Johnny Turks Media Watch

Awaiting a new dawn
· Bruce Grant
· April 25, 2009
MY FATHER served at Gallipoli and on the Western Front in Europe. His health never fully recovered and he died aged 57. I often attend the Anzac Day dawn service as a mark of respect to those, like him, who gave their lives.

I have been to Gallipoli — I've stood on the beach, surveyed the heights, marvelled at the heroic eight-month struggle to dislodge the Turk, standing firm on his own soil. I have visited the grave of my father's brother in Cambrai, France, near the Belgian border. He died in 1917, aged 19, while a prisoner of war of the Germans. Their mother, my grandmother, was German, and I thought not only of him — younger than two of my grandsons and dying far from home in the hands of the enemy — but of her. I wondered about a destiny that brought her family as hopeful immigrants to a country that was now at war with her own people.

Respect and honour for the bravery of the soldiers and the forbearance and fortitude of their loved ones does not mean I am comfortable with the public emotion on display.
When I was a diplomat, I presided, as required, over our annual Anzac Day ceremony — but I invited Turkey's ambassador to take part.
All over the world, people gather to remember battles and wars won and lost, and, sometimes, when the moment is ripe, these occasions spill over, sweeping common sense and human dignity aside.
Hitler's manipulation of the German people's humiliation after the First World War is a classic case. His attempt, later, to destroy the Jewish people, in what has been simplified for posterity as the Holocaust, has become a reference point for both friends and enemies of Israel's military activism. Slobodan Milosevic seized on Serbians' emotional memory of ancient history — the battle of Kosovo in 1389 — to justify his campaign against the Albanian minority. In Vienna, the spot where the Ottoman forces were turned back in 1683 became a reference point for Austro-Hungarian revivalists.

When Lyndon Johnson sought to revive the spirit of his country during the Vietnam War, after American forces were overwhelmed at Pleiku in 1965, he drew on the futile defence of the Alamo, a fort in Texas where, in 1836, a couple of hundred Americans (including Davy Crockett) held out against the Mexican army.

In Japan, the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, where 2.5 million of the nation's war dead are commemorated, including 14 who were judged war criminals and executed, has become a touchstone of political leadership. When John Howard wished to incorporate the commitment of Australian troops to Iraq into the national narrative, he invoked the spirit of Gallipoli.
Gallipoli was a moment in history when Australia came to "know itself", in the phrase of the official historian, C.E.W. Bean. The stories my father told were of two kinds. One was his middle-class, city-boy amazement at the crude humour and daredevil antics of his compatriots from the farms and goldfields. Gallipoli was for him not so much a military epic as a personal and social revelation. He discovered that Australia was a more robust, diverse society than he had imagined. The 1981 Australian film Gallipoli touched on this. Under its major theme of British strategic blunders and Australian courage and innocence, a minor theme was the testing of "mateship" in the friendship of two young men from contrasting backgrounds.

My father's other stories revealed an affection for "Johnny Turk". I was confused, as a child, as to who the enemy was, because he was unflagging in his scorn of the British and unstinting in his respect for the qualities of the enemy. After the early assault, the two sides were entrenched side by side, within shouting — and throwing — distance of each other. A camaraderie of shared fear and boredom developed. And there was time to think.

Compton Mackenzie, who was almost ecstatic in his appreciation of the Australian soldiers as Homeric heroes at Gallipoli, records a typically rational moment from his own experience. "I wanted to argue with (the Turk gunners) about the futility of war. It seemed so maddeningly stupid that men should behave as impersonally and unreasonably as nature."
In his anthology of writings on war, John Keegan has noted that, through the history of changing military strategy, one testimonial remains unchanged: war is inhumane. Even in the age of chivalry, the loser paid a terrible price.

Steven Runciman's detailed history of the Crusades is a terrifying account of human degradation for the most exalted reasons.

The secular state continued the tradition, with rape and pillage as spoils. Any Australian who has read the novels of Naguib Mahfouz will know how the behaviour of our men in Cairo en route to Gallipoli has remained in Egyptian memory.

I will attend the dawn service again this year. I will honour brave men and women who have died in war. I will still think, however, that war is a failure of human intelligence. I will still think that the enormous expenditure of states preparing themselves for war could be better spent on almost anything else. And I will remember that the victims of modern war are not only brave soldiers but ordinary people who get in the way.

The weapons of war have become so inhuman and in scale so global and impersonal that the bravery of war has lost its edge. For those who give their lives for country, there are tens, hundreds, thousands of civilians who die because they are in the way.

How should we remember them?

Bruce Grant is an author and former diplomat. For more Anzac views, including an essay by historian Marina Larsson, go to theage.com.au/opinion