ANZAC Day 25 April 2014 - Ninety-nine years ago.

The Last to Leave,          Leon Gellert

The guns were silent, and the silent hills
 had bowed their grasses to a gentle breeze
 I gazed upon the vales and on the rills,
 And whispered, "What of these?' and "What of these?
 These long forgotten dead with sunken graves,
 Some crossless, with unwritten memories
 Their only mourners are the moaning waves,
 Their only minstrels are the singing trees
 And thus I mused and sorrowed wistfully

I watched the place where they had scaled the height,
 The height whereon they bled so bitterly
 Throughout each day and through each blistered night
 I sat there long, and listened - all things listened too
 I heard the epics of a thousand trees,
 A thousand waves I heard; and then I knew
 The waves were very old, the trees were wise:
 The dead would be remembered evermore-
 The valiant dead that gazed upon the skies,
 And slept in great battalions by the shore.
*****************************************

The Silence

This is indeed a false, false night;
There’s not a soldier sleeps,
But like a ghost stands to his post,
While Death through the long sap creeps.
There’s an eerie filmy spell o’er all —
A murmur from the sea;
And not a sound on the hills around —
Say, what will the silence be?

            R. J. GODFREY, GALLIPOLI



Notes:

Leon Gellert, Gallipoli poet.
He enlisted in the AIF on August 22, 1914, eighteen days after Britain had declared war on Germany. For seven weeks his battalion was kept in reserve on its troop ship before being ordered to land at Ari Burnu beach at dawn on April 25.

Gellert survived nine weeks on Gallipoli before coming down with dysentery. Evacuated to Malta, he contracted typhoid and was sent to England to convalesce. His reputation was made when his collection of fifty-five poems - Songs of a Campaign including Before Action, The Return, War!, The Death and The Attack at Dawn - was published.

Please read more about Leon Gellert at the link above!

Villers-Bretonneux catafalque - no weapons?

Just curious - watching the Anzac Day dawn service from the Australian War Memorial Cemetary in Villers-Bretonneux I wonder that the guard have no weapons.

On April 24th 1918 the Germans had taken Villers-Bretonneux and were driving the allies back.

Something else to remember about the battle at Villers-Bretonneux is that it was a victory, the ANZACs and the French drove back the Germans and won the battle, the allies eventually winning the war.

The battle won, the ANZACs realised it was three years to the day that the landing at Gallipoli took place.

The Last Post and Reveille were very well played at this service.

Anzac Day - Dawn Service 25/4/10

Ninety-five years after the Gallipoli landing we remember...

I've just arrived home from the Anzac Day Dawn Service. It’s warm and overcast, and in town it’s foggy. I thought I could get a nice photo of sunrise on Anzac Day, but it was not to be.

The crowd at the Dawn Service was great to see. It's a small country town and there were easily over 100 people there.

The homily was wonderful. The Reverened spoke of love, and what it is, and how a special love of comrades and country is what has given us our freedoms, and that such hard-won, costly freedoms should not easily be given away. I’m going to see if I can get it, but I suspect it was only with a few notes and “off the cuff”.

I should carry a notebook with me, to write down my thoughts.

After the Dawn Service the local RSL hosts a Gunfire Breakfast. At the breakfast all serving and ex service members are welcome to eat a breakfast prepared and supplied by the local Lions group. Bacon, eggs, snags, baked beans, bread, tea, coffee, rum. Yes, rum. It is a tradition that rum is provided for addition to coffee for/with breakfast after the Dawn Service.

Reading some of the information in the links I provided yesterday about Anzac Day I was surprised to see that Australia is unusual in its War memorials and commemorations as we not only remember the dead, but celebrate and honour those who came back. British War Memorials are only dedicated to those who fell. In Australia any town which had representatives in any war has a war memorial.

Quadrant April 2010 - Anzac in Ashes

Anzac in Ashes
Mervyn F. Bendle
The attack by the left on the Anzac tradition has escalated. As I predicted last year (“Gallipoli: Second Front in the History Wars”, Quadrant, June 2009; “The Intellectual Assault on Anzac”, Quadrant, July-August, 2009), the centenaries in 2014 of the outbreak of the Great War, and in 2015 of the Gallipoli campaign, will see an intensifying debate about the war as people seek to come to grips with the meaning of the seminal event of the twentieth century. Pushing itself to the centre of this struggle will be the intelligentsia, which historically has depicted these events in simplistic ideological terms and as exercises in futility. The intelligentsia is also infuriated by the Anzac legend, which is a dynamic cultural force over which it has little control, and for which it has very little sympathy, empathy or understanding.

Full article here:
http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2010/4/anzac-in-ashes