Our Task of Remembrance

History is a strange book.

From 1853 to 1856 the British and the French empires, allied with the Ottoman Turks, fought the Crimean War against the Russian empire of Tsar Nicholas.

Matthew Arnold’s great poem “Dover Beach” was first formed in the early 1850s but not published until 1867. It is not “about the Crimean War” nor is it simply “about” the ancient Peloponnesian War that it is said to reference. But Arnold’s poem is about his present time, a sense of the age, and the “we” of the third-last line includes us easily in its scope. It ends: 

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. 

From Dover to France is about thirty kilometres but it has been a great gulf of historical difference. Forty years before the Crimean War, the British, and German entities like Prussia, were allies with Russia and other European nations against Napoleonic France. By 1914, the alliances change again, with Prussia and Turkey, both former allies, now the foe, and France, an enemy so often in previous centuries, now an ally, as it will be in the Second World War.

The changing and re-changing of alliances gives one sense to Arnold’s line, “Where ignorant armies clash by night”. Friends and allies of one decade reverse roles in another, and then reverse them again.

St Paul’s College and Sydney University were founded in the context of that Crimean War in which 800,000 died. Eighty per cent of them died from cholera. The Crimea witnessed an increasingly industrial war machine—the literal machine—rifles with a thousand-yard range, fifty-gram bullets that smashed bones, bigger high-explosive mortars and field guns, steamships immune to wind, railways built to deliver wagon loads of shells to sustain continuous rates of fire.

The First World War would push the machinery of war to a further extreme, which has since been taken to the unthinkable extremity. The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz prophesied this in 1830 and in a way opens up the descriptive sciences of an apocalypse no longer mythical or in the realm of the imagination, but expressed in the darkening night of history.

In New South Wales in 1856, the Ottoman Turks were an ally, a strange fact in the long history of European strange facts. Who for instance remembers Vienna and wonders what the world would be like if it were an Islamic city and had been so for hundreds of years? Or, apart from the Tsar, who remembered 1453?

The Tsar was in part on a holy crusade referencing that loss of Constantinople from the Greek-speaking Christians, and in which Christian realm Gallipoli would once have lain. The imperial and “Christian” West sided with Islamic Turkey against the Tsar.

So, in 1915, the Anzacs of the Australian Imperial Forces came ashore against former allies of noble cause, the Turks, at Gallipoli Cove.

An Archbishop of Melbourne (Archbishop F.W. Head) said around 1930, “Here in Australia we are part of the great British Empire and it’s our privilege to sustain that Empire, keep it Christian and preferably Church of England.” No Australian archbishop could say that today. The empire does not exist, the Commonwealth of Nations is a “light touch successor”, Christianity within the Euro­zone is one of the questions rather than an automatic answer, and “the Church of England hath no authority in this realm of Australia”.

It is a different world. We hear the term “AIF”, but have to imagine that Australian soldiers were designated part of an imperial force. The “I” was for Imperial and empire was the thing. We are more familiar with AFL, and it is said that the minute’s silence before the big match of the day makes it the largest Anzac Day service. 

To some extent, Australians are suspicious of big-picture claims. Some may differ and say we are a gullible and swayable people. But empire is gone, the Commonwealth is kind of good idea but distant, and as for America, despite media orientation and “mate status”, beyond a certain point the jury remains as suspicious as it was of “all the way with LBJ”. Manning Clark said that Phar Lap, the surf at Bondi and Bradman’s scores were more deeply in the psyche—and it is perhaps in that direction that we are “swayed”.

Perhaps then on Anzac Day we see in Australia residual emphasis on individual heroism or on the Australian individual who outperforms simply because she or he imagines that she or he is in some way innately just better than others on the larger stage, or “more willing just to go and do what needs to be done”. But no “big-picture grand themes” really remain to inform the social body as it considers the issues of war in the darkling book of history.

Perhaps for those reasons the media now encourages the heroic god-like warrior status of Anzacs and other war dead. But were they not in some way “just blokes”?

Now we return readily to primal themes of blood sacrifice, but as someone has said, “When they come asking for blood sacrifice you must ask the name of the god calling for it.”

Many individual Australians are aggressively comfortable in their own skin, as “individual”. Perhaps this skin comfort explains in part the new custom of the expansive tattoo as the new sign for the Aussie sporting and military style—something we have not really seen before. In the past, the tattoo distinguished between the primitive and the modern.

Tattoos may compress and condense meaning from the social body (empire, nation, church) to realms of meaning in the personal or individual body: “My body my life.”

In a Christian church service on Anzac Day what is “the residual body of Christ” to say and do? At Easter, Jesus’s body bore marks of suffering as the literal imprint of an unjust trial and execution, after brutalisation and thuggery at the hands of the Pax Romana military. It was in that abused body that he rose from the dead, the texts tell us. It placed him amongst the company of the suffering abused. St Paul also said, “I bear in my own body the marks of Jesus”—in effect the same wounds.

The point in part is to enable a world informed by it to move on and to see warfare cease or become rare, to see its glory as and terminating, to see the raised Christ of Easter as the advocate for an order of a different kind. But the strange book of history may give the lie to that hope. It seems to have done so fairly regularly and perhaps it will all the way out to the apocalypse.

The challenge to us? We are not to forget our war dead, nor the Easter claims, nor those who serve today.

Today is not actually about us, of course. Not about me, nor you, not about any one person here in chapel. We are not Narcissus looking into a pool of war dead and seeing only our own reflection or our own glory. Today is about them, the war dead and war injured, and about the inherent tragedy and indelible losses of war, of generations that ended or never were.

It is then not such a great challenge to us to walk respectfully from one end of town to the other, enjoying the privilege of the free, perhaps raising a respectful glass in honour of the named individuals of this college at some point. Perhaps we feel or imagine the gaze of our forebears upon us, and can bear that.

Can we be happy in that? Not really.

Some things should not be left hidden in texts or in the past, and must be brought out and gazed at.

On the memorial wall we read the ancient Horace’s words, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”—sweet and proper it is to die for one’s country. The soldier Wilfred Owen reworked this in his First World War poem of that name, written shortly before his death. He re-registers that ancient slogan in a way we can or must also hear: 

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores in innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori. 

Let us remember them.

This is an edited version of an address Ivan Head, the Warden of St Paul’s College at the University of Sydney, gave at the College Chapel on Anzac Day.