Letters from France Part 14

I hesitated for a minute or two racking my brain--it seemed to me that once, some months back, I had used that convenient term in a cabled message.

"Oh, don't for goodness sake say you do it, too," said the owner of the elbow sling pathetically. "Isn't Australians good enough?"

"I'm not sure--once--I may have. Not for a long time, anyway. I sometimes speak of the Anzac troops or the Anzac guns."

"Oh, that is all right--Anzac troops--there's no objection to that--we are that," went on the grammarian with the elbow sling, "but there's no such thing as an Anzac--the Anzacs--it's nonsense."

I remember that day well. It was the day before their first entry on the Somme. The man with the elbow sling had stopped a shrapnel pellet one frosty morning eight months before at Anzac; the man who sat next to him had a Turkish shrapnel sh.e.l.l burst between his shins at h.e.l.l Spit. They were some of the oldest hands, back again, and about to plunge with the oldest division into the heaviest battle the division had yet faced.

It was more than a grammatical objection. You know the way in which it makes you wince, if ever you have lived in Australia or New Zealand or Canada, to hear people talk of "the colonies" or "the colonials." The people who use the words do not realise that there is anything unpopular in their use, although the objection is really quite universal in the self-governing States, and represents a revolt against an out-of-date point of view which still lingers in some quarters.

In the same way anyone who _is_ in touch with them knows that to speak of the feats of "an Anzac" or of "the Anzacs" is unpopular with the men to whom it is applied. You will never hear the men refer to themselves as Anzacs. They call themselves simply Australians or New Zealanders.

It is an interesting mental phase. The reason of it is not that Australians and New Zealanders dislike being clubbed together. Quite the reverse--the Australians are never more satisfied than when they are next to the New Zealanders. The two certainly feel themselves in some respects one and inseparable to a greater extent than any other troops here. They are proud of Anzac as the name of their corps, and as the name of that hill-side in Gallipoli where their graves lie side by side.

The reason why they always avoid calling themselves "the Anzacs" is that the term was at one time a.s.sociated in the Press with so many highly coloured, imaginative, mock heroic stories of individual feats, which they were supposed to have performed, that its use from that time forth was, by a sort of tacit consent, irrevocably d.a.m.ned within the force.

The picture which it called up was that of the "Anzac" in London, with his shining gaiters and b.u.t.tons and generally unauthorised c.o.c.k's feathers in his hat, reaping the glory of the acrobatic performances which his battered countrymen, very unlovely with sweat and dust, were credited with achieving in No Man's Land. This was before the Somme fight, when first these Gallipoli troops came to Europe. The regular British war correspondents were not responsible for it--this nonsense was not written by them; when the day of real trial came they wrote of it conscientiously and brilliantly, and nothing that could be written was too much. But the vogue of the wildest stories of the "Anzacs" was when Australians and New Zealanders were doing little beyond hard work in France, and knew it. The noun "an Anzac" now bears with it, in the force, the suggestion of a man who rather approves of that sort of "sw.a.n.k"; and there are few of them.

The Australian and New Zealander are both intensely, overwhelmingly proud of their nationality; and only good can come of the pride. They are also intensely proud of their two-year-old units--and one of the drawbacks of the necessary rules of censorship is, that battalions of our army, which are famous throughout the force by name, have to be known to you only through vague references. Their character and history, as distinct and strongly marked as those of different men, will only come to be known to Australia when the history of these campaigns comes to be written.