I have been a pacifist for the majority of my life. I don’t ‘get’
militarism and it makes me sad to contemplate that in the 21st
Century a military response is still the reflex response to conflict between
nations or sometimes even within. One of the happiest times in my school life
was when I was in the school brass band
for a couple of years (trombonist, still love the bones)but it all became less
happy when to be a member of the band you had to also be in the army school cadets.
I played along with that for a few months, went on a bivouac or two, was roared
at and humiliated by some loud voiced bullies, but eventually quit both the
cadets and the band.
I was at school in the 60s and 70s as the Vietnam War was
being waged and was left to wonder why we were there and left to wonder if it
went on how likely it was that my birthdate would pop up in the macabre marble ‘lotto’
and I’d be conscripted. It was a dirty pointless war and I’d be a conscientious
objector. There’d be a clash of my ethics, pacifism, with my morbid fear, jail.
Would I run away and hide or top myself
(what a dichotomy to choose not to go off and kill and yet take my own life
because of fear)? Ah well it was a fleeting dilemma because thank goodness
Gough put an end to the pointlessness and ended both conscription and our
involvement in Vietnam.
Being a child of the 60s and 70s I also saw the decline in
Anzac Day. Our Vietnam folly was partly to blame, most of the population
disagreed with it and many of the old diggers from previous wars disparaged it.
To our shame the soldiers returning from Vietnam were shunned, scorned and vilified.
Very few people turned out to witness the Anzac Day marches/marchers and many
doubted it would last beyond the mid-70s and many thought good riddance.
And then we grew up.
And then we wondered how we could be so dumb, so unfeeling, and
so reckless.
There are two men in my family, my mother’s uncle William
and my father’s brother Douglas that I know of who went to war. William enlisted in 1916 and
Douglas in 1940 so two men, different wars.
I knew Uncle Doug’s story from talking to him and from what he
had told my father. He had been to the Middle East and saw the horrors of New
Guinea during his five years of service. He wasn’t reluctant to talk about his
service (at least to me) but I didn’t ask him too much such is the pious
piteousness of we pacifists. Gosh he was a good man, a kind man and he served his country well. I always remember once asking him for advice if I
should ever be called up and he simply grinned and said ‘Don’t go’.
I knew nothing about Great Uncle William except that his
name was on the war memorial in Wangaratta, listed as A. Bull because he was
known in his family by his middle name Angus (not uncommon in the first half of
the 20th Century). With the centenary of Gallipoli and the coming
commemorations of centenaries of different battles in WW1 I wondered about him.
The National Archives are a mine of information and that was
particularly so for my research on William, ‘Bill’, Angus. I got to know a
stranger whose story is simple and sad.
W.A. Bull was born in 1886 and grew up just out of
Wangaratta. He was a hard worker and that work was mostly on farms where he was
diligent and attentive, much loved in his family and much admired by his mates.
The quiet simplicity of a bush life, when modern Australia was but 100 years
old, a population of not quite five million, many of Ned Kelly’s family and victims were still alive and Australia had
only been a Federation for a bit over a dozen years, was shaken up by events on
the other side of the world. The other side where few had travelled to but many
of the population had travelled from or were descended from those who had.
School wasn’t compulsory yet so it was the lucky few who could read and write,
it was a hot, dry country with no air-conditioning, no flush toilets and food
came from the land not from the supermarket freezer. The newspapers brought the
story of Gallipoli to the citizens of Australia and a year later William
enlisted to join the army. He was on his farm in Tarrawingee, a town many of
you may never heard of.
After a period of training in Wangaratta and Seymour William
boarded the HMAT Shropshire, along with fellow servicemen of the 37th
Battalion at Station Pier Port Melbourne on September 25th 1916 for
the six week journey to Britain. I wonder what was on his mind as he left a
tiny, tiny hamlet in country Victoria to board a huge ship and seeing places
like Durban on route before arriving in Plymouth on November 11th.
On the 16th November he was ‘marched into 3rd
Division Amalgamated Training at Battalion Hurdcott on the Salisbury Plains
near the village of Fovant. This training was described as ‘long, intensive and
thorough’ much of which was under the personal, exacting and relentless control
of Major-General John Monash. The 37th Battalion set foot in France
on November 23rd 1916. At
this time William would still have been engaged in his training at Hurdcott and
imagining where his military career was about to take him in the next wave of
the 37th to be transferred to Europe, most likely just after
Christmas. On the 17th November he was ‘marched out’ to 10th
Training Battalion in Durrington.
His Christmas Day was likely uncomfortable and unpleasant
because on Boxing Day 1916 Private William Angus Bull was admitted to Lucknow
Isolation Hospital Tidworth ‘dangerously ill’. He was transferred to Fargo
Hospital the following day. His parents John and Annie were sent a telegram
advising them of his illness. He was diagnosed with cerebro spinal meningitis
and sadly passed away on January 2nd 1917. I was born 40 years and
27 days later.
William is buried in Tidworth Military Cemetery nearby.
He never married.
He had no children.
He left behind a grieving father and mother, two loving
brothers and a sister. His brother, my grandfather, would find every subsequent
Anzac Day a painful, heartbreaking reminder of his older brother’s death. That
gives the day meaning, that makes it matter.
I think of my great uncle willing to give his life for his
country, maybe even looking forward to getting ‘stuck in’, a bit trepidatious
sure, perhaps even scared but willing.
But instead he ends up in a far off
country, in a hospital, in pain, dying and no doubt cared for by kind and
compassionate medics and nurses but without his mum, without a wife or partner,
no child to think of, his mates probably ready to head off to France or the
Front. I wonder if he was lonely, I wonder if he cried.
A few years back I visited that strange place Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plains. Little did I know that only a few miles from where I wandered William had trained and passed away about 80 years before. I am pleased to know his story and I will remember him. On 2nd
January 2017, God willing, I hope to stand with some of the family in front of
the war memorial and acknowledge the centenary of his passing.
So all ANZAC stories are not stories of heroics on the field;
some are smaller stories but they matter too. And that’s why Anzac Day has
meaning.
I once stood at the military cemetery in Cambridge and also
at Arlington. The white crosses and white tablet headstones, those thousands of
memorials, the sad sea of white, those rows of grief and broken hearts are each
a mark of a single person and a single story. They are called ‘memorials’
because we have to remember.
I wonder if we can ever remember to not have to lay another
cross or plant another stone.
I wonder what world we might have today if all the William
Angus Bulls had have lived.
I just wonder about it all.
Lest we forget.
