There is a very memorable passage in AB Facey’s beloved memoir A Fortunate Life where an unnamed senior British officer visits the front line at Gallipoli. When he suggests a highly risky and pointless action and is told that they do not want to lose more men needlessly, his callous reply is: “What is a few men?”.
In 1989, the Australian band Hunters and Collectors named their album “What’s a few men?” in tribute to this mention. I immediately got the reference.
Facey went on to comment that he and his comrades then would refer to that visiting officer as Lord Kitchener, probably with the awareness that the Field Marshall would have been equally as callous as (if not even more than) his fellow officer.
Kitchener, who made his name as the anti-hero of the Boer War, before becoming the poster boy of the British Army in the First World War, would have at least have been extremely callous, if not indifferent, to the lives of friend and foe alike. It was, after all, in the Boer War where the concentration camp was invented, as a way of controlling the enemy civilian population.
With the lens of 120 years perspective, it is difficult not to see the civilian deaths from disease in those camps as a crime against humanity, or that Kitchener, if he were alive today, would not be facing prosecution under the Rome Statute.
Whether Kitchener himself was guilty of ordering war crimes, such as those which Breaker Morant then committed, and for which Morant was rightly punished, is debatable.
This has come to the fore again this week, where people in Adelaide are petitioning for the inclusion of Breaker Morant’s name on a Boer War Memorial, just shows how little we have learned.
Let us get this straight: Breaker Morant was a murderer and a war criminal. He killed several unarmed people, including civilians. It is possible that he was following unofficial orders from the British command structure, but this would not exonerate him of his actions.
In recent years, various elderly Germans who, as teenagers, served in some minor capacity in concentration camps, have faced justice for their complicity in crimes against humanity. Why is it that those people are facing justice, whilst on the other side of the world we are still considering Morant as a hero and a martyr?
Following immoral orders does not exonerate the guilty of their crimes.
Which segues into the other current matter. The Australian Federal Police have had to abandon their initial war crimes investigation into Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith VC due to the possible inadmissibility of some of the evidence they have, whilst a senior barrister has raised the opinion that quite possibly, his infamy means that Roberts-Smith cannot be fairly prosecuted.
I do hope that these issues are resolved, and that due process of the law can be followed properly, either to exonerate Roberts-Smith, or to convict him.
In the case of Roberts-Smith, unlike those of Morant, there are no suspected orders from the command structure to commit war crimes. These are the product of a toxic warrior culture, of which Roberts-Smith was a progenitor rather than a product. The command failures which led to this culture flourishing do not exonerate the officers involved from failure as leaders, but they do not make them complicit in war crimes, the way that Kitchener may well have been.
Whilst we await the prosecution of one suspected war criminal, we should not be celebrating a convicted war criminal as a hero. Nor should the carefully curated display devoted to Ben Robert-Smith’s military career continue to be on show at the Australian War Memorial.
We need to remove any lingering doubt about what we as a nation expect from our soldiers. There is no glory, nor heroism, in war crimes.
Lost For Words! 