BROKEN NATION: Australians in
the Great War
Joan Beaumont
Allen & Unwin, 2013, 628pp, $55.00
Professor Beaumont has
written a broad narrative history of Australia’s part in the Great War. Though
it seems aimed principally at the general reader, it is fully referenced,
enabling interested readers to delve deeper into the subject. The manner in
which she links events in Australia with events overseas at around the same
time is particularly useful. The book is well produced, and places events in
their correct context. For example, the reality that the Charge at The Nek
supported the Australian/New Zealand attack on Sari Bair Ridge, not the British
landing at Suvla Bay (as was suggested in the film Gallipoli) is highlighted.
Professor Beaumont writes
about the Great War with an understanding of the ethos of the times,
acknowledging, for example, the influence of their Christian culture on the
attitudes of many soldiers serving in ‘Palestine … so steeped in biblical
history’. Some ‘post-modernisms’ do come through, though in an era of
multiculturalism in which dual loyalties are celebrated it seems strange to
criticise, even implicitly, those who in 1915 considered themselves to be both
Australians and ‘sons of the Empire’.
The discussion of the
conscription referenda and the long-term problems they caused for Australian
society is particularly well set out, as are the racial issues that underlay
much of the ‘No’ case. However, Professor Beaumont does not highlight that the
demand for conscription arose at least in part because the AIF was expanded
beyond Australia’s capacity to maintain on a voluntary basis. It became a force
larger than the Canadian Expeditionary Force, which drew on a population more
than 50 percent higher than Australia’s. The reality of over-expansion is
demonstrated by Figure 5.1, comparing enlistments against battle casualties
between 1916 and 1918, and by the frequent references to battle fatigue and
over-used units.
Professor Beaumont notes
that each of Australia’s five infantry divisions chose to construct its
memorial at the site of a victory (however bloody), rather than to commemorate
its losses in unsuccessful battles like Fromelles or Bullecourt. This is in
keeping of the self-image of the First AIF, as an ultimately victorious force.
Indeed, one such memorial (to the 2nd Division at Mont St Quentin) was so
aggressively triumphal that the invading Germans destroyed it when they
occupied France during World War II. As Professor Beaumont notes, the AIF was a
force that did not see itself as the victim of circumstances!
As is common among
historians, the Versailles Treaty is criticised for its draconian terms,
quoting Keynes’ attack on it as a ‘Carthaginian peace’. Perhaps, but a German
victory might have brought harsher terms upon the Allies, given the example of
Brest-Litovsk. As an example, had the British Empire lost to Germany in that
era of colonial ‘trade-offs’, claims might have been made against Australia,
which had nearby pre-war German colonial possessions.
Perhaps inevitably in a
volume of this size there are typos, including Mansurian Lakes, Steel’s Post,
Anthill (probably appropriate for the Bullant), and 260,544 British deaths at
Gallipoli. Actual errors have also crept in: there were 66, not 40, Australian
Victoria Crosses awarded during the war; the figure of 40,000 Australian deaths
in 1917 seems high, perhaps it is the cumulative total to then; the battalions
of the 1st Division and the 4th Brigade were split during the expansion of the
AIF in 1916, but not those of the 2nd Division. There is also some confusion
about unit designations in places; the map on page 366, for example, has the
4th and 12th Light Horse Brigades charging at Beersheba!
JOHN DONOVAN
