Anzac Day

Semi-holiday today as Aussies reflect on the 'Diggers' who've given their lives fighting for their country. Mostly, Anzac Day focuses on the under-fortified soldiers who fought bravely but futilely at Gallipoli during WWI, where thousands of young Aussies died charging headlong into Turkish machine gun fire. Today's Age has a poignant story about a park dedicated to Gallipoli veterans that offered safe haven to Marysville residents fleeing the inferno of Black Saturday.

The article also captures the poisoned military mentality of Gallipoli:

The Great War was exactly a year old, his son home in Victoria not yet that, when Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander White received his final orders.

The men of the 8th Light Horse, the regiment he commanded, were to be first over the top.

In three days' time, they were to charge from their trenches up a narrowing hillcrest known as the Nek, the top of which was occupied by Turkish forces. They were to run the bare 30 metres of dusty, uneven ground towards the fortified Turkish machine-gun positions on a hill known as Baby 700, which commanded a sweeping view of the entire tiny battleground below.

The orders came that the men of the 8th were to charge at the Turkish machine guns carrying only fixed bayonets and, if they had them, homemade jam-tin bombs.

Not a single bullet in a single rifle.

The generals did not want the attack slowed by soldiers stopping to aim and fire.

In other words, the men were sent to their deaths. Darwin was wrong.