WHY HE IS NOT "THE ANZAC"
_France, November 28th._
"You don't call us the Anzacs, do you?" asked the man with the elbow
sling appealingly. "You call us just Australians and New Zealanders,
don't you?"
I hesitated for a minute or two racking my brain--it seemed to me that
once, some months back, I had used that convenient term in a cabled
message.
"Oh, don't for goodness sake say you do it, too," said the owner of the
elbow sling pathetically. "Isn't Australians good enough?"
"I'm not sure--once--I may have. Not for a long time, anyway. I
sometimes speak of the Anzac troops or the Anzac guns."
"Oh, that is all right--Anzac troops--there's no objection to that--we
are that," went on the grammarian with the elbow sling, "but there's no
such thing as an Anzac--the Anzacs--it's nonsense."
I remember that day well. It was the day before their first entry on the
Somme. The man with the elbow sling had stopped a shrapnel pellet one
frosty morning eight months before at Anzac; the man who sat next to him
had a Turkish shrapnel shell burst between his shins at Hell Spit. They
were some of the oldest hands, back again, and about to plunge with the
oldest division into the heaviest battle the division had yet faced.
It was more than a grammatical objection. You know the way in which it
makes you wince, if ever you have lived in Australia or New Zealand or
Canada, to hear people talk of "the colonies" or "the colonials." The
people who use the words do not realise that there is anything unpopular
in their use, although the objection is really quite universal in the
self-governing States, and represents a revolt against an out-of-date
point of view which still lingers in some quarters.
In the same way anyone who _is_ in touch with them knows that to speak
of the feats of "an Anzac" or of "the Anzacs" is unpopular with the men
to whom it is applied. You will never hear the men refer to themselves
as Anzacs. They call themselves simply Australians or New Zealanders.
It is an interesting mental phase. The reason of it is not that
Australians and New Zealanders dislike being clubbed together. Quite the
reverse--the Australians are never more satisfied than when they are
next to the New Zealanders. The two certainly feel themselves in some
respects one and inseparable to a greater extent than any other troops
here. They are proud of Anzac as the name of their corps, and as the
name of that hill-side in Gallipoli where their graves lie side by side.
The reason why they always avoid calling themselves "the Anzacs" is that
the term was at one time associated in the Press with so many highly
coloured, imaginative, mock heroic stories of individual feats, which
they were supposed to have performed, that its use from that time forth
was, by a sort of tacit consent, irrevocably damned within the force.
The picture which it called up was that of the "Anzac" in London, with
his shining gaiters and buttons and generally unauthorised cock's
feathers in his hat, reaping the glory of the acrobatic performances
which his battered countrymen, very unlovely with sweat and dust, were
credited with achieving in No Man's Land. This was before the Somme
fight, when first these Gallipoli troops came to Europe. The regular
British war correspondents were not responsible for it--this nonsense
was not written by them; when the day of real trial came they wrote of
it conscientiously and brilliantly, and nothing that could be written
was too much. But the vogue of the wildest stories of the "Anzacs" was
when Australians and New Zealanders were doing little beyond hard work
in France, and knew it. The noun "an Anzac" now bears with it, in the
force, the suggestion of a man who rather approves of that sort of
"swank"; and there are few of them.
The Australian and New Zealander are both intensely, overwhelmingly
proud of their nationality; and only good can come of the pride. They
are also intensely proud of their two-year-old units--and one of the
drawbacks of the necessary rules of censorship is, that battalions of
our army, which are famous throughout the force by name, have to be
known to you only through vague references. Their character and history,
as distinct and strongly marked as those of different men, will only
come to be known to Australia when the history of these campaigns comes
to be written.
Printed by Cassell & Company, Limited, La Belle Sauvage, London,
E.C.4