A ballet and a memoir lend new vigor to Anzac Day reflections on war's horrors and heroism

By MICHAEL FITZGERALD

n the Freeze of 1917, Australian soldier W.H. Downing recorded the everyday misery of the Western Front: no blankets, feet so cold he couldn't sleep, no mail for six weeks. "Australia has forgotten us," he lamented, "and so has God." He need not have despaired. Almost 80 years since the end of World War I, the memory of the conflict remains a defining one for Australians and New Zealanders alike, who lost their national innocence on the battlefields of Europe. As writer David Malouf has noted, "the First War never ended. It was the beginning of what happened to us and is still happening."

With Anzac Day on April 25 marking the 83rd anniversary of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps' disastrous landing at Gallipoli, remembrance is taking new and old forms. Not only did Downing survive the war to build a legal career in Melbourne, where he died in 1965, but his memory is being revived with the reissue of his memoir, To the Last Ridge, out of print since 1920. And the same Anzac pluck summoned up by his graceful prose is being celebrated in dance with the Australian Ballet's new work, 1914.

Poetry, painting and prose have long been inspired by the mangled moonscape of the trenches, but not ballet. For his first full-length piece, choreographer Stephen Baynes turned to Malouf's acclaimed 1982 novel Fly Away Peter, of which Baynes says, "The deeper you go, the more meaning you seem to find." Malouf's tale of working-class Jim Saddler, who journeys from Queensland to Europe to join his gentleman boss Ashley Crowther at the Front, is rich with metaphor. Yet former soloist Baynes struggled to find a dance style that balanced the naturalism the story required with the neoclassicism he had refined in 1995's Beyond Bach. Hardest were the battle scenes, for which the choreographer found clues in the horrific photographs of the time. "I don't know how well it works," he says. "We'll just have to see."

He needn't worry. The ballet, whose Sydney premiere earlier this month launched its Australian tour, has a dignity and restraint befitting its subject. His soldiers have a jocular ease which tightens with the savage, staccato movements of drill parades and the swallow swoops of battle. His 35 dancers move purposefully, often pausing to let Graeme Koehne's glorious score and Andrew Carter's evocative set, with its ribbed stage doubling as sand dune and trench, tell the story. The leitmotif of flight gives the ballet its powerful, circular rhythm. Says Baynes: "In spite of the loss, life goes on."

A grimmer cycle is captured in To the Last Ridge (Duffy & Snellgrove; 207 pages): "Bodies, living and dead, were buried, tossed up, and the torn fragments buried again," Downing wrote of an artillery attack during the third battle of Ypres. Where 1914 reaches for metaphysical heights, his memoir is grounded in the muck of war. No detail seemed to escape him: the muddy weight of a greatcoat, the skim of machine gun fire "from knee to groin," the fragile morale of men in whom "despair, hope, despondency and resolution fought for the possession of each soul."

By then a sergeant, Downing earned a Military Medal at Polygon Wood in 1917 for his "coolness and courage" under fire. He also had a novelist's descriptive sensibility: caught in the glare of no-man's land, his soldiers are transformed into statues; at an abandoned chateau, a soldier plays ragtime jazz on a grand piano as bullets fly; by the Menin Road, "a few flares rose gracefully, like daffodils in the sky." In a narrative as jagged as shrapnel, Downing and his men become mere pointillist dots, "swarming like bull ants from shellhole to shellhole," in some larger, darker scheme of things.

1914, too, evokes a swirling canvas of epic sweep. Echoing the water birds he observes from the dunes, Steven Heathcote's Jim yearns to fly free of the social forces--the winds of war that literally blow Ashley's picnickers from the stage--that will eventually destroy him. As in Fly Away Peter, where Malouf writes of the "deadly sewing machines stitching their shrouds," war is made poetic.

At the end of 1914, as Baynes' soldiers move elegiacally off stage, we might have been transported back to Downing's frozen trench: "At sunset when 'Retreat' is blown," he wrote, "we rise and watch the sun go down, thinking on the soldier souls that travel with it, sinking at evening in the west, rising in the morning in a daily resurrection." Between page and stage, these soldier souls spring to poignant life.