In his address on Sunday morning 26 April, Lt Col. David McLure remembers the events of 100 years ago at ANZAC Cove as well as the overseas service of our modern soldiers. The address was made at St Mark's Anglican Church, Darling Point, and mentions Lt. Athol Adams who took part in the Gallipoli landings as well as LCPL Jason Marks who lost his life in the recent Afghanistan conflict (printed with permission).
Yesterday, 100 years ago, 16,000 Australians, as part of a 70,000 strong Force of British, French, Indian and New Zealand troops, made an amphibious assault on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey. Estimates differ, but around 900 Australian and New Zealand soldiers died on the first day.More information on LCPL Jason Marks is available at:
The campaign was a complete failure. By the time of the evacuation 8 and half months later, over 44 thousand Allied soldiers had been killed, of whom 8,709 were Australian. Over 85,000 Turks died defending their homeland. It was, on any view, a military disaster. So many lives wasted in a lost cause. Some worry about ANZAC Day, and its capacity to obscure the horror and folly of war. For my part, I am glad that our ANZAC Day tradition is born from disaster, not triumph. It emphasises to us that ANZAC Day is not about remembering Australia’s participation in military campaigns, but rather, remembering the sacrifice of the Australians who served in them. Australians have at times been guilty of being somewhat ahistorical in our romanticising of the natural skill and instincts of the first ANZACs. The reality, though, is that their deeds require no embellishment to be able to look with awe at their courage and sacrifice. One does not need to look far from this very congregation to prove the truth of this. One of your parishioners, Sarah Renwick, has kindly permitted me to read from a letter by her Great Uncle, LT Athol Adams, one of the first ANZACs, to his mother. The letter is dated 27 May 1915 and was sent from a hospital in Alexandria. It reads, in part:I got hit on April 25th the first day we landed, soon after getting ashore. I got one through the upper arm and about half an hour afterward got another on the wrist which smashed the watch and put my left hand out of action temporarily. I then left the line and went down to the beach…I returned to Gallipoli on Sunday evening…. On Saturday evening we got orders to return to the firing line and as we were going up I got hit again. This time in the right thigh, a clean hit right through. I couldn’t walk and while I was being taken back I got another in the right lower arm. The bullet hit a man who was helping me and broke his arm and then went into me and stayed in my wrist. I was taken on board …a fine hospital ship where we had A1 treatment. On Monday afternoon… they took the bullet out under gas. I’ll send it out to you and [you] had better send it to Bill to go on his watch chain with that bit of his knee. One can only marvel at the breezy nonchalance of being shot 4 times in 10 days, but I suppose LT Adams rightly thought he was one of the lucky ones. He survived the Gallipoli campaign, but tragically died in an air training accident in Egypt in 1917. LT Adams’ injuries bring me to the beautiful flag over which this Church stands as custodian. As I understand it, this flag flew over No. 2 Australian Casualty Clearing Station in Egypt and then later in France in 1916. Later still, it was used as a shroud to cover the bodies of soldiers killed on the Western Front. It is, of course, a Union Jack, not the Australian Flag. As a sidenote, I was curious about why a Union Jack was flown by an Australian Army unit 15 years after Federation. The Army was ordered in 1908 to replace the Union Flag at all military establishments with the Australian Ensign. As a serving Army officer, it gives me a little satisfaction to know that even back then in 1916, as now, Australian soldiers would obey orders that put their lives in great peril, but would happily defy any interference with the symbols they hold dear. Today, the Australian Army is represented by and is the official protector of the Australian National Flag. It is a role which the Army takes rather seriously, especially when we lose one of our own. Which leads me to a final personal reflection. On ANZAC Day in 2008 I stood at dawn on a hilltop in the Oruzgan province of Afghanistan and listened to all the usual components of the ANZAC Day service. It occurred to me that on the next ANZAC Day, I too would be a veteran. As the Ode was read, I looked at the large poster sized photos our survey technicians had made of the 4 Australian soldiers who had been killed in that conflict as at that date. When you read the stories of Gallipoli and the Western Front, you are struck by the phenomenal perseverance of the soldiers who fought and suffered in truly awful conditions. This thought made me feel ever so much a fraud, as I shrugged my shoulders under the reassuring weight of my body armour, surrounded by all the military hardware of which the first ANZACs could only dream. Two days later, a member of my Task Force, LCPL Jason Marks, was shot and killed in combat. It was in this awful experience I saw the ANZAC sprit living on. From the moment his body was returned from the field, until the moment he was repatriated to his family, he was shrouded in the flag of our nation and guarded with all the solemnity we could muster. But the moment his coffin was loaded into an RAAF aircraft for its sorry journey back to Australia, the members of the Task Force went back to their vehicles and returned to the field on which he was lost. There was still much work to be done. We will remember him. This was the ANZAC spirit of mateship and perseverance in action. Sadly, this ritual was repeated another 36 times over the following few years. Everyone persevered. War is a terrible and wasteful curse of the human condition. To remember the sacrifice of all those who have served, is to hold out the hope that future generations will not know it first-hand. We cannot dream that Afghanistan will be Australia’s last war, because only a few days ago a new contingent of Australian and New Zealand soldiers left to serve in the latest conflict in Iraq. But perhaps we can all dream and pray that on the 200th anniversary of the landing at ANZAC Cove, our descendants will distantly remember Afghanistan and Iraq as the very last wars that Australians endured.
http://www.defence.gov.au/vale/Cpl_Marks/Lance_Cpl_Marks.htm
Very moving
ReplyDeleteThank you for following the blog and remembering the sacrifices of our modern ANZACS.
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