THE AUSTRALASIAN IDEAL
Knights-errant of the human race,
The Quixotes of to-day,
For man as man they claim a place,
Prepare the tedious way.
BERNARD O'DOWD.
Strong to defend our right,
Proud in all nations' sight,
Lowly in Thine–
One in all noble fame,
Still be our path the same:
Onward in Freedom's name,
Upward in Thine.
BRUNTON STEPHENS.
It is so easy to be wise after the event that I don't suppose many of us
are much impressed by the aggressive wisdom of those critics in our
midst who are still noisily telling us of the naval and military
blunders made in the inception and development of the Dardanelles
campaign and with what beautiful simplicity they might all have been
avoided. One has no patience with such chatter and no use for such cheap
sagacity. You cannot remedy any errors by wasting time in learned talk
about them; there is only one way of atonement, and that is to put them
at once behind you and go resolutely on, seeing to it that they are not
committed again. Even Napoleon made his mistakes, for the ablest
commander is not infallible. And it is the most youthful folly to
belittle our own leaders and urge them to take lessons from the perfect
organisation and supreme military tactics of our enemy when we know that
Belgium, Calais, Paris, Riga, and a score of other places stand witness
to that enemy's crude blunderings and the failure of his arms. I
remember how in the early days of the war certain of our very clamorous
newspapers were filled with joy over the complete breakdown of German
diplomacy: German diplomacy, they said, had not had the skill to detach
Russia from France, so that they might have made easy war on France
alone; they had failed to keep Britain out of it; they had failed to
keep Italy out of it; they had failed to capture the sympathies of
America; and those journals poured scorn on the German diplomatic
service as a pompous and unintelligent futility. Yet when Turkey sided
with the Huns, when Bulgaria joined them, and when Greece insisted on
remaining neutral, these same sapient papers cried out lustily that
British diplomacy was fumbling and worthless, and broke into pious
wishes that we had diplomats as clever and triumphant as the Germans.
Which means, of course, that their failure with three of the smaller
Powers makes our diplomats inferior to those who failed with four of the
greatest.
Let us have done with such pitiful nonsense, and get on with the work we
mean to do. Let us make up our minds that the Germans will have their
full share of incidental victories; no sensible person ever dreamt that
they would not. It is the big, inexperienced schoolboy idea, this, that
your side is losing if it is not winning all the time. The adult mind
knows that the way of conquest is never so smoothly paved; that the best
and bravest, coping with a powerful and subtle enemy, must needs be
often baffled, but what matters is that he is only baffled to fight
better, knowing that if he does so no check is a defeat, for in the long
run it is only the final victory that counts.
There have been rumours that, because the Suvla Bay attempt did not
achieve its objective and, for the moment, a condition of stalemate
prevails there, the Dardanelles campaign is to be abandoned, but they
find no favour in Australia or New Zealand. There were indignant
protests against such a course in the Australasian press, protests that
the gallant fellows who had laid down their lives on that battle-torn
peninsula should not be allowed so to have died in vain; that the work
to which they and their dauntless comrades had set their hands should be
carried through determinedly and their high self-sacrifice justified.
Yet, they added, it was a question for the military authorities, and, at
the worst, they would loyally accept their decision. You may take it
that Mr. Hughes, the new Australian Premier, replying to questions in
the House of Representatives at the end of October, spoke for all
Australasia when he said, amidst tumultuous cheering, "Our business is
to carry out the instructions of the Imperial Government, and to give
the Government the enthusiastic support we owe it as a duty. We must
refrain from criticising the actions of men placed in a position of
frightful responsibility, and also from listening to the
thousand-and-one critics who have not the slightest authority to speak."
Obviously, if those critics are as expert as they would have us believe
they should be wearing khaki and utilising their transcendent ability in
doing things better, instead of dissipating it in unhelpful words.
The fact that Canada has just completed arrangements to bring her forces
in the field up to a total of 250,000, and that Australia and New
Zealand are recruiting and training and enlarging their armies so
rapidly that they will soon have reached the same total, and do not mean
to stop there, is sufficient indication of the stern spirit of resolve
in which the Britains oversea are facing this great issue which no
half-measures can decide. And we of the homeland, who do not take our
opinions or all our information from our newspapers, know that the soul
of the old country marches with them, and will march with them
dauntlessly step by step to the end, however far off it may be.
If it were otherwise–if we were the cravens that a few of our noisy,
irresponsible journalists would make us out to be–do you imagine that
the manhood of those new countries, sons of the great men who were our
fathers also, would have risen so spontaneously to save from destruction
the Empire of a generation so unworthy of their past, and the
civilisation for which we and our Allies stand? They are not out for
territory, they are not out for conquest; they are the vanguard of the
new democracy, and they are out in the place that is theirs, in the
forefront of the battle, fighting and dying for the highest ideals of
the human race, for the freedom and natural rights of our common
humanity. The German junkerdom, the Prussian militarism and out-of-date
war-lust that is abhorrent to us, is ten times more abhorrent to them,
for in their ideas of freedom and equal human brotherhood they have
outstripped us. They are less shackled than we are by old use and wont,
by conventions and precedents that hamper our onward movement; but they
know their ideal is ours, for they lit their torch at our fire, and they
are breasting the onslaught beside us at this hour because they know it,
and could by no means stand aside and see that fire trampled out under
the hoofs of a race in whom the brute savagery and primitive ideals of
war and domination are so damnably renascent.
All the blasphemous and discredited formulas and political doctrines
that oppressed our peoples in a past whose ancient tyrannies and
legalised inhumanities we have long repented, still survive with more
degenerate and diabolical manifestations in twentieth century Germany.
The gospel of the divine right of kings flourishes there, and the whole
nation would seem to have been so dehumanised in their training that, in
the main, they have accepted the dicta of their most modern professors
that the State is above morality and can do no wrong; that war is a
beautiful and a glorious thing; that a country clothes itself in dignity
and honour by crushing and pillaging its neighbours and reducing them to
subjection, and to that god-like end is justified in violating treaties,
and outraging and massacring the innocent and the helpless. They are so
incapable of realising the shame of these things that the horror of the
civilised world at the Belgian martyrdoms, the sinking of unprotected
passenger ships laden with civilian men and women, the wanton slaughter
by bombs and shells of non-combatants in unfortified towns, and the
callous assassination of Edith Cavell, genuinely surprises them: they
are so wholly brutalised that they are not even sensible of their
brutality. The growing demand among the humaner races which are perforce
in arms against them that, before peace is made, strict justice should
be done upon the barbarous breakers of international law, as it is done
on those minor criminals that break national laws, strikes them as
purely fantastic. They would sanctify murder when a king or his
ministers commit it, and make it accursed only when it is done by lesser
men. They have not yet advanced far enough in the path of reason to have
a glimmering suspicion that the man, crowned or uncrowned, who
deliberately plans a war of aggression for the aggrandisement of his own
State and, after years of cunning and dastardly preparation, falls with
fire and slaughter on his victim, is an outlaw and a criminal against
the common laws of decent nations. We realise, in these days, that,
except when it is in self-defence and for the freedom not of one race
but of all, war is plain murder, and the wholesale murderer should and
must be amenable on that count at the bar of civilisation. The surest
way to end war is to strip it of its glamour, treat it as the
blackguardly crime it is, and punish the criminals. The German savages
have not even stopped short at murder on the field of battle, and I for
one shall lose some faith in the democracies of the world if, in due
season, von Bissing does not take his stand in the dock of an
international police-court and undergo his trial and sentence for the
assassination of Edith Cavell, as any common butcher would for any
common murder; and there are those as high and higher than von Bissing
who must, unless we would make the name of justice a byword, take their
turn in the same dock and answer in the same fashion for the hundreds of
unarmed men and blameless women and children who have been
systematically done to death in cold blood away from the fighting line.
It is our duty to make it clear, in this enlightened age, that no State
is above morality; that there are natural, human laws which cannot be
broken with impunity, and are not to be set aside by any the most
self-important State that ever reared itself under heaven. This feeling
is growing in intensity in the hearts and minds of Britain and her
Allies, and nowhere is it held with a more passionate conviction than
among the great democratic peoples of Canada, New Zealand, and
Australia.
"I am one of those," said Mr. W. A. Holman, the Premier of New South
Wales, speaking the other day at Sydney, "who hope that when victory is
achieved there will be no weakness on the part of the Allied
Governments. I hope, when we have gained peace, the Allied Governments,
acting in the interests of civilisation, will avail themselves of so
unprecedented an opportunity to declare that the public law of Europe is
no longer a law without sanction and without punishment, but that those
who break the public law of Europe are to be treated like criminals who
break any other law. I hope we shall have the pleasure of seeing some of
the members of the German Ministry placed upon their trial for wilful
murder and brought to account for the various acts committed at their
instigation. I am as confident about the ultimate result of this
struggle as is any one here. I have no fear and no doubt. I have never
wavered. But if there are those who doubt, let me say this: it is better
that we should perish in the trenches than contemplate the possibility
of succumbing in the struggle that is now before us."
That is the authentic voice of Australia–of all the young democracies
who are joint heirs and will more than ever in the future be joint
sharers with us of the destinies of the British Empire. They have some
sentimental regard for the old country, but they are not drawn to us in
this business merely by that; their motives are higher, their ideals
rooted in a deeper emotion. They have turned their backs on the night
and set their faces towards the morning, and they are not fighting so
much to save the British Empire as the hopes of human progress that
would go down with it if it fell. Germany, who is leprous with iniquity,
declares herself pure and noble in God's sight. Great Britain is faulty
enough, as all human institutions are; she has done many grievous wrongs
in the past, has been unjust to smaller nations and tyrannous to the
weak, but she has become conscious of this, has the grace to acknowledge
it, and has endeavoured and is endeavouring to atone for some of her
unrighteousness. In this frank self-knowledge lies her hope of
salvation. We no longer live for the crude aims and glories that
inspired us three or four centuries ago; we have, as a nation, grown
beyond them a little, have climbed by painful degrees a little higher
out of the primal slime. We have blundered into dirty ways, but have not
been contented to wallow in them. Through all our divagations we have,
in some short-sighted fashion, followed the gleam; we are still far from
arriving at a realisation of the later ideal that has subdued us, but we
are still moving towards it, and the chief reason why our great
self-governing Colonies are with us in this crisis is that they are
travelling the same road, towards the same goal.
But I despair of saying clearly in words of my own just what it is that
has secured to us the glorious loyalty of our kindred of Greater
Britain. Members of the same family, they are under no illusions about
us; they are familiar with our weaknesses, our hypocrisies, our
injustices; but it is our pride that knowing the worst as well as the
best of us, as those of a family circle must, they still have faith in
our ultimate right-mindedness, and can give reason for their faith.
There are hints of that reason scattered about their literature, but I
don't think it has ever been more fearlessly, more fully, or more
poignantly revealed than it is by John Farrel in his "Australia to
England"–one of the greatest things in Australian poetry:
... By lust of flesh and lust of gold,
And depth of loins and hairy breadth
Of breast, and hands to take and hold,
And boastful scorn of pain and death,
And something more of manliness
Than tamer men, and growing shame
Of shameful things, and something less
Of final faith in sword and flame;
By many a battle fought for wrong,
And many a battle fought for right,
So have you grown august and strong,
Magnificent in all men's sight–
A voice for which the kings have ears,
A face the craftiest statesmen scan,
A mind to mould the after years,
And mint the destinies of man.
Red sins were yours: the avid greed
Of pirate fathers, smocked as Grace,
Sent Judas missionaries to read
Christ's word to many a feebler race–
False priests of Truth who made their tryst
At Mammon's shrine and reft and slew–
Some hands you taught to pray to Christ
Have prayed His curse to rest on you....
But praise to you, and more than praise
And thankfulness, for some things done,
And blessedness and length of days
As long as earth shall last, or sun!
You first among the peoples spoke
Sharp words and angry questionings
Which burst the bonds and shed the yoke
That made your men the slaves of kings!
You set and showed the whole world's school
The lesson it will surely read,
That each one ruled has right to rule–
The alphabet of Freedom's creed
Which slowly wins its proselytes
And makes uneasier many a throne;
You taught them all to prate of Rights
In language growing like your own.
And now your holiest and best
And wisest dream of such a tie
As, holding hearts from East to West,
Shall strengthen while the years go by;
And of a time when every man
For every fellow-man will do
His kindliest, working by the plan
God set him. May the dream come true!
And greater dreams! O Englishmen,
Be sure the safest time of all
For even the mightiest State is when
Not even the least desires its fall!
Make England stand supreme for aye
Because supreme for peace and good,
Warned well by wrecks of yesterday
That strongest feet may slip in blood!
_Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._