Andrew Leigh (Fraser, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Leon Gellert, aged 23, signed up to fight in the Australian Imperial Force 18 days after the outbreak of the war. He did so, as he put it, dancing and singing. Like so many other young Australians, Gellert reacted to the idea of war with a mix of naivety, confusion and courage. He was inspired by the romance of collective purpose and the adrenalin of combat. And, even after experiencing the chaos of the battlefield, traces of that enthusiasm persisted.

Gellert translated his experience into poems that some have celebrated as the best English language poetry of World War I. Here is his Before Action:

We always had to do our work at night.

I wondered why we had to be so sly.

I wondered why we couldn't have our fight

Under the open sky.

I wondered why I always felt so cold.

I wondered why the orders seemed so slow,

So slow to come, so whisperingly told,

So whisperingly low.

I wondered if my packing-straps were tight,

And wondered why I wondered……Sound went wild………

and order came…… I ran into the night,

wondering why I smiled.

It is plain here that the experience of war made Gellert curious to himself. He could record his thoughts and sensations but not entirely understand them or understand even what it meant to be a man who was smiling in the midst of the chaos of battle.

That experience of confusion in the heat of battle is one which is common in stories of warfare. As Captain George Mitchell of the 10th Battalion recorded in his diary:

My breath came deep. I tried to analyse my feelings, but could not. I think that every emotion was mixed—exultation predominating. We had come from the new world for conquest of the old … The price of failure we knew to be annihilation, victory meant life. But even so whispered jests passed around.

Captain Mitchell shared Gellert's puzzlement at the odd mix of paradoxical inclinations ratcheted up under the conditions of conflict.

Gellert was eventually evacuated from the theatre of war, after a shrapnel wound led to septicaemia and dysentery. He later revisited the field of battle, at this time an abandoned scene of an epic struggle—a veritable graveyard. He writes:

The guns were silent, and the silent hills

had bowed their grasses to a gentle breeze

I gazed upon the vales and on the rills,

And whispered, "What of these?" and "What of these?"

These long forgotten dead with sunken graves,

Some crossless, with unwritten memories

Their only mourners are the moaning waves,

Their only minstrels are the singing trees

And thus I mused and sorrowed wistfully

And he speaks of the great battalions who sleep by the shore. This mourning for the dead men opens up to include the entire natural landscape. There is a romance that lingers, and there is a place for that. But, as the journalist Charles Bean saw, there is a need to remember the individual soldiers in their particularity. As military historian Jay Winter has observed:

States do not remember; individuals do, in association with other people. If the term "collective memory" has any meaning at all, it is the process through which different collectives, from groups of two to groups in their thousands, engage in acts of rememberance together.

On the 100th anniversary of the landings of Gallipoli, we are remembering those who have fallen silent—a generation none of whom are with us today. But we remember through the great institution of the War Memorial. It was set in train in 1918 when Charles Bean recognised a need to conserve and curate the wartime experiences of our troops.

Bean's account of the Gallipoli landing was delayed by official approvals. Reports of the English war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett became the defining account of the landing. He was not present for the landing, but his account has had a major effect on the myth making around Gallipoli and was the focus of many re-enactments which became the footage that featured in newsreel reports of the landings. In Ashmead-Bartlett's accounts, we see the happy young warriors, exhilarated because they had tested themselves and not been found wanting:

No finer feat has happened in this war than this sudden landing in the dark, and the storming of the heights, and, above all, the holding on while the reinforcements were landing.

He speaks about them as 'raw colonial troops'.

Bean, by contrast, would not allow himself this overstated rhetoric. He felt the need of telling things straight. He fought the desire to embellish, much to his credit. But even Bean did not think his readers would tolerate an entirely frank account of soldiers under fire. He wrote privately:

The success of an army like ours chiefly depends on what proportion of these strong independent-minded men there is in it. And in the Australian force the proportion is unquestionably undoubtedly high—may account to 50 per cent or more. I have seen them going up against a rain of fire and the weaker ones retiring through them at the very same time—the two streams going in opposite directions and not taking the faintest notice of one another.

By Bean's calculations, if one in two of your troops were sufficiently resolute to advance under fire, you had the markings of an unusually successful army. He could see that a proper report of war would register human frailty and heroism in equal parts. This is, of course, reflected in the way in which we now look back upon World War I, where we see the errors of Winston Churchill in the landing, the success of Kemal Ataturk in anticipating the landing point, the great enduring sadness that echoes down the ages and the knowledge now that the terms of the 1918 armistice were largely available two years earlier, in 1916.

As we mourn the men who were lost due to the mistakes that were made, we remember those individuals through the War Memorial, inspired by Charles Bean. As he wrote in 1918:

… on some hill-top – still, beautiful, gleaming white and silent, a building of three parts, a centre and two wings. The centre will hold the great national relics of the A.I.F. One wing will be a gallery – holding the pictures that our artists painted and drew actually on the scene and amongst the events themselves. The other wing will be a library to contain the written official records of every unit.

Bean had hopes from the beginning that the memorial would incorporate a roll of honour, listing all of the Australians who died in war. The list was to have been arranged by town of origin so that visitors to the memorial—which is the No. 1 place for visitors to Canberra—could easily find the names of the dead from their own town. But the scale of the casualties and the cost constraints imposed on the building defeated those plans.

Bean urged that the memorial not refer to 'trophies'; he preferred the term 'relics'. He urged that the captions and text should not use derogatory terms; it should refer to 'Germans' not 'Huns' and to 'Turks' instead of 'Abduls'. The avoidance of sloganeering and stereotyping ensures that, in the words of Professor Winter: 'States do not remember; individuals do, in association with other people.'

In Canberra, we remember Michael Scannell, who attended Gungahleen School in Lyneham. He landed in Gallipoli in May 1915 and served there until September when he was admitted to hospital with dysentery and diarrhoea. We remember Charles Lee, who was born in Canberra. He enlisted in Pound Hill, Queanbeyan, previously in Weetangera. He served in Gallipoli with the 7th Light Horse Regiment from May 1915 until he contracted appendicitis. We remember Ernest Murray, who enlisted in Canberra and who received a bar to the military medal for actions on 30 October 1917 when he set about clearing comrades of his who had been wounded by the bursting of a shell. We remember Standish O'Grady, who attended St John's in Canberra and served at the 18th Battalion, which landed in Gallipoli on 19 August 1915. He was killed while charging up Hill 60 on 22 August, just three days after landing.

We remember of course, too, those extraordinary words of Kemal Ataturk:

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives … You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours … You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace.

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