"Oh captain, my captain': Haig and Churchill, war leaders.

Making up quotations to suit yourself is not new.  One of the most popular fauxtations of WWI, the British army being lions led by donkeys, was created by the man who “quoted” it, British historian Alan Clark. He seems to have adapted it from other sources, about other wars about other armies, to use in his book, The Donkeys, about British military offencives during the war. As an image, it was picked up by the creators of Oh what a lovely war,  which depicted British generals as incompetant at best, and callous butchers at worst. This image in popular culture was still in use in Blackadder goes forth, which had General Melchett as incompetant and callous, and had Haig literally throw (model) soldiers into a bin while planning an attack.

But popular culture may not be your best guide to history. A shock, I know. Douglas  Haig’s reputation

went from respected in the aftermath of the war, until his relatively early death in 1928, through to villainy in the Sixties, as part of the antiwar movement of the time, to a more balanced and nuanced rehabilitation more recently. No-one is claiming he never set a foot wrong, or did not make decisions that cost thousands of men’s lives needlessly, but his reputation as unimaginative, unfeeling, and incompetant is nevertheless undeserved. Indeed one of his earliest critics, who criticised him during the war, was Winston Churchill. Writing his history of World War One afterwards, he was forced to admit, given the circumstances and resources available to Haig, Churchill’s respect for him grew.   

Water Reid’s Douglas Haig: Architect of victory is part of the move to redress this imbalance. Reid does not argue Haig was the best General available to the British, but he argues he was the best Commander in Chief, a role that demands much in administration and organisation and human resources, as well as military concerns. Haig oversaw an increase in his army from three hundred thousand to three million men (including soldiers from the Empire) and a revolution in military technology in the same time that has never been equalled. Far from being unimaginative or staid in tactics, he increased the engineering corps’ experimental section from by a factor of seventeen and was enthusiastic to introduce new weapons such as tanks that would help his soldiers. No other man at the time had this capability. By war’s end, the British army was the most efficient army on earth, bringing together infantry, armour, artillery and air support together, using tactics painfully learned, and in an attack that drove the German army from the centre of France back to the German border. Other experts, generals, politicians, expected the war would last until 1919. Haig was the only one, literally, who saw how the war could end in 1918, and was central to making it happen.

Churchil of course was Prime Minister of Great Britain in WWII. By this stage he was a veteran of three wars, including the First World War. He was a man of almost indominatable courage, imagination and energy. It would not be an exaggeration I think to say that Britain would have lost the Second World War without him. And if Britain had lost, sought peace with the Nazi regime, how would the attack on Russia have gone then, with a full German army concentrated on one side, and an entirely

unsupported USSR on the other? For all of the astonishing tenacity and courage of the Russian soldier, and their leaders’ disregard for their welfare, the modern world would be very different.

Carol D’Este’s book Warlord: a life of Winston Churchill at war 1874 - 1945, is a study of Churchill as a warrior both on the field and as a leader of a warring nation.  As a leader Churchill was responsible for some dreadful decisions that cost many men their lives such as the attacks on Gallipoli, Norway, and Greece. Yet no-one else could have done what he did, invigorated the British nation to stand and fight when nearly all hope was gone, and their allies defeated.  In his failures were elements of his greatness – imagination, the search for a bold stroke, his unwilliness to do nothing when danger was present. He was a flawed leader, and D’Este doesn’t pretend otherwise but he was a great man, and in the right place at the right time.

It is one of the ironies of Churchill’s life that he was to oversee the transition from Empire to a small nation on the second tier. By allying with the US and the USSR, he ensured the defeat of Nazi Germany but he also brought in the next generation of great powers. Churchill was central to the war effort up to 1941. Afterwards he was not, and he knew it. He still made his presense felt, and had his influence and of course his wonderful oratory, but Britain’s day as a world power was waning, and all he could do was eulogise the sunset.

Churchill knew war personally, had seen the massacre at Omdurman, (which De’Este sees as the beginning of the war between the Muslim and the West still going on today) and fought in the trenches in France. And yet he gloried in battle, and even in his sixties, leading the nation, yearned to grapple with the enemy personally. Robert E Lee said it, but Churchill knew what he meant: “It is well that war is so terrible, else we shoud grow too fond of it.” This conundrum, love of battle and awareness of it’s horrors also fed into Churchill’s leadership.

Churchill knew something else. He may have forgotten it in the attack on Italy but he knew it. Going to war means you have to know what you are fighting for, and you have to go all in or not at all – “war to the knife”. As we grapple with the Middle East, this is worth remembering for all our leaders.

Oh enough war. I have a book on octopuses now.

'Fathers and Sons' Hear me roar: The story of a stay-at-home dad.

Most people don’t like going to the dentist. Me, I’m fine. It’s not a hobby or anything but it’s not a fear I have to conquer either. And this is due to my childhood dentist, Mr Roberston (Later it on it was more chummy and I called him ‘Col’.) He and my father, a GP,  worked in the same building and shared the waiting room. He would make jokes, pretend that the sight of teeth made him sing, and generally made going to the dentist, if not something to be looked forward to, at least something that could be fun.

His son Ben went to school with me.  Apart from the fact our fathers worked in the same building, (so did we, come to think of it) we didn’t have much in common. Ben was a good sportsman and I was not, always a major division in a private boys school, and to the best of my recollection, we didn’t have any of the same classes. So while Ben and I had nothing against each other, we never became good friends either.

I’ve just read Ben’s book Hear me roar: The story of a stay-at-home dad. I probably came at this book from the wrong angle. I’d heard that Col ‘didn’t come out too good’ in this book, so I was reading mainly for that story. But the main thrust is Ben’s experiences when he suspended his journalism career to become the stay-at-home parent, first with one, then two sons, and the effect it has on his life and his marriage. It’s a journey that takes him from the euphoria of new fatherhood through to depression and all stages in between.

He’s also worried about the effect he has on his children. And this is where Col comes in. As a parent, it turns out, my funny childhood dentist was angry, violent, foul-mouthed and deeply unpleasant for his wife and children to live with. When the book begins, he is merely a bad example for Ben to react against as his own children take him to his limits, as children do. But when his estranged father rings him and announces he is dying with cancer, Ben chooses to go visit him, and resume their difficult relationship.

This is the central section of the book and for me the strongest. But as I say, I was reading from the

wrong angle. Those who are parents might connect as strongly or more so with the stories of the challenges and satisfactions of raising children. I found all that entertaining, written with journalistic clarity and humour. But it was Ben’s relationship with his father, and how it plays on his mind, that held me.

This is no ‘Daddy Dearest’. Ben forces himself to remember the good times, when his father was the father he wanted. There is one incident when he is explicity trying to make his son feel as safe and protected as his father made him feel at a similar time. And he knows his father was a good provider and ensured his childen lacked nothing material. But it seems it was like how a friend of mine described having an alcoholic parent – you never knew which parent you were coming home to. I cannot imagine what that was like. The older I get, the luckier I realise I’ve been.

And it made me think. What Ben is talking about is, in the main, a common experience for stay-at-home mothers. I’ve always been sympathetic to parents but obviously I have no idea of the experience. And I begin to get some idea of the vehemence behind my mother’s resentment every time an official form compelled her to say she didn’t have a job.

One of Ben’s mantras as a parent is I’m not going to be like him, which helps him contain his anger and frustration. Studies tell us the most abused children do not become abusers themselves, becaust they cannot imagine doing to others what was done to them. Ben is a good example of that. In the end, I believe, no matter our background, we all choose who we are.

And so it turns out I didn't know my childhood dentist at all well. But I do remember him as a man in a mask. It's heavy-handed imagery I suppose but not at all inaccurate.

"To the ends of the earth" Hunting Evil

I just finished watching an episode of the new BBC series of Father Brown. (Spoiler alert). The victim it turns out was a Nazi killer and the criminal one whose family he killed. Both spend time dressed as a Catholic priest. Escaped Nazis in England? The Catholic Church as a haven for killers? Both are true, as detailed by Guy Webster in his excellent Hunting Evil: How the Nazi war criminals escaped and the hunt to bring them to justice.

I am fascinated with Nazi Germany. A cultured highly educated nation, whose leaders appreciated art, poetry and classical music were between them responsible for one of the greatest horrors ever perpetrated upon by one set of human beings upon another. World War Two was bad enough, but the Holocaust, the systematic and deliberate attempt to wipe a group of people to the last individual off the earth was unprecedented and so far unreplicated. There have been other genocides but none so deliberate and priortised. It has been argued if the Nazis were not so anti-Semitic, the released resources could have seen them win the war. In other words, the top priority of Nazi Germany, as they ran a country and a war, was to kill every Jew on the planet. To do this, they sacrificed both the country and the war.

The full extent of the crimes against humanity took a long time, years, decades in some cases, to become apparent, in part due to their extent. Even so, during the war, the Allies declared that they would hunt the criminals to the ends of the earth. In practice, once Germany was defeated, priorities changed. No-one will be surprised to find that counties such as Argentina, Syria and Paraguay were happy to forget about Nazi atrocities as it suited them. It is a little more startling to find Britain, the United States, France and Soviet Russia, doing the same.

In his introduction, Webster says he considered changing his title to ‘Hunting Evil  - or not.’ Once the Second World War was over, priorities changed. The Allies were now split, the Communists trying to overthrow the West and vice versa. This was their top priority, and if it meant using Nazi war criminals for their expertise in espionage and knowledge of the other counties, they would do so.  Which is not to say there were not other parts of the same governments trying to bring Nazi criminals, often the same individuals, to justice. But the necessary resources of personnel and money were never made available. People driven by a sense of justice were left dangling.

Speak of Nazi hunting and Simon Wiesenthal comes to mind.  For decades he was the face of trying tobring justice to those who had escaped. Sadly, as Walters shows, many of his achievments, the dramatic incidents in his life, were the stuff of exaggeration, even fantasy. His organisation claimed to have captured over a 1000 Nazis. In truth, they captured ten, and the information they provided to other organisations was often little more than rumour. They did give some support to the capture of Eichmann, more to the capture of Stangl, but even then Wiestenthal exaggerated, eventually putting himself in a wrestle with Eichmann in Argentina. But for all his faults he did keep the issue in the world’s eye, and made sure that time would not erase the memory of the crimes.

Nor was he alone in his misinformation about Nazi escapees. In the 80s, the US and Israelis finally put some real effort and money into hunting down Josef Mengele. Wiesenthal gave them information Mengele was here, now here, now here. But Mengele was already dead and buried. The money and effort that they put in went to finding a four-foot deep grave in a Paraguayan jungle.

Other myths get busted here too, notably ODESSA, the organisation that ran Nazis out of Europe and into safe havens. It probably never existed, certainly not as the professional rich organisation in Frederic Forsyth’s book. Escape groups did exist but were small, ad hoc, and more in the nature of mates helping mates. The notorious Bishop Hudal, the priest who hid and aided many Nazis as they went through Rome was oddly motivated by what sounds like Marxists ideals: the war was a conflict between two economic systems and the actions of individual soldiers should not be cause for their punishment. Among the people helped to escape was Franz Stangl, later convicted for co-reponsibility for 800 000 deaths. It is entirely possible that Hudal did not know who Stangl was, or what he had done. Not many people did. By the time Stangl was publicly identified as the commandant of Treblinka and Sobibor, he was already in Brazil.

Stangl never changed his name. His wife sent mail back home to Austria, telling their friends where they were. They registered with the Austrian embassy. Yet even when his crimes became apparent, his friends did not betray them and the government, it seems, did not even run a check through their files. He was arrested finally in 1967. Even Mengele registered at a West German embassy, giving his real name and address. This is the most disturbing aspect of this book, the widespread lack of will from governments, churches and individuals, to do anything. And such will as existed is fading. We have had other wars, other attrocities. Do we try and bring justice? Or do we try to use moral relativism to reduce our responsibility to do something, as was attemped by Klaus Barbie’s defence lawyer? Or do we wait till the criminals are old or dead, and say, no matter how monstrous their crime, ‘it was all so long ago, it’s just not worth it’?

I have a theory why we are so ready to call someone like George Bush Jr or John Howard a Hitler, though the comparison is ludicrous. It comforts us to think that if someone like Hitler were to come along again, we would be among those who would resist him. But the truth is, most people in Germany, even if they did not agree with the Nazis (they never won an election outright) went along. It took extraordinary people to resist.  We are the 99%, or so we’ve been told lately. 99% went along. And given the chance to punish the Nazis, after a brief outburst of justice, most people slung it into the ‘too hard’ basket. The Nazis fascinate because they are humanity at its worst.  And the reactions of the non-Nazis, German, Austrian, and from every other country, could have been ours. I don’t know I would have resisted. And that thought terrifies me.

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"Where's Eddie?" - Eddie and the Cruisers

Some excellent films have been made of B-grade novels, while some truly terrible films have come from excellent novels.  Truffaut said something like a work of genius is an idea that has found its ideal form of expression. Which may explain why good novels make average films and vice versa.

Eddie and the Cruisers was a failure at the box office but has become something of a cult classic. My brother introduced me to it many years ago. It features Michael Pare as Eddie Wilson, a combination of Jim Morrison, young Elvis Presely and Brian Wilson, and Tom Berenger as Frank Ridgeway, or Wordman, a college kid who ends up the band’s lyricist and keyboard player. After the Cruisers hit the big time with their first album, Eddie is killed in a car crash. The story takes place two decades later, when interest in the Cruisers is revived and someone is tracking down Eddie’s lost tapes, the rumoured second album, and isn’t afraid to kill to get them. It’s a good movie and the music is good even if it rather sounds like what Bruce Springsteen was doing in the 80s rather than rock of the 1960s. (Do us all a favour and avoid the sequel, Eddie and the Crusiers II: Eddie lives! That exclamation mark is a shriek of disappointment.)

I was surprised the other day to walk into a library and see a new edition of the novel, by P F Kluge, sitting on the shelves. One, I didn’t know it was a novel and two, it seemed a bit odd to bring it back. So I borrowed it and have come back to tell you all about it.  It’s not a bad read. The movie kept pretty close to the story, although they have softened it somewhat. The novel is darker and more violent, but I think the scriptwriters made the right call there. I don’t think the tone of the novel and the stakes quite justify the violent ending of the novel, and suit better the pathetic villainy of the movie. But the novel is a loving tribute to the music and the power of the music of the early 1960s, and the terrible power of youthful dreams. The Maguffin of the lost tapes, with the surname, makes me fairly certain that Brian Wilson and the long lost Smile album form part of the inspiration for the Eddie Wilson character, while his sexy onstage persona and reaching for philosophical insight brings to mind the lost Jim Morrison. Perhaps it’s all a bit of anachronistic jumble of rock heroes but it seems to me that’s the nature of popular music, someone new who reminds you of someone else.

Anyway, I had an enjoyable few days reading the book and even ordered a copy to be sent to my brother for his birthday. If he hasn’t got it yet, and this is the first he knows about it – happy birthday AB!

'Warriors three' - The Collapse of the Soviet Union

Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, John Paul II: there are no finer names to get Lefty blood boiling. John O’Sullivan, a conservative writer, journalist, and editor and one-time advisor to Thatcher, finds all three admirable. But then that’s how it goes. One side’s heroes are another side’s villains and God forbid we should find anything admirable in our villains or disappointing in our heroes. Not that The President, The Pope and the Prime Minister: Three who changed the world is a hagiography. But it is certainly written from a conservative viewpoint.

Its main thrust is the part these three played in the collapse of the Soviet Union. There are those that will tell you the Soviet Union would have collapsed anyway. Oddly these are often the same people who were screaming at the policies that were brought in place to try and engender the collapse of the Soviet Union. These policies will never work! They’re dangerous! We’ll be at war before the USSR collapses! [USSR collapses] Oh well, that was always going to happen.

This is the argument used whenever someone we don’t like does something that is good; that was always going to happen, or as an alternative, oh anyone would have done the same in the same circumstances. God knows I’ve done it myself. But John O’Sullivan shows that the downfall of the Soviet Union was brought about in large part due to the change in direction at the Vatican, Downing Street and the White House when these ‘conservative’ leaders took quite radical turns.

It was Richard Nixon who engineered Détente, a policy of co-existence that was to ensure that the two

most powerful nations in the world would have no reason to go to war. But what this did, as writers and dissidents such as Natan Sharansky will tell you, was to trade the human rights of people living under the Soviet Union for international stability. Living in a Western democracy that now was under less threat, this probably seemed like a good deal. Living in a gulag, less so.

Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II refused to accept the Soviet Union as a fact of life. And this was quite a radical step. During Reagan’s presidency for example, Teddy Kennedy visited the USSR to advise them how to deal with Reagan. This was not done out of any traitorous leanings but because Kennedy, like so many, assumed the USSR was not going anywhere and so to antagonise them as Reagan was doing, was dangerous. It was sincerely held belief, and as it turns out, wrong.

John Paul knew what living under a Communist dictatorship was like, which drove his policy towards the Soviet Union. His visit to Poland in 1979, which O'Sullivan sees as a starting point, was greeted by thousands and thousands of his fellow Poles, giving them the knowledge that their unhappiness with their government was shared by millions of their fellow Poles. Between his speeches calling for free and just government and their sheer will and numbers, the Poles received strong moral support for their long and difficult campaign for freedom.

This was supported by political, military, economic and moral pressure from Britian and the US. Sullivan brings together many of the events of that time from 1978 through to showing the effect on the Cold War endgame, including the Falklands War, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the assasination attempts on all three of his main players. Some of the stories as played out in popular culture are revealed as having layers. For example, Reagan’s Star Wars Initiative as it was known was a controversial attempt to build defensive missile shield in outer space. This was portrayed at the time as as dangerous game of military-economic brinkmanship. Less well known was Regan’s repeated offers to the USSR to share the technology. If both sides had it, then they could both reduce their nuclear stockpile as it would not be much use. This offer was knocked back, more than once. Certainly I never knew this. Doubtless the element of risk was still there. But if O’Sullivan’s account is accurate, Reagan read the Soviets better than they read him.

 Of course it was not just these three people who brought about the change. From Lech Walena through to the thousands of politicians, workers, protesters and dissidents in many countries, most of whose names we will never know, there were many others, and their struggles and sacrifices were crucial. But their efforts would have been in vain without the support of these leaders showing it in practical terms on the world stage.

You can read of more critical accounts of this time - His Holiness by Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, for example - if you wish, and I don’t claim this book to be the final word. Any big topic like this requires wide reading. Nor, before anyone jumps and down, do I claim these three are beyond criticism. But it shook a few of my preconceptions of the time, particularly my view of Reagan, and that’s a good thing. If you only read to find writers you agree with, what’s the point of reading at all?

"You can't go home again." - The fourth book of Gormenghast

Some years ago when I was touring with a show to Melbourne, my friend Eugene Gilfedder and I were browsing in a second-hand-bookstore when he pointed out a book Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake and asked if I had ever read it. I said I hadn’t and he urged me to. The first book of the series was not there though so I didn’t buy it that day. When later I moved to Melbourne to live, I went to the same bookstore and bought the trilogy. And I’m glad I did. Thanks Eugene!

The current big buzz in fantasy is ‘Game of Thrones’ which also tells the story of old families. But whereas the Seven Kingdoms is a country in flux, to say the least, Gormenghast is a massive castle where the Groans and the people that serve them have lived in a manner unchanged for countless centuries. The protagonist, Titus Groan, is born to be the 77^th Earl of Groan, and live his life exactly as his ancestors did, dictated by rituals and tradition, the purpose of which have been lost in time.  Outside the castle, a small town surrounds the walls and beyond that, is forest. The world Peake creates is astonishing – gothic, baroque, fantastic without magic or dragons, and the characters are as vivid and memorable as any Dickens came up with. The language is rich and dense, like a thick woolen tapestry of exquisite design.

In the first book, Titus Groan, we follow the inhabitants of Gormenghast from the moment of Titus’ birth through to his ceremonial naming as heir seven months later. The creepy spine though this story is Steerpike, a young man working in the kitchen who connives and murders his way towards power and freedom.

The second book Gormenghast follows Titus from age seven to seventeen, and culminates in confrontation with Steerpike. Both are young men suffering under and fighting the weight of meaningless tradition. But Steerpike’s methods are underhand and violent, whereas Titus simply, at the end, walks out.

Which takes us into the third novel, Titus alone. This is often considered the least of the trilogy and I have to agree. Where we might have thought we were in a medieval castle somewhere, it turns out the world is much more modern. Outside Gormenghast is a steampunk world of cities and cars. Titus’ adventures here are episodic, and while the characters he meets are still memorable, the book never achieves the solid world of its predecessors. Peake himself was already suffering from the neurological diseases that would kill him in his fifties, so perhaps that affected his writing, or perhaps he was striking out in a new direction. The book it seems was never quite finished by Peake though, and that’s how it feels. Indeed, when the BBC made the television series in 2000, they only used the first two books.

Part of the problem is Titus himself. In Gormenghast he is surrounded by richly eccentric characters. Just their names gives you something of their flavour; his father Sepulchrave, his sister Fuchsia, the minister Flay, the cook Swelter, Dr Prunesquallor, Nanny Slag and Sourdust, the Master of Ritual, and on and on. Titus himself is something of a cypher, which works in the first two books but leaves him exposed in the third. Peake had intended two more novels in the sequence, Titus Awakes and Gormenghast revisited as their working titles. But early death, as I say, prevented that. So we are left with two excellent novels and third which though flawed is certainly worth your time in reading.

His widow, Maeve Gilmour, an artist in her own right, found some of Peake’s notes for his fourth planned novel, along with a few fragments of the opening chapter. From this, she wrote fourth Gormenghast novel, which continued Titus’ adventures in the outside world. Whether she ever intended this to be published, or whether she did it as a means of keeping a connection with her dead husband, we don’t know. But her granddaughter found the manuscript in the proverbial attic, and it was published in 2011 under Peake’s original title, Titus Awakes.

Sadly it’s not very good. Titus moves through this story without purpose, consciously letting himself drift where the tides of life take him. He doesn’t ever seem to be in that much danger, and never really in a situation where he cannot extricate himself without too much trouble. You can’t feel too much for this character or what happens to him.

The ending however is quite moving. Titus meets a man three times, in a hospice, in a monastery and finally on an island with his family. The man is clearly an artist and each time Titus meets him, he feels a deep connection with him. And each time, the man is healthier and happier than before. Clearly, even without knowing too much about him, this is Gilmour’s portrayal of her husband, his journey in reverse order to the one that led from Peake’s house on the island of Sark to the hospital where he died. In the end, Titus stays with the artist and his family on their island home. Whether Peake ever would have had Titus come home to Gormenghast, Gilmour did bring him home to his creator.

As a novel, it’s negligible. As an act of catharsis or connection for a grieving widow, it acquires an odd power. I’m glad I read it.

"What are they marching for?" Remembering ANZAC Day

In Australia, we have just marked ANZAC Day, which is our version of Memorial Day. We also mark Armistice Day in November, but ANZAC Day is our big one. It's a public holiday with dawn services, marches featuring veterans, their relatives and descendants and current serving men and women in major cities, special church services, and much drinking as the day goes on.

It is the anniversary of an attack on Turkey on the 25th of April 1915 which ended as a tremendous failure. ANZACs (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) as well as troops from Great Britain, Ireland, France, India and Canada managed to get ashore in the Dardanelles, but fierce defence from the Turkish troops kept them pinned on the shore, with the furtherest point achieved at Chunuk Bair by New Zealand soldiers. After eight months of bloody fighting all Allied troops withdrew.

Although British troops lost far more men than the ANZACs, for Australia, then just a little over fourteen years old, the campaign was of a far greater significance. For the first time since we became a nation, we sent troops overseas and they acquitted themselves not only well but heroically. The reputation of the Australian army was made in that campaign, with praise coming from British commanders as well as Turkish opponents.

Looked at this light, it's no mystery why ANZAC Day so quickly became such an important day. It was marked the very next year and by 1923 had became a holiday. In the 60s and 70s, with the anti-war protests of Vietnam, and WWI veterans becoming a dying breed, the march and the day was in danger of becoming obsolete. Since the 90s it has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity, and is recognised as a day of solemnity, thanking those that died in the service of their country, and recognising all the victims of war, be they in uniform, at home, or even belonging to the enemy. Still doesn't mean that old soldiers don't like a beer when they get together.

 So being popular, and involving war, the more progressive type has to find fault with it. The ANZAC myth has produced the ANZAC myth myth, which tells us just about every thing you know about ANZAC campaign and the day is wrong, ill-informed, propaganda and glorifying war. Po-faced pundits on television, having neglected to study history, ask in very serious voices provocative questions that only they dare to ask, not realising, had they studied history, those questions have been asked and answered before. History is another subject people don't feel the need to study to pronounce on it.

The reputation of the ANZAC soldier has been exaggerated, they say, blaming C E W Bean, the official war historian. But Bean's work is impeccably documented and the praise that came from ally and enemy real enough. What about the soldiers that ran, that turned away from the enemy? They are in there too, and in the large print. But the vast majority of soldiers fought well, so if the emphasis of our memorial is on them, we are only going with numbers. Maybe they did join for a lark, to get away from small towns and be with their friends. But when they were confronted with the reality of war, they met the challenge.

Like in many other areas of life, there seems to be an idea that focussing on the negative, the worst of people, the darkness is somehow more courageous, more real, than focussing on the positive. But we're kidding ourselves. There is a thing called the Parochialism of the Present, the belief that what is now is the best that has been. The ANZACs  challenge that idea to say the least. They provide an example of bravery and self-sacrifice that we, in our comfortable, rich, well-protected lives have never been called on to match. I pray God we never will be. But there is that thought, in our darker hours, that maybe we couldn't. And it's much easier to denigrate the example than to think that we won't match it. In the end, if all you know of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles is the ANZAC legend, where troops were ashore in an ill-

conceived plan badly carried out, fought bravely, suffered, earned the respect of their allies and their enemies before evacuating in a well-planned, well-performed operation, you've actually got a pretty good idea of what happened.

ANZAC Day marks the day when Australia went from a political idea constructed from votes and legislation to a nation on the world stage, and we use this day to remember all those who suffered in war then and since. If you want to pooh-pooh this day, go ahead. We live in a free country. 

PS: This entry was inspired in part by John Hirst's Sense and nonsense in Australian history, a collection of his essays from a career studying Australian history. It's worth checking out!