Glorious Deeds of Australasians in the Great War

by E. C. Buley

Wherever he comes into contact with Nature, the Australasian finds justification for his idea that life is a long struggle against adverse conditions, a struggle which must only be relinquished at the merciful call of Death itself. Considering the fewness of his numbers, he is engaged in the most terrific task that engages any of the nations of the world. He is developing a vast unknown continent, and contending with conditions that are most curiously fickle. The unconsidered circumstances of one year become the determining factors of the next, and that by some whimsical no-law that baffles all intelligent prevision. In another century he may have mastered some of the tricks that climate and environment, to mention but two of his ever-present problems, are playing with his means of livelihood; for the present they make his existence one long uncertain struggle.

For instance, a bag of seed wheat brought from another district may contain a few seeds of a harmless weed, known for many years to be innocent; not worth worrying about one way or the other. The transfer to new conditions of soil and atmosphere suddenly transforms this inoffensive plant into a vegetable pest, that climbs over all saner growths and chokes them out of existence with the ineradicable monstrosity of its new functions. Fertile farms are rendered useless, and the product of the work of whole lifetimes negatived by such malevolent miracles; but they give the Australasian the fighting spirit. Two or three men will go out and face a roaring bush fire with a two-mile front, in the apparently hopeless task of holding it in check till further assistance can be procured. Drought, flood and pestilence are fought in the same uncompromising way, for the race has the instinct of grim battle implanted deep down in its nature. The Australasian knows there is always something to contend with; he knows it is no use to expect a soft time; he must fight.

So he becomes resourceful, inventive, open to suggestion. He is certain there is a counter to every blow delivered by Fate, if one could but discover it. To expect to fight, to realize that there is always a chance to win, but a reasonable expectation of defeat, to seek expedients without being discouraged by failure; all these things make good training for soldiering. They are all part of the daily life of the Australasian, even of the Australasian of the cities. Disaster, sudden and swift; change, inexorable and sweeping; disappointment, bitter and undeserved; he recognizes them all as everyday factors in his existence. The fighting spirit cannot be held long in abeyance if they are to be countered and overcome.

Then the Australasian has the fighting equipment. He is superbly healthy, in spite of his leanness and the drawn look due to the lines that life bites into the faces of even the young men. These men of the sun-dried plains and the rocky ranges look upon illness as something unnatural, something to be ashamed of and concealed; they seem almost to have the instinct that prompts the sick animal to hide from its fellows, and sometimes impels the hale beasts to slay the sick one for the reason that illness is unnatural, dangerous, and an offence. Australasia has the lowest death-rate of the world, a significant fact in the health record of a nation. A nation of athletes! Swift runners, fast swimmers, tall lean men whose movements are made with incredible and deceptive swiftness, inured to the saddle and to long marches under a tropical sun. Compare a regiment of them with a regiment of home-bred Britons, and the advantage in smartness of appearance would lie with the latter. The Australasian is inclined to be loose-jointed and slabby; they use the word "lanky" themselves. They are inclined to economy of physical effort, to walk with a slouch and a swing. Do not be misled by the lack of "snap" in their movements; it is deceptive.

Enterprise and daring are theirs by heredity. They have descended from a race of adventurers. Their immediate forbears were those whom the love of adventure drew to new and little known countries, who were not content to rust out in quiet English villages, to economize for a lifetime on oatmeal and potatoes in a Scottish croft, or to die of rheumatism on the edge of an Irish bog. They married brave girls, and crossed the long oceans to become pioneers of the newer races, transmitting their health and love of adventure to a whole nation.

The Australasians have been accustomed to the weapons of the soldier all their lives; they are part of the daily life of many of them. The rifle and the entrenching tool pass into accustomed hands, which know just how to make the best use of them. Their far-sighted eyes detect little signs of the country through which they pass; their trained minds, versed in all the lore of the country-side, draw the just conclusions. All the work of the camp comes naturally and easily to their hands; many of them are practised guides and scouts. They find the shortest and best way from one place to another by an uncanny kind of instinct; they select the best paths by some natural process that cannot be explained.

When the Australasians were first submitted to the practical test of campaigning to prove their worth in actual warfare, they were held by experts to have failed in one particular, due to their lack of special training. One requisite of the modern soldier was wanting in their composition; they were deficient in discipline. They insisted on ignoring many of the formalities in behaviour exacted from the trained soldier; they protested that they could not see the necessity for them. It would have been easier to underestimate this disadvantage than to correct it, had the Australasians adhered to their original schemes of national defence. But before a second time of testing had come round, they had made differences of a vital kind in their military system, and in the change the defect in training had been remedied.

The Last March through Sydney Streets.

With the introduction of national service in Australasia, provision was also made for the local production of the implements and munitions of warfare, and for military equipment. Their local supply of the raw material for such purposes is unequalled in the world, and thus it came that the Australian forces in the Great War were equipped in a style of serviceable comfort that was the admiration of all who examined it. In short, the Australasian forces who were sent to participate in the Great War were first-class material, well-trained and excellently found, a body of men of whom it was reasonable to expect fine deeds should the chance ever come their way.