THE AUSTRALASIAN SOLDIER
And Southern Nation, and Southern State aroused from their dream
of ease,
Shall write in the book of Eternal Fate their stormy histories.
"The Australasians are possibly the finest troops in the world."
The considered judgment of an observer at the Dardanelles, Commander
Josiah Wedgwood, M.P., deliberately pronounced for publication in the
Press, caught the attention of many readers of newspapers in this
country. Cabled out to the Southern Hemisphere, it was reproduced in
every newspaper in Australia and New Zealand, where a thrill of pride
and gratitude vibrated from end to end of the country, radiating back
to the most remote township at the very Back of Beyond.
This was generous appreciation indeed, and accepted in the same
spirit of generosity in which it was tendered. The vow, "Our last
shilling and our last man," with which Australasia had solemnly
entered upon the Great War was as solemnly renewed. The Southern
Britons quivered with comprehensible pride at the generous and timely
praise; it was more than they would have claimed--much more--but it
carried a message of consolation to many a stricken home ten thousand
miles away from the blood-stained battlefields of Europe. "Good
soldiers, none better!" Then they have not died for nothing if they
have merited that epitaph from the Motherland.
[Illustration: A New South Wales Battalion, ready for the Front.]
Nature, as well as the deliberate plan of the Australasians
themselves, has ensured that an army of Australasians must
necessarily compose a very fine fighting force. It may be that the
qualifications of the soldier of the future shall consist of an
incredible callousness of heart, and an extended knowledge of all the
detestable forms that can be assumed by the most hideous of human
crimes. But the qualifications of a warrior have not yet been so far
modified by the Great War that he has been converted into a poisoner.
It is still assumed that he is a man who risks his life in the fair
fight he wages with fair-minded men, whom unfortunate circumstances
have made his foes for the time being. Coolness and resource in
danger, magnanimity in the glory of victory, and stoutheartedness
in the first abashment of defeat may still be called the soldier's
virtues; and the oldest excuse for war, that the soldier kills
without murder in his heart, can still be pleaded by the Briton who
takes up arms in defence of his country.
Soldiering of this sort has always been an instinct with the Southern
Briton. The individual citizen there is under no misapprehension
about the preparedness of his country for war; he looks around
and sees for himself. To desire to retain a great continent for
ever for the exclusive use of the white races is a privilege
involving heavy responsibilities. There is an obvious danger in
excluding one's neighbours because they do not conform to the high
ideals of civilization adopted by the Briton. Very deliberately
the Australasian has adopted this provocative attitude toward his
coloured neighbours, who far outnumber him, though possessing only
very restricted areas of territory for their habitation, as compared
with the spacious elbow room which the Australasian reserves for
himself.
From his early boyhood the young Australasian is made familiar with
the possibility of taking up arms in self-defence. Whatever may be
thought of the measures he takes for the development of his holding,
in proof of his title to it, there can be no difference of opinion
as to his readiness to fight for his spacious heritage. He knows
what such a war would mean to his country, with its long stretches
of undefended coastline, and the sparse population of the country
behind them. These coasts are so obviously vulnerable spots that only
a purblind fool could ignore their terrible significance. And the
Australasian is certainly no fool.
There are other circumstances, too, in his daily life that may be
partly responsible for his curious readiness to take off his coat and
fight. The uncertainty of his surroundings may be responsible for his
belief that life is one long fight with circumstance. He goes forth
to his daily occupation with the light of battle in his eye; there
is something pathetically cynical in his creed that it is necessary
to fight for what he gets, even after he has fairly earned it by
more peaceful means. He gives his admiration to the man he calls
a "battler," and reserves a contemptuous surprise for the man who
expects to get anything at all without fighting for it.
Wherever he comes into contact with Nature, the Australasian finds
justification for his idea that life is a long struggle against
adverse conditions, a struggle which must only be relinquished
at the merciful call of Death itself. Considering the fewness of
his numbers, he is engaged in the most terrific task that engages
any of the nations of the world. He is developing a vast unknown
continent, and contending with conditions that are most curiously
fickle. The unconsidered circumstances of one year become the
determining factors of the next, and that by some whimsical no-law
that baffles all intelligent prevision. In another century he may
have mastered some of the tricks that climate and environment, to
mention but two of his ever-present problems, are playing with his
means of livelihood; for the present they make his existence one long
uncertain struggle.
For instance, a bag of seed wheat brought from another district
may contain a few seeds of a harmless weed, known for many years
to be innocent; not worth worrying about one way or the other. The
transfer to new conditions of soil and atmosphere suddenly transforms
this inoffensive plant into a vegetable pest, that climbs over all
saner growths and chokes them out of existence with the ineradicable
monstrosity of its new functions. Fertile farms are rendered useless,
and the product of the work of whole lifetimes negatived by such
malevolent miracles; but they give the Australasian the fighting
spirit. Two or three men will go out and face a roaring bush fire
with a two-mile front, in the apparently hopeless task of holding it
in check till further assistance can be procured. Drought, flood and
pestilence are fought in the same uncompromising way, for the race
has the instinct of grim battle implanted deep down in its nature.
The Australasian knows there is always something to contend with; he
knows it is no use to expect a soft time; he must fight.
So he becomes resourceful, inventive, open to suggestion. He is
certain there is a counter to every blow delivered by Fate, if one
could but discover it. To expect to fight, to realize that there
is always a chance to win, but a reasonable expectation of defeat,
to seek expedients without being discouraged by failure; all these
things make good training for soldiering. They are all part of the
daily life of the Australasian, even of the Australasian of the
cities. Disaster, sudden and swift; change, inexorable and sweeping;
disappointment, bitter and undeserved; he recognizes them all as
everyday factors in his existence. The fighting spirit cannot be held
long in abeyance if they are to be countered and overcome.
Then the Australasian has the fighting equipment. He is superbly
healthy, in spite of his leanness and the drawn look due to the
lines that life bites into the faces of even the young men. These
men of the sun-dried plains and the rocky ranges look upon illness
as something unnatural, something to be ashamed of and concealed;
they seem almost to have the instinct that prompts the sick animal to
hide from its fellows, and sometimes impels the hale beasts to slay
the sick one for the reason that illness is unnatural, dangerous,
and an offence. Australasia has the lowest death-rate of the world,
a significant fact in the health record of a nation. A nation of
athletes! Swift runners, fast swimmers, tall lean men whose movements
are made with incredible and deceptive swiftness, inured to the
saddle and to long marches under a tropical sun. Compare a regiment
of them with a regiment of home-bred Britons, and the advantage in
smartness of appearance would lie with the latter. The Australasian
is inclined to be loose-jointed and slabby; they use the word "lanky"
themselves. They are inclined to economy of physical effort, to walk
with a slouch and a swing. Do not be misled by the lack of "snap" in
their movements; it is deceptive.
Enterprise and daring are theirs by heredity. They have descended
from a race of adventurers. Their immediate forbears were those whom
the love of adventure drew to new and little known countries, who
were not content to rust out in quiet English villages, to economize
for a lifetime on oatmeal and potatoes in a Scottish croft, or to die
of rheumatism on the edge of an Irish bog. They married brave girls,
and crossed the long oceans to become pioneers of the newer races,
transmitting their health and love of adventure to a whole nation.
The Australasians have been accustomed to the weapons of the soldier
all their lives; they are part of the daily life of many of them. The
rifle and the entrenching tool pass into accustomed hands, which know
just how to make the best use of them. Their far-sighted eyes detect
little signs of the country through which they pass; their trained
minds, versed in all the lore of the country-side, draw the just
conclusions. All the work of the camp comes naturally and easily to
their hands; many of them are practised guides and scouts. They find
the shortest and best way from one place to another by an uncanny
kind of instinct; they select the best paths by some natural process
that cannot be explained.
When the Australasians were first submitted to the practical test of
campaigning to prove their worth in actual warfare, they were held
by experts to have failed in one particular, due to their lack of
special training. One requisite of the modern soldier was wanting
in their composition; they were deficient in discipline. They
insisted on ignoring many of the formalities in behaviour exacted
from the trained soldier; they protested that they could not see
the necessity for them. It would have been easier to underestimate
this disadvantage than to correct it, had the Australasians adhered
to their original schemes of national defence. But before a second
time of testing had come round, they had made differences of a
vital kind in their military system, and in the change the defect in
training had been remedied.
[Illustration: The Last March through Sydney Streets.]
With the introduction of national service in Australasia, provision
was also made for the local production of the implements and
munitions of warfare, and for military equipment. Their local supply
of the raw material for such purposes is unequalled in the world,
and thus it came that the Australian forces in the Great War were
equipped in a style of serviceable comfort that was the admiration
of all who examined it. In short, the Australasian forces who were
sent to participate in the Great War were first-class material,
well-trained and excellently found, a body of men of whom it was
reasonable to expect fine deeds should the chance ever come their way.
The other factors to be taken into consideration are important ones.
The first was their fine youthful pride in the opportunity of serving
side by side with the soldiers of the Mother Country, and of the
proud European nations allied to her. There will always be generous
rivalry between the troops of two great nations fighting side by side
in a just cause. But the spirit in which the Australasians went out
to the service of the Mother Empire goes deeper and further still. It
holds nothing questioning or calculated, it is the conduct of men who
hail as a proud privilege the opportunity of laying down their lives
for the underlying principles on which the structure of the British
Empire is reared. The danger note had only to be sounded and these
men hastened to record their eagerness to serve; more, they well knew
why they were so keen. With them duty and inclination walked hand in
hand.
Finally, the people of Australasia are well assured of the justice of
the cause for which they fight. Nowhere was more interest displayed
in the speeches that explained the causes to which the war is due,
nowhere is there a public better informed of the efforts made to
preserve peace, and of the deliberate flouting of them by Germany.
Small nations themselves, the Southern Britons fully comprehend the
danger to the small nations of Europe from the grasping aggression
of their strong unscrupulous neighbours. They claim as part of their
heritage those pages of British history which tell how gloriously
Great Britain has espoused the cause of the weak in the past. There
is no quarrel in which the men of Australasia would more gladly
take up arms with the Mother Country than one for the innocent
weak against the guilty strong. And such a quarrel, they are well
persuaded, is the root cause of the Great War in which they are now
fighting.
FILLING THE GAPS