A personal ANZAC Day reflection

Posted by Jim on April 26, 2010

This year’s ANZAC day meant something a little different to me.

During a trip to Europe over Christmas, I visited the grave of my mother’s uncle who is buried at the Lijssenthoek Military Hospital Cemetery in Belgium. Lijssenthoek is several kilometres from the village of Poperinge, which was one of the rail staging posts for the Flanders campaign.

My great uncle is one of about 1,200 Australian soldiers buried in Lijssenthoek with some 12,000 other young men – who were in the prime of their life – beneath rows of identical headstones. His record on the Australian War Memorial web site reveals he died the day after being shot in the face and his abdomen. Ten days previously he had returned to the trenches after suffering from the Spanish Influenza. I have a letter written around the time he rejoined the front a few days before he died. The stress of being shelled was palpable as he signed off, noting that he had to go because of the barrage. He was barely 21 years old.

The son of the hotel owner on the square in Poperinge drove me out on a cold, sleety morning. Europe was particularly cold over Christmas last year. I stepped out of the car and there was a stillness notwithstanding the farming activity in the fields beyond the cemetery and the smell of a piggery was in the air. Ninety-three years after the battle that claimed my great uncle, the land was returned to its former use, farming.

In October 1917, this part of Europe experienced the worst rain in 30 years. The land was torn up in artillery craters. When soldiers went over the top, these craters provided cover for those who were fortunate enough not to be shot as they advanced. But that month the trenches and the craters were flooded. This was the awful reality of the battles that soldiers faced in Belgium a year before the Armistice.

I had the row and grave number for my uncle. But, before I ever reached it, I was moved to tears by the sheer number of young men represented by each of the headstones in this little corner of Belgium. And in remembering my relative I felt strongly that I was remembering all the men who had perished there.

And so, in Noosa on ANZAC day, 2010, in the small square around the Tewantin War memorial with the sun warm on my back, I remembered those men whose remains lie in rows in what is left of the village of Lijssenthoek. I remembered my grandfathers who served in the Light Horse and the Camel Corps; my father and my uncles who served in the second world war; my brothers who joined the army, one conscripted and the other who was a volunteer for a short time; friends who had served in Vietnam when, if my lottery had fallen against me, I might have joined them; and my nephew who found himself in one of the most dangerous jobs as a driver in Iraq.

The costs of war are not limited to the soldiers who do not come home. It is borne by the families of dead soldiers. But, the families of men and women who have been traumatised by their experiences also bear the cost. Many small towns never recovered from the loss of their young men in 1914 – 1918.

ANZAC day no longer glorifies the wars that brought and still bring us our dead young soldiers and for that I am grateful. War in defence of our country is justified. There have been other wars – some contemporary – in which the validity of our involvement has been not been so clear. But, whatever the politics and morality of some engagements, we will always wish that our soldiers return home safely to their families and are undamaged by the psychology of war.

A personal view, Jim McDonald, 26 April 2010