HINT OF HISTORY - ANZAC DAY

April 25th is ANZAC Day here in Australia and, knowing I have readers who are not Australian or New Zealanders I thought I would talk a little bit about ANZAC Day and what it means to us.

I think every country in the world has its own day of remembrance and commemoration for those who have fought and died in the conflicts of the world.  Americans have Veterans Day, the British have Remembrance Day and in Australia we have ANZAC day, commemorated on April 25^th every year.

ANZAC literally means the “Australian and New Zealand Army Corps”… the young men gathered from this far flung corner of the British Empire who sailed off in 1914 to help defend “the mother country”. The young men who boarded the troop transports at Princes Pier here in Melbourne, probably didn’t even understand quite what it was they were going to defend the mother country from. All they knew was that England had called and it was a good excuse for an adventure.

 Although, I have no direct Australian connection to ANZAC day (my own grandfather fought in the British army as a medic in Mesopotamia and in an earlier blog I have written of my search for the grave of my father’s cousin on the western front - Tears on the Western Front), I served in the Australian Defence Forces for nearly twenty years  and  I have followed my husband’s researches of his own grandfather, EAB,  who went to war in 1915, was wounded in the arm and returned home in 1919.

In 1914 Australia as a country was only 13 years old, having achieved its independence from Britain in 1901. The total population was only 4 million but the ties with England were still strong and in England’s hour of need a generation of young Australian men answered the call. Over 400,000 thousand enlisted to serve in the AIF (the Australian Imperial Force) - 10% of its entire population. Back to statistics later but remember that number.

Australian soldiers in Egypt

The big adventure started in Egypt. Wearing their distinctive slouch hats, the young soldiers explored the souks, had their photographs taken, visited the pyramids and rode camels. Anything further from Australia they could not have imagined. The British officers were heard to complain about their disrespectful attitude and their larrikin ways.

In far off London, the secretary for the navy, Winston Churchill was planning a campaign to seize the Dardanelles (the narrow entrance to the Black Sea) by attacking the Gallipoli peninsular, firmly held by the Turks under Mustafa Kemal (later known as Ataturk). Having failed to take the Gallipoli Peninsula with a naval attack, he decided to send in land troops. Key to this invasion were the ANZACs and on 25 April 1915 they landed at ANZAC cove and Suvla Bay. Confronting them were cliffs and the heavily dug in and armed Turkish forces. They came under heavy fire even as they struggled ashore. The campaign was doomed for failure even before it began.

The Gallipoli Campaign...the Australians landed in the north

The Australians and New Zealanders showed incredible bravery and forced their way up the cliffs establishing positions along the front but the Turks were too well dug in and for 8 long months a stalemate ensued. Attacks on Lone Pine and the Nek were repulsed with heavy casualties on the Australians side. In December 1915 the most successful manouevre of the whole campaign was conducted with minimal casualties...the withdrawal from the Gallipoli peninsular. 

In 1934 Atatürk wrote a tribute to the ANZACs killed at Gallipoli:
"Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours... you, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land. They have become our sons as well."
(This inscription appears on the Kemal Atatürk Memorial, ANZAC Parade, Canberra)

The Australians at Anzac Cove

The irony that one of the most seminal moments in Australian history was technically a massive defeat is not lost on the Australians.  What is remembered is that Gallipoli had been a bitter blooding, a hard coming of age. 8,709 young Australians never left the Gallipoli peninsula and lie interred in the Commonwealth Cemetery at ANZAC cove. But if Gallipoli had been hard, worse was yet to come. The Australians were sent to the Western Front where for another 3 long years they fought and died for the “mother country”.  As the only battle seasoned troops on the Western Front they tended to be used as “shock troops” and suffered commensurate casualty rates, amongst the highest of all the allies.

My husband’s grandfather was among the second wave to land at Gallipoli and he talked quite freely about his time there so much so that the family assumed he had been wounded there. It was only when my husband started his researches that he discovered that EAB had survived Gallipoli and had sustained his wound on the Somme in November 1916 (only a few months and  a few miles from where Richard Conway-Lowe, my own forebear, died in August of that year). He never spoke about the Western Front. In 1919 he returned to Australia with an arm held together with twitching wire, cleared a soldier settlement block in the Riverland of South Australia, married and raised a family. He died of a heart attack on an ANZAC day march in the 1960s.

Remember the 400,000 men who went to war?  According to historian Patsy Adam Smith:

• died            58,961
• wounded   166,811
• missing or prisoners of war 4,098
• suffered from sickness  87,865

"At almost 65%, the Australian casualty rate (proportionate to total embarkations) was the highest of the war."

As a percentage of the Australian population, nearly an entire generation of young men had been wiped out or were in some way left impaired by the War (part of the story behind my own novel, GATHER THE BONES).

ANZAC day itself was formally gazetted as a public holiday in 1921 , although its observance had begun as early as 1916. As a child growing up in Australia in the 1960s and 70s, in the midst of another unpopular war being fought in Vietnam, ANZAC day became almost reviled. Protesters would line the streets, hurling abuse at the old soldiers as they marched past.  It was thought as the last of those who served in the Great War died and the ranks of those who fought in the second grew thinner, that ANZAC day would lose its meaning  and like the old soldiers just “fade away”.

I don’t know what happened, what changed but in the 1990s, a new generation discovered  ANZAC day--whether it was being taught in schools or it was part of a wave of national pride or a real understanding about what the lives of those young men who died in that terrible war really meant. The crowds at the ANZAC day marches and dawn services began to grow, a new generation wearing their grandfather’s campaign medals started to march behind the battalion colours. Today the dawn service at Gallipoli in Turkey is the site of a mass pilgrimage of young Australians every year.

The Dawn Service at Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance 

The traditions of ANZAC day are part of our genetic make up. The dawn service, the playing of the last post, the words “Lest we Forget”, followed by marches, wreath laying, the gunfire breakfasts and the games of  "two up" and the baking of home made Anzac biscuits.

To me, as a soldier, ANZAC day was an important part of the year, beginning as a private soldier in a hastily cobbled together drum corps  (as I have no sense of rhythm my career as a drummer was shortlived!), to a young officer helping the parade marshalls. My husband, an infantry company commander, frequently marched with his soldiers. We enjoyed many a “gunfire” breakfast – tea and whiskey and avoided losing our money at two up. I have worn the slouch hat with its distinctive "rising sun" hat badge with incredible pride, conscious of the men and women who went before me.

For the three years we lived in Singapore, we attended the dawn service held at Kranji War Cemetery, where another generation of young Australian lie buried – those who fell in the defence of Singapore in 1942. A lone piper stood high above us on the roof of the memorial as the day broke through the humidity over the peaceful green sward, peppered with its simple white gravestones.

I have been to the dawn service in Paris, stood on the battlefields of France where Richard Conway-Lowe died and where my husband’s grandfather was wounded, attended the ANZAC Day commemorations on the Somme and sung the Australian national anthem and the Marseilles so many times I became hoarse. I have shared breakfast at the little school in Villers Brettoneux, paid for by fundraising from Victorian school children after the war. This little village had been liberated by the Australian troops on Anzac Day 1918. Around the walls of the school hall with its carved Australian animals are the words. “Nous n’oublions pas l’Australie”. We will never forget Australia.

LEST WE FORGET

Excerpt from GATHER THE BONES by Alison Stuart. In this excerpt Helen Morrow reflects on the moment when her husband and brother decided to join up. Her husband, Charlie, did not return.


"The photograph showed two young men in the uniform of infantry officers, one seated and the other standing, a photograph like thousands of others that were now the last link with the dead. Helen had a single portrait of Charlie, taken at the same photographic session, sporting an elegant, unfamiliar moustache and grinning from ear to ear, like an over-anxious school boy, keen to join the ‘stoush’, kill the ‘bloody Bosch’. She felt a keen sense of pain that reverberated as strongly as it had on the day he told her he would have to return to England.

“I can’t leave them to fight the Huns, Helen,” he said. “Damn it, I have a duty to England.” 

The drunken words came back to her and she could see Charlie in the kitchen of Terrala with his arm across her brother Henry’s shoulders, as they celebrated their mutual decision to join the war.

Henry had already enlisted in the Australian Light Horse and Charlie told her a few days later that he intended to return to England to join his cousin’s regiment.

“Do you think I would leave Paul to uphold the family honor?” he said. And he’d gone.

Even as she had stood on the dock at Port Melbourne, the cold winter wind whipping at her ankles, she had known he would not return. She wondered if his decision to go would have been any different if they had known she was carrying his child. Probably not."

TEARS ON THE WESTERN FRONT

My husband, who prefers to keep his cyber identity private so I shall call "D",  and I met in the Army Reserve (Officer Training...he lent me a pencil for my navigation exercise...etc. etc.). We both served in the Australian Army for just on twenty years each before a move to Singapore put an end to both our careers. One thing all those years instilled in us was a mutual interest in military history.

D’s grandfather fought with the Australian Army in World War One. He had been in the second wave at Gallipoli and the family had always assumed he had sustained his wound there.  Until D started researching his grandfather’s history, no one knew he had served in France. He would talk about Gallipoli but never the Western Front and it was on the Western Front, in the bitter fighting on the Somme he had been wounded in the left arm.

My own grandfather (on my mother's side) was a medic in the British Army and served, as far as we know, for most of the war in the Middle East. He joined up after his eldest brother had been killed near Basrah in modern Iraq. Many people may think the medics had a cushy job but quite often they put their own lives on the line to rescue the wounded and transport them back to the casualty clearing stations. Mercifully he survived unscathed but his experience may explain why he never settled to normal life in Yorkshire and accepted a posting in the civil service in Kenya (Colonial East Africa), taking his new bride with him,  a young lass who had never even been to London.

In 2005, D and I finally achieved a long held ambition to visit the Battlefields of World War One. We began in Ypres in Belgium, that beautiful medieval cloth town so comprehensively destroyed in the war.  Together we walked the city walls finding little war cemeteries along the way and joined the solemn crowds at the Menin Gate for the service of commemoration which is held every night.

The evening commemoration at the Menin Gate

We  hired a car and with a map in hand we drove out into the Ypres Salient. The flat Belgian countryside bears little resemblance to the nightmare pictures we had seen in the Museum in Ypres but among the green fields, there are countless cemeteries, with the white crosses in orderly lines looking,  as I described it in Gather the Bones, like a “harvest of death”.

The Allied Cemetery - Passchandaele (Polygon Wood)

From Belgium we drove down to France and Amiens. It is hard to imagine the horror that 1914-1918 visited on the soft green fields of the Picardy countryside.  The little villages have been rebuilt and farmers tend the fields just as they always did but the grand war memorials and scattered cemeteries once again bear the testament of those who died here. 

It was one of many tiny little villages on the road to Amiens that brought together both D's grandfather and my search for a missing relative - Pozieres.

It was here, at the battle for  Pozieres, that D’s grandfather had been shot in the arm, an injury which would trouble him for the whole of his life and it was here in the British cemetery that I fulfilled a promise made to my father ... to find the grave of his own father’s cousin, Captain Richard Conway Lowe MC. The War Graves Commission makes it an easy task to locate the one tombstone among the many and I had little trouble in finding it in the British Cemetery.

What I hadn’t been prepared for was the wave of emotion that surged through me as I stood looking down at the simple white grave stone.  All I knew about Richard Conway Lowe had been gleaned from a few family photographs of a rather solemn little boy with fair hair and glasses. Family history recounts he had been a good student at Winchester and Oxford and had been destined to go into the Church. I also knew he was 6’ 7”. He came from a respectable middle class family in Edgbaston near Birmingham and on the outbreak of war, he joined one of the local Warwickshire volunteer regiments.

I didn’t know he was only 22 years old when he died. He was the same age as my eldest son. As I laid the little poppy I had bought with me, I touched the gravestone and thought how many, many years it had been since anyone grieved at this graveside. The entire family line had effectively died out with this boy. I sat on the grass beside his headstone and the tears welled up. 

Laying a poppy on Richard's grave

Since returning from that trip to France, the wonder of the internet enabled me to trace the citation for his military cross. I wish my father were still alive to share it with.  It reads:

Military Cross for Officers

"Second Lieutenant Richard Conway Lowe., 1st/6th Battalion, The Royal Warwickshire Regiment, Territorial Force.

For conspicuous gallantry on 4th November, 1915, in France.

When directing a working party in front of the parapet, the Germans opened fire and wounded a man of the covering party. Second Lieutenant Lowe and a Serjeant rushed to his aid, and although the Serjeant was grazed by a bullet and Second Lieutenant Lowe shot in the thigh, the bullet being subsequently found in the wound, they carried the wounded man across the open and through the wire into a place of safety.

Second Lieutenant Lowe had previously been wounded, and had been brought to notice for excellent work at the front." (London Gazette Issue 29371 16 November 1916)

He received his medal personally at Buckingham Palace in January 1916 while home recovering from his wound. 

He was killed in action on August 18, 1916. The Germans had been in occupation of Pozieres since 1914 and in July 1916 the allies commenced one of the bloodiest battles on the Western Front...the recapture of Pozieres and to secure the high ground behind it. When I looked to see what action had taken place on that day,  "British advance from Pozieres to Somme; ground gained towards Ginchy and Guillemont."  Just another day on the Western Front.

The main street of Pozieres after the action of 1916

After his death his mother, Marie Lowe, worked tirelessly in organising women volunteers for the provision of laundry services to the hospitals in Birmingham coping with the needs of the wounded. By Dec 1917 over 4000 articles a week passed through the hands of the 70 VAD volunteers and 8 paid laundresses. The family history relates that his father, Conway, "never really recovered from the death of his elder son". He fell out with his business partners and "These two blows left Conway a broken man, and Marie had to become the decision maker and mainstay of the family."

The little boy who died a hero...

These few days spent in the company of the dead from a bloody war provided part of the inspiration for my new book, GATHER THE BONES. 

The following is a short extract, drawing on my own experience...
"...Helen stared out of the foggy car window as the countryside changed from pleasant fields and hamlets to an unrecognizable landscape of ruined villages, barely passable roads, devastated forests of tree stumps and a bleak landscape of churned fields. If she could have imagined the end of the world this is what it would have been like.

Many of the villages through which they passed had been completely destroyed leaving nothing more than piles of rubble where there had once been a bustling little town with bakers, butchers, churches and homes. Some new buildings had begun to rise from the ruins, but the deeper they drove into the Ypres Salient, the more dismal the landscape became. What had once been fields were now nothing more than wild earthworks from a painting of hell, dotted with small cemeteries of rows of white crosses, like a grim harvest of death..."

For more about the First World War and the inspiration for Gather the Bones, see my post on "A Michelin Guide to a Story Idea" first published on Historical Hearts.

Meet Ms. Stuart...

I think I can say GATHER THE BONES has been thoroughly well launched.

I really was at a loss as to how to send off an ebook but the Facebook party turned out to be a huge success. In preparing for it, I threw together a couple of videos and thought I would share them on my blog page. They are a little rough and the wandering eyes are caused by trying to read from a computer screen behind my Mac notebook which I was using to record the video.

So excusing a rather untidy office and an even scruffier author...

The first is the "Welcome" video in which I talk about how I came to write GATHER THE BONES.

The second is a reading from the story:

TO READ AN EXCERPT (the Prologue and first chapter) click HERE.