By Deacon Peter Devenish-Meares
I STAND here in the sacred grove adjacent to the Toowoomba Mothers’ War Memorial holding a fallen twig directly descended from a Lone Pine.
Its parent pine was brought home by the 25th Infantry Battalion, 7th Brigade AIF about 98 years ago.
As the cool breeze touches my face I am re-awakened to gratitude to all those who served and who still serve, be it in khaki or in the community.
Their honour and our abiding remembrance is the order of the eternal day.
Across 100 years their service, mateship and duty done reaches out to us. So our thanks and reminiscences go always as we pray too for those at home – then and now.
I am also reminded of the one, Jesus who went before us as the first-born from the dead who first laid down his life in absolute love. (Mark 14:26-42)
Then
Quinn’s Post, Lone Pine, the Nek: every close-fought affair has sunk apt and deep into Australia’s national memory.
Some may call Gallipoli a futile, stalemate operation but a nation’s honour and need cannot ever be relegated to any words.
Besides we were ready to, needed to, go – to do what was necessary and stay ‘til the end. Duty done.
The rightfully evoked, eternally at rest and much missed dead ask us – no, need us – to live well as if peace itself depended on it and our very next kindly action required it.
Their new nation’s necessity heeded whatever of later historians’ arguments from safe armchairs.
Deeds were done in platoons, in ships’ companies and in flight and all were more than a sufficient price to finally catch peace when war wearied of its rancid race.
Then and since at Villiers, Tobruk, Kokoda, Korea, Malaya, Vietnam and in Afghanistan, just to name a few, tens of thousands went.
They served and still serve with honour despite all the odds against them – thankfully.
Recall, too, 3000 nurses who volunteered for active service in the First War.
They tended at clearing stations and in so many hospitals from the Levant to London via India.
As with the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) they were compassion personified.
With quiet dignity and starched assurance they could tell you that ordinance incalculable didn’t warn of wounds too awful to recount nor presage wretched tears to limbs or eyes – welling long after spent shells had cooled, fallen silent and peace reigned.
Such peace ran like life’s blood not gore, mind you; flowing hope-filled in the human heart, well beyond pencilled plans and harried dispatches.
Pax tore mercifully ahead of so many incalculable, noble and sad deeds to finish first at long last.
This armistice bestowed its blessing like a long-looked-for dawn’s light breaking into a darkened world’s nightmares although not before such devastation than can ever truly be recounted.
These our forever ones run ahead of us, still.
Death can have no last bitter word.
Australia is ever thankful for the returned and it won’t forget the dead; pain beyond pain for way too many gone too early.
All are still known in an eternal knowing now.
No harm can touch these greatly mourned, deeply missed dead – their going more than devastation itself, so many held in fathers’ unspeaking hearts and mothers’ enduring pain.
Each was gone well before Bendigo, Braidwood, Hobart, Kingaroy and Kalgoorlie relations would wish it.
Their shocked silence reached aching ears then and still reverberates at the Gate, ripples across a dark, silent pool near Mt Ainslie, shines from every sandstone Cenotaph, flares in a 6pm RSL flame and watches quietly from a dusty glass-plated photograph on an old mantelpiece.
Each name is inscribed in stone, etched carefully in capitalised gold-lettered panels and on generations of aching hearts – some even heralded by well warranted, re-forged Crimean cannon metal and a small crimson ribbon.
Be comforted, they slumber in a noble peace having won an unexpectedly early victory at the eternal finish line.
All are now at rest in simple earth – some in places unknown but to God and many others lay below ample, well tendered lawns, each grave topped with a white Portland stone marker – row upon row.
Now
Those from the Dardenelles and beyond helped forge our nation’s crucible where the superfluous is burnt away in land instilled by loss and shaped by hope.
Across a century, they call forward our highest order efforts: to serve each other in troubled times by all necessary and audacious means.
Times such as Granville, Darwin’s Christmastide, the Ash Wednesday fires, flooding from the Great Divide and Yasi – each devastation burning, washing or blowing away long nurtured dreams and unachieved enthusiasms.
In Timor-Leste and in the Solomons they served, cared, built and attended to duty.
We see it too in the service to the most vulnerable in our society such as at Mission Australia – each responding in modern ways to the eternal call – “love one another” (John 13:34-35).
Never is mayhem the last word, of course not, because now, like in earlier close-fought affairs, Australian hearts, hearths and halls are moved to action and given over to the lost, and to care for the sad, the wounded, the fire-shocked and storm-driven homeless – fed, bandaged, listened to, then led gently away to row upon row of mattresses to dream far better dreams.
We are not a different people to those who suffered in the war to end all wars.
Rather, their modern inheritors and especially so our volunteers who, ignoring desperately needed rest, battle beyond containment lines, volunteer in St Kilda and Surrey Hills, at Rosies, for Caritas in Vanuatu, and work where mud water creeps eerily silent over lawns, slowly up swept steps not even bothering to knock as it spills poor manners onto loved floors.
All the while, too, countless Defence members, bone-weary charity workers, ambos, numb police, SES and rural fire stalwarts, and brightly vested Red Cross workers reflect light back to those in darkness; hope shining like in khaki and starched nurse capes 100 years ago.
Pray for them all.
Lest we forget … and always then to act.
Deacon Peter Devenish-Meares is an Army Reserve chaplain who served for six years in a full-time infantry battalion. He is also also deputy state chaplain at St John Ambulance.
