With few dissenters when the war trumpets sounded in Britain in August 1914, the echoes carried to the corners of the Empire. The call brought forth an extraordinary display of solidarity. In New Zealand, the “university classes emptied… sports fixtures were abandoned. To be left behind was unthinkable. If your mate was going, then somehow you had to get away too,” wrote New Zealand historian Christopher Pugsley. More than two million served in the armies of the dominions (self-governing British Commonwealth nations). At least a quarter of those who laid down their lives in Britain’s cause were not British. Their skin tones varied from pale and freckled to black and their spiritual beliefs covered a spectrum from Presbyterianism to paganism.
Nor were Australia and Canada directly threatened, yet their losses – roughly 60,000 dead each – were also extremely painful. What gave them the strength to carry on? After the war, the idea gained ground that, for these adolescent nations, participation was somehow a rite of passage. The efforts of their young men on the battlefield had proved they were the equal of the mother nation. Gallipoli and Vimy Ridge were spoken of as heroic episodes at which Australia and Canada ‘‘came of age’’.SOURCEMavi Boncuk |
Recruitment poster by an unknown artist, printed in Brisbane in 1915 for the Queensland Recruiting Committee.
"The Trumpet Calls" A poster by the renowned artist Norman Lindsay. 1914.
In 1915, Australia entered the war against Germany in the ill-fated, poorly planned campaign against Turkey in the Dardanelles. Filled with enthusiasm and a spirit of adventure, young men from cities and country towns lined up at recruitment centres to sign up for the Australian Imperial Force. By August 1915, diseases like typhoid fever, dysentery and influenza had decimated the ranks of those remaining at Anzac Cove. Flies were the chief culprit in the spread of disease. Rations were poor, malnutrition was common and the men had no respite from front-line action … for there was nowhere to go to rest and recuperate. Many of the men had been on active duty since 25 April, and they were exhausted.
