World War I

War aims to achieve essentially political objectives through the use of organised violence. It is a tricky business because the means we try to use – the violence itself and the way we organise and inflict it – exert a powerful fascination which often overshadows the objectives we have set ourselves. We so easily focus on the fighting itself and forget why we are doing it. Afghanistan today shows how the resulting muddle can distort contemporary strategic choices. But it also affects our view of past wars, which matters because past wars so strongly shape the way we see ourselves today. We tell and retell the stories of our soldiers’ heroism and tragedy, but hardly consider what they were fighting to achieve. As a result, we come to see our military history as a series of heroic exploits shorn of strategic purpose, so that war’s violence and sacrifice becomes self-validating; an end in itself. Almost, as Peter Weir suggested, like a sport.

Having disposed of World War I in a couple of brief chapters, our shell-shocked soldiers wonder what to do next. During the war, sinister balloons carrying out surveillance had hovered over the trenches. This now gives Axel Glover and Edward Llewellyn an idea. They have become mates in an understated English way, never making eye contact.

‘The first time I saw Axel Glover he was standing stark naked in a wide shaft of sunlight,’ begins the novel, which is written in the largely monologic voice of a diary or memoir. It records the lives of these two ‘very deep friends’ who, having survived the war together, commit to the somewhat eccentric adventure of ballooning to ‘New Albion’, in the Western Pacific of the imagination.

Our fascination with Gallipoli is probably at a peak. Like other symbolic events, it rises, falls and rises again in public esteem and curiosity. In the last quarter of a century, beginning when Anzac Day was at a low ebb, books and documentaries about Gallipoli have flooded bookshops and television stations. This new book by Professor Robin Prior, a specialist Australian historian of World War I, argues that the flood tide has almost drowned us in myths. The subtitle of his book is ‘The End of the Myth’. It is doubtful whether one able historian can terminate the myths, but this is a brave attempt.

According to Peter Rees’s introduction to The Other Anzacs, ‘at least 2498 nurses’ served overseas with the Australian Army Nursing Service during World War I, with about 720 in other units raised in Britain or privately sponsored. There were ‘at least 610 nurses’ in the New Zealand Army Nursing Service, and perhaps another 100 overseas. The criteria for acceptance were high. Nurses were required to have completed at least three years’ training in an approved hospital, to be aged between twenty-one and forty, and either single or widowed. The rules about marriage, however, were not always strictly observed, and as men sometimes fudged their age and other circumstances to get into the army, occasionally a woman may have disguised her marital status. But once in the Army Nursing Service, marriage usually meant resignation. If a nurse wished to keep working after she married, she had to join one of the private medical or hospital services that had come into being.

It was a bright and bold idea of Graham Freudenberg to write a book on Winston Churchill and his long links with Australian political and military life. Though Churchill didn’t visit Australia – ‘wise man’, some said – he was a strong or even decisive influence at several turning points in our history and indeed our mythology.

Churchill exerted influence here long before 1940, when he became Britain’s prime minister. He sparred with Alfred Deakin in London in 1907; he was the political mastermind behind the Gallipoli landing in World War I; and in 1921 he helped to throttle the renewal of the nineteen-year-old Anglo-Japanese naval alliance. In the 1920s he delayed, for valid financial and strategic reasons, the creation at Singapore of a naval base intended to be Australia’s front-line defence against Japan in the next world war. He was a lonely giant in defying Hitler in that terrible year of 1940; and in the following years he clashed with Australia’s prime minister, John Curtin, on vital strategic questions.

In the days of the Great Anzac Revival, it is unusual to find an Australian VC who has not been the subject of a biography. Here we have one of the most famous of them all – Arthur Blackburn (1892–1960). I was surprised to find that this is the first biography of him.

A History of The Great War alludes to an encyclopedic work that appeared in the wake of World War I. Bound in red leather and embossed with gold, it exemplified officially sanctioned history. Peter McConnell’s recommissioning of the title is more than mere irony: it throws down a challenge to our acceptance of conventional history. His central character is a latter-day Penelope, a decent, ordinary woman who nonetheless possesses many of the noble attributes often evinced by the Anzacs: endurance, resourcefulness, patriotism and courage.

Why does ANZAC day seem more popular now than forty years ago? Despite the thinning ranks of veterans, attendances at dawn services in most capital cities are up, crowds at the marches are large and enthusiastic, numerous historians and former members of the armed services seem to be running profitable battle-field tour businesses, and the desire of young Australian backpackers to include Gallipoli (particularly on Anzac Day) in their itineraries increases every year. This popularity is even more remarkable given that in the 1970s and early 1980s Anzac Day was a source of controversy and dissent: anti-war protestors, Vietnam veterans who felt excluded from the national ethos, indigenous Australians who felt their wars were overlooked and feminists determined to highlight the problem of women raped in war, all saw this national day of commemoration as an occasion to press their cause. The RSL did not respond well to these attempts to undermine the sanctity of the day. The re-emergence of Anzac Day as a site for unity and cohesion, particularly amongst younger Australians, is intriguing.

In a response to Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli published in Quadrant in 1982, Gerard Henderson observed that ‘recounting the story of the Anzacs has become something of a growth industry’. Five years on, the Gallipoli industry shows no sign of a downturn. The salvaging and publication of war diaries, letters and manuscripts that had long mouldered in museums, libraries and attics, the spate of ‘epic’ teledramas and ersatz war fiction (like Jack Bennett’s spin-off from the aforesaid movie), new historical studies and the resurrection of old ones such as C. E. W. Bean’s Official History and, at the other end of the scale, John Laffin’s Digger: The story of the Australian soldier (its subtitle magically changed to ‘The legend of the Australian soldier’), all attest to the enduring appeal of Australia’s military exploits to writers and filmmakers and to the subject’s ability to tap a popular audience.

Leonard Mann’s account of his experiences in World War One, Flesh in Armour, has recently been reissued. It may be the case that there are certain experiences that are impossible to write about unless one has personally undergone them. The three great Australian classics of World War One – Flesh in Armour, The Middle Parts of Fortune and When the Blackbirds Sing – all convey an air of total verisimilitude when it comes to describing the conditions of battle. In comparison, even such gifted writers as David Malouf and Roger McDonald convey the impression of faking it when they come to write about war, no matter how much care they take or research they have done.