Ninety-nine years since the Anzacs landed at Gallipoli, I can’t help but feel proud of the men who went to off war in 1914 – both those who returned and those who didn’t. I’m especially proud of my great grandfathers – George McClintock, Arthur Blackburn, Alexander Forbes and Tom Roberts – all of whom were lucky enough to survive Gallipoli and the western front.

Yet what those men did has very little to do with me. On an intellectual level, I’m not sure I can explain that pride. With the first world war gone from living memory, there’s a push for a greater emphasis on the “Anzac legend” in history classes, and millions will be spent on centenary commemorations next year. As our enthusiasm for all things Anzac swells, it’s worth stopping for a moment to try to justify our feelings about it.

McClintock’s diary, which my uncles found and transcribed, helped me do just that. Running low on cash in the early 1920s after the failure of his soldier-settler farm, he sold the diary for £25 to the State Library of NSW. His health had never really recovered from the war and, sick with tuberculosis and injured while working on the Harbour Bridge, he died aged 41.



The first thing that leaps out from the diary is my young great grandfather's quiet machismo. Writing about the defence of a position at Dead Man’s Ridge at Gallipoli, he wrote:

I could see one chap in particular crawling up to our trenches with bombs. I jumped into the trench and fired. I don’t think that chap will tell anymore tales. He was no more than 10 yards from our trench.

Shortly after doing away with the Turk in the trench, he was sent down the line with a message. On his way back he was called into a support trench by a corporal, from whom he bummed a cigarette.

I had been smoking it a few minutes when, crash, I got one in the left arm in a line with the heart. The bullet remained in my arm. But I could see the end of it.

He wrote later, this time after being shot through the thigh while making dinner:

I have beaten the Turks again and they will have to make another bullet on me to kill.

'I jumped into the trench and fired. I don’t think that chap will tell anymore tales'. Photograph: Alex McClintock Photograph: Alex McClintock

Another of my great grandfathers, Arthur Blackburn, was similarly cavalier when he told my grandmother that he won his Victoria Cross for “just being a soldier”. In fact, he’d led several near-suicidal mission against a German machine gun position at Pozières. His name is still on the town water tower.

As for Tom Roberts, he wrote to his sisters (on a flannel rifle rag, using a biscuit tin as a desk) that he and his mates were “as happy as soldiers lice”, though the Turks had been putting “the fear of Allah” into them.

It’s all rather thrilling, all these chaps doing in other chaps and getting shot. It’s also natural, as time passes, to assume that people were just made of sterner stuff back then. Yet it does the generation who went to war a disservice if we believe they were supermen.

What’s amazing, and what we should be proud of, is that my great grandfathers’ generation were probably not so different from us. As their gallows humour and self-effacing attempts to downplay their fear and bravery make clear, they were men struggling to adjust to awful circumstances. McClintock, for example, wrote of dry-retching after mistaking a dead comrade’s foot for a tree branch and grabbing hold of it. Roberts wrote to his sisters to complain about a commanding officer who harassed him for not shaving.

A nearly 100-year-old poppy, which was pressed in the third volume of George McClintock's diaries. Photograph: Alex McClintock Photograph: Alex McClintock

Growing up on the other side of the world in a period of relative peace, none of them expected to be thrown into a horrible war. In 1914, Blackburn had just graduated from law school and Roberts was working overseas. Perhaps optimistically, McClintock listed his occupation as “boundary rider” on his enlistment form, despite the fact that he grew up in the Sydney suburbs.

They were also not all the doe-eyed colonials of the typical Anzac legend, ready to fight for the mother country. My grandmother describes Blackburn as “very Australian” and says he enlisted because it was “the right thing to do”, rather than out of any obligation to England.

For his part, McClintock was rather more sympathetic to the Turks, who shelled the hospital at Gallipoli as he lay wounded, than to the English, who had left stockpiles of ammunition nearby. He wrote:

The English call this fair fighting well I don’t and it is not fair to the men in hospital and not fair to the enemy. The Turks fought us fair and I don’t think anyone could have fought fairer.

They were part of an entire generation who gave up their lives and their sweethearts for four years. The saw and most likely did awful things. The next generation was forced to do the same. When they came back, they were no doubt changed men.

It’s easy to say those horrors are unimaginable. Yet for those of us with no military experience, imagining the circumstances of those who have served Australia is a necessary part of remembrance.

If we cast the Anzacs, the returned and the fallen alike, as fundamentally different from us, then it’s impossible to even try to appreciate what they went through. If we turn them into purely mythic figures, then Anzac Day becomes merely an exercise in flag waving, a day for platitudes about freedom and sacrifice.

The truth is much more stirring – that ordinary men did things most of us hope never to do, mostly because they thought it was right. I don't know if that's something for us to be proud of, but it's certainly worth remembering.