The story not told on ANZAC Day
By John Tognolini
Another ANZAC Day is past, but it's worth considering these words of one veteran who never marched on April 25: "I never went one step. My son has never forgotten or forgiven me for not taking him to an ANZAC march. He doesn't know why, and I'm not going to tell him. No-one else is going to tell him.
These words are from an Australian mutineer, in the 1979 documentary, Mutiny on the Western Front, produced by Brian Morris. I found it in a video shop — a reminder that "old" material exists which can be better than current productions.
After the slaughter at Gallipoli, Australian infantry were sent to France. At Pozieres in July 1916, 23,000 Australians were killed in six weeks. Before that, another 6000 had died in one night at Fromelles. Of 330,000 Australians who went to war, 60,000 died and 150,000 were wounded.
Australians were constantly used as shock troops, suffering great casualties. One observer of the soldiers in the First Battalion, who mutinied on September 25, 1918, said,"I was rather shocked with the look of the men, not demoralised to any degree, but grey, drawn faces and very, very grim. It is the first time I have passed an Australian battalion without seeing a single smile on any man's face. Some of them are utterly sick of war and do not want to fight again."
After being taken out of the trenches, believing that they were going to be given leave, the soldiers were ordered back to fight again.
On hearing this, they at once organised a meeting, barring officers from attending. By a vote of two to one, the 300 survivors of a once 1000-strong battalion refused to go back into the trenches.
They were totally indifferent to any punishment the army high command would use against them.
"Well I got ten years", said one mutineer. All the non-commissioned officers got 10 years. We were all disgusted and frustrated. That's the frustration of the men who had been going in and out of the line for three years. We were really hostile with the injustice — not the punishment, the injustice — of the whole affair.
"We were not brave men, we were skunks, in the eyes of Churchill. We went across to England and they met us at the boat and they put handcuffs on us and marched us through the streets, handcuffed."
The mutineers' plight in prison was hidden by the strict censorship: "I thought it would be 10 years. I was quite satisfied with that. What could we do to alter things? You are not allowed to write home from a jail for a start. That was a penalty, wasn't it ... I couldn't tell [his sisters] the facts, you see. I just made up I had a special job to do over there and that sort of thing."
When the war finished, the mutineers were pardoned. The mutineers were written out of history, like so many other events of the war and rassing truths that tarnished the romantic myth of ANZAC.