Reflections on my Father

 The world, in some respects, is exhausted by the welter of commemorative reflections, activities and events over recent months on the anniversary of the armistice of 1918.Though the last veterans of the “war to end all wars” have long passed from among us, our collective memory of the industrial scale of that single episode of calculated human slaughter continues to haunt us all. Not least because of the futility of it all.At one level, it remains a deeply personal story as we reflect on a war which left no Australian family, nor community untouched or unscarred. The humblest local war memorials all tell the tale. We can barely imagine how we, in the analgesic age in which we now live, in which we now choose to be offended by everything, how tiny communities managed to cope with the magnitude of their human loss. One in ten Australians in uniform. One in six of them killed. One in two physically wounded. And all bearing the deepest psychological scars of what they had seen, survived, and could never forget.I remember as a small child, growing up in a small Queensland country town of Eumundi, gathering at dawn with my father Bert, a veteran of the “Second Bash” as he called it, together with the surviving veterans of the First. I remember being among a long column of silent men marching through the darkness to an inconspicuous memorial almost hidden beneath the branches of a modest forest of Moreton Bay figs, each tree planted in honour of one of the local fallen. A town of only 150 people. Yet five local boys dead. Most of them in the dying months of the war in 1918. And for what?My father was born a week after the armistice. In fact 100 years ago today. On 18 November 1918. Although he was killed in an accident when I was still a boy, I remember talking to him about his experiences, first in the Middle East, and then the Pacific. He had signed up for the lot. The adventure of a lifetime, he called it. And for a purpose - to defend the world against Hitler, and Australia against Tojo. Simple. But true. Nationally existential. Our backs were against the wall. We fought with everything we had, and with our allies, we won. And I’m proud that my Dad had played his part.But Dad could never figure out the First War. He told me he’d talked to one of our neighbours, Dick Caplick, about it a lot. Dick had a banana farm. He’d also been among the first wave at Gallipoli and had lost an eye in the landings. Dick’s annual ANZAC Day pilgrimage to our tiny, four-teacher primary school, with lovingly folded maps, carefully unwrapped, to help explain to us bemused urchins where the Brits had got it so badly wrong that day, would also terrify us as he stared down at us from the veranda through his emerald-green glass eye. But Dad said that even Dick couldn’t explain how we ended up fighting on the side of the bloke who shot the Arch-duke and his missus, and how that ended up with us fighting Johnny Turk.That’s where the other lesson of the First War comes in. Not the tragedy and the bravery of the diggers. That went without saying. Not even the incompetence of the generals, although there was a fair bit of that. No, it was the absolute failure of the political and diplomatic class of the time to prevent an entirely preventable war. Indeed, when the German Chancellor in August 1914, Theobald Bethmann-Hollweg, was later asked by an enraged colleague how the war could have come about in the first place, Bethmann-Hollweg’s reported reply was: “Ah, if only we knew!”As Graham Allison reminds us in his recent account of “Thucydides Trap,” the bottom line was that by 1914, the changing dynamics in the balance of power between Britain, the established pre-eminent global power of the time, and Germany the rising power, caused many in both capitals to conclude that conflict was inevitable. The same dynamics were at play in German calculations concerning the emerging power that was Russia, thereby constituting a real and present danger to Germany’s east. This in turn had produced a series of mutual defence treaties, meaning that if conflict erupted between any two of great powers of the time, then all five would automatically become involved.To this complex cocktail of mutual suspicion, compounded by rapidly changing power relativities, was then added the series of crises of the summer of 1914, culminating in the assassination of an obscure member of the Austrian aristocracy, virtually unknown to anyone else outside the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And once the spark was lit, the crisis escalated of its own accord, the political class and their diplomatic emissaries failed to contain it (in fact many chose to fan it because it enhanced their domestic political positions) and the rest is history. And then 21 million soldiers and civilians went as lambs to the slaughter.Therefore when a century later, and in a different hemisphere, we contemplate the escalating tensions between China and the United States, the plethora of potential “incidents” that present themselves from the East China Sea, the Taiwan Straits, the South China Sea, the Korean Peninsula (if and when the peace process goes awry) and even an extended trade, technology and cyber war, we should reflect deeply on the comprehensive failure of global political and diplomatic leadership a century ago. I think both my father Bert, and his mate Dick, would want that. Lest we forget.