Remembrance Day has always been a bit of an oddity in Australia.
While the 11th day of the 11th month marks the 1918 armistice that ended World War I hostilities on the European Western Front and in the deserts of the Middle East, it has also been a moment when Australians have been encouraged to reflect upon the contributions of their service personnel, both past and present.
It is by no means a uniquely Australian moment, a point that has been brought home to me many times over the years while standing in Commonwealth war cemeteries across the world. Indeed last November 11 we were in the cemetery at Damascus, a peaceful and serene place surrounded by prickly pears and punctuated with olive trees and vivid oleander, while representatives of dozens of countries – with the notable exception of Australia – laid remembrance wreaths.
The Australian-mounted troops had, after all, been the first to ride into Damascus at the vanguard of the British forces who liberated the place from the Ottoman Turks in late 1918, much to the enduring chagrin of T. E. Lawrence “of Arabia”, who arrived some hours later.
But that – like so much of what happened on the European Western Front – is a largely forgotten part of a Great War that has, for Australia, been dominated by a focus on Gallipoli.
Indeed our nation has much more fully embraced Anzac Day – the anniversary of the disastrous Dardanelles landings that marked the beginning of a wholly avoidable tragedy at Gallipoli that cost more than 8000 Australian lives – than Remembrance Day.
It is understandable because the great loss at Gallipoli occurred when federated Australia was barely 14 years old. The loss of life at Gallipoli was so profound and – once the truth became known about the botched landings and battles such as that at the Nek – senseless, that it was the first large-scale human tragedy to beset white Australia.
Australia has since inextricably linked its identity – perhaps even its genesis as a nation – to those terrible events beginning on April 25, 1915, in a way that has engaged, perplexed, divided and enraged historians, social anthropologists, politicians, writers and journalists ever since. It has become a moment of proud national celebration and commemoration for reasons that may never be entirely tangible.
Australia never had a Bastille or a Civil War, a momentous internal political and military conflagration to conceive it as a nation in blood and in cold steel and in cordite. We had Eureka, which is not quite the same, and then we had Anzac, which came two-and-a-half years before the armistice and was first commemorated a year to the day later in 1916.
Federation, despite all of its pioneering tales, had ceased by the time of Anzac – with its stories of terrible human loss, endurance, courage and yes, of course, mateship – to capture the Australian imagination.
And the first Diggers always made a distinction between November 11 and April 25.
The first was more strictly for the commemoration of those left behind. April 25 was much more a celebration of the life and the spirit of those who lived on. Once a year the Diggers – united by their unspeakable experiences – marched and reminisced, played two-up and got plastered, then returned their uniforms to their closets and did their best to cope for another year.
They endured. Just as their families endured their terrible survivor guilt and their prickliness, their physical wounds and their no-less-debilitating emotional scars.
Anzac, with all its truth, with all its legend and all its many myths is all about endurance. The potency of endurance – another description of suffering in silence – had never dawned on me until I heard Peter Cosgrove talking about it this year. At this time, around about Anzac Day, I was grappling with the issues of national identity, myth, courage and the Australian soldier for a long journal essay.
“Part of our reverence for them is that somehow they endured," said Cosgrove, the former Australian Defence Force chief. He was right: endurance is at the essence of Anzac.
And so their endurance has captivated successive generations. And never more so than today when thousands of young Australians converge on battlefields in increasingly far-flung places, on Anzac Day, to imagine just what they did endure – the blood, the flies, the terrible rations, the loneliness and the fear, encountered a world away from home.
The first Anzac Day in 1916 had at its core the acknowledgement of what the survivors of Gallipoli – and especially those who were injured and maimed there – would endure. It was about the obligation (always pitifully unmet in my view) that a new country would have to its men who had sacrificed their youth, their optimism, and their physical and mental well-being to the war effort.
One of the great Australian myths of World War I is that young men continued to heed the call – while the conscription debates raged – because they thought that the conflict offered them a small window of opportunity to see the world and experience some excitement.
This may have been the case with some of the first volunteers.
But by Anzac Day 1916, when the stories of slaughter at Gallipoli were the focus of Australia's national conversation, any suggestion that war equalled adventure had dissipated.
Those who signed up in 1916 and 1917 knew there was a fair chance that they would die or be maimed for life in the mud of France or in the dust of Palestine. They only had to look at their streets in their towns and cities – where the survivors wandered with missing limbs and empty eyes – and the ever-lengthening fatality lists to know it was no adventure.
The political potency of commemoration has been profound in Australia, especially since the last World War I diggers died.
Anzac Day and Remembrance Day give us an opportunity to think about the men who gave their lives on the battlefields and those who returned and endured. And about those who endured them.
It's a good time to consider this: for every story of heroism and super-human courage, there is another one of frailty and suffering.
Personally, Remembrance Day and Anzac Day have always been about reflecting on the horror of war – and its profound human legacy.