St John's Cathedral, Brisbane and the Anzac Legend

During the First World War, four out of every five Australian casualties occurred on the Western Front and it could take many hours for a wounded soldier to get from his trench to a casualty clearing station. The Australian War Memorial (AWM) records that for many of the wounded their first sight of an Australian nurse in her white uniform was like that of an angel. In the war, seven Australian nurses were awarded the Military Medal for acts of gallantry and devotion to duty under fire. The AWM recalls that, during one bombing raid in August 1917, Australian Sister Kelly shielded her patients’ heads with basins and bedpans. An army chaplain found her in a hospital tent, holding a wounded man’s hand as the bombs fell. “I couldn’t leave my patients,” she said simply.

Staff, nurses and patients at the fractured femur ward at No. 2 Australian General Hospital at the Somme, France 1917, the setting of the bloodiest battle in the First World War with one million soldiers on all sides killed or wounded.

Australian War Memorial C03665

The First World War is often depicted as the ultimate example of the futility of war. Historians, novelists, poets and film producers have focused on the mud and the trenches and the image of countless soldiers being sent to their deaths by generals from the safety of their headquarters for the sake of gaining or defending a few metres of ground. The rationale for prosecuting the war against Germany in 1914-1918 is often compared unfavourably with the Second World War (1939-1945), when Britain, Australia and the United States confronted demonstrably evil ideologies —German Nazism and Japanese imperialism—and found themselves fighting for their very survival. Today, the reasons for going to war in 1914 seem more questionable, reasons bound up with political, economic, nationalistic and imperial rivalries between the European Powers (particularly Britain and Germany) and their aristocratic leaders which arose during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. There was also at the time a pervasive belief in Australia that war was a ‘rite of passage’—a test of manhood and of national character—one which would enable the young country to prove that it was more than a degenerate outpost of convict stock, but a nation able to stand alongside the best in the British Empire and the British race. This belief was linked to what would nowadays be described as a ‘racist’ belief in the inherent moral superiority of the British peoples, not only over people of colour but also over ‘white’ foes like Germany. From another perspective, however, Britain, Australia and other British Empire countries went to war in 1914 with the clear and overwhelming support of their peoples.

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