Michael Piggott's book, New Feller Master: Beyond the Trenches; Australia's Neglected WWI Story, is published by Big Sky Publishing on 2 February. There is a review on our sister website, Honest History. Besides the book's detailed description of a single day's fighting and many years of Australian colonial occupation, it has some memorable passages relevant to any war, anywhere, or indeed any historical event.
Accounting for the dead (page 141)
Accounting for death due to war requires a certain resignation, an acceptance of complexity and secondary and deeper contexts. The wish for an answer to how someone died becomes a demand to be told the answer to ‘why?’. As to who needs answers, that varies too: a grieving family’s seeking more immediate and heartfelt than that of a biographer, for example, or that of a community or nation.
Accounting for lives lost in war is equally a kind of remembrance, the implied reason being that combatants ‘gave’ their lives for their country, in defence of their country. Inevitably shaped by culture and history, variation might cover naming conventions (‘the fallen’, ‘martyrs’, ‘unknown soldier’); policy regarding bodies (buried in situ, repatriated); acknowledgement of combatants’ names (individually prominently listed, groups by unit, community etc); and what is singled out for accolades (military or political leadership, acts of extreme valour, suicidal sacrifice).
Multiple echoes of the past (page 178)
Surveying the origins of modern centralised recordkeeping for criminal investigation in late 19th century France, Matt Matsuda generalised that ‘All events have their witness, their memory: the trace’.* Matsuda expressed a fundamental truth. Even in the physical world, we see markers laid down, literally via phenomena such as tree rings, glacial moraines and meteorite impact sites. And, as Simon Schama has illustrated, metaphorically through the cultural understanding of time and memory via landscape. Our own actions often leave traces, too: mental and physical, psychic and embodied, traumatic and happy, analogue and digital. Across the years – in social memory, in cultural practice, in libraries and archives – evidence endures, resonates and self-edits. Bureaucracies of course create administrative records, and some, through accident or design, will survive. These ‘present traces of the past’ are what we study when we regard the past.
We will remember them (page 227)
Who is remembered and who forgotten? And what factors shape the answers? The list is endless. Even narrowing the focus to war (declared and otherwise), one hesitates to generalise. War in which century, what kind of warfare, were bodies buried in situ or repatriated; was the conflict celebrated or quickly embarrassingly forgotten? Are there archives, were there war correspondents, did the victors alone dominate the history writing? The questions pile up.
Our interest here, essentially, is not in a war or a battle but an occupation – even if an occupation run by soldiers. From them, four came under notice during research for this book [and their stories are told in the following chapter] and prompted questions which arose from their post-war life or afterlife. In part because of this interest, in part because there were sources enabling it to be pursued, the four can live on in collective memory. If we wish to, to quote from Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’, we will remember them.
* Matt Matsuda, The Memory of the Modern (OUP, 1996), p 139; Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (HarperCollins,1995)
Picture credit: detail of book cover.
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