Commemoration reticence

Dorrigo Evans is the central Australian character in the camp. Modelled, perhaps after Weary Dunlop, he is a medical officer and negotiator with the Japanese regarding the welfare of the POWs. Dorrigo knew what being a leader means and knew that the fate of the men under his command relied on his character. There is one scene in which his men give him a steak, part of a windfall from a slaughtered cow. Looking at the steak his mouth ran with saliva because he, like his men, was starving. He insisted, against every natural impulse that the meat be taken and shared with those in the hospital. He knew that if he had eaten it his status among the men would have been reduced. He defied the British officer class who relied on special treatment from the Japanese and was determined to be one with the men he commanded. Perhaps this is a genuine aspect of Australian character; egalitarianism in extreme.

While he demonstrated great strength of character on the Line, Dorrigo found that he was lost in the post-war civilian world. He was a husk of a man, was serially unfaithful to his wife and hungry for status. The character that he demonstrated among the POWs did not negotiate well the trivialities of peacetime life. His experience in the war did produce wisdom although it was a wisdom that did not seem to help. In a remarkable passage this is spelled out in a conversation with his wife Ella:

He thought of how the world organises its affairs so that civilisation every day commits crimes for which any individual would be imprisoned for life. And how people accept this either by ignoring it and calling it current affairs or politics or wars, or by making a space that has nothing to do with civilisation and calling that space private life. And the more in that private life they break with civilisation, the more that private life becomes secret life, the freer they feel. But it is not so. You are never free of the world; to share life is to share guilt. Nothing could wash away what he felt.

This is very close to the Christian doctrine of universal depravity. Even this man who behaved in a fashion that discounted his own life for the lives of the men he commanded had to admit: "to share life is to share guilt." Being a war hero did not exempt him, he did not emerge from the conflict a free or whole man. The brotherhood forged in war is a great thing but it does not mean that human frailty and self-deception are erased. It does not remove one from guilt. It is just this that is lost when we sentimentalise the experience of war, let alone find in it the forging of the national character. This can only lead us back to the jingoism of the Japanese commanders who believed that their national character was superior to all others.

The novel is, among many things, about guilt and the impotence of any kind of justice. The emperor is not hanged; many of the commanders escape the justice of the Americans while an insignificant guard is put to death. But each man has to deal with what happened. Some are driven mad, some come to wisdom and some live in an unreal world. The experience of both the brutal and the brutalised must be dealt with in some way. This realisation dissolves the distinction between the good and the evil and makes the dealing out of justice problematic.

Reading Flanagan's book is a great way to come close to the realities of war and its aftermath. The book is an attempt to expose not just awfulness, it is an attempt to plumb the spiritual realities of men on both sides of the conflict.

I have never attended an ANZAC day ceremony because I felt that a different god was being worshipped than the God I worship each Sunday. Perhaps we should examine the identity of this god to see what we serve? I can understand wanting to preserve in memory all of the lives lost in war just as we remember our own dead who died of natural causes. But if that act of remembrance is used to bolster our national pride, or is understood as the source of national character, then I have a problem because the idea of sacrifice is linked to salvation.

Is the sacrifice of young men in war to be compared to the sacrifice of Christ? More to the point, is that sacrifice understood as displacing the sacrifice of Christ? If so, what form does salvation take? Is that the same as nation building?

There is no salvation in war, even in victorious war, let alone a defeat. In the novel, Nakamura and Dorrigo Evans are not saved; their lives are destroyed. This is the reality that our sentimentality masks; broken bodies, broken minds, shared guilt. The use of dead soldiers to build an image of national character can only establish a hegemony that ties us to a myth of sacrifice. This is not good news, civil religion never is.