TRANSCRIPT
When Britain and Germany went to war on 4th of August 1914, Australia's Prime Minister at the time, Joseph Cook, and Opposition Leader Andrew Fisher pledged full support for Britain.
The first engagements were in the Pacific and, of course, Gallipoli in 1915.
It was the following year, in 1916, that Australians fought on the Western front in Europe, where losses were heavy and gains were few.
Nearly 417,000 men enlisted.
60,000 of them never came home.
In July 1916 Australian troops were introduced to machine gun warfare at Fromelles [[from-ell]], in Northern France, where they suffered 5,533 casualties in 24 hours.
By the end of the year about 40,000 Australians had been killed or wounded on the Western Front.
In 1917 a further 76,836 Australians became casualties in battles such Bullecourt [[bool-cor]], Messines [[mess-een]], and the four-month campaign around Ypres [[eep]] known as the battle of Passchendaele [[pash-uhn-dayl]]
And it's there, at the Menin Gate memorial, where the names of 54,000 soldiers who were never found in the chaos war spawned are engraved on its walls in remembrance.
Matthias Diependaele is the Heritage Minister of northern Belgium's region of Flanders.
“You should know that every evening, every evening of every single day since the 1920s there has been a couple of people blowing a horn outside the Menin Gate. That's every evening, almost 100 years that they have been doing that. That is the idea of commemorating every individual lost life in that war. And that's the strength of this dossier. That's what we want to do. We want to point out that war is losing or makes you lose individual lives, persons who has families, who has to have a social life. And that is that the loss that we want to point out.”
At the Tyne Cot cemetery, also near Passchendaele, 12,000 Commonwealth soldiers are buried, row upon row.
With the war in Ukraine ravaging Europe's heartland again, the sites have a new relevance says Erin Harris, a guide at Tyne Cot.
It's the largest cemetery for Commonwealth forces in the world, for any war.
“I think it's so easy to make that link and we get so many people coming through here and making that link with Ukraine just because it is so relevant at the moment. And you're seeing, you know, the same situation happening with these two sides fighting and, you know, endlessly. And you come here to a place like this and you really see, well, this is still happening, this is still going on in the world.”
Visitor Christophe De Nayer from the Netherlands also makes a link between the past and the present conflicts.
“Well, the youngsters talk a great deal about war and what is happening in Ukraine and Russia. And it is important to make sure that we don’t forget about World War I and all the events too. Even if it is a 1 ½ hour drive, it is good that they see this and can ponder all this because just talk is easy.”
Now both France and Belgium want UNESCO to include the area on its famed list of world heritage sites alongside the Great Barrier Reef, the Great Wall of China, and Peru's Machu Picchu.
They argue that the area of 139 sites has been living history almost since the guns finally fell silent in 1918.
Matthias Diependaele again:
“It is here that we also started with a new kind of remembrance, a new kind of looking back on those conflicts. And that's actually something that we wanted to spread around the world. That is the idea of the fact that you have individual lives lost and you have to remember every individual life in its particularity. And that's something that we want to give back to the world as of course a dam against the new conflicts.”
UNESCO has already ruled that's not necessarily enough to achieve recognition.
To the dismay of the two nations, UNESCO snubbed the request in 2018 with the advice of the International Council on Monuments and Sites littering its conclusions with fragments like “several questions,” “lack of clarity,” “too narrow and limited” and “shortcomings.”
A decision on the issue is expected to be made around Sept. 21 during UNESCO's World Heritage Committee meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
