1914 – A Century Later

The Great War is, for many Australians, the event that defined our nation. The larrikin diggers, trench warfare, and the landing at Gallipoli have become the stuff of the Anzac “legend”. But it was also a war fought by the families at home. Professor Joan Beaumont is an internationally recognised historian of Australia in the two world wars, the history of prisoners of war and the memory and heritage of war. She is Professor of History at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, and has published several books about World Wars I and II, most recently Broken Nation – Australians and The Great War. On Tuesday 11 February 2014, Joan Beaumont addressed The Sydney Institute to talk about Australia and Australians in World War I – at home and abroad.

1914 – A CENTURY LATER

JOAN BEAUMONT 

Anyone who still visits bookstores, rather than shopping online or reading kindle, will be aware that the centenary of World War I is swelling, seemingly without end, the already voluminous literature on Australian military history.

Why then did I write Broken Nation? Quite simply because, despite all the books that have been published in the past three decades on Australians at war, there was no single, comprehensive history of Australia in World War I – that is, a history which integrated battles, the home front, diplomacy and memory. The vast majority of books published recently have covered battles and military units. In some ways this is not surprising. Battle, after all, is the essence of war and the Anzac “legend”, which is the most enduring legacy of World War I for Australians, is a story about soldiers and their behaviour in battle.

But it is time that we acknowledged that World War I was about more than fighting and killing. Sometimes called the first “total” war, it was a conflict in which civilians mattered.  In the case of Australia — and this is a little known fact ­— the civilian experience was the majority one.  Yes, a remarkable number of Australian men enlisted and served overseas — nearly 417 000 and 330 000 respectively from a population of that numbered 4.3 million in the 1911 census. But most Australians stayed at home. Many, of course, were women and children but even among men of aged 19 to 60 years, nearly 70 per cent did not enlist. In essence, then, the story of Australians in World War I must be seen as more than the Australian Imperial Force at war.

This is particularly so, since it was the Australian population on the home front — a term which was coined during World War I in recognition of its importance — who underpinned the national war effort. They did not fight but they accepted casualties on a scale which would be unthinkable today. They mobilised their labour, gave their money and poured their emotional energies into public debate and activity. In addition, many Australian workers suffered from rising prices and a reduced standard of living. Most critically, for all this, most Australians continued to support the war and believed that the causes for which their men were fighting were just. It is often forgotten that some domestic populations of World War I ultimately lost the will to fight — notably, Russia in 1917 and, to some degree, Germany in late 1918. But, even though Australian society was profoundly divided on the question of conscription and there were high levels of violence in public political life, the will to continue the war survived.

Obviously, the consensus about the war was not universal. From the start of the war, the industrial labour movement maintained that the real contest was one between labour and capital. As the left saw it, no one would benefit from the slaughter and carnage of industrialised war but the bloated plutocrats. By 1917, the trade unions were so alienated that they launched a massive general strike all along the eastern seaboard and in mid-1918 the Labour Party conference demanded an end to the war through a negotiated peace. Yet, whatever the voices of dissent, the consensus about the legitimacy of the causes for which the war was being fought was widespread enough for there not to be general collapse of morale on the Australian home front. Despite the violence in political life and the radicalisation of the working class, Australians did not opt for revolution.

The home front therefore needs to be seen as an essential part of the national experience of war. It should also be imagined as being in a dialogue with the battlefront. Often it is argued that civilians and soldiers were in completely separate spheres. In many ways they were. Australia was remote from the conflict; and Australians did not experience the occupation, bombing, starvation or homelessness that was the lot of many European peoples. Nor could those at home truly comprehend the horrors of battle in modern industrial warfare: the almost intolerable noise of artillery; the terror of arbitrary obliteration, the obscene injuries inflicted on soft flesh by shrapnel, machine-guns, flame throwers, bayonets and gas; the misery of life in the trenches in winter and the foulness of gangrene and trench foot.

Yet, if you look closely into the rich archives of the Australian War Memorial, it is clear that Australians at home were not emotionally quarantined from World War I. The men of the AIF wrote letters that were often graphic in their detail about wounds and death. Some even mentioned the incompetence of those commanding them. Remarkably, some of this voice of loss and cynicism escaped the pen of the censor. For example, one young officer Alec Raws wrote home to his family from Pozières, about the death of his brother, Goldy, thus:

I want to tell you, so that it may be on record, that I honestly believe that Goldy and many other officers were murdered … through the incompetence, callousness, and personal vanity of those high in authority. I realise the seriousness of what I say, but I am so bitter, and the facts are so palpable, that it must be said.[1]

This letter arrived home after Alec himself had been killed. What, one wonders, did his family make of it? The contrast between his anger and the values he espoused at the time he volunteered only thirteen months earlier was palpable.  In July 1915 he had told his father:

I do believe that there are some things worth more than life. … I [claim] no great patriotism. No government, other than the most utterly democratic, is worth fighting for. But there are principles, and there are women, and there are standards of decency that are worth shedding one’s blood for, surely … Death does not matter.  

Even if soldiers did keep silent, trying to reassure their already anxious families, the enormous casualty lists spoke to what was really happening on the battlefronts. The bodies of the wounded too, who started to return to Australia within three months of the landing at Gallipoli, testified to the mutilation, disfigurement and obscenity of the war.

So, every dimension of Australian life in 1914–18 was affected by knowledge of what was happening in France, Belgium and the Middle East. Nowhere is this clearer than in the two referenda about conscription in 1916 and 1917. The latter gained their raw passion, rancour and violence not just from the gravity of the issues at stake but from the fact that they were played out against the backdrop of some of the most destructive battles in which the British imperial armies fought, the Somme and the Third Ypres.

In turn, events on the battlefront were shaped, positively and negatively, by what happened at home. Perhaps the influence of home on soldiers was less dramatic than the reverse, but, like all armies in a democratic age, the AIF looked to their families and communities for affirmation of what they were doing. They needed confidence that there were being remembered, even if this took the now anachronistic form of “comforts” prepared by an industry of voluntary (and mostly female) patriotic workers. The commander of the AIF for much of the war, General Sir William Birdwood, at least thought this, telling Australians in 1920 that the high morale of Australian solders was maintained “very largely, because here in their homeland, you good people never let them forget that you were always with them, rejoicing with them in their days of triumph and sympathising with them in their hardship”.[2]

In contrast, the progressive decline of volunteers for the AIF, and the fact that Australians very narrowly voted against conscription, twice, presumably conveyed ambiguous messages to the soldiers about the depth of home-front support. Even though many in the AIF themselves seem to have opposed conscription, they had to face the reality that the huge losses in battle in 1917 and 1918 would not be fully replaced. Towards the end of the war, the five Australian infantry divisions were seriously understrength. Their battalions, that were so central to their morale and mutual support, were being forcibly disbanded, causing near mutiny. If the war had continued into 1919, the Australian narrative might not have been one of triumphalism, but rather, one of retrenchment, decline, or even rebellion. If the war had actually ended in defeat, there might even have been an Australian version of the “stab in the back” theory which so infected German political life after the war.

Another reason for positioning the home front centrally in Australian memory of World War I is because it was here that much of the lasting damage of the war occurred. Of course it was the men of the AIF — the more than 61,000 dead and 153,000 wounded — who bore the physical cost of the war. But their families and the Australian political system and social fabric were also left injured and maimed. Initially, in 1914 there was a widespread consensus about supporting the British declaration of war. There was a strong cultural and emotional identification with the British Empire, given that over 90 per cent of the population was of Anglo-Celtic extraction. Beyond this, it was taken as axiomatic that that Australia’s security depended upon the supremacy of the Royal Navy globally and within the Asia Pacific region.

By 1916, however, Australians were polarised around the question of how the military and economic cost of the war should be borne. The resulting disputes left the society divided along fault lines that lasted at least a generation: the volunteer against the “shirker”; the conscriptionist against the anti-conscriptionist; and, though sectarianism was not created by the war, the Catholic against the Protestant. The insults, calumny and accusations that each had traded with the other in the hysteria of the conscription debates were not forgotten. They continued to poison public life for many years.

Although it is difficult to quantify, post-war Australian society seemed less tolerant of difference, more fearful of radicalism and more xenophobic. Most notably, the Labor Party had split under the pressures of war. This stalled its pre-war emergence as a party of national government and ushered in a long period of dominance of federal politics by the non-Labor parties. In the opinion of some historians, this meant the loss of the innovation and reforming energies for which pre-war Australian politics was renowned. In much of the recent memory “boom” this negative legacy of the war has been elided.

However, if my book aims to reinstate the home front in the history of Australians at war, I do not dispute the centrality of fighting to any account of World War I. On the contrary, I aim to provide a comprehensive coverage of all the major battles in which Australians fought in a form that is accessible to the general reader, and that keeps to the minimum terminology like “salient” and “re-entrant”!

What is interesting to observe is that today’s memory “boom”, which is fuelled by a mix of national pride, family genealogy and a fascination with mass trauma, has established its own elite of battles. Gallipoli is clearly pre-eminent for Australians and universally known. Villers-Bretonneux, Pozières, the Somme and Fromelles also seem to be recognised beyond the circles of military and battlefield tour enthusiasts. But, if tertiary students are any guide, beyond that much has been forgotten. However, the Australian defence forces fought in many other battles and theatres of war in 1914–18. When the national memorial was being completed at Villers-Bretonneux in the 1938, the list of battles approved for inscription were the Somme, Pozières, Bapaume, Bullecourt, Messines, Menin Road, Polygon Wood, Broodseinde, Poelcapelle, Passchendaele, Avre, Ancre, Villers-Bretonneux, Lys, Hazebrouck, Hamel, Amiens, Albert, Chuignes, Mont St Quentin, Epehy, Hindenburg Line, St Quentin Canal, Beaurevoir Line.[3]

It is almost inevitable that some of these battles are now little known. All historical writing and memory — be it at the level of the individual or the collective (the community and the nation) — is selective. What we remember today is shaped as much by the priorities of the present as by the events of the past. I have therefore examined the processes — the commemorative rituals, the installation of memorials, the creation of museums, the organization of “pilgrimages” and the production of film — by which particular episodes of World War I have survived to dominate national memory today. What these processes reveal is that the hierarchy of “sites of memory” in 2013 is not that of 1919. When the five divisions of the AIF came to choose the locations for their dedicated memorials they chose Pozières (1^st Division), Mont St Quentin (2^nd Division), Sailly-le-Sec (3^rd Division), Bellinglese (4^th Division) and Polygon Wood (5^th Division). These battles do not map easily onto today’s commemorative priorities. Where, for example, is Fromelles, the battle which is now remembered as the bloodiest twenty-four hours in Australian military history (there were 5533 dead and wounded in that period)?

It seems, then, that the men of the AIF chose to be remembered for their victories, not their defeats. Gallipoli perhaps was the exception, though even this was reported a “triumph”, in the sense that it was the dramatic storming of the cliffs by the initial landing forces on 25 April 1915 that rapidly entered Australian mythology. In contrast, the dominant mode of understanding in the memory of war today, which has been heavily influenced by the Holocaust, is catastrophe and victimhood. In this framework, combatants are depicted as “mere non-consenting victims [and] mutineers and rebels [as] the only true heroes”.[4]

Yet, if we owe anything to the generation that fought and died in World War I — and the rhetoric of the public commemoration suggests that we do — it is to try to remember the war in the way they saw it. This relates particularly to the values for which they were fought. The dominant popular narrative of World War I in the Western world has become one of futility: a war in which the losses were never matched by the gains; in which lives of “lions” were thrown away in their millions by incompetent “donkeys”; and in which military victory failed to bring any lasting peace to Europe. There is good reason for this, but it should not be forgotten that Australians had clear war aims in World War I. These included the maintenance of British global imperial power, the protection of the White Australia Policy, the guaranteeing of Australian security in the Pacific, the defence of democracy against German tyranny and aggression, and the protection of the rights of small nations such as Belgium. Some of these war aims we still embrace; others we struggle to understand. No one anyone born after 1950, for example, can begin to comprehend the intense loyalty to the British Empire that sustained many Australians through four terrible years of war.

My final aim in my book, therefore, is to examine how these interests and values were pursued in both the home-front debates and the wider sphere of imperial and international relations. When Australians went to war in August 1914, it was because Britain had declared war on behalf of the whole Empire. Constitutionally, as a British Dominion, Australia was not a sovereign independent state. The new sense of national consciousness that World War I spawned did little to challenge imperial loyalty as the dominant value, but it did start a process of change in the status of Australia within the Empire and world. Like other Dominion leaders, Hughes came to demand in 1917–18 a greater voice in imperial decision-making; and Australia was granted for the first time in 1919 independent representation at a major international conference, the Paris Peace Conference.

However, none of this guaranteed that Australia could achieve its war aims.  Hughes, whose antics at Paris remain both engaging and mortifying, was able to ensure that Australia retained control, albeit under a League of Nations mandate, of the strategically important German colonies to its north (which Australia had occupied in 1914). He also succeeded, as he saw it, in protecting White Australia by stymying the Japanese attempt to gain international affirmation of the principle of racial equality. But when it came to other core Australian interests, such as reparations for its crippling war debt, Hughes confronted the reality of the severe limits to Australia’s influence and power. The Treaty of Versailles, which ended up being a deeply flawed compromise between power politics and the liberal internationalism of US President Woodrow Wilson, was therefore a bitter disappointment to Hughes and his colleagues.

World War I, in fact, had transformed the world order which Australia had gone to war to defend. By 1918 the dynastic monarchies of Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary had collapsed, the Ottoman Empire had disintegrated and Bolshevism had triumphed in Russia. Yes, Germany’s attempt to dominate Europe had, it seemed, been checked; but the price that was paid for victory was the erosion of the dominance of British imperial power globally that was a core war aim for many Australians. The United States, although it entered the war only in 1917, had emerged to challenge the centuries-long dominance of Europe. Japan, the nation whose expansionist intentions caused almost hysterical concern among Australians, had also capitalised on the war to enhance its strategic position in the Asia–Pacific region. All of this was not as obvious in 1919 as it was in 1942, when British imperial power in the Asia–Pacific collapsed humiliatingly at Singapore, but enough of it was evident for Hughes to view the peace settlement as a defeat for Australia and a victory for the United States. In the realm of diplomacy, therefore, the Australian experience of World War I was again largely one of loss.

It is intriguing, then, that the war which caused such damage should have spawned what is now the foundational narrative of Australian nationalism. Beginning in the immediate aftermath of the landing at Gallipoli, the Anzac “legend” would rapidly gain a hold on the imagination of the Australian press and public. From 1916 Anzac Day was established at the heart of the national calendar of commemoration and its rituals soon incorporated a valorising discourse of national pride. This claimed not only that Australians had made a decisive contribution to Allied victory. They had also performed exceptional feats in war; and had proved themselves worthy of the Anglo-Saxon white race and their forebears who had conquered the Australian bush. Most importantly, the men of the AIF, as citizens in arms, had displayed resourcefulness, courage, endurance and mateship — behaviour which provided a model for future generations of what it meant to be Australian.

It was almost as if the sheer scale of Australia’s loss during World War I demanded a narrative of hyperbole that invested its profound trauma with significance. Certainly Australians invested more energy than any other nation in building war memorials: some 1500 to 2000 of them, probably the highest rate for any country that fought the war.  In many cases these memorials also perpetuated the divisions of the war by listing not just the dead, but also the men who had volunteered serve in the AIF and survived.

In the years that followed the Anzac “legend” would continue to embedded as the hegemonic narrative of the war, in the sense that it would come to be seen as natural and incontestable, even by those who were not part of the elites or institutions that created and promulgated it. It would survive and evolve across the decades that followed. With effortless ease, it would prove able to accommodate the service of the men and women who followed their fathers’ example and served in World War II. It would survive — only just — the bitterness of the Vietnam War, the next equally divisive debate about conscription and the radicalism and feminism of Australian youth in the 1960s.

Then, when the decline of the Anzac “legend” and its rituals seemed almost terminal, it would be re-invented in the new nationalism of the late twentieth century to validate the ongoing service of Australian defence personnel in peacekeeping and international conflicts. Focussed on the core values of endurance, courage, sacrifice and mateship, and more sensitive to gender and ethnicity,  “Anzac” is now invoked, not just by politicians but sportsmen, policemen and others who champion the values of the collective and the team over the individual, to stand for “what it means to be Australian”.

How and why this happened — and why a narrative that met the needs of Australians in World War 1 should continue to have such cultural dominance and emotional power in a radically different Australia a century later — is yet to be explained.

ENDNOTES