the game two-up pretty much anywhere you want to, where normally gambling of any sort is strictly limited[2]. This is because two-up (it's a coin game) was played a lot by the Anzac soldiers. I find this - faintly peculiar, as a memorial!

[0] Which I actually sang, for the first time in *years*: as an atheist republican I have Issues with it, but I kind of felt that as one of the presumably reasonably few Brits present I should show willing, or hm, something. I dislike the word 'patriotism' but it *is* my country.
[1] Gender-neutral language note: I wanted to say the *men* in charge, because hey, it *was*, but I don't think I want to have that particular debate as I'm not at all comfortable with the 'women would have handled it better' argument.
[2] On a side-note: which are the games that are listed on that thing that hangs in UK pubs as legitimate to gamble on? Cribbage, shove-ha'penny, bar billiards, dominoes... I thought there were 7? I think it's now supposed to be 'games of skill', but I'm sure there used to be a List.

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When I talked to damned_colonial and chrisf afterwards, both of them felt that Anzac Day has a stronger feeling of memorial than it does of glory.

There's also the idea of Anzac Day as a sort of birth of the Australian nation, which perhaps encourages some idea of glorification? (The ideals of mateship and a 'fair go' are the ones that I've seen referred to.)

My sense of this is that Australian's are proud of those who serve in uniform, especially those who have died. We glorify the person, but not the war.

The idea of mateship in particular is certainly something that is tied up in the Anzac mythology, but again my sense is that it is about the ordinary people who went to war and not about the war nor the purported justifications for war.

*nod*, I think the mateship thing is about ordinary people supporting each other through difficult times, and if being in a war isn't a difficult time, I don't know what is. And there's a sense of anti-TPTB in it, because you go to war and kill people because TPTB want you to, but because you're supporting your mates. Which, OK, has some toxicness built in (when I was a kid we called it peer pressure), but I think it's less toxic than "my country, right or wrong".

The 11am thing in the UK is 'cos the WW1 ceasefire specifically specified that the war would stop at 11am. Bet the families of those killed between dawn and 10:59am on 11th Nov weren't too impressed by yet another piece of contrived symbolism by the generals.

I went to the Anzac Day dawn service in Perth last year (Fran was still jet-lagged - she was for most of our trip); it was amazing, especially as the location in Perth - right next to botanical gardens - was so beautiful. Very different atmosphere to UK Rememberence Day, as you pointed out.

CJ (DW-less for now)

cSVXOn

pWLOib

psxb6L

I think incompetent leadership is a pretty widespread viewpoint on WWI, “lions led by donkeys” being the usual short summary.

(It occurs to me that I'm not sure to what extent the 'hideous mess' aspects of the Europe part of WWI are general knowledge at home. I mean, the carnage, yes, but *is* it general knowledge just how unbelievably, criminally ignorant and incompetent those[1] in charge were? Or is it seen as a tragedy without direct responsibility, or with more complicated responsibility?)

There's a lot of accessible and frequently-read poetry that dwells on both the pointlessness of the carnage and the stupidity of those making the decisions, and I think that this does bring home the hideous-mess-ishness of it all a little. Esp as most of those poets died later on in the war, so the poetry's tied up with human tragedy/real-life narrative and so more real and potent to lots of people. And there's plenty more in the way of books/film/other semi-fictional whatsits that have been written after the fact dealing with it, too. (Mind, there are also plenty about the GLORY OF WAR.) I'm not sure that there's *enough* awareness of it - pacifist-me says cannot be because we keep making bombs ect, but that's a v simplistic attitude. But I think WWI has more awareness of that sort of thing than anything other than Vietnam.

I have v mixed feelings about the whole remembrance thing. Some year I will get around to getting white poppies to wear.

I'm wondering: Do you, like me, have, quite apart from pacifism etc, a very specific knee-jerk reaction to the words "The British Army"?

I have a pretty knee-jerkish reaction to *all* armies, I think. But not them particularly, rly. Sorry! Bad Irisher!

I gather that Aussies tend to have a similarly negative response!

How serious is that, though? I'm aware of the whinging about whinging poms (though as always it's worth pointing out that despite being half a bloody planet away, they are still in the Commonwealth), but unless I've missed something, they're unlikely to have grown up with the expectation that a news piece that starts "The British Army today..." continues "shot at your ostensible compatriots".

All propaganda, of course - "British Army rescues kitten from tree" wouldn't get much play on RTE news - but, I was surprised to realise recently, still producing a powerful and lasting effect.

Not so much the 'whinging Poms' thing as the fact that the convict history of white Australia means that there are bad associations with the British Army. (So kinda the same thing but much older history.) NB this is my understanding from discussion with a friend the other day on the subject, ICBW.

But I also think that a lot of what happened wrt Easter 1916 and subsequent wars was RLY RLY STUPID from the Irish side as well as utterly disproportionate from the UK-ers, and I am v well aware that this is not a common or popular pov back in the Ould Country. And I have chosen to live amongst the evil oppressors and *totally prefer it here would never move back ever*, so I don't always feel very Irish anyway.

No no, I know it doesn't stand up so much, that's why it's knee-jerk.

There's a lot of accessible and frequently-read poetry that dwells on both the pointlessness of the carnage and the stupidity of those making the decisions, and I think that this does bring home the hideous-mess-ishness of it all a little.

Also, Blackadder Goes Forth.

Yes, that was also in my mind.

I'd be interested in any links that you'd have regarding the incompetence - I have an impression of it as the pinnacle of big bloody wars where you chuck soldiers at the enemy: ridiculous to modern sensibilities, but then modernity is defined by the fact that we don't this any more.

Don't have links atm, sorry (& I would like to say "I'll investigate" but I'm not likely to have time in the foreseeable future, I'm afraid). Off the top of my head, though, the basic point is that those in charge were still fighting a turn-of-the-century war (pre-machine-gun, basically), wherein yeah, you & your bayonets go in against them and their bayonets[0][1]. Whereas in fact WWI *was* a modern war, in the sense that the enemy could now sit tight behind their machine-guns and kill many, many of your soldiers all at once.

Now, screwing this up once: stupid, and ignorant (because yeah, OK, new tech, but not *that* bloody new). Screwing it up over and over and over again: wilfully blind incompetence.

They were still using *cavalry*, ffs.

And of course it's more complicated than that: once you have your soldiers lined up in trenches, what *do* you do when you realise that it's not working the way you expected? And we had our own guns, and the sappers and what-all (P and I went to a particular hill out near Ypres which had basically been fought over and trenched and shelled solidly for a good two years, and even nearly a century later you can see the sheer *destruction* wrought), but...

Those in charge were still thinking about glory, and charges, and throwing people in against other people: and they didn't let a simple thing like the fact that *that wasn't the war being fought* let them change their tactics. Is basically the point.

If you want more info I'd suggest your local library as a good point; the librarians should be able to assist (librarians don't just issue books! they know about information!)

[0] Yes, gross over-simplification, but you get the point.
[1] And of course in a significant proportion of conflicts engaged in by the British Army in the 19th c, "they" were somewhere out in one of the many colonies and weren't equipped or trained in any kind of remotely comparable way to the Brits, even allowing for the poor health of some of those getting recruited when there was a war on.

It looks like incompetence with the benefit of hindsight, but I'm not sure that it was quite so obvious knowing what they knew then. After all, the Germans did make two massed attacks (one near the beginning and one near the end of the war) that made substantial progress.

I have 1xMastersDegree in all of this nonsense, of course, but argh no real time to write a comment just now. Later on I'll refresh my memory on all the memorialisation-of-WW1-in-Britain stuff I did and distil you a quick summary of scholarly opinion.

That would be k-awesome!

Right so. (Feel free to think "oh do shut up Abi" and stop reading at any point.) WW1 isn't remembered as a great military victory - because obviously it wasn't - and I don't see remembrance as glorification of war, it's slightly more complicated than that. I'd say more like acceptance of war, because that's the origin of all these ceremonies: a government and population trying to make sense of what happened. Not specifically militaristic, more nationalistic and patriotic. I did huge amounts of work on how commemoration in the UK is not solely about remembering the dead, but about remembering them in a particular way.

Remembrance ceremonies have a big element of the need to explain/justify the enormous balls-up that was the First World War. War myths pre-1914-18 typically focus on individual heroism and honour, the glory of the cavalry charge, etc - none of this was appropriate given the realities of the trenches, and the foolhardiness/incompetence of the commanding officers (delete as appropriate - it's arguable that WW1 was a balls-up simply because nobody really knew how to deal with this brand-new style of warfare or how to stop it once it had started).

So c. late 1918, the government starts to think it would not be so good if the general populace were to feel that the war had been an enormous balls-up and they'd all sent their menfolk off to die for nothing - especially as the more fortunate menfolk were all on their way back from the trenches with horrific stories of officer-class incompetence to tell. Memorialisation was encouraged by the government as a way to remind people of what they had won by the war (peace in our time, that is - I am particularly uncomfortable with the "we shall remember the fallen and it shall never happen again" line that things take, given that it did happen again 1939-1945 and continues to happen again all over the place, but they didn't know that in 1919) as well as to give them a partial compensation for what they had lost by it (death of loved ones presented as unavoidable in pursuit of the national ideal, death in war reinterpreted as patriotic, a sacrifice to the greater good; glorious in a different sense).

"The Myth makes the unpalatable aspects of war acceptable by giving them meaning and purpose; death in war becomes heroic sacrifice for the nation" -- quote from one of my essays there. And the symbolism and ceremonies of memorialisation are all carefully constructed to further that portrayal. Probably only about 15% of the population lost a family member in the war. Hardly a majority - so why is remembrance such a societal act? Because it suited government to encourage a certain way of remembering, to justify events which could quite reasonably have been said to be their fault.

Graves and war memorials are my specialty with which I try not to bore people, but in brief: graves are standardised and uniform, symbolising equality in death and also reinforcing the idea that "these are the dead of a nation" rather than "here lies Joe Bloggs"; war memorials and cemeteries usually feature a Cross of Sacrifice (like JESUS) or Stone of Remembrance (big, flat and altar-shaped, DO YOU SEE). First World War = a blood-sacrifice to ensure peace, analogous to that of Christ.

The popular idea that the First World War was a pointless waste of life is a lot more recent (though poets, ex-soldiers etc were saying that all along) - it comes from comparisons with the Second World War, which is slightly easier to justify. Have another essay quote: "Most understand that war is a terrible thing, but that circumstances can make it the only option. Armistice Day now commemorates both of these emotions, projecting the distasteful aspects of war onto the First World War, and the acceptability of fighting in an honourable cause onto the Second." So blame WW2 for your militarism.

I don't do poppies of any colour. It's far too complicated an issue for me to work out whether I feel comfortable about wearing one.

(very late in replying, but) thank you very much for this! It's really interesting to read - thanks for taking the time to write it.

bagatelle definitely
darts i *think*
and one other if there were 7, ooh bar skittles maybe?
or normal skittles?

Yes! Skittles! And also darts & bagatelle. (I do not know what bagatelle is, but I *love* the word.)

it's like pinball without the fun.

also i was thinking about this and i'm pretty sure that billiards (in addition to bar billiards) was one as well.

Interesting to read about ANZAC day. I avoided it, thinking it would be like Remembrance Day in the UK. Glad to hear it was more memorial than war glorification.

In the UK, I sometimes go to a Hiroshima remembrance event, where songs are sung and children float candles down the river, and that suits me better than Remembrance Day.

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Anzac Day

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[2] there totally was a list

Re: [2] there totally was a list

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