Three Ways to Remember the Dead
On the Memory of War
But to and fro in my dreams I will go
I’ll kneel and I’ll pray for you,
For slavery fled, O glorious dead,
When you fell in the Foggy Dew.The Foggy Dew
More than anything else, the two world wars serve as a point of mythological origin for the terms of our present day. They symbolise the ultimate triumph of good over evil, of democracy over totalitarianism. Yet the number of people who actually fought in these wars is fast dwindling. The last known veteran of the First World War, Claude Choules, passed away in 2012 in Perth, Australia. Give it a few more decades and there will be no more living observers to these tremendous events. So crucial to the formation of our world, they will soon pass entirely from living experience, at which point they will exist solely within our memory, at the mercy of politics and history. The links we maintain back to them are more important than ever.
ANZAC Day
Australia and New Zealand were both Dominions of the British Empire during the First World War. Soldiers from those countries comprised the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs), the spearhead of the tragic Gallipoli campaign.
When the Ottoman Empire joined the war on the side of the Central Powers, the Entente was suddenly cut off from its Russian allies. A plan was devised to re-supply them by forcing a way through the Dardanelles. The British didn’t expect the sick man of Europe to put up much of a fight.
Two landings were made in 1915 on the western side of the peninsula known as Gallipoli. The Anglo-French landing at the lightly defended Cape Helles was repulsed, but the ANZAC landing—despite encountering heavy resistance—established a beachhead. For the next six months they struggled up the slopes of the bay, making it as far as Sari Bair, a small mountain range not even 2 kilometres away. To divert the Ottoman army, another diversionary landing was attempted a few kilometres north at Suvla, but it amounted to nothing. By the time the ANZACs were evacuated in December over 10,000 had died.
Gallipoli became a symbol for the arrogance of the British ruling class and the pointlessness and horror of their imperial adventures—of war itself. It is mentioned in the Irish folk song The Foggy Dew. Despite contemporaneous rumblings of the 1916 Easter Rising, many Irish were drawn to the war over Britain’s guarantee of Belgian sovereignty. The song laments those volunteers (“wild geese”) who, though under the thumb of British oppression, took up the cause of “small nations”, only to meet lonely death far away from home:
Twas England bade our wild geese go
small nations might be free,
But their lonely graves are by Suvla’s waves
or the fringe of the great north sea.
On the other side of the world, the Gallipoli myth became a moment of national self-awareness. Banjo Paterson put his finger on the pulse with his poem We Are All Australians Now:
The mettle that a race can show
Is proved with shot and steel,
And now we know what nations know
And feel what nations feel.
Australia and New Zealand both observe ANZAC Day as a national holiday. Since its first celebration in 1916 it has grown to include all those who have died in military and peacekeeping operations in the histories of these young nations. Despite the reflexive Kiwi cynicism to war, imperialism, or ceremony, ANZAC Day somehow has the power to drag thousands of participants out of bed before dawn. Every year they gather around the country’s memorials to attend services comprising speeches, karakia, prayers, songs, bagpipes, anthems, and poems, a blend of traditions that perfectly resembles our nation’s mixed heritage.
This year’s ceremony at the Auckland War Memorial museum—held for the first time in two years because of Covid restrictions—was also conspicuous for the presence of a Turbaned soldier standing guard at the base of the cenotaph. More than 15,000 Indian soldiers fought at Gallipoli, including the 6th Gurkha Rifles, the only regiment to actually make it to the top of Sari Bair.
Far from celebrating war, the tone of ANZAC Day is solemn. It recognises genuine heroism on the behalf of those who, finding themselves in overwhelming, inexplicable danger, pressed on anyway. The act of remembering reminds us of the demands that war places upon us. It also reminds us of the costs. By summoning up these memories, it keeps alive for a little while longer the hope that we shall not have to repeat them.
The Last Post Ceremony
Germany’s strategy in the First World War was to knock out France as quickly as possible in a lightning attack, before Russia had a chance to fully mobilise her army. Key to this was the circumvention of French fortifications along the border by striking through neutral Belgium; the violation of Belgian sovereignty was Britain’s justification for entering the war. When the German advance was halted at the Marne river valley, both sides attempted to envelop each other’s northern flank in Belgium. During this “race to the sea” (as it became known), the town of Ieper (usually known in English by its French name “Ypres”) was the site of three extremely fierce battles.
After capturing Ieper, progress against the German line stalled beyond the city walls. It was bombed from ridges to the east, which became the first objectives of a major Entente offensive in 1917. Among other horrors, this battle saw the first use of mustard gas, and was fought by a young German private named Adolf Hitler.
New Zealand’s role was to capture a village called Passchendaele. Artillery shelling had completely destroyed the area’s trees and drainage system, however. When the offensive finally began, heavy rainfall had turned everything into an unnavigable morass. Soldiers took cover in the holes left by artillery shells, and then drowned in the mud.
One can still feel these horrors vividly in Siegfried Sassoon’s brutal imagery. In Dulce et Decorum est he describes the victim of a gas attack:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Most of the Kiwis who fell in battle are now buried at a cemetery in Polygon Wood, a little forest east of Ieper. The rest of the Commonwealth dead—the ones with no known graves—have their names inscribed on the walls of the imposing Menin Gate, located on Ieper’s eastern boundary.
One of the most curious features of the Menin Gate are the two limestone lions in front of it. The original lions were displayed there from 1862 until they were damaged and removed during World War I. In 1936 the Australian government obtained the lions and put them into storage at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. They were restored by Lucas Zywuszko in 1987 and briefly returned to Ieper in 2017, on the centenary of Passchendaele. The Australian government also gifted the city with a pair of replicas, which now sit on plinths in front of the Menin Gate.
Every day since 1928—excepting the period of Nazi occupation—the city of Ieper has recognised those who fell in her defence. At 8pm the street beneath the gate is closed. A group of buglists—members of the local volunteer fire brigade—gather to play the Last Post. The Last Post was a short tune used in the British Army to signify the end of the fighting day. The Last Post is followed by a short lament from a lone piper.
In more elaborate versions of the ceremony, other pieces of music may be performed, or speeches given. Among the commemorations I have seen includes a wreath donated by a German biker group. Such gestures seem even more unlikely than war. To see them from the people you least expect is to believe, if only for the blink of a disbelieving eye, that peace might actually be possible.
De Dodenherdenking
Unlike the Belgians, the Dutch had always tried to stay neutral. They succeeded in keeping out of the First World War, but despite promises to respect their neutrality, Germany invaded them in the Second World War. The nation capitulated within a week following the mass bombing of civilians in Rotterdam.
Because the Dutch and Germans have strong cultural ties—and in the views of Nazi race science, a common Aryan stock—there was great enthusiasm for their possible absorption into the Third Reich. The Dutch government refused, however, and went into exile in Great Britain. Queen Wilhelmina broadcast speeches on the radio across the channel to her captive people. Her son-in-law, the German Prince Bernhard, took a more active role; despite having been a member of the Nazi Party and the Schutzstaffel in the 1930s, he organised the No. 322 “Dutch” Squadron of the Royal Air Force and personally flew a Spitfire against the Luftwaffe.
Dutch society was then based on a pluralistic, semi-segregated model known as “pillarisation”. According to this model, Catholics, Protestants, Socialists, and Liberals were all entitled to their own political parties, schools, unions, newspapers, and clubs. A successful occupation would mean the gradual Nazification of all these institutions. This met with strong resistance from the churches and the communists, the latter of whom formed the bulk of the early Dutch resistance. They organised a nation-wide General Strike in 1941, to protest pogroms that had been launched in the Jewish neighbourhoods of Amsterdam.
At first the Nazi administration had sought to win the Dutch over with a light-handed approach. They now began to purge clergymen who would not advocate Nazism, and to break up unions that would not participate in their forced labour programs. The Nazi crackdown culminated in the blockade of food to civilians in the final stages of the war. The resulting Hongerwinter caused over 20,000 deaths.
The Netherlands was liberated on May 5th 1945 by a combination of Canadian, Polish, and British soldiers. That date is now a national holiday. Yet the more touching tradition I have observed occurs the day before, on the Dodenherdenking (“Remembrance of the Dead”). A ceremony takes place at the cenotaph in Dam Square, Amsterdam. All flags fly at half-mast. At 8pm a moment of silence is observed—not just at Dam Square, but around the whole country. Public places become hushed. Televisions are muted or turned down. Conversations stop. The radios broadcast silence. Drivers and cyclists pull over to the side of the road. The blokes at the pub gaze into their beer glasses. Then after two minutes—as though it had only been a cloud briefly passing over the sun—life resumes.
With no pomp, compulsion, or splendour—in a manner befitting the thrifty, practical Dutch spirit—the whole country experiences a brief rupture with the ordinary hustle and bustle. The act of remembrance doesn’t take place in a formal ceremony or an overt, outward gesture. It takes place in every person’s mind, in the quiet moment in which the unbidden memory of the dead returns to their thoughts.