| THEY marched down the street in uniforms of jungle green
- and slouch hats. There were tall men and short men, slender men that reminded
you of good horses and robust men that reminded you of oxen.
They had quiet, assured air that only soldiers have who have learned to be soldiers
in meeting the enemy in battle. They knew the things that soldiers know, things that can be learned only in the red of battle. They were entitled these things. They had graduated in the Desert and Greece and
Crete and Syria, and now they were fresh from a post-graduate course in the
stinking jungles of New Guinea. These were the elite, these were the
front fighting men.
I watched them pass by, and I saw many faces that I knew and many faces
that were strange to me, and I thought: This is the Australian Soldier, not of these men by himself, but all these men who move together as one,
they are the Australian Soldier. Joe there, he is the Australian Soldier, not Joe alone, but Joe and the cove behind him and the bloke in the far
rank (Blue, I think they called him when we were in the Desert) and the
bloke beside Blue with the scar on his jaw where a Jerry bullet clipped him
in Greece. . . .
I watched the jungle green ranks go by and, watching, I was thinking o Australian Soldier, whom the newspapers talk about as if he were one
or a number of men each exactly like the other physically and mentally
and morally, incapable of acting differently one from the other, as any
25 pounder shell is like any other 25-pounder shell. It is a conception that gives heed to the individual differences of Joe and the cove behind him and
Blue and the bloke with the scar on his jaw, and the tens and the twenties the thousands of others who combine into the single figure that we label Australian Soldier.
Each of them is an entity. They resemble one
another only because they have shared certain experiences. Each of them been afraid and unafraid, each of them has killed his man or tried to, of them has walked with death in its ugliest,
cruelest form. Each of is something of the Australian Soldier but alone none of them is the
Australian Soldier, any more than a cell in a man's body is the man. All men are only particles of the thing we mean when we talk of the
Australian Soldier and praise his qualities with words, a million of which are not
worth one live cartridge up the spout of his rifle when he is in a hot spot.
That is something you have to understand: The Australian Soldier is not
one man but tens of thousands of men. He is the man who in peace cashed the cheque you handed through the teller's grille at the bank,
who delivered your bread at the back door who tried to sell you a vacuum -1,~aiitr or an insurance policy or a block of land; he is the man behind the
counter who measured out fifteen yards of curtain material, or wrapped up
the shirt you bought, or weighed out two pounds of sugar for you, who drove a mob of cattle through the outback, who laid bricks or pushed a pen or dug coal or wrote the things you read in the newspaper.
He is tens of thousands, of men with tens of thousands of characters. He is quiet and rowdy, aloof and friendly, tidy and careless, gentle and rough, fastidious and vulgar, stolid and mercurial, generous and mean, vain and modest. He is as complex as only a man with tens of thousands of characters can be.
He knew nothing of war and soldiering when he came from his farm or Ills office, his shop or his business, and enlisted. He knew in a vague kind of way that it would be tough, but he reckoned it would be an adventure, too. He was as raw as a brumby at first. He didn't like discipline much, but lie accepted it, and they drilled him and marched him, and hammered him into. shape. He didn't bother his head thinking about it, but it was rather like, the shaping of a blade. First, there was just a piece of Crude iron. They took the iron and they refined it. They got rid of a lot of dross and useless material in the process.
Then they tempered it into steel that would flick and bend like a whiplash, they ground it until it had a cutting edge like a razor and a thrusting point like a lance. They made of that unlovely lump of iron a beautiful and a dangerous thing. At least, it looked a beautiful and a dangerous thing, but it still had to prove its quality, it had to prove itself in combat. That was what it was forged for, that was its reason for being. Its beauty would be worth nothing, its flexibility, its keen edge,
it's sharp point would be worth nothing if it were to fail then.
It was tested in combat and it did not fail. It conquered other blades. It cut and thrust, and it killed men. It clashed with a stronger blade than itself, and it bent and came out notched and scarred and blunted, but it came out unbroken. The good steel that was in it had suffered, but the good steel had not snapped. And something had happened to it in that combat with a stronger blade. Something in the soul of the steel had toughened, as though the heat of unequal battle had re-tempered it and wakened in it sleeping qualities of hardness and power and durability.
The damaged blade was repaired. The edge was re-ground and the notches were smoothed out, the blunted point was sharpened again. The scars remained, but they did not lessen its excellence as a weapon. They were badges of service, the proof of the trials it had undergone.
That is the Australian Soldier - a fine blade, as merciless in action, and
as good to look at, as trustworthy, as deadly.
He is not a swashbuckler. He is not the black-and-white artist's conception, a slovenly
lounger against walls with his tunic hanging open, who gets drunk whenever he can and goes absent without
leave at every opportunity and spends his leisure time planning how he can take rises out of
his hereditary enemies, the officer and non-commissioned officer. It's a queer
thing but the man who talks big and drinks hard and is the Tough Guy before the shooting starts usually isn't much good when it does. It's the quiet fellow, generally speaking,
who does the job and goes berserk in action once in a while and wins the medals. And you don't find the Australian Soldier trying to make his officer look a fool.
First, it would be pretty hard to do that because the average officer has come up through the ranks and knows all the tricks himself. And, second, the officer is just as much a part of the Australian Soldier, one of the tens of thousands of cells that go to the making of the figure that that phrase means, as any other in the ranks.
One of the best Australian fighting soldiers I know is an officer. He is a brigadier now, but he was a major when first I knew him, a slender, quiet man, with a high, quiet voice. I couldn't see him as a dashing soldier himself, or as a dashing leader. I think a lot of his men felt that way about him, too, Then the Australians went into action. This major was in the front of the battle wherever it moved. He always seemed to be where the blue was hottest, and if he was afraid, as all
normal men are afraid at times in battle, then nobody knew it.
I don't know what the fighting qualities of that mythical creature are, but they must be terrific.
The major came out of the Wavell Campaign in Cyrenaica with a Distinguished Service
Order - no easy decoration for a man of his rank to win, (especially at that stage of the
war) - and a halo of valorous legend about his head. He came out with a reputation, too, for having been one of the first half-dozen Australians inside every town that the A.I.F. had entered on the
advance to Benghazi.
There was a man, there was a soldier. You never saw anybody less like swashbuckler, but no swashbuckler was ever tougher when the fighting
began. You could almost think that he was the apotheosis, the Australian
Soldier, except that no one man is the Australian Soldier because no one can combine within himself tens of thousands of characters, no one
man can be so complex as everything that term implies. You cannot take man, either private or officer, and tell his story as a soldier and say,
There, that is the Australian Soldier!" You cannot tell the stories of ten and say it. The Australian Soldier is so much more than that, so much
bigger than one man or ten men can be, so much stronger than one man or ten men can be, so much greater than one man or ten men can be. His story is the story of thousands of men.
And his story isn't all a tale of victories. No army that was ever worth its salt had nothing but victories behind it. An army is like a man in one thing. Its character is not created by success alone; it must know defeat, too, or it will remain incomplete. An army is like that, whether it
it's an army of Australians or Englishmen or Hottentots. I know the Australian Soldier has been beaten in battle. I know he has retreated. When I hear people who have never seen a battle, especially a losing battle, talking about the Australian Soldier and
sentimentalizing over him, I remember those lines of Siegfreid Sassoon:
. . . You can't believe that British troops "retire,"
When hell's last horror breaks them and they run. . . .
Of, course they run - British troops and Australian troops and Hottentots alike. They run because there is a time in some battles when men must run or become gibbering maniacs. Terror and the things terror makes men do are not
cowardice. Terror is something that comes at times to the bravest men in battle,
momentarily overwhelming them as an avalanche overwhelms the flowers on the mountainside. Terror is all part of the shaping process, one of the flames that harden the steel of the blade.
No, the Australian Soldier isn't one man. He cannot be depicted as one man. And yet in order to depict him truly you must present him as a novelist would present a single
soldier - not by discussing him like an analytical chemist, not by describing his physical outline, not by enumerating his vices and his virtues, blaming the one and praising the other, but by drawing a picture of him in battle, telling what circumstances shaped his character, how he went into the flames, how he emerged from them.
Only so, by depicting the actions in danger and hardship, in defeat and victory, of the many that are the one, can you depict the character of the one that is the many. |
