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April 2007

Australians and New Zealanders are already assembling around an obscure cove in the Dardanelles; by April 25th, they will number in the thousands. On that day, in the pre-dawn chill, they will sing and pray and shed tears over an event that took place more than ninety years ago, a military catastrophe that claimed perhaps as many as three hundred thousand lives –Turkish, British, French, Australian, New Zealand, and others. Many of the crowd will be young, around the same age as the nearly twelve thousand ANZAC’s – the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps - killed. Not particularly impressive statistics, perhaps, compared to the sacrifice of other nations and the carnage of the Western Front, but on April 25 millions of Australians and New Zealanders will also gather in country towns and silent cities around the world, from Coonabarabran and Rotorua to London and New York, to recall that disastrous first day of the Gallipoli campaign. They have learned the lessons of Gallipoli since they were school children: that battles the politicians assure us are essential are often peripheral and not worth the cost, that military ‘intelligence’ can be little more than guesswork and military leadership frequently inept, that the people we are taught to despise can turn out to be friends.  They will be reminded of a bungled defeat, an unnecessary tragedy, a staggering loss of life for two tiny nations; they will not glorify war but dwell on its prodigal madness, and they will not celebrate a military victory but the triumph of human endurance, bravery, compassion, and generosity.

By December 1915, the Allied troops would all be evacuated, except for those who rest there still, in the most successful maneuver of the entire enterprise. By war’s end, sixty thousand young Australians and eighteen thousand New Zealanders would lie dead on foreign fields. How do two nations, barely numbering six million between them, recover from such staggering loss? They don’t – they just don’t.

Statisticians put the cost of war in terms of millions of pounds or dollars: no one can count the cost in terms of all that butchered brilliance, the lost possibilities along with the lost limbs and disfigured minds, the silent depressions and the screaming violence, and the terrible, paralyzing grief that endures.

We are a people of the Cross: we place it on our buildings, around our necks, on the bodies of our babies at Baptism. This does not mean we advocate violence or death, but rather the opposite: we know the cost of victimization and hatred, of plots devised by leaders to secure their personal ends at the cost of others’ lives. In the same way, a nation can be defined by its battles, can treasure its armed forces and take pride in an exemplary military tradition, and at the same time abhor warfare, be fiercely patriotic and fiercely protective of its service men and women. It all depends on what you truly value, and hence what you celebrate.

 

 
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