Another ANZAC Day (April 25) already fades into memory as I contemplate its powerful influence not only on our Australian history but on a much broader stage.
When I was a boy in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I used to watch the Sydney parade every year, from start to finish.
I must have been an odd sort of kid because I always found it intensely moving. Men and women in their tens of thousands from World War II dominated the day—they were still in the prime of life, a few even then in their 30s.
There was also a solid contingent of World War I men, too, getting on in years, of course, but still fairly vigorous. And there were also touchingly small groups of very old men who had served in the Boer War (1899–1902).
But time, like an ever-flowing stream, moves inexorably on, and most of those old timers have run their course and passed to their rest.
Historic Battles Through Time
The Greek historian Herodotus tells this story about Xerxes, the king of the Persians, who invaded Greece using his famous bridge of boats across the Hellespont:“Xerxes took his seat on [a throne of white marble] and gazed upon all his land forces and all his ships. ‘There came upon me,’ said he, ‘a sudden pity, when I thought of the shortness of man’s life, and considered that of all this host, so numerous as it is, not one will be alive when a hundred years are gone by.’”Lord Byron took up that story at its final stage. Against all expectations, the Persian fleet was utterly routed, and before Xerxes’ very eyes and in the sight of most of the population of Athens, his once-proud fleet was annihilated just a year later at the Battle of Salamis (480 BC):
A king sat on the rocky brow Which looks o’er sea-born Salamis; And ships, by thousands, lay below, And men in nations—all were his! He counted them at break of day— And when the sun set, where were they?The might of Persia was arrayed in all its splendour when the sun rose, but by dusk, their hopes were dashed and their dreams of victory in tatters.
It’s quite a story and still immensely stirring, even though those events took place two and a half millennia ago.
For us, in Australia, they hold a special poignancy because while the Greeks called it Hellespont, we now call this region the Dardanelles or the Straits of Gallipoli.
The story neither starts nor ends with Xerxes and Gallipoli. Besides that narrow sea passage that is the boundary between Europe and Asia lie the ruins of Troy, where history and myth are blended in the great epic poems of Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, the oldest and perhaps the noblest creations of the literature of Europe.
Nearby too, is the great city, once known as Byzantium but later as Constantinople or Istanbul, where the Roman Empire survived till 1453, when it finally collapsed under the forces of Islam.
Not much history is taught nowadays, so few can appreciate the significance of the fact that Rome’s power endured throughout an enormous span of history from its foundation in 753 BC to the fall of Constantinople (which had become the capital of the Roman Empire) more than 2,000 years later.
Nor is it easy for us today to grasp the impact of that fall on the outlook of the peoples of Western Europe.
Fleeing Greek scholars brought the Greek language and priceless treasures of Greek literature to Western Europe, many of which had previously been unknown or known only by rumour.
Celebrating Diamonds Refined Through Failure and Hardship
Against the whole backdrop of history, our own role as a nation in the Gallipoli campaign is just a blink of an eye ago.All the soldiers who took part have passed away as surely as the troops of Xerxes, yet their memory is still fresh and young.
Their names are listed on war memorials throughout the country, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren still turn up each year to pay their respects at cenotaphs and ceremonies. The wonder is that so many who attend are both young and proud of the great tradition.
Gallipoli was the first major amphibious operation in modern warfare. But we are not jingoists—Gallipoli was a failed campaign, though as a strategy, it was bold and ambitious and clever in its planning.
If it had succeeded, it would almost certainly have shortened the Great War and eased the terrible pressure on the trenches of the Western Front.
But it failed for a wide variety of reasons, and today we celebrate it as the refining fire in which so many elements of our nation’s spirit were forged.
Not just our nation’s but New Zealand’s as well, as the very term ANZAC so neatly records.
Britain and France and the Gurkhas were involved in the bitter fighting, too, a fact often overlooked: six Victorian Crosses were won, before breakfast, by members of the Lancashire Fusiliers on the first day of the Gallipoli Campaign!
All these Commonwealth heroes were well matched by a chivalrous enemy: the Turks, honourable and noble, suffered terribly too.
Surely nobody in the history of warfare ever spoke more generous words over the bodies of the slain than did the Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk: “Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.”
