"With military ardour"
In this episode, we explore how hints of the past can help us make sense of real issues in the present day
Wandering past the now-unused town-hall here the other day, and its near-obligatory war-memorial from a hundred years ago, I noticed also a pair of these old naval cannon.
They seemed interesting - to me, anyway - because they looked like an odd mix of two very different periods in military history, kind of stuck halfway between the old muzzle-loaders of the wooden-ship navy, and the heavy-metal of the steamship era.
And sure enough, that’s what that brass plaque behind the gun does show.
They’re from a small locally-built navy sailing-ship from the early 1800s, and converted to steam in the 1850s. The cannon come from a refit in the 1860s, with that odd rifled-barrel extension sticking out at the front done somewhat later, and removed from the ship when it was finally decommissioned at the end of the 1890s. probably never having fired a shot in ager at all.
But then there was this detail that I noticed on the plaque, in its penultimate paragraph: “to supply ornaments and inspire the native youth with military ardour”.
What? What’s that about?
Okay, I do sort-of get what this is about: back then it was still the later end of the British Empire era, with its constant need for new recruits to go off to some foreign land, and make someone else’s life hell “For King And Country” and all that. You know, the usual thing that colonising countries try to do to everyone else, much as Russia is (or was) trying to do in its latest last-ditch colonial adventure in Ukraine.
That whole Imperial “King George commands and we obey / Over the hills and far away” thing was still going very much full-bore at the time those cannons were placed outside the town hall. For Australia, though, those dreams of colonial glory and military ardour came crashing down less than twenty years later than the date of that plaque, in the bloody fiasco that was Gallipoli, as described so well in Eric Bogle’s 1970s song ‘And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’. Some perhaps healthy cynicism has developed since then, perhaps best typified by Country Joe McDonald’s now-classic ‘Vietnam Rag’, about yet another post-colonial war that Australia let its politicians drag itself into. (Not just politicians, of course: often the real cause of war is the rich finding new ways to get richer at the expense of everyone else’s lives - “There’s plenny of money to be made / Supplyin’ the army with the tools of the trade”, as Country Joe put it. But we’re perhaps not supposed to notice that point…?)
Yeah, I know, I got suckered into those myths too, just like just about everyone else. In some ways I still do. It was everywhere around when I was a kid, with lot of pressure from the state to keep it going: joining the military cadets was compulsory at school, for example, the only choice you had was about which wing of the military you would join in. (But hey, I did learn how to fly a plane from that, so it wasn’t all bad…) I was lucky that I wasn’t living in Australia back then, otherwise there’d have been a high risk I would have been hauled off into the pointless trauma-factory that was late-1960s/early-1970s Vietnam. And those myths are still around now, all-pervasive, always: war as game, as spectacle, not as the bloody slaughter that it actually is. Oh well.
The bleak reality is that in the civilian world, just about everything related to war is literally a crime - and it can often be useful to remember that fact. It’s also useful to note that the term ‘Defence Of The Realm’ has a lot of different meanings: as I recall, the last three major deployments for the Australia Defence Force were not ‘military’ in the ‘bang-bangs’ sense at all, but were about rescuing the population of an entire town from a bushfire-blazing beach, helping overstretched medical staff do COVID testing in the early stages of the pandemic, and ferrying freshwater to tsunami-struck Pacific islands. So yes, maybe we do still need to “inspire the native youth with military ardour” - but there are often much better ways to make use of that energy and ardour beyond just bouncing around with a ‘bang-bang’ and getting blown to pieces in yet another war.
Well written (again) and thank you. I remember getting in trouble with family & school for being a pacifist sparked by the mess on Vietnam. Activist is my new dream job.