A battlefield of imperishable memory ? The 1917 Belgium campaigns in Australian collective memory

Abstract

The dreaded Ypres salient was the favourite battle ground of the devil and his minions , wrote one Anzac years after the First World War had ended. Surely few Australians who experienced the 1917 offensives in Belgian Flanders would disagree. At the battle of Messines and the third battle of Ypres, the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) initially helped the British achieve several limited victories in the infamous salient. However, the Anzacs involvement in the fighting around Ypres eventually ended in muddy defeat, not far from the ruined village of Passchendaele. By the end of these offensives in Belgium, the AIF had suffered forty-five thousand casualties, thirty-eight thousand of which were maimed and killed during third Ypres, making it the bloodiest of all the AIF s 1914 18 engagements.

Given the extent of their sacrifices, the Anzacs exploits in Belgian Flanders ought to be well known in a nation that fervently commemorates its participation in the First World War. Yet, Messines and third Ypres occupy an ambiguous place in Australian collective memory. Analysing the memory work of official and non-official agents including that of C.E.W. Bean; the Australian War Memorial; returned servicemen; battlefield pilgrims; and, more recently, the Department of Veterans Affairs, working in collaboration with Belgian locals this thesis explores why these battles are peripheral to the dominant Great War narrative in Australia: the Anzac legend. Examining Australian acts of collective remembrance over the last century, it argues that those who lived through the war had difficulty integrating the AIF s costly Belgian battles into the triumphalist Anzac legend popularised during the interwar years. As the war faded out of living memory, the articulation and commemoration of the legend shifted away from celebrating martial triumph to accentuating the tragic, traumatic and futile elements of Australia s experiences in 1914 18; elements which have long been associated with the AIF s campaigns in Belgium. Nevertheless, the legacy of weak interwar commemoration and West Flanders status as a multinational as opposed to a uniquely Australian site of memory, have ensured that Messines and third Ypres still remain on the margins of Australian First World War memory.