Reflections on Anzac Day

Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown.

Thomas Hardy wrote the above, but in 1914, at the request of the British Government, Hardy (by then 74 years old) began writing patriotic verse in order to support the work of the propaganda bureau.

In WW1 Australia as part of the British Empire found itself fighting the Turks and their allies. One of the few voices in opposition at the beginning of WW1 was Frank Anstey of the Labor Party. He saw the war as a product of the machinations of capitalists and warned that workers would suffer the most.

Others joined in to oppose the war. Churchmen and freethinkers together established the Australian Peace Alliance (APA) in October 1914. John Curtin, prime minister of Australia during WW2, was a member. The APA coalition grew from thirteen groups in 1914 to fifty-four groups in 1918. Two women's groups also appeared – the Sisterhood of International Peace (SIP) inspired by the Reverend Dr. Charles Strong and the Woman's Peace Army (WPA). SIP appealed to the middle class and concentrated on educating children to the ideals of peace. Eleanor Moore and others in SIP spoke at anti-war and anti-conscription meetings. The WPA protested more vigorously. Led by Vida Goldstein, the first woman to stand for federal parliament, WPA engaged in militant street demonstrations and committed acts of civil disobedience.

Men were not leaving farms, factories and firms fast enough to fuel the furnace of war. Between October 1915 and February 1916, nine recruitment marches were held starting from various points in NSW; the most notable was the first march from Gilgandra, known as the Cooee march. There was also a similar march in south-eastern Queensland. The social pressure on young men to join these marches must have been enormous. How many died because they were made to feel ashamed not to go?

The opposition to the war was strong enough so that Australians voted against the referenda to institute conscription of 28 October 1916 and 20 December 1917.

After the war the only organisation established during the period that continued operation was SIP. In 1920 it became the Australian branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). During peace people are not impelled to work against war. However, the pressures for it continue. As long as this world is in arms we are not living in a time of peace.

In the words of President Eisenhower who was the commander of the allied forces in Western Europe during WW2:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The costof one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushelsof wheat. We pay for a single destroyerwith new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

One can find these words on the website of The Australian War Memorial:

https://www.awm.gov.au/

During the Centenary period, the name of each of the 62,000 Australians who gave their lives during the First World War will be projected onto the façade of the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial.