1914 – 2014, A CENTURY OF SACRIFICE
By Mike Rann
Australian Ambassador to Italy
On August 4th, we begin honouring the centenary of the
Great War.
Here in Italy, which entered the war in 1915 on the side of
Britain and France, the focus will be in the very north of the
country, in places like Trento, where bitter mountain
fighting cost more than half a million Italian lives.
On Monday in Britain there will be a service at Glasgow
Cathedral the morning after the close of the Commonwealth
Games, followed by a vigil at Westminster Abbey.
Across the Channel, at St Symphorien, near Mons in
Belgium, leaders of nations that were on both sides of that
conflict will gather in a beautiful cemetery that includes the
graves of Allied and German war dead. Similar services will
be held in cities, country towns and cemeteries around the
world, including Australia.
On April 25th next year we will commemorate the centenary
of the Allied landings at Gallipoli in 1915. People will gather
at hundreds of dawn services at ANZAC Cove in Turkey;
around Australia and New Zealand; in the steaming heat of
Papua New Guinea; in the morning chill of a Flanders field;
at Villers Bretonneux in France; at Souda Bay in Crete;
here at the Rome War Cemetery, and at similar ceremonies
around the world.
For Australians and New Zealanders, Gallipoli has a special
significance. On ANZAC Day we honour a unique
relationship between both countries forged in mud and
blood. It was this conflict that helped shape our characters
and define our identities as new nations, as well as enshrine
a bond between us that can never be broken.
In April the New Zealand High Commissioner to the United
Kingdom, Sir Lockwood Smith and I visited Gallipoli with
the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. We crossed
the Dardanelles by ferry and drove to ANZAC Cove, playing
songs like "The Band played Waltzing Matilda" and "Maori
Battalion" in the car.
Without crowds, speeches and hymns there was a quiet,
poignant beauty to a glorious coastline with towering hills, a
sea of deepest blue and beaches that reminded us of
home. Not the bloodstained hell that it was 99 years
ago. The only sound we heard was the gentle lapping of the
waves on the shore.
We visited our sacred sites: Lone Pine, Shrapnel Valley and
Chunuk Bair where the New Zealand memorial faces a giant
statue of the Turkish leader, Kemal Ataturk.
We visited cemeteries that were once battlefields, our
soldiers buried where they fell, but now ablaze with irises,
pink flowering Judas trees and hedges of rosemary. At the
Nek we stood on a ridge where four waves of Australian
Light Horsemen were mown down. It was where Charles
Bean wrote that "the flower of the youth of Victoria and
Western Australia fell". At Beach Cemetery we paid our
respects at the grave of John Simpson, the digger with the
donkey, who cared for his mates.
Further down the Peninsula we visited a cemetery where
10,000 of our French allies were buried, and a memorial at
Helles Point remembering the 21,000 British as well as
soldiers from India and Newfoundland who died there.
But more than anything it was the inscriptions on the
headstones that are fused in my memory. Some said "died
for God, King and Country", but it was the more personal,
the more intimate, that were most powerful. "My darling
only son", or "From your wife and four young children", or
"left us a boy, died a man", or the last words of a dying
Aussie solder to the mate who was holding him in his arms
"God bless you, Cobber".
Most of all I will remember the simple, plaintive cry of a
mother, with her inscription "We miss you at home", a
sentiment of sacrifice experienced in recent years by so
many mums, partners and kids of our soldiers lost in
Afghanistan.
So at dawn services each ANZAC Day, Aussies and Kiwis
say a quiet and humble thankyou to mark the everlasting
companionship between the living and dead. And each year
we are moved when the Turkish Ambassador recites the
words of Ataturk now engraved on a memorial at ANZAC
Cove.
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
Here in this country of ours,
You, the mothers,
Who sent their sons from far away 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
The World War One ceremonies will continue in 2016 at the
Somme, a battleground which alone claimed more than a
million lives. Among them the writers, artists and
musicians, the great engineers and doctors, the farmers,
factory workers, the husbands and fathers who were not to
be.
They will not be forgotten. We will sing the hymns and read
their names engraved on memorial walls and headstones;
the lost company of cheerful mates.
The statistics tell a stark story. Staggeringly, the total
number of military and civilian casualties in World War One
was more than 37 million, including 16 million dead and 20
million wounded. A generation of young men were lost.
The impact on countries with small populations was also
immense. Between 1914 and 1918, 38.7 percent of the total
male population of Australia, aged between 18 and 44,
fought with a casualty rate of 65 percent, the highest of any
country.
But this year the commemorations are not only focused on
the Great War.
In May, shortly after arriving in Italy Sasha and I attended
the services commemorating the 70th anniversary of the
Battle of Monte Cassino.
The Polish service was deeply moving. More than 1000
brave Poles died storming the German stronghold in the
ruins of the once glorious 11th century abbey at the top of
the mountain.
At the cemetery, high on the towering hillside and close to
the rebuilt abbey, a Polish scout or guide stood behind each
headstone, a reminder of the sacrifice that helped build
their future. The inscription on the memorial is particularly
poignant
For our freedom and yours
We soldiers of Poland
Gave
Our soul to God
Our life to the soil of Italy
Our hearts to Poland
There is also a message to visitors: “Passer-by, go tell Poland
that we have perished obedient to her service”.
We also joined the New Zealand Governor-General, veterans
and their families at the cemetery where 500 Kiwi soldiers
are buried, many of them members of the famed Maori
Battalion. We watched the spirited Haka challenge to Prince
Harry and were moved at the sight of one old soldier
searching for, finding and caressing the headstone of the
brother who had fought beside him there in 1944.
At the UK ceremony the following day I thought of my own
father who had fought in Italy with the British Army. At the
Commonwealth Cemetery I was once again reminded of the
importance of the word “ally”, so powerfully reinforced by
the inscription on the Australian War Memorial at Hyde
Park Corner in London: “Whatever burden you are to carry,
we also will shoulder that burden”. It was a message from
Australia to Churchill in 1940, when Britain didn’t quite
“stand alone” because there were Aussie and Kiwi pilots in
the skies over Kent and Sussex defending London.
And we must never forget the Eighth Army, in all its
multicultural strength and diversity, who, on its long march
across the deserts of North Africa and from one end of Italy
to the other, took a step each day closer to home and to
victory.
In June, of course, we remembered that 70 years ago on DDay, the largest armada history has ever seen, left Britain in
an operation that was as epic in scale as it was in
aspiration.
Their purpose could not have been clearer. Europe was
enslaved by the greatest tyranny. Proud nations were in
chains. Millions were dying in camps such as Auschwitz,
Dachau and Bergen Belsen.
Civilisation, itself, was in peril.
Their mission wasn’t simply to storm the Normandy
beaches. It was to free a continent.
And the Allies could not have prevailed in Normandy
without the intelligence coming from Bletchley Park where
9,000 people worked undiscovered in three shifts every day,
year after year, breaking the codes that helped shorten the
War, saving countless lives.
All these events were inter-connected at a time when history
itself appeared to be racing.
There could be no D-Day unless the RAF, whose fighter
pilots alongside those from Australia, New Zealand, Poland,
Czechoslovakia and Canada, had not won the Battle of
Britain. There could be no VE-Day without D-Day. No VEDay without the massive sacrifice of millions of Soviet troops
and citizens. No VP-Day without the bravery of our
American friends at Midway, Guadacanal and Okinawa and
alongside Australian diggers in the jungles of New Guinea.
For those of us who had parents and grandparents who
served their countries in both World Wars, the ceremonies
will have great personal meaning.
Last year at Westminster Abbey I attended a service to
commemorate the 73rd anniversary of the Battle of Britain. I
will always remember the faces of those surviving pilots as
they looked up to see a Spitfire and Hurricane flying in close
formation over Big Ben.
Today we look back to generations that possessed a quality
of spontaneous decency and shared sense of duty. They
were prepared to give everything, including their lives, to the
next generation. We remember their talents, their promise,
the years never spent with their children, their spouses or
their sweethearts. They endured bereavement, privation,
smashed cities, and prolonged separations from loved ones,
that are unimaginable to us now.
In a time of terrorism, when the enemy is often unknown
and unseen, we honour not only those who have fallen but
also those who continue to bravely serve us in conflict zones
and in peacekeeping operations around the world.
So, as we honour a century of sacrifice we will remember
our fallen comrades as the best of our breed, the saviours of
all we cherish and the architects of who and what we are.