ANOTHER VOICE

When the blood, sweat and tears have all dried up

AUBERON WAUGH

On 25 May 1915, my grandfather, Aubrey Herbert, a captain in the Irish Guards attached to the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps at Gallipoli as intelli- gence officer with the rather curious job of liaison officer to the Turkish enemy, joined a party of four to arrange a truce for the burial of the dead. One of his companions, Blarney, ended the war as brigadier-general in the Australian army; another, Howse V.C. became surgeon-general and director- general of the Australian Medical Services. Herbert wrote in his diary that evening:

We walked from the sea and passed immedi- ately up the hill, through a field of tall corn filled with poppies, then another cornfield; then the fearful smell of death began as we came upon scattered bodies. We mounted over a plateau and down through further fields of thyme where there lay about 4,000 Turkish dead. It was indescribable . . There were two wounded crying in that multitude of silence. I walked over to the second, who lay with a large circle of dead that made a mound round him, and gave him a drink from my water bottle . . . I had to leave the bottle. Later, a Turk gave it back to me. The Turkish captain with me, said, 'At this specta- cle even the most gentle must feel savage and the most savage must weep.'

The dead fill acres of ground, mostly killed in the one big attack, but some recently. They fill the myrtle-grown gulleys. One saw the result of machine-gun fire very clearly: entire companies annihilated — their heads dou- bled under them with the impetus of their rush and both hands clasping their bayonets.

Perhaps I shall continue to fill this col- umn with extracts from my grandfather's diaries during the next six months of Gal- lipoli's 80th anniversary, if only as a gentle refutation of the Keating-Hayden version of events. But perhaps one more quotation will suffice for the moment. Three months later, on the day after the disastrous Suvla landings, Herbert wrote:

When men have gone to the limits of human endurance, when blood has been spilled like water, and the result is still unachieved, bitter and indiscriminate recrimination inevitably follows. But Anzac had one great advantage. Our leaders had the confidence of their men. The troops were able to see General Bird- wood and General Godley every day in the front trenches with themselves, walking about under fire as if they had been on a lawn in England, and the men knew that their own lives were never uselessly sacrificed.

Not quite the impression one receives from the Keith Murdoch-Peter Weir ver- sion of the campaign, used to stoke anti- British, republican feeling by Australian politicians of the opportunist Left. The greatest animus felt by British, Australian and New Zealand troops alike was against the politicians. 'Wherever I go, I hear praise of politicians,' wrote Herbert wryly — in addition to being English and upper- class and a guards officer, he was also absentee Conservative MP for Somerset (later Yeovil) at that time.

Reaction to Lord Bethell's article 'The great Australian lie' (6 May) has been fairly intense in Australia. To a certain extent it was misrepresented as being an attack on the Anzac legend itself, which is concerned chiefly with the undoubted and magnificent heroism of the Australian and New Zealand forces. One pro-monarchy Liberal MP, Tony Abbott, announced that British lords should stick to fox-hunting and keep their hands off the Anzacs, who were heroes and nation-builders: `Not even Paul Keating would be crass enough to dishonour their name by drag- ging them into a political fight,' he averred.

Another senior Australian wrote warning Bethell not to overestimate the intelligence of Australians — 'nearly half of whom today are not of British stock'. Neverthe- less, when Bethell talked about Australians, he was 'really only talking about a minority of socialist Labour Party provocateurs with hidden agendas . . . These socialists want a republic/Labour dictatorship . . .

Keating, who attributes his republican sentiments to his Irish antecedents, and makes a point of referring to the Queen as a foreigner, has cleverly denied any inten- tion of using Australia's 7,300 dead at Gal- lipoli as a means of advancing his career.

Part of the subsequent Anzac legend is "Everyone has a dirt book in them.' that Australia won the Great War, was deserted by the British in the second (Burma is forgotten) and rescued by Amer- ica. I do not know who is blamed for the Australian defeat in Vietnam, but the inci- dent has not stopped Paul Keating from assuring his ever gullible followers that Australia is part of Asia.

There need be no harm to such antipodean jingoism, but it seems a crying shame, in the light of our shared histories, that it takes an anti-British flavour. Perhaps nationalism is always moronic. I know of no Englishman who has visited Australia with- out loving the place. There is a combina- tion of innocence, openness and vitality which reminds us of England when we were young. New Zealand, from my one short visit to it, is even more poignant and remi- niscent of a lost Britain. Being with the New Zealand Division, Herbert saw more of the New Zealanders, 'who had the virtues of the Australians and British troops. They had all the dash and elan of the Australians and the discipline of the English.'

He describes a period of time in August 1915 when he was stuck with 63 New Zealanders, all that was left of a battalion: I admired nothing in the war more than the spirit of these 63 New Zealanders who were soon to go to their last fight. The great distance from their own country created an atmosphere of loneliness. This loneliness was emphasised by the fact the New Zealanders rarely received the same recognition as the Australians in the press, and many of their gallant deeds went unrecorded, or were attributed to their greater neighbours . . . At night, the voices of the tired men continually argued the merits of the Expedition, and there was always one end to these discussions:

'Well, it may be a — mistake, but in a war of this size you will have mistakes of this size, and it doesn't matter a — to us whether we are for it here or in France, for we came out to do one job and it's nothing to us whether we finish in one place or another.'

Lord Bethell is right. It will be a terrible shame if the truth is lost. The greatest shame of all, perhaps, is that nobody in any of our countries had the sense to see how it would have been to everyone's advantage in the long run if we could have brought Australia and New Zealand into the Euro- pean Union with us. They are only slightly further away than some of its existing out- posts in overseas France.