Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

An Anzac flashback - lite

I'm just about all Anzac Dayed out after watching yesterday so many televised prayers, hymns and commemorations for the long-ago departed. I feel a little nervous too that the heads of our modern defence forces are still so heavily into prayers and solicitations intended to appeal to an intangible deity. Will they be the same if the balloon goes up?

And how about all the Australian politicians who traipsed off to Gallipoli and Villers-Bretonneux to demonstrate that they are au fait with their expense accounts and a vote-winning love of military history. I'm sure they'll be relaxing with their travelling companions somewhere nice today.

Should I mention the pod of bagpipe players at Villers-Bretonneux? Yes, perhaps I should. They were playing in a new disharmonic style which surely would have enhanced the reputation of the instrument amongst its admirers, and detractors. I guess they were nervous.

A couple of years ago I compiled a series of educational notes for a group Australian Army Cadets who were heading for Villers-Bretonneux. My eldest daughter was amongst them. That was the year I was briefly back on the Army payroll as a second class lieutenant (AAC). I probably would have been third class if they'd had that rank available. I was a bit of a slouch when it came to saluting. (Some old habits die hard.) This is what I looked like at 61.

The Australians' arrival in France

Following the bitter lessons at Gallipoli which concluded in December 1915, the deployment of the AIF in France occurred from March 1916. Disembarkation took place at the Mediterranean port of Marseilles on the south coast, and at Le Havre, which faces the English Channel from Normandy, northern France.

Watching their arrival, a reporter from Britain's Daily Chronicle wrote:

There was no mistaking them. Their slouch hats told me at a glance, but without them I should have known. They have a distinctive type of their own which marks them out from all other soldiers of ours along these roads of war.

They were hatchet faced fellows who came riding through the little old market town: British unmistakably, yet not English, nor Irish, nor Scottish, nor Canadian. They looked hard, with the harness of a boyhood and a breeding away from the cities, at least, away from the soldier training of our way of life. They had merry eyes (especially for the girls 'round the stalls), but resolute, clean cut mouths, and they rode their horses with an easy grace in the saddle as though born to riding, and drove their wagons with a recklessness among the little booths that was justified by half an inch between an iron axle and an old woman's table of coloured ribbons.

These clean shaven, sun tanned, dust-covered boys, who had come out of the hell-fire of the Dardanelles and the great drought of the Egyptian sand, looked wonderfully fresh in France. Youth keen as steel, with a flash in the eyes, with an utter carelessness of any peril ahead, came riding down the street. Since then I have seen thousands of them behind the lines, where they have been waiting to 'go in'. They have been billeted in areas through which many British divisions have passed after a brief spell of rest, and about these old farm-houses, and barns, and village inns, which will be haunted always by the memory of this British occupation, the Australians have made themselves at home with the French inhabitants.

When they came up in a train from a southern port in France, they were all at the windows drinking in the look of the French landscape, and one of their officers tells me that again and again he heard the same words spoken by these lads of his. "It's a good country to fight for - it's like being home again."

General Birdwood was in command of the Australians. He gave some of the troops a pep talk about the need for good behaviour, concluding with the words, "And, lads, there is one thing more – drink. As long as you keep from that I know you will be all right." Some of the Australians were to discover the pleasures of champagne in later adventures - which caused a bit of a stir. Going by the attached photograph, General Birdwood didn't say anything about chocolate, which is what the Aussies were negotiating for.

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

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Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!