by Marilyn Lake
The inseparable fusion of heroism and killing can be found in the famous early accounts of the landing at Anzac Cove. The first, and by far the most influential, was by the English war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, which appeared in Australia on 8 May 1915. More than any other report it launched the legend of Anzac. There had been, he told his avid readers, ‘no finer feat in this war’ than the landing at Gallipoli, while the courage of the wounded was such that it would, ‘never be forgotten’. But his enthusiasm stemmed from the Australians’ élan most characteristically displayed in their enthusiasm for bayoneting Turks. When their blood was up, he observed, ‘this race of athletes … rushed northwards and eastwards, searching for fresh enemies to bayonet’.3
The questions I posed to the students about war and its celebration are difficult to deal with, but they graphically illustrate the problems which arise when we continue to employ today the language and ideas of another era. The cherished rhetoric of 1915 carries with it the militaristic ideas of the Edwardian world as it had been before the outbreak of World War I. And while at contemporary Anzac Day celebrations, speakers ritually condemn war, the old rhetoric gestures in the opposite direction. It continues to refer to nobility, sacrifice and the role of the soldier in the creation of the nation.
The duty of manhood
In discussion with the students, we agreed that in the past many authoritative figures had declared that the nation was born on the shores of the Gallipoli Peninsula (also now known as the Anzac Peninsula). This view was widely held. Clergymen, politicians, poets, mayors and business leaders all clustered in common chorus. Anzac Day, announced the Anglican archbishop of Sydney in 1916, ‘gave Australia her soul’.4 The Sydney Morning Herald declared that the nation had cast on one side the ideas and ideals of adolescence and ‘assumed the serious responsibilities of Man’s estate’.5 The Hobart Mercury was similarly convinced that at Gallipoli, Australia ‘had taken up the duties of manhood’. Australians had become a ‘blood brotherhood in the best sense’.6 The Sydney Roman Catholic paper, Freeman’s Journal declared that: ‘we are at last a nation, with one heart, one soul and one thrilling aspiration’.7
A common theme ran through much of the rhetoric. War was the ultimate test both of men and nations. The battlefield was the site where they succeeded or failed. Like steel they were tempered or consumed in the fire of conflict. The poet AB Patterson had written:
The mettle that a race can show
Is proved with shot and steel,
And now we know what nations know
And feel what nations feel.8
And much of the language of 1915 was carried through into the post-war period. The author of a 1921 book about Anzac celebrations in Queensland wrote that 25 April was the day on which Australia became entitled, ‘through an ordeal of blood, fire, and suffering to take her place among the great nations of the world’.9 In his official history of the war published between 1921 and 1942, CEW Bean declared that on the battlefields Australia faced ‘the one trial that … all humanity still recognizes – the test of a great war’.10
Another theme which ran through much of the rhetoric about war was that conflict had a purifying effect on society, turning the citizen’s attention away from pleasure, leisure and material advancement to the more serious, the more spiritual aspects of life. It made society more earnest, banished frivolity and purged Australian life of ‘its intemperance, uncleanness, mutual distrust, commercial dishonesty, political chicanery’.11 Such hopes were voiced in serial sermons during the early years of the war and were taken up by Prime Minister WM Hughes who argued:
Since it has evoked this pure and noble spirit who shall say that this dreadful war is wholly an evil? Into a world saturated with a lust of material things, which had elevated self into a diety, which had made wealth the standard of greatness, comes the sweet purifying breath of self sacrifice.12
Clearly then, many Australians believed in 1915 that nations were made in war, that armed conflict was the supreme test for both men and their societies. Several important questions therefore present themselves. Why were these views so common at the time, were they contested by contemporaries and should we today (almost a hundred years later) still echo the accompanying and dated rhetoric?
Edwardian militarism
Perhaps the most difficult thing to explain to a contemporary audience is the extent to which the symbolism, ceremony and language of Anzac relate back to the ideas current in Europe and North America in the years before 1914 and the intense and incessant debates about war which characterised the era. At the turn of the century both Britain and the United States were involved in wars. The United States fought Spain, driving her out of Cuba and the Philippines while Britain conquered the two Boer Republics in South Africa with the assistance of troops from Australia. Both wars were controversial, evoking both ecstatic support and intense criticism, and serious consideration about the place of war in the life of modern nations. At the same time there was both an increasingly expensive arms race and the introduction of universal conscription in almost every country in Europe with the exception of Britain itself. War was constantly discussed in the books and journals of the period. Militarists urged governments to spend ever more money on armies and navies, warned of impending dangers and talked of both the terrible, inescapable necessity and the ageless nobility of war.
Running like a warming current through much heated rhetoric were ideas drawn from the innumerable popular accounts of Social Darwinists. Applied, and just as often misapplied to society, they suggested that nations like the species of the natural world were governed by the iron laws of evolution and were inescapably driven into ceaseless struggle and competition. The fit would survive and triumph; the weak would be crushed and swept aside. War was the principal means of struggle and therefore an ugly necessity which nonetheless brought forth the most selfless devotion to the nation. Such ideas were heard and held in much of Europe, the United States and the British dominions. The leading international jurist of the age, TJ Lawrence, alluded to the contemporary doctrine which held ‘that nations cannot long retain their manly virtues of courage and endurance unless their populations are from time to time disciplined in the hard school of war …’13 In Britain the history professor JA Cramb wrote in 1914 that in war man had a possession which he ‘values above religion, above industry and above social comfort’ because it provided the power which ‘it affords to life of rising above life’.14
The book in question, Germany and England was an immense success and was reprinted ten times in three months. In a follow up text, The Origin and Destiny of Imperial Britain, published posthumously in 1915, Cramb was even more lyrical. The shaping, all pervading thought of the book was of ‘the might, majesty, and the mystery of war’. Armed conflict brought with it the ‘intensification of life’. The battlefield, he declared, was, ‘an altar; the sacrifice the most awful the human eye can contemplate or the imagination with all its efforts invent’.15 The leading British military figure Colonel FN Maude held similar views. War was necessary to society because it was like a cleansing fever. It cleared away the ‘foulness of the body national and patriotic, and its renewed life is thereafter stronger in proportion as the ordeal has been drastic’.16 For one of Maude’s military colleagues, CH Melville, war was the ‘supreme test of virility’; for another it was ‘God’s test of a nation’s soul’.17
Senior serving British officers held similar views. General Sir Ian Hamilton, who was to command the Gallipoli campaign, declared in 1906 that it was the ‘heroism, self sacrifice and chivalry’ which redeemed war and would ‘build up national character’.18 But by far the most powerful voice was that of Lord Frederick Roberts, military hero and commander in chief until 1905 when he stepped down to become president of the influential National Service League. Without war, the great man declared,
a nation is in risk of running to seed. And when the war is a just one … its benefit to the nation is great. It is an appeal to the
manhood and the virtue of the people. It prevents decadence and effeminacy. It corrects the selfishness and querulousness which are inevitably bred by a long peace.
We are all tried by fire are we not? A nation needs to be tried by fire – needs to be put on trial every now and then, and tested by the laws which govern this planet – the law I mean, particularly, that only the efficient survive.19
The views of men like Roberts and Hamilton were widely known in Australia and often referred to in local debates. They carried an aura of aristocratic authority and of hard won experience on the empire’s diverse battlefields.
Australian leaders who read the books of the period and the articles in the leading contemporary reviews from Europe or the United States were constantly reminded of the intense debate about war and its role in the life of society. The works of continental European soldiers and scholars were frequently translated and published in Britain. German writing about war, though much condemned at the time in the English speaking world, had little to say that stands out from the militarist declarations commonly heard in Britain, the United States and Australia. The historian and notorious Prussian militarist, Heinrich von Treitschke had many things to say about war that sit comfortably with the rhetoric of Anzac. ‘Only in war’ he wrote, ‘does a nation become a nation’. He talked much of the sacrifice ‘of fellow countrymen for one another’ which was nowhere, ‘so splendidly exhibited as in war’.
And those who died well should be treated as heroes. ‘It is the heroes of the nation’, he declared, ‘who are the figures that delight and inspire youthful minds’; and among authors it is those whose words that ring ‘like the sound of trumpets whom as boys and youths we most admire’. Anyone who did not rejoice in stories of the nation’s military heroes was ‘too cowardly to bear arms’. Treitschke also wrote about killing and the masculine camaraderie Australians called mateship:
We have learned to know the moral majesty of war in the very thing that appears brutal and inhumane to superficial observers. That one must overcome the natural feelings of humanity for the sake of the fatherland, that in this case men murder one another who have never harmed one another before and who perhaps esteem one another highly as chivalrous enemies, that is at first glance the awfulness of war, but at the same time its greatness also …
If we pursue this idea further we recognize that war, with all its sternness and roughness, also weaves a bond of love between men, since here all class distinctions vanish, and the risk of death knits man to man.20
A great deal of evidence supports the Prussian thinker’s claims about the bonds between men. In all armies the story was the same.21 The heroic rhetoric of 1914 did not survive the horrors of modern warfare, but the bonding of comrades remained to provide the emotional sustenance which allowed men to endure.
In his celebrated history of World War I John Keegan observed that men whom the trenches ‘cast into intimacy entered into bonds of mutual dependency and sacrifice of self stronger than any of the friendships made in peace and better times’.22 There is no doubt about the importance of mateship in the AIF. But the mistake is to present mateship as something inimitably, even uniquely Australian. Even the word ‘mate’ was commonly in use in contemporary Britain. As early as 1914 the liberal scholar Gilbert Murray was celebrating the fact that the mateship common among ‘working men’ was becoming more general. ‘The ice between man and man is broken now’ he announced, ‘we are now a band of brothers standing side by side’.23 The German cavalry officer Rudolph Binding similarly wrote of the sense of comradeship he experienced at the outbreak of war because men:
were equal. No-one wished to count for more than anyone else. On the streets and avenues men looked each other in the eye and rejoiced in their togetherness.24
The pacifist rejoinder
War, then, was on the mind of the Western world in the years before 1914. But many people devoted their energies to opposing militarism and supporting the powerful international peace movement. The jurist TJ Lawrence observed:
Among the most extraordinary phenomena of modern times we may reckon the simultaneous growth of the material preparations for warfare and a sentiment of horror and reprobation of war. Both are apparent all over the civilized world.25
Peace activists looked with hope to the International Peace Congresses held at the Hague in 1899 and 1907. Much debate took place about the future role of international law and the use of mediation to settle disputes between nations. Captains of industry like Andrew Carnegie and Alfred Nobel invested in peace. The Nobel Peace Prize was inaugurated in 1901. The peace movement in Britain was energised by opposition to the Boer War which drew in many of the most prominent liberal intellectuals and politicians. The National Peace Council brought together assorted political, religious and industrial organisations which met at national congresses at Bristol in 1905 and Cardiff in 1909. Activity peaked at the time of the Universal Peace Congress in London in the summer of 1908.26 The Australian peace movement had links with comparable bodies in Britain, but it was unable to exert an equal measure of influence on public life.
Pacifists drew inspiration from many, and often contradictory, sources. They attacked contemporary militarism on many fronts. Perhaps the most enduring was the objective assessment of the likely cost of prolonged war fought with modern weapons. The most prophetic and most chilling was the work of the Polish industrialist IS Bloch whose book Is War Now Possible was published in England in 1899. A powerful corrective to romanticism about war, Bloch argued with technical expertise and dark foreboding that modern war would be prolonged and immensely destructive. He correctly foresaw that the firepower of modern armies would lead to the stalemate of the Western Front and the enormous loss of life among any formations caught in no-man’s land. It was a message that many ignored. The English journalist Norman Angell provided the peace movement with a powerful and immensely popular book called The Great Illusion first published in 1909 and subsequently reprinted many times. Angell argued that war made no sense among the great powers whose economies were closely integrated and mutually dependent and, like Bloch, he pointed out in detail the enormous damage which would result from a major war in Europe.
Running parallel with the warnings about the likely consequences of war, were attacks on the premises which underpinned much of the militarist literature. Popular Social Darwinism was turned on its head. War, it was argued, did not ensure the survival of the fittest but their destruction, leaving the feeble and the unfit to propagate the next generation. The American pacifist and scholar David Starr Jordan observed in 1915 that:
The certainty that war leads towards racial decadence by the obliteration of the most virile elements these being thereby left unrepresented in heredity, is becoming widely accepted as the crucial argument against the war system of the world …27
And the natural world did not provide evidence of conflict and killing within species but on the contrary those animals which co-operated were more likely to survive. Angell argued that the natural course for man was to establish the means for future co-operation and that the true struggle was with the natural environment not with each other.
The veneration of military heroism was also challenged along with the related claim that nations benefitted by war. The radical English scholar JA Hobson decried the ‘false philosophy of history’ which claimed support from ‘misapplied biology’ and had,
imposed on a large semi-educated public the belief that a military and commercial struggle for existence and for predominance is a wholesome necessity in national life.28
Hobson called for Britain to direct a larger share of her ‘thought, feeling and activity’ to those works of internal development which were the ‘wholesome food of patriotism’.29 Fellow scholar GP Gooch decried the exaltation of military achievement and the ‘relative disparagement of the more humdrum pursuits of civil life’. These were common sentiments at the time. Gooch also called into question the ‘glorification of physical courage revealed in
war’ arguing that military courage was, in itself ‘no surety for moral excellence’ and it often existed in company ‘with utter moral degradation’.30
The American pacifist General Hiram Chittenden, responding to writers who lauded military heroism, attacked what he called the ‘warped conception’ of true courage and heroism. He thought there was no more virtue in dying on the battlefield than in any other circumstance. ‘What makes a man go into Battle?’ he asked rhetorically. He thought it was seldom personal courage or patriotic fervour, observing that soldiers,
must obey orders under severe penalties; their pride helps them for they hate to be called cowards and when the strife is on fear vanishes in the excitement and wild passion of the moment. Men dying thus have no special claim to virtue. Each passing day calls forth, in the line of common duty acts of true heroism … which entitle the actors to recognition as high and lasting as that accorded to the noblest deeds of war. It is a perversion of justice to hold in light esteem, as the world commonly does, the humble heroes of daily life and laud to the skies the heroes of camp and battlefield.31
A central concept that came under pacifist attack was the proposal that war made nations and made them great. ‘Historically’, LC Jane argued, ‘it is idle to suggest that the mere fact of fighting … has any beneficial effect upon national character’. Rather war called into vigorous life, ‘the more degraded instincts of mankind’.32 Angell directly addressed his many contemporaries who sang the praises of war as ‘a valuable school of morals’. Did they believe ultimately that war of itself was desirable? Would they, he demanded to know, ‘urge going to war unnecessarily or unjustly merely because it is good for us?’33 But there were even more uncompromising voices than Angell’s. DS Jordan declared in 1915 that murder remained murder even when done ‘on a gigantic scale under the sanction of the state and the blessing of the church’.34 He was writing before his country entered the war. Englishman George Bernard Shaw penned a similar passage at the height of the conflict on the Western Front: