We will remember them

I was, I confess, a part of that generation that grew up with what I later came to see was an unhealthy disdain for the ANZAC tradition. I was deeply influenced by Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year, which I saw performed at the beginning of my teens.

I was too young to explore the many layers of meaning in the text, but bought readily into one of its superficial narratives, an exposé of a generation that I, readying to be an Angry Young Man, felt were overly controlling and out of touch with a post-Beatles world (the play, of course, was written before the Beatles). By 1986, when the play resurfaced, at least in Melbourne where I was by then living, it all seemed passé: few people attended ANZAC observances and World War One survivors were few and far between.

Then, suddenly, a whole lot of things coalesced, and either I or the world or both woke up.  Over the next five years our senses of respect grew exponentially; children proudly wore their grandparents’ medals, attendances at marches increased dramatically, school curricula embraced new reverence for sacrifices made.

With them emerged new waves of understanding of what those caught up in the  brutalities of war (not just WW1) had lived through. PTSD became a thing; slowly we who lived warlessly realized that the degenerate drunken day that Seymour in part portrays was not some sort of selfish nostalgic debauchery. Slowly, as the last WW1 Vets died out we realised that the gathering and marching and telling stories, and yes no doubt a drop or two of rum and the odd game of two-up, was a tiny step of healing for those whose scar-tissue reached far deeper than we could ever imagine into their minds and souls.

While I didn’t this year, it has been my privilege in recent years … perhaps twenty or more now, to take part in and often lead liturgical observances for those whose lives were caught up in wars not of their own making. It remains true, of course, that there are some deeply evil forces who strive endlessly to make money out of war, whose share prices soar when Messrs Trump and Kim Jong-un rattle sabres, but that has never been the real story of war.

The real story is told – or not – by the men and women whose lives have been irreversibly changed (and that includes families of service men and women) by conflict. The real story is written in scar tissue. As the War Poets made clear, there is no glory in war. But there is respect for those who put their lives on the line for ideals of hope, freedom, and justice. Lest we forget.