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| John A Lee in 1936. He lost his arm in the war. |
How exactly are we supposed to
honour the solemn Anzac imperative 'Lest We Forget'? After a century,
actual living memories of the so called 'Great War' no longer exist.
The thousands of dead New Zealanders and Australians who died on the
slopes of Gallipoli are represented by lists of names etched onto
memorials, black and white photos of young men wearing lemon squeezer
hats. Newspapers run hundreds of stories about individual soldiers
and how and where they died. Families are shown holding pictures of
their relatives from 100 years ago, medals are proudly displayed.
Thousands of people will wear red poppies and attend dawn services
on April 25th in order to attempt to honour the memory of
the dead.
There is a huge amount of emotion and a sense of ritual in these
rites of remembrance. Even though I am deeply critical of the entire
notion of 'remembrance' and its de-politicised practices in the 21st
century, I still cannot deny the awesome power of the Anzac
spectacle. Exactly what thoughts and memories will be stirred in the
minds of people across New Zealand and Australia I cannot
fully comprehend. The call to 'honour the dead' has quasi-religious
overtones. For many people Anzac day is an opportunity to partake in
a ceremony with a set of meanings and values not readily on offer from
the secular world we now live in. The solemnity, the sense of
tradition and connection to the past, the idea of a collective
identity and the transcendence of the everyday world: all these are
powerful elements that cannot be denied.
These potent spiritual currents have a magical effect. Just as a
shaman or a priest might summon the power of the dead, so too the
ghosts of Gallipoli are resurrected anew each year to cast their
spells. We need to be wary of priests and shamans:
sometimes they abuse the powers they have over ordinary people. In
the context of modern day Anzac practices, we need to very carefully
and critically think about who plays the role of priest and shaman.
With these thoughts in mind let us depart from the world of spells,
rituals and abstract images of fallen soldiers. Let us try to honour
the imperative 'Lest we forget' in the most literal and down to earth
fashion we can. The best way I can think of is to read books written
by Anzac veterans. These exist in many different formats: diaries,
biographies and novels. There is a quite literal mountain of Anzac
related literature which is devoted to the idea of preserving the
'memories' of the soldiers. My experience in reading some of these
books has taught me that there are vast differences in the nature of
the accounts given of the war and what it was like. Soldiers were of
course individuals who experienced the war in a variety of ways,
according to their temperament and beliefs and values. There's a very
real and significant complexity here, and to choose any single text
over all others is without question a political act. I will not deny
my intentions here, I want to do everything in my power to encourage
discomfort, suspicion and hostility towards the institutional
narrative of Anzac day. The text I am going to choose is John A Lee's
1937 novel 'Civilian into Soldier'. Although the book is a work of
fiction, it is very clearly based on John A Lee's experiences as a
WW1 veteran. The battle described happened in June 1917 in a French
town on top of Messines ridge. The main character is John Guy. The
Anzac virtue I will examine is that of courage.
John Guy waits in the trenches for the order to go over the top. He
describes the soldier next to him trembling with fear, and he can
hear the sound of teeth chattering. He feels the fear too and does
his best to steady and calm himself. To counter the terror of what
awaits them John makes up horror stories of what awaits them and
attempts to use black humour to cure the fragile nerves of himself
and his comrades.
They joined him in his efforts and and competed horror against horror
as they poised on the brink. He cured his own and his comrades' fear
by exaggerating it and laughing at the exaggeration. As he sneered he
lost his own slight tremor and lessened a little the clicking of his
neighbour's teeth.
These imaginative exercises are interrupted by a nearby 'whizz bang'
exploding nearby. The shock is invigorating, and John Guy adopts a
pessimistic and resigned attitude to counter the fear:
But the excitement engendered by the shot soothed Guy's nerves,
horror at the human grill stilled his tremblings. Placidly he
resigned himself to anything the lingering remnant of night held. The
machine would get everyone, and it didn't seem to matter whether one
was torn to pieces in a trench, riddled in the open, or grilled like
a cutlet in a red-hot stove. There was not much use fretting about
one's fate. Whether men shivered or not they were ground or pulped,
whether they laughed or cried.
The men in the trench whisper to each other the amount of time to go
before the battle. When Guy hears the whisper 'An hour to go' his
fear comes back with a vengeance. He listens again to the sound of
his neighbours teeth, and gets a massive surge of adrenalin. He stops
feeling tired, his equipment no longer feels so heavy, and he begins
to feel excited by the thought of the battle to come. He psyches
himself up into a high pitch of readiness for battle, and by the time
the 'five minutes to go' whisper arrives his fear has dropped away:
He was crouching like an athlete, he was already half-fiend, blood
and iron, ready to be amalgamated with blood and iron. He would ride
a wave of molten metal into Messines, into the very gates of hell. He
had lost all concern for his person. He was charged with dynamic
exaltation. His fleshy limbs were limbs of steel, his heart was
beating with the steady stroke of a mighty engine. He did not know
it, but far above the ordinary man he had the power of emotional and
fanatical adaptation in crisis. He was ready to embrace the devil and
rollick with him in hell. He had lost all concern for his comrades,
had forgotten them as he tensed himself to spring. He didn't know, he
did not care if they were possessed of his divine hysteria. Some
were. Some were still brittle humans too aware of their frailty.
By the time to go over actually comes, John Guy identifies himself as
a part of this wave of violence directed against the Germans. He
loses his fear, but he also loses his sense of connection with his
comrades and his sense of humanity. When the battle finally begins he
feels invincible:
Fear and horror, what were they? What the hell were they when frenzy
sat in possession? He was an iron man, a giant. He was irresistible.
[…] he was free from all hurt and all ache, he was drunken with the
killing lust, as merciless and as efficient as the barrage.
As he makes his way through the shell holes and barbed wire, Guy
spots a friend of his dying. He feels no emotional response and
continues on his way. As he continues he sees three German prisoners
being escorted and yelling 'Kamerad!' to
avoid being shot at. John Guy joins his fellow soldiers in laughing
at them:
How ludicrous grown men, husbands, fathers, seem when running with
arms aloft, pleading, afraid of red-eyed capturers. For advancing men
are not dove-like. Childishly funny was the mortal fear of humans.
Laughter came spontaneously, hysterically.
He then witnesses one of his fellow New Zealanders shoot one of the
prisoners. Although he disapproves, Guy does nothing. A sense of
nihilistic patriotism has turned him into a cold blooded killer:
Shooting a prisoner wasn't criminal at the moment, seemed merely a
breach of good taste. What were a few Germans more or less? What the
hell was anyone?
In a few months Guy might see more dispassionately if he lived that
long. For the moment his eyes were red. He knew homicidal mania. He
had patriotic delusions.
The bloody and violent scene continues for several pages. There is a
very despairing tone which unflinchingly confronts the darkest
aspects of what men become in war. There is a strong tendency for
contemporary Anzac discourse to emphasise the deaths of New
Zealanders above all else. It's not always very well “remembered”
that our soldiers not only died, but also killed:
On the right a New Zealand company
was working through the tumbled heap of masonry that had been
Messines, running from concrete emplacement to concrete emplacement,
shooting, bayoneting, bombing, being shot, being bayoneted, being
bombed. Men with red in their eyes were running at men with fear in
their eyes, the aggressor imbued with the destructive surge of the
barrage, the defender weak under its bloody hammering. For men on the
heels of barrage are fiends and and men being attacked are human
beings. Nevertheless if men attacked with hysterical frenzy, men
defended out of despair. Men in grey defended, and shot and shot
until they were overwhelmed, and then died wondering why surrender at
the bayonet point had noy been accepted. When men resist and kill so
that their excited breath fans victors' faces, the fiends who have
advanced despite toppling comrades cannot turn in an instant to
apostles of meekness. The instant it took a finger to press a
trigger, and arm to jab with a bayonet, a hand to release the clutch
of a bomb, was not enough to metamorphize the beast into the dove, to
bridge the abyss between the primeval reversion and the twentieth
century human. For war is war and war is atrocity, and only the
splash of blood can wash blood from the vision. In the ruins men
squirted nickelled death out of barrels. What else could they do? To
even run away they had to retire through the British barrage. In the
ruins New Zealanders battered them down, thrust them down to death.
The battle of Messines was one of very few “victories” won by the
NZEF during the course of the first world war. Just what to think of
this “success” depends upon your point of view. Clearly John A
Lee takes absolutely no pride in this victory, in fact there is a
deep sense of shame and horror evident from the text I have quoted
above. To really see the politics which still play out in these
ancient trenches, it is very interesting to compare Lee's narrative
with that of some modern day Anzac historians. Check out this 14
minute clip from the recent documentary 'Journey of the Otagos' which
focuses on the Battle of Messines and spot the differences:
All quotes are from 'Civilian into Soldier' John A Lee,
Northumberland Press Limited 1937
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