Remembrance Day has always been for Australians a quieter affair than Anzac Day, particularly as Anzac Day in recent years has taken on a brassy, bragging style. Most of us now do not even pause at 11am on 11 November. But perhaps there will be quietness during the day to think some thoughts about killing and dying. We may also unearth some clues about our life as a nation.
The American jurist and Civil War veteran, Oliver Wendell Holmes, famously said, 'We have shared the incommunicable experience of war'. Holmes spoke for all veterans of his war and all other wars. Yet if the experience of war is 'incommunicable', we still talk and write an awful lot about it. If you type the single word 'war' into the Amazon search box, you get more than half a million entries.
If something is 'incommunicable' then why so much communication? Holmes himself provided part of the answer: 'We have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top ... In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire.' Those who have gone through the fire, who have been passionate to this full measure, empathise with others who have done similar things and felt similar emotions. On the other hand, these men and women often find it difficult to pass on the experience to those who were not there.
Wives, families and observers have frequently remarked upon the reluctance of veterans to talk of their wars. Most writing about war comes from people who did not serve in the conflict being written about. The American Civil War continues to attract a steady stream of volumes. World War I has generated thousands of books, with many more to come during the centenary. Then there is World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and numerous other smaller conflicts, all with their own literature.
Why? Wars change history, often in unexpected ways. They are fascinating and exciting, with battles and sieges, the birth and death of nations, great and flawed leaders, masses of men under arms, heroism and cowardice, courage and cruelty, the broad sweep of grand strategy, military campaigns requiring analysis and explanation, individual human stories evoking sadness and regret. There is Lincoln and Antietam, Gallipoli and Edith Cavell, the Western Front and the Unknown Soldier, Anne Frank and Dresden, 600,000 Americans in Vietnam and Kim Phuc, Ben Roberts-Smith VC and Waziristan villagers taken out by American drones.
The treatment of war often takes a didactic or even semi-religious aspect. Recently, Brendan Nelson, the director of the Australian War Memorial, has taken to recommending the 'Anzac' values depicted on the stained glass windows around the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier — devotion, comradeship, coolness, endurance and so on — as a guide to virtuous living for young Australians. The historian Ken Inglis described Anzac as Australia's civil religion. Although we were the first country anywhere to come together under a national constitution after a mass popular vote, we downplay Federation and venerate instead a failed military campaign in Turkey in 1915.
The interest in Anzac and in wars generally has intensified in Australia since around 1990. Does the sound and fury of war merit this sharp focus?
Some observers have suggested we obsess about Anzac (and Pozieres and Fromelles) because we have had relatively few wars, compared with, say, Britain. Yet we have been involved in some kind of war for much of the last 75 years, in World War II, Korea, Malaya, Konfrontasi, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iraq again.
There is another possibility. Graeme Davison, in his 2009 Menzies Lecture, characterised modern young Australians trekking to the Dardanelles as like Ulysses in Greek legend. There was an element of Ulysses also in the journeys of the original Anzacs, many of whom had imbibed as children the myths of Greece and Rome, but today 'the old themes of patriotic duty and sacrifice have receded in favour of an emphasis on travel and risky adventure'.
Davison argued that the Odyssey narrative has a strong appeal to a people who have always valued their worth in terms of how they are seen by great and powerful friends. Reliving the Anzac myth leads us into 'a chauvinistic attempt to prove ourselves in the eyes of others'. This strange Odyssey begins at home, though. The way we make much of Anzac suggests we still have a lot of maturing to do as a nation. At least the Remembrance Day minute was brief and dignified.
Our recent obsession with making pilgrimages to battlefields, and with commemorating and sacralising and trying to understand the experience of war, has overshadowed other equally memorable and important but rather less showy parts of our history. It is said that, in our daily lives at home or at work, the urgent often drives out the important. In living our national lives, we are letting the noisy and exciting swamp what really matters.
Until we make real progress in other fields — making multiculturalism work under pressure rather than simply as a slogan, for example, or reconciling meaningfully between black and white — Anzac will remain in place as a bloated and disproportionate national myth.
David Stephens is the secretary of Honest History, a coalition of historians and others supporting the balanced and honest presentation and use of Australian history during the centenary of World War I. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent the views of all of Honest History's 300 plus supporters; it is a broad church.
Original artwork by Chris Johnston