 |
| The Battle of Hamel, July 4, 1918 |
Today, millions across the world will pause to remember those who lost their lives in the Great War, World War I. Many people do this each year, but this year the moment will be of even greater significance, as it will mark a century since the official signing of the Paris Peace Treaties in 1919 that officially announced a new era of peace in Europe and the world. The actual fighting had ended the year before, on the 11th of the 11th at 11.00 am, which is why we come together to remember and try to make sense of the horror unleashed between the years 1914 and 1918.
My own grandfathers, James Robertson of Ballarat and Howard Michael McCann of Adelaide, survived the First World but not all their siblings and friends did. Some 60,000 Australians died out of a relatively small population of 4 million. Another 240,000 were physically injured, and we cannot know the psychic wounds many carried through the rest of their lives. Howard McCann had a large scar and dent on his forehead and I never found the right moment to ask him about it before he passed away in 1980. My other grandfather, James Robertson, who turned 21 on April 25th 1915, the day he landed at Gallipoli as a member of Ballarat’s 8th Battalion, died before I was born. Part of the satisfaction of being an Historian is to make sense of their lives, and all the other Anzacs.
At moments like these, adults speak of the sacrifices of our soldiers in the First World War without always explaining what the Australian soldiers, all of them volunteers, were attempting to do. If there was no purpose to their bravery and, in many cases, their deaths, then what they did cannot be considered a sacrifice. So let us first say that, in the last 100 days of the First World War, Australian troops, who made up only 5% of Allied troops on the Western Front, under the agency of General Monash, played a decisive role in stopping the invading Germans winning the war in their Ludendorff Offensive, before pushing the occupying German army out of Belgium and northwest France back to the German border Armistice Day. Today there are towns in Belgium and north-east France which stillcommemorate the liberation of their territory by Australians.
If the Paris Peace Treaties of 1919, one hundred years ago, did not prevent the onset of World War Two 20 years after, don’t blame our WWI Diggers who sacrificed their best years and in many cases their lives to put the world right. It is not the soldiers who were at fault, but the diplomats of the 1930s who appeased Hitler in the name of peace and reversed the victories our soldiers had achieved for the world.
I am proud to be a grandson of James Robertson and Howard McCann. I am sorry not to know more about the details of their lives, but I treasure the legacy of their spirit, the spirit to be free, the spirit to defend freedom, to risk everything for freedom, and to lose everything in in the pursuit of freedom. I hope, at this time, we can reflect on this legacy of freedom, for standing up for the good and the right thing, both overseas and here in Australia, and in our lives right here in this community. And it’s a legacy that’s encapsulated in a line that has echoed through the last 101 years: ‘Lest we forget’.
As is customary at this service, I will now read the Ode, which is taken from the poem ‘For the Fallen’. ‘For the Fallen’ was written during the early days of World War I by English poet, Robert Laurence Binyon. Binyon wrote this as long lists of the dead and wounded began to appear in British newspapers. When I say the words, “We will remember them” and then later, “Lest we forget”, I ask that you respond with these same phrases. At the conclusion of the Ode, The Last Post will be played, followed by a minute’s silence in honour of those who have lost their lives in war. You will then hear the Rouse, which was used in the military to call soldiers to their duties, but which also symbolizes a new beginning.
"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them."
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them."
Lest We Forget
