and the band played
Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Sun, 13 Jun 1999 07:31:57 +0100
A small spurt of recognition in the early hours
of this morning when I found myself listening,
on the BBC, to the familiar chorus of:
'And the band played Waltzing Matilda ...'
It was being sung not by the male singer -
like everyone else, I still can't remember his name -
but by Joan Baez. With her usual vocal clarity
& strident pacifism she made it clearer than
I'd fully realised that the whole thing refers to
'1915' &, by implication, to the horrific Australian
casualties at Gallipoli.
It is, of course, a part of antipodean folk lore that
the great majority of the dead in that unfortunate
expedition were Australians & New Zealanders
sent there by the perfidious Brits to do their dirty
work for them.
Just another long-tailed yarn from Down Under, folks.
In fact, the British contingent (a lot of them Irish
volunteers) outnumbered the ANZACs by many thousands.
For once the whingers are revealed to be not Poms
but Ozzies.
No matter. We might both be shamed into silence by
the magnanimity & tenderness of the inscription on
the memorial above Anzac Cove, written by Kemal Mustapha
himself, promising the parents of the dead soldiers that
the Turkish people will tend the burial places of
their enemies as carefully as those of their own children.
(A promise that has been meticulously kept.) I'm no
more susceptible to cenotaphs than the next man but
I had a momentary difficulty with a watering eye
when trying to focus my camera on it a couple of months
ago.
Scottie B.