The Funeral Should Honour the Soldier

 The media relishes a military funeral. The last rites of any Australian now dying abroad on active service will almost certainly be reported in the newspapers, usually with pictures. The crackle of the firing party’s volley across the grave, the bugle’s fading notes, are now almost television clichés. A nation’s proper tribute to a fallen soldier, the private grief of loved ones—these indeed are delicate matters, and the decency and seemliness of every formality touching them should command the respect of Australians as a whole. But have we got it right?

Over the two hundred years that Australian forces have served abroad, our fallen have been buried on (or near) the field of battle. About five hundred Australian soldiers died in South Africa in the Boer War. In Europe, our Great War dead lie in their thousands in France and Belgium— far from home but remembered with honour, as recent ceremonies of renewal movingly showed at Villers-Bretonneux and Fromelles. Our dead from the Second World War encircle the globe, beginning just off our northern coast where, for example, beautiful war cemeteries at Port Moresby and at Lae extend their quiet ranks of headstones or tablets. The Korean War kept some three hundred men behind, and Vietnam about four hundred.

Yet Australians were always eager to erect memorials also at home. In his remarkable book Sacred Places, historian Ken Inglis has described them, right down to the “single Digger statue” in the smallest country hamlets.

Nowadays we repatriate our soldiers’ remains, and they lie in Australian soil. That change in itself is so fundamental that perhaps we should re-examine the whole process, to ensure that it properly portrays a nation’s honour to its sacrificial dead, that it raises a memorial recording their individual identities, and offers comfort to their families.

Apart from Paul Keating’s theatrical reburial in Canberra of a Great War “unknown soldier” plucked from his mates in France, I had known of but one exception to the old rule of “bury him where he fell”. Towards the end of the Second World War I was posted as an instructor to an army school which was housed in the grounds of the Royal Military College, Duntroon. Strolling one day for exercise around a gentle hillside overlooking the college campus, I came with astonishment upon a single massive grave of austere design. The low tombstone was surmounted by an immense bronze funerary sword, laid, as it were, along the body’s length. The inscription told me that here lay Major General William Throsby Bridges. He was the founding Commandant of the Military College, and first commander of the AIF in the First World War. (It was he who created the title “Australian Imperial Force”, a name proudly revived in the Second World War.) Bridges led the Australians ashore at Gallipoli in April 1915 and (always courageous in his frequent front-line visits) was shot by a Turkish sniper on May 15. He died three days later and (after temporary interment in Alexandria) his body was brought home to Duntroon.

Bridges was certainly an outstanding military figure in the earliest days of Australian Federation, but did that entitle him to his solo distinction of repatriation? Could this have been merely an expression of class-consciousness and rank? Surely, under the majestic equality of death in battle, even Private Bill Smith, AIF, might have been a candidate?

Last week I lunched with a veteran mate. Older than me, he had passed through Duntroon and was already a serving officer when the Second World War began. I asked his thoughts about Bridges. In rough paraphrase (after a really good lunch, who of us can recall exactly what was said?) this was his answer: “The decision to bury Bridges there was brilliant. Now as a tutelary spirit, he continued in death to survey the college he had sternly commanded during his life. He was a brave leader of troops in battle. The mere sense that he was still there, up on the hill, was a fine influence on the standards and traditions of the College he had founded in 1911.”

Military ceremony attracts the interest (the self-interest) of politicians as keenly as a dead cat attracts flies: might there be a photo-op in this for ME? Paul Keating’s prime ministerial preening at the “unknown soldier” re-interment, and his prostration on the earth at Kokoda remain two celebrated exercises in the emetic art, and Australia’s national dignity should never have to suffer such again.

Although conservative governments have avoided the vaudevillean excesses of Keating, their record is not spotless. If my memory is right, it was under John Howard that we began to see prime ministers officiating on occasions such as “welcome home” parades of contingents returning from a tour of duty overseas. This, surely, was a slight to the troops. They had sworn to defend their country, accepting their own possible death as part of their package. They were entitled to be welcomed back by our head of state—the Governor-General—at that time the exemplary Major General Michael Jeffery.

A prime minister, however good, is but the passing creature of a fickle electorate, and sometimes even less than that: he may be merely an individual detested but endured for an uncertain period, while his treacherous cabinet colleagues ponder the tactical moment for sticking in the stiletto. I had from time to time the uncomfortable feeling that General Jeffery and his high office were being shouldered disrespectfully aside.

At the recent military funeral of the seventeenth Australian fatal casualty of the Afghanistan campaign, the television cameras showed Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott seated side by side, exchanging a tight-lipped confidence. Now, I am willing to believe that the hearts of both of them, in a general way, absolutely overflow with generous human sympathy. (Abbott, I know, has at some philosophical depth pondered the difficult moral and ethical problems of waging war.) But—let’s face it—both were there for the photo opportunity, and for any trifling advantage they could squeeze from it for their party. By the time this issue of Quadrant is published, one or other of them will almost certainly be prime minister; what I saw on television was less a tribute to a dead soldier than an effort to “make it”.

The pollution of politics will inevitably hang increasingly over our new “at home” military funerals, and the true significance of a solemn rite will be degraded. At the very least, a strict official protocol should enforce the rule of propriety that public military occasions should be presided over only by the Governor-General, or by her representative. Politicians who are by private feeling moved to attend should always be accommodated with a seat—in the back row.

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In Quadrant of last June, unable to find a full text of Ogden Nash’s famous poem “The Four Bastards”, I appealed to any reader who might be able to supply it. With amazing speed—even before my next monthly article was in proof—three responses brought in just what I needed, and I was able to thank each sender by name in the July-August issue. Many others have followed, including (beat this!) the sheet music for a sung version. I have drawn three conclusions, all heartwarming: that Ogden Nash’s fame remains bright; that “out there” in the real wide world, quite a lot of indulgent people read my articles; that Quadrant’s readership includes many very kind people. Thank you all.