25 October 2018
PDF version [269KB]
Nicole Brangwin
Update to a 2008 paper by Brooke McDonagh and Laura Rayner
Foreign Affairs, Defence and Security Section
All hyperlinks contained in this publication were correct
as at 24 October 2018.
Executive
summary
-
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I.
Each year at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month we stop to observe
one minute of silence to remember those who served and died in wars and armed
conflicts.
-
While the fighting stopped on 11 November 1918 as a result of
separate armistices being signed with Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary and
the Ottoman Empire, the war did not officially end until the Treaty of
Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919.
-
What followed was an annual armistice commemoration on 11
November, which became known as Remembrance Day after World War II.
Contents
Executive summary
Introduction
Armistice Day
The Armistice
The Australian Imperial Force (AIF)
and the Armistice
An Australian occupation force?
Repatriation—getting the troops home
The cost of World War I
Australian casualties
The economic cost
The political and social cost
The legacy of the First AIF
Commemorating the Armistice
Is it Armistice Day or Remembrance
Day?
A period of silence
The Unknown Soldier
Poppies
Rosemary
Introduction
By 1918 death had lost its individuality. The
high casualties suffered by most Australian battalions often reduced them to
half-strength. Constant reinforcements arrived and many of them didn’t last
more than a month. It was hard to have long-term mates because death was so
common and so random. Death was not exceptional; it was the normal condition. Its
uniqueness had an impact only on the soldier’s devastated family, and the
advice to them normally came as a brief, bureaucratic formula letter. A few
platitudes became a receipt for a life.[1]
This Remembrance Day—11 November 2018—marks the 100th
anniversary of the armistice which ended World War I (1914–18). On this day, as
in years before, Australians will observe one minute of silence at the 11th
hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, to remember and commemorate those who
served and died in all wars and armed conflicts.
Armistice Day
The Armistice
Armistice: an agreement made by opposing sides in a war to
stop fighting for a certain time; a truce; origin early 18th
cent.; from French, or from modern Latin armistitium, from alma ‘arms’
+ stitium ‘stoppage’.[2]
In late 1918, after over four years of unremitting bloody
warfare, Germany (now under a newly-appointed civilian government and having
endured heavy defeats over the previous four months) called for the suspension
of fighting—an armistice—so as to secure a peace settlement.[3]
In late September 1918, the chief German strategist, General Ludendorff, had
recommended that Germany make peace, then changed his mind. However, the German
Government ignored his change of heart, and in late October sent a delegation
across the French line to begin negotiations. Faced with ‘widespread strikes at
home, mutiny in the fleet and revolution threatening in a number of regions,
the delegation had little choice but to sign’.[4]
At 5.10 am on 11 November 1918, an armistice was signed by
the Allies and Germany, and the following order was issued to all opposing
forces:
Hostilities will cease at 11:00 today, 11 November. Troops
will stand fast in the line reached at that hour.[5]
After 52 months of slaughter and loss, the guns of the Western
Front finally fell silent—at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month—11
November 1918.[6]
This moment was chosen by the Allies as the time for the official commemoration
and remembrance of those who had died in the war.[7]
One hundred years on, while it is commonly accepted that the
war ended at 11 am on 11 November 1918, that is not quite correct. This
was when the fighting stopped. An armistice is not surrender, nor was this
armistice the only one. There were a total of five armistices arranged between
the Allies and the US and their enemies in 1918, being Bulgaria, the Ottoman
Empire, Austria, Hungary, and Germany. One hundred years on we consider that
the German army of November 1918 was a defeated force, but that is in
hindsight. The German Armistice (or Compiegne Armistice) did not require
Germany to demobilise its army—that happened with the Treaty of Versailles. In
the meantime, despite having to surrender large quantities of equipment, ‘the
German army remained, on paper at least, a formidable force’; as long
afterwards as the spring of 1919, this situation was causing some unease in the
face of growing political calls for Allied demobilisation.[8]
The Australian Imperial Force (AIF) and the Armistice
On the day of the Armistice with Germany there were ‘few
Australian troops at the front’—most were returning to ‘the line’ from a period
of rest 80 miles to the rear.[9]
During the heavy fighting between the beginning of June and 5 October 1918, the
Australian Corps had suffered ‘almost 35,000 casualties including over 7,000
dead’. The withdrawal from the front line of the Australian infantry
battalions, comprising the majority of the approximately 100,000 Australian
soldiers on the Western Front, was at the insistence of Prime Minister Billy
Hughes. Hughes, who was visiting Britain at the time, believed that the
Australians were being used as ‘shock troops’.[10]
However, ‘Australian support units remained fighting with the advancing armies
up to 11 November’. There were divisional artillery and trench mortar
batteries, four Australian air squadrons, as well as salvage companies, sappers
and tunnellers. It was tunnellers and pilots who seem to have been the last
Australians to die in battle on the Western Front.[11]
The AIF’s official historian, C.E.W Bean, found that the
intensity of reactions to the news of the Armistice increased the further he
went from the front:
But generally, in the forward area when there arrived the
great moment for which everyone had longed for four dreadful years, nothing
whatever happened, at least outwardly, to distinguish that day from others. It
is true the air seemed a little flat–like stale soda water–one missed the
reverberations that had filled it continuously for years. Otherwise, on that
day and for weeks later, life at the front went on as usual.[12]
On the day of the Armistice:
The 1st and 4th Australian Divisions
were then arriving in the region about le Cateau. Neither there nor at the
front was there any general demonstration - the sound of guns ceased; the gates
of the future silently opened. Wonder, hope, grief, too deep and uncertain for
speech, revolved in almost every man’s mind while, in the British zone at
least, army life went on as usual pending the next decisions.[13]
For some, the reaction was one of stunned disbelief.
According to the diary of an Australian signaller, he and his friends:
... just stood quiet and looked at one another as though they couldn’t
take it in ... as if they were afraid it might not be true.[14]
The personal accounts of Australian soldiers’ experience of
the Armistice support Bean’s reports that reactions to the Armistice were more
strongly expressed the further from the front the soldiers were. For instance,
Ashley Ekins (Head military historian at the Australian War Memorial) notes
that ‘some AIF battalions did not even record the armistice in their war
diaries’.[15]
Soldiers billeted in French towns reported joining in the joyful celebrations
with flags waving, wine flowing freely and all restraint thrown off between
locals and allied troops of all kinds. Some of the 60,000 Australians in the UK
on 11 November ‘reinforced the Australians’ reputation for hooliganism’. At
around midnight on 12 November, Dominion soldiers using timber they had
ransacked from bus signs and road dumps, ‘built bonfires at the base of
Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. The huge blaze left scars on the monument
that are still visible today’.[16]
An Australian occupation force?
It is clear from a letter written on 12 November 1918 by the
Australian Corps commander, General John Monash, that he expected his
Australian troops would become an occupying force in Germany. He expected that
the Australian Corps would follow a day behind the retreating German troops to
the Rhine, a distance of 200 miles. The Australian Corps was to ‘represent the
Dominions in the South Army of occupation’.[17]
It was not going to be easy. The Germans had been fighting a ‘retiring battle ...
destroying railways, bridges and road junctions so completely that a great part
of the [Allied] infantry was now unable to keep up with them—and had in parts
actually lost them’.[18]
Monash recognised that the Australians’ march into Germany would be ‘a
stupendous and difficult operation, owing to the lack of good roads, paucity of
railways, and the entire absence of supplies in the territories which we will
occupy’.[19]
In the end, despite Prime Minister Hughes’ initial request
on 11 November that Australian troops be part of the occupation, ‘only No. 4
Squadron, Australian Flying Corps, No. 3 Australian Casualty Clearing Station
and some of the railway operating men reached Germany’.[20]
The majority of the First AIF returned home over the course of 1919.
Repatriation—getting the troops home
The story of how the AIF kept nearly 200,000 restless troops
occupied while they waited to return home was told by the official historian,
C.E.W Bean, in ‘The war ends’—Chapter XXI of the official history volume, The
Australian Imperial Force in France during the Allied Offensive 1918.[21]
Planning for the repatriation of the AIF had begun as early
as December 1916, but was not far advanced when the Armistice was declared, due
in most part to the failure of the Australian Government to provide details of
its policy—particularly who would be going home first and how the troops would
be kept occupied for the estimated year it would take to return all of them to
Australia. There were 95,000 troops in France and Belgium, 60,000 in Britain
(reinforcements, sick, wounded and convalescents) and 30,000 in Egypt and
Mesopotamia, so the task would take some organising.[22]
On 21 November 1918, Lieutenant General John Monash was appointed
Director-General of Repatriation and Demobilisation. Monash decided that the
troops ‘must now be instilled with a “reconstruction morale”’—a vision of
themselves as useful members of the nation.[23]
To this end, ‘Monash seized on the AIF education scheme’, just as it was coming
into operation.[24]
Although the ‘education scheme did not achieve all that was hoped’, several
thousand Australian troops did take advantage of its attempts to provide
professional technical and general courses to help the troops return to
civilian life.[25]
Some Australian troops were already on their way home when
the Armistice was signed. In September 1918, two months special leave in
Australia had been granted to 6,000 Australian troops who had left Australia in
1914—the ‘originals’. The priority for repatriation of the rest of the force
from Europe was made on essentially the same basis: ‘first to come, first to go’.
In this, Australia followed the preference of the troops themselves, rather
than the plan preferred by the British of repatriating according to the demands
of industry, or the Australian Government’s initial preference for repatriation
by regiment.[26]
Despite obstacles such as disputes over the space allotted
for hammocks by the Admiralty on board the ships (deemed inadequate by
Australian standards), ships were provided more quickly than had been expected
and by the end of September 1919 only 10,000 Australian troops remained in
Britain. In 1919, Australian soldiers in Britain were marrying at the rate of
150 per week and they and their families (amounting to a total of 15,386 wives,
children and fiancées) were also brought to Australia.[27]
Sometimes there was one last obstacle. When the troopships reached Australian
waters, the ship was quarantined if influenza had been detected on board,
causing a great strain on discipline. However, this course of action possibly
delayed the dreadful post-war epidemic that was sweeping the world, and
probably saved Australia from a heavier civilian death toll.[28]
Returning home on troopships, Australian service personnel,
scarred physically, emotionally or mentally, reacted in a variety of ways—some
laughed and cheered that they had survived, some cried quietly at all that they
had seen, but the majority were silent, ‘... deep within the turmoil of their
thoughts, and it was only their eyes that betrayed the truth of what they had
had to do and endure’.[29]
Reputedly, these Australian soldiers said they could smell the Australian bush
even before they could see land, or even ‘detect the subtle but unmistakeable
smell of a distant bushfire’.[30]
The cost of World War I
There are various estimates of the number of people killed
and wounded in World War I:
This first modern world conflict had brought about the
mobilisation of over 70 million people and left between 9 and 13 million dead,
perhaps as many as one-third of them with no known grave.[31]
Unprecedented in scale and horror, the First World War had
involved 35 countries and mobilised more than 70 million people, of whom some 9
million were killed, more than 21 million wounded and 8 million reported
missing or taken prisoner. Countless other human beings were left hideously and
permanently disfigured, shattered in mind and body. Four mighty, centuries-old
empires—German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman—and their reigning
dynasties were expunged from the map. Vast swathes of Europe were devastated.[32]
A total of 65,264,810 men were mobilised by all nations
involved in World War I. Of them, 7,449,087 were killed, 21,215,226 were
wounded, 7,750,945 were listed as prisoners or missing and some 36,415,258 were
non battle casualties. Of the total force mobilised by all nations the average
casualty rate was 56 per cent.[33]
Australian casualties
Almost half the eligible male population of Australia
enlisted during the war.[34]
The impact of the war on the population of Australia, which in 1914 numbered
just under 5 million, can be gauged from the number of casualties outlined on
the Australian War Memorial’s website:
The First World War had been a long and destructive conflict for
all the nations involved. Throughout the course of the war, of the 330,000
Australian soldiers who saw active service, approximately 60,000 were killed,
82,000 were wounded in battle, and a further 88,000 suffered a variety of
illnesses and injuries. By December 1918, 104,000 Australian soldiers had
returned from service as invalids.[35]
In his 2005 Remembrance Day speech, the former governor-general,
Major General Michael Jeffery, summed up the terrible human toll:
In the course of the war 416 809 [Australian] men had
enlisted for service overseas, of whom 331,000 actually left Australia. At the
war's end there were 95,951 men in France, 17,255 serving in the Middle East,
and a further 58,365 in depots, bases and hospitals in Britain. Total
casualties were 60,000 dead, 166,811 battle casualties, 4,098 prisoners of war
and missing, and 87,865 sick from other causes. We lost nearly 6,000 killed and
wounded in one day at the battle of Fromelle [sic]. It was an enormous effort;
proportionately we suffered the highest casualty rate of any army in the war.[36]
Tragically, the legacy of physical and mental trauma claimed
as many Australian lives within the following decade as were lost during the
war itself. Of those who returned to Australia, 60,000 died within ten years of
their return because of ‘... the maiming effects of poison gas, what was termed
shell shock and other serious physical disabilities. Then there was the
insidious toll taken by alcoholism, violence, broken marriages and suicide’.[37]
The economic cost
According to the Official History of Australia in the War
of 1914–18, the monetary cost of the war up to mid-1934 was
£831.3 million, which equates to approximately $82 billion in 2018 prices:[38]
The cost of the war to Australia between 1914–15 and 1919–20
(including interest and sinking fund but not war gratuities) was £333,594,954 plus
£43,398,098, i.e. £376,993,052. The first of these amounts was the actual
expenditure of the Commonwealth on war services during the years mentioned, and
that expenditure was met out of loan money to the extent of £262,507,829 and
out of revenue to the extent of £71,087,125 (including interest and
sinking fund charges amounting to £46,469,102).
The smaller sum, £43,398,098, consisted of
indebtedness to the Government of the United Kingdom for payments made,
services rendered, and goods supplied to or on behalf of the Australian army
during the war. But the total cost of the war is not comprehended within the
expenditure to the end of the financial year 1919-20. Expenditure on
repatriation and pensions was a direct consequence of the war, and that continued
to be a very heavy drain upon the finances of the Commonwealth in later years.
The total cost to 30th June, 1934, had reached the figure of £831,280,947,
inclusive of war gratuities, interest and sinking fund.[39]
The
political and social cost
Historian Joan Beaumont noted in a lecture she delivered at
the Australian Parliament in March 2014 that the conscription debates in
Australia during the war prompted the ‘shattering and reconfiguration of the
political party system’, which ‘resulted in a significant shift to the right in
federal politics that would last for a generation’.[40]
Beaumont also acknowledged that the impact of the war ‘left Australians
inward-looking, almost xenophobic, traumatised by grief and deeply divided by
the political rancour over conscription and the inequality of sacrifice’.[41]
The legacy of the First AIF
Despite the horror of World War I, and despite finishing his
history in 1942 when Australia was again at war, the official historian C.E.W
Bean, completed his final volume on a sombre but positive note:
What these men did nothing can alter now. The good and the
bad, the greatness and smallness of their story will stand. Whatever of glory
it contains nothing now can lessen. It rises, as it will always rise, above the
mists of ages, a monument to great-hearted men; and, for their nation, a
possession for ever.[42]
Commemorating the Armistice
Is it Armistice Day or Remembrance Day?
In recent times, there has been some confusion as to whether
the day is Armistice Day or Remembrance Day. After World War II, the Australian
and British governments deemed it more appropriate to commemorate the
sacrifices made in all conflicts and changed the name of the day to Remembrance
Day.[43]
The tradition of Armistice Day continued until January 1946
when Britain proposed to the Dominions that National Remembrance, Thanksgiving
and Dedication should be observed on the Sunday before 11 November, unless 11
or 12 November fell on a Sunday. In March 1946, the Chifley Government agreed
to the observance of Remembrance Sunday, although remembrance and dedication had
been more the focus of Anzac Day. However, there was some disquiet expressed by
the Annual Congress of the Returned Sailors’, Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Imperial
League of Australia (RSS & AILA—now the Returned and Services League or RSL)
in 1949 that, with the substitution of Remembrance Sunday for Armistice Day;
‘the nation had really lost something of great spiritual significance in the discarding
of the simple ceremony of two minutes’ silence which was the principal feature
of Armistice Day gatherings’.[44]
The RSS & AILA did not want to discard Remembrance Sunday, but wanted the
two minutes silence on 11 November reintroduced, as this had been ‘the
principal feature of Armistice Day’.[45]
In October 1950:
The Commonwealth Government therefore informed the United
Kingdom Government ... that it was proposed in future to revert to the procedure
followed prior to 1946 and that Remembrance Day would be observed in Australia on
11 November, the ceremony of two minutes’ silence taking place at 11 a.m. This
would not however preclude services of commemoration being held in the Churches
on the appropriate Sunday.[46]
In 1997, Governor-General Sir William Deane issued a proclamation
formally declaring that 11 November each year would be ‘known and observed
as Remembrance Day’. In the proclamation, the governor-general also urged all
Australians to ‘... observe, unless impracticable, one minute’s silence at 11:00am
on Remembrance Day each year to remember the sacrifice of those who died or
otherwise suffered in Australia’s cause in wars and war-like conflicts’.[47]
A period of silence
According to the Australian War Memorial’s website,
a period of silence of either one or two minutes is said to have been first
suggested by Edward George Honey, an Australian journalist working in London.[48]
Under a pen name, Honey wrote to the London Evening News in May 1919,
suggesting ‘five minutes of national remembrance’ to be observed anywhere that
people chance to be: ‘Church services too, if you will, ... surely in this five
minutes of bitter-sweet silence there will be service enough’.[49]
His suggestion was joined by another from an influential South African
politician, Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, whose son had been killed in France in 1917
and who, in October 1919, proposed to a friend in the British Cabinet that a
period of silence be observed on Armistice Day in all the countries of the
British Empire. Fitzpatrick’s suggestion was forwarded to King George who
invited both Honey and Fitzpatrick to a rehearsal involving the Grenadier
Guards where five minutes was found to be too long and two minutes was decided
upon. Elizabeth Williamson’s Wartime article, ‘Eloquent
Silence’, describes the story in detail.[50]
The King issued a special proclamation on 7 November 1919, which
was carried by all national newspapers in Britain:
Tuesday next, November 11, is the first anniversary of the
Armistice, which stayed the world wide carnage of the four preceding years and
marked the victory of right and freedom.
I believe that my people in every part of the Empire
fervently wish to perpetuate the memory of that great deliverance and of those
who have laid down their lives to achieve it.
To afford an opportunity for the universal expression of this
feeling it is my desire and hope that at the hour when the Armistice came into
force—the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month—there may be
for the brief space of two minutes a complete suspension of our normal
activities. During that time, except in the rare cases where this may be
impracticable, all work, all sound, and all locomotion should cease, so that in
perfect stillness the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent
remembrance of the glorious dead.
No elaborate organisation appears to be necessary. At a given
signal, which can easily be arranged to suit the circumstances of the locality,
I believe that we shall all gladly interrupt our business and pleasure,
whatever it may be, and unite in this simple service of silence and remembrance.[51]
The silence was observed at the Armistice Day ceremony in
London and in towns throughout England in 1919. The Governor-General of
Australia, after receiving notification of the King’s proclamation, held a ceremony
on the federal Parliament House steps in Melbourne, where he read the King’s
message to a ‘great crowd’. The ceremony transformed the city into ‘a vast
cathedral’.[52]
According to The Argus, ‘there was something electric in the King’s
appeal, and Melbourne’s citizens were quick to respond to it. Nothing
spectacular marked yesterday’s ceremony. It was the spontaneous tribute of the
people’.[53]
Tens of thousands of people also attended a public service in Martin Place in
Sydney.[54]
In 1920, the governor-general was again notified of the
King’s hope that, throughout the British Empire, two minutes silence would be
observed at 11 am on Armistice Day. The prime minister informed all the state
premiers of the King’s request and again a short ceremony was held on the steps
of the federal Parliament House in Melbourne.[55]
According to tradition, the first minute was for giving thanks for the
survivors and the second minute was a time to remember the fallen.[56]
Edward Honey died in 1922, but his idea was embraced and a
lasting tradition established. In recognition of this, fifty years after his
death, a memorial plaque set in natural rock was unveiled in the grounds of
Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance as a permanent
tribute to him.[57]
The Unknown Soldier
In 1920, the London commemorations on the second anniversary
of the Armistice included the funeral, with full military honours, of an
unknown soldier from the Western Front battlefields. The remains were interred
in Westminster Abbey and over one million people paid their respects at the
Unknown Soldier’s tomb over the following week. French commemorations in Paris
that year also included the interment of the remains of an unknown soldier at
the Arc de Triomphe. Over the years, the majority of other Allied nations also
adopted the tradition of entombing unknown soldiers.[58]
Although bringing home an unknown Australian soldier had
first been planned in the 1920s, it was not until 1993, on the 75th anniversary
of the Armistice, that the remains of an unknown
Australian soldier, exhumed from a French World War I military cemetery,
were entombed in the Australian War Memorial’s Hall of Memory.[59]
The prime minister, Paul Keating, gave a speech
at the entombing of the Unknown Soldier in which he said:
This Unknown Australian is not interred here to glorify war
over peace; or to assert a soldier’s character above a civilian’s; or one race
or one nation or one religion above another; or men above women; or the war in
which he fought and died above any other war; or of one generation above any
that has or will come later.
The Unknown Soldier honours the memory of all those men and
women who laid down their lives for Australia. His tomb is a reminder of what
we have lost in war and what we have gained.
We have lost more than 100,000 lives, and with them all their
love of this country and all their hope and energy.
We have gained a legend: a story of bravery and sacrifice
and, with it, a deeper faith in ourselves and our democracy, and a deeper
understanding of what it means to be Australian.[60]
Throughout the country, ceremonies were conducted
simultaneously in towns and cities, culminating at 11 am with the burial and
the traditional two minutes silence. According to the Australian War Memorial,
this ‘ceremony, which touched a chord across the Australian nation,
re-established Remembrance Day as a significant day of commemoration’.[61]
Poppies
In 19th century English literature, poppies symbolised sleep
or a state of oblivion. While this symbolism continued in World War I, the
poppy also began to be associated with the sacrifice of bloodshed. The poppy is
a symbol of the battlefields on the border of France and Belgium, where more Australians
lost their lives during World War I than at Gallipoli. Poppies flourish in
disturbed soil and red poppies were among the first plants to grow in the ruins
of these battlefields in northern France and Belgium.[62]
According to soldiers’ folklore, ‘the vivid red of the poppy came from the
blood of their comrades soaking the ground’.[63]
A popular poem
from World War I, In Flanders Fields, was written by Canadian John McCrae
who, in 1915, was inspired by the sight of poppies on the Ypres battlefield. He
was the first person to describe the poppy as a flower of remembrance:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place: and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.[64]
The poem was published by the English magazine Punch
after apparently being submitted anonymously. After the war, the impact of the
poem was still keenly felt. The poem inspired Moina Michael from the American
YMCA to write her own poem in response and to wear a red poppy. At an
international gathering of YMCA secretaries in November 1918, Michael spoke of
the poem and poppies. This inspired the French secretary of the YMCA, Madame Anna
Guérin, to approach organisations throughout the allied nations to raise money
for widows, orphans, and needy veterans and their families through the sale of
poppies. It soon became tradition in Allied nations to wear a red poppy on
Armistice Day in remembrance—a tradition which remains to this day.[65]
In Australia in 1921, the RSS & AILA began selling silk poppies
imported from French orphanages for a shilling each for Armistice Day—‘five
pence was donated to a charity for French children, six pence went to the League’s
own welfare work, and one penny went to the League’s national coffers’. The RSL
continues the tradition of selling poppies on Remembrance Day, which raises
funds for its welfare work.[66]
At the Australian War Memorial, red poppies can be found pushed
in beside names on the panels of the Roll of Honour—a practice which began on
Remembrance Day in 1993 as a spontaneous gesture by people waiting to pay their
respects at the funeral of the Unknown Australian Soldier.[67]
Rosemary
Sprigs of rosemary are commonly worn on Anzac Day, but can
also be seen on Remembrance Day. The herb, an ancient symbol of remembrance and
fidelity, was believed to assist in the improvement of a person’s memory. As rosemary
grows wild on the Gallipoli peninsula, it has a particular significance for
Australians as a symbol of remembrance.[68]
[1].
R Black, ‘A
home never to be revisited’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 November
2007, p. 28.
[2].
C Soanes and A Stevenson, eds, The Oxford Dictionary of English, revised
edition, Oxford University Press, 2005.
[3].
E Williamson, ‘Eloquent
silence’, Wartime, 41, January 2008, pp. 46–49; Australian War
Memorial (AWM), ‘Origins
of Remembrance Day’, AWM website.
[4].
R Proir and T Wilson, ‘Winning the war’, in P Dennis and J Grey, eds, ‘1918:
defining victory’, Proceedings of the Chief of Army’s History Conference,
29 September 1998, p. 41.
[5].
Williamson, op. cit.
[6].
Williamson, op. cit.; Australian War Memorial, ‘Origins of Remembrance Day’, op.
cit.
[7].
Ibid.
[8].
B Lowry, Armistice 1918, The Kent State University Press, Kent, 1996,
p. 174.
[9].
C.E.W Bean, ‘The
first Armistice Day’, Reveille, 10(4), 1 December 1936, p. 16; A
Ekins, ‘The
end of the Great War: Australian soldiers and the armistice of November 1918’,
Wartime, 4, Summer 1998, p. 10.
[10].
C.E.W Bean, ‘Chapter
XIX—the Hindenburg Outpost-line’, in The Australian Imperial Force in
France during the allied offensive, 1918, Volume VI of the Official History
of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1942, p. 878.
[11].
Ekins, op. cit.; P Burness, ‘The
last to fall’, Wartime, 44, 2008, pp. 38–41.
[12].
Bean, ‘The first Armistice Day’, op. cit.
[13].
C.E.W Bean, ‘Chapter
XXI—the war ends’, The Australian Imperial Force in France during the allied
offensive, op. cit., p. 1053.
[14].
M Doherty, ‘Remembrance
Day marks 86th anniversary’, The Canberra Times, 11 November 2004,
p. 2.
[15].
Ekins, op. cit.
[16]. Ibid.,
p. 11.
[17].
FM Cutlack, ed., War letters of General Monash, Angus and Robertson,
Sydney, 1934, p. 282.
[18].
Bean, ‘The first Armistice Day’, op. cit.
[19].
Cutlack, op. cit., p. 281.
[20].
Bean, ‘Chapter XXI—the war ends’, op. cit., p. 1072.
[21].
Ibid.
[22].
Ibid., p. 1057.
[23].
Ibid.
[24].
Ibid., p. 1058
[25]. Ibid., pp.
1071–1072.
[26].
Ibid., p. 1058.
[27]. Ibid.,
p. 1061.
[28]. Ibid.,
p. 1073.
[29].
Black, op. cit.
[30].
Black, op. cit.
[31].
Australian War Memorial, ‘Origins of Remembrance Day’, op. cit.
[32].
Williamson, op. cit.
[33].
M Jeffery, ‘Address
on the occasion of Remembrance Day commemoration’, Wollongong, 11 November
2005.
[34]. Ekins,
op. cit., p. 13.
[35]. Australian
War Memorial, ‘1918:
Australians in France—the cost of war’, AWM website. The AWM also lists the
official number of service deaths for World War I as 61,555 (from 4 August 1914
to 31 March 1921): AWM, ‘Deaths as a
result of service with Australian units’, AWM website.
[36].
Jeffery, op. cit.
[37].
Black, op. cit.
[38].
The 2018 figure was adjusted using the Reserve Bank of Australia’s pre-decimal
inflation calculator to convert 1934 pounds to 2017 dollars and the last 12
months’ Consumer Price Index to convert the 2017 figure into 2018 dollars.
[39].
E Scott, ‘Chapter
XIII—Finance’, in Australia during the war, Volume XI of the
Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, 7th edn, Angus and
Robertson, Sydney, 1941, pp. 495–496.
[40]. J Beaumont, ‘Going
to war 1914–18: the view from the Australian Parliament’, speech,
Parliamentary Library, Canberra, 19 March 2014. For further information
about the conscription debates see N Church, Political
attitudes to conscription: 1914–1918, Research paper series, 2016–17,
Parliamentary Library, Canberra, 2016.
[41]. Ibid.
[42]. C.E.W
Bean, ‘Chapter
XXII—the old force passes’, in The Australian Imperial Force in France
during the allied offensive, op. cit., p. 1096. This last paragraph has
itself been the subject of examination by historians, e.g. Martin Ball’s paper,
‘Re-reading
Bean’s last paragraph’, in which he reveals that Bean originally intended
the paragraph to be in the opening chapter of the first volume of the official
history, but was persuaded otherwise by his publisher and by the prime minister,
Billy Hughes; and Peter Londey’s paper ‘A
possession forever: Charles Bean, the ancient Greeks, and military
commemoration in Australia’, in which Londey points out that it was the greatest
of Athenian historians, Thucydides, who famously wrote that his history of the
Peloponnesian War was not intended as a piece for the moment, but as ‘a
possession for ever’.
[43].
Australian War Memorial, ‘Origins of Remembrance Day’, op. cit.
[44].
J Amess, ‘A
day of remembrance: 11 November’, Sabretache, 24, April–June 1983,
p. 26.
[45].
Ibid.
[46].
Ibid.
[47].
WP Deane, Proclamation,
Special Gazette, no. S 437, 30 October 1997.
[48]. Australian War
Memorial, ‘A
period of silence’, AWM website.
[49].
Williamson, op. cit.; ‘Remembrance
Day silence’, Despatch, 17(5), November 1981, pp. 116–120.
[50]. Williamson, op.
cit.
[51].
‘From
the archive, 7 November 1919: the King’s plan for silence on Armistice Day’,
The Guardian UK (online), 11 November 2014.
[52].
Amess, op. cit.
[53].
‘An
empire stilled. Tribute to the fallen. Impressive city scenes’, The
Argus, 12 November 1919, p. 15.
[54].
‘Great
service in Sydney’, The Argus, 12 November 1919, p. 15.
[55].
Amess, op. cit.
[56].
Williamson, op. cit.
[57].
Williamson, op. cit.
[58].
Australian War Memorial, ‘Origins of Remembrance Day’, op. cit.
[59].
Australian War Memorial, ‘Tomb
of the Unknown Australian Soldier’, AWM website.
[60]. P
Keating, ‘Remembrance
Day 1993: commemorative address’, speech, Canberra, 11 November 1993.
[61]. Australian
War Memorial, ‘Origins of Remembrance Day’, op. cit.
[62].
Australian War Memorial, ‘Commemoration:
red poppies’, AWM website.
[63].
Ibid.
[64].
Australian War Memorial, ‘Poems:
In Flanders fields’, AWM website; J King, ‘Passchendaele
... we died in hell’, Perspective, 11 October 2007.
[65]. Australian
War Memorial, ‘Commemoration: red poppies’, op. cit.
[66].
Ibid.
[67]. Ibid.
[68]. Australian
War Memorial, ‘Commemoration:
rosemary’, AWM website.
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