Remembering the diggers

Today is ANZAC Day, marking 96 years since the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landed at Gallipoli. The military action itself was a miserable failure (unless you’re looking at it from the Turkish perspective), but it marked the coming of age for the antipodean part of the British Empire.

I haven’t been to Gallipoli, but I have visited a lot of the WWI British cemeteries in Northern France. Some are very small, maybe a couple dozen graves; others are appallingly large. Each headstone is marked with the soldier’s name, rank, regimental crest, date of death and age. But there are many that bear only a cross and the legend “a soldier of the Great War…known unto God.”

And here’s what I felt after walking the avenues of the dead: it was a war fought entirely for the furtherance of empires, on both sides of the slaughter. And hundreds of thousands of men from the colonies paid the highest price to maintain imperial structures.

To no avail—by 1918 three of the empires lay in ruins and the foundations of a fourth had been weakened so that it tottered on for only a few decades. Tens of millions were dead from military action, disease and starvation. And hundreds of square miles of Europe was laid waste.

And since then…well, you know the story.

Across Australia and New Zealand today, people commemorated all of their countrymen lost to wars in the past 96 years. Gallipoli to Afghanistan. That’s a lot of loss in less than a century for countries with such small populations.