Anzac Day 2021 St John’s College University of Sydney
The Gettysburg Address is high among the speeches that honour war dead and injured. Lincoln gave it 1863 at the dedication of the Gettysburg battlefield as a National Cemetery, seventeen months before the result of that American Civil War was known. It contains 271 words and runs for less than three minutes, while a preceding speech went for two hours.
Here is less than one minute’s worth of what Lincoln said:
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
In the same way, the war dead of Gallipoli, and of all who have served in Australia’s wars since: those from this College and from amongst our own families, and right up to Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan, exercised the same consecratory power, in so far as our comments or rhetoric is concerned.
We set time aside to honour and remember ‘lest we forget’ or as the learned Dr Richard Hooker said around the year 1600: that posterity may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream.
When Lincoln said: ‘. . . we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it’ he referred to the blood cost of a then great cause of a human and political ideal ‘the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced: the American experiment in the ideal of human equality and a type of non-monarchical and non-hereditary elected government. And as Lincoln said aphoristically to an audience in an even shorter speech ‘The flag will only stay up if you keep it up.’
Gallipoli. AIF did not stand for Australian Infantry Forces, but Australian Imperial Forces. Gallipoli was not a standalone conflict but part of a global conflict between empires, each of which empire has now passed away – vanished as empire amongst empires.
Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Russia, Ottoman. No longer Empires. Perhaps an American empire exists in some sense, perhaps a Chinese: each seeks to project power across the globe, to be the global matrix. Economic globalisation is a kind of empire.
What of Australia? Manning Clarke in his History of Australia said that we never had a Civil War because whenever things heated up someone would ask ‘Has Phar Lap won? What is Bradman’s score? What is the Surf like at Bondi?
It might be better if it were always Bondi where 18 year old men and women are running ashore or ploughing through the surf or rescuing others in the good cause. It might not be so. Any study at all of history suggests that it won’t be.
Australians can be particularly challenged by Lincoln’s words: ‘that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.’.
What is our cause? Our vocation? What might be asked of each of us? What noble path might quietly light up as ‘the way’? These are questions for young Australians. They may have a specific shape for catholic Christians.
Gallipoli can become the centre for deep study of WWI and of today’s world, gazed it with all our attention, even of our own vocation. Gallipoli is a Turkish form of the earlier Greek name of the nearby town Kalli-polis, meaning Beautiful City or Good City. There were many kalli-poleis in the Greek world, and the theory of the Kalli-Polis goes back to Socrates and Plate. Plato’s Republic was one attempt to describe the Kalli-polis the beautiful or good human city.
The good city, the beautiful city, the better world – the great cause that invites our last full measure of devotion: within which the church is called to signpost the great city of God, perhaps in the way Jesus referenced the leaven hidden in the flour that quietly raises the whole lot. Individual faith matters.
These next few days one could read some Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. One could ponder that dangerous nineteenth century mantra ‘war is politics by other means.’ Perhaps it is no longer politics by nother means but something altogether worse. One could ponder the phrase apocalypse from below.
Students can ask or simply ponder ‘How am I apportioning in the weeks ahead, the 168 hours given me each week?’
There is a riddle or jumble hidden in Gallipoli. When this College was founded in that vanished time of empire, Russia was Britain’s enemy and Turkey was Britain’s friend. In 1815 German Prussia was Britain’s friend and France was Britain’s enemy. In 1915 Prussia and Turkey were enemies and France and Russia friends. It is hard to make sense of this.
Tolkien was also a WWI veteran who saw many lost. He wrote in a letter:
“Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ – though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory. (Letter #195)”― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
It would be good if our experience fo faith and life, in our times, were better than a long defeat, a holding out for something joyful beyond attrition.
Perhaps Gallipoli today reminds of the Kalli-polis, the Beautiful City, the Good City into which God in Christ calls all God’s children – and each of us in some distinctively personal way. . ‘to strive with the full measure of our devotion.’
Likewise, we cannot add to Our Lord’s sacrifice. It was in historical time ‘once and for all’. In another sense each does add to it by participating in that one sacrifice of the Mass, that eucharistic good event, where the necessity and the for-us-ness of Jesus’s rejection, suffering, death, burial, resurrection and sending of the Spirit is rehearsed and set before even us, and where sign, symbol and reality unite as we participate.
In the light of life that flows from it we can discern and find that great cause leading into the transcendent God, to which one may truly and safely give ‘the last full measure of devotion.’ Lest we forget.
Dr Ivan Head 