At last the prattling Polonius show ...

The pond apologises for jamming together all of the Sunday Terror pieces this day, but it had to make room for prattling Polonius ...

The pond is deeply disturbed at the treatment that the reptiles dish out to Polonius these days ...

At one time, he was treated as an heroic reserve, standing by and ready to be flung into rearguard action on a weekend to bolster clicks ...

Yet what happens when he delivers a splendid bit of jingoistic sabre-rattling of the old-fashioned cavalry charge kind?

He stays on the back line, panting at the bit, waiting to play his part, and for what? He ended up being spat out, flung into the google gristmill, like a mindless small cog in the brutal war machine, jostled up against heretics and philistines ...

The pond's heart almost broke at the shabby treatment of a grand old digger - readers will remember Polonius's heeding of the call to arms, and his valiant contribution to the war in Vietnam, where he served with distinction.

Oh yes, they also serve who write columns and run institutes, and war mongering duty is never done ...

It's called trading off, like the pond mentioning as some kind of honour certificate the family member killed at Gallipoli and sundry other uncles killed, or wounded in action ...

It's not quite the same as being there, or measuring up to Polonius's valiant service in 'Nam ... which reminds the pond that eventually it finished that show the Yanks called "The Vietnam War",  with an emphasis on the definite article, the "The" offering a specifying and particularising impact, and yet in over twelve hours of footage, there were just three passing references to Australia ... and one unacknowledged climactic moment using Neil Davis footage ...

Never mind the real diggers who fought there and died for Ming the Merciless sucking up to the Yanks ... for this Polonius did such valiant service?

Never mind, as a result of the reptiles keeping Polonius in reserve, the pond had wandered off to observe others in action, including this outrageous scribbling at John Menadue's blog, from which the pond has extracted a few juicy quotes - the full post by historian Douglas Newton is here, as the good prof contemplated the situation after Gallipoli...

The solution? A new ‘great offensive’ in the Middle East, and agreement beforehand with France to snaffle up the lot. And how to divide the spoils? Here Sykes famously pointed to a map and suggested, ‘I should like to draw a line from the “e” in Acre to the last “k” in Kerkuk [sic]’, that is, a line running almost a thousand kilometres, from the coast (of what is now northern Israel) to northern Mesopotamia. France would take everything north of the line – Britain, under various guises, would take everything south of the line. (War Committee. ‘Meeting held at 10, Downing Street on Thursday, December 16, 1915’, ‘Evidence of Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Mark Sykes, Bart., M. P., on the Arab Question. TNA: CAB 24/1/51.) 
But the fall of the Tsar in March 1917 threw all this into doubt. In April, therefore, the Western leaders met again, this time at St-Jean-de-Maurienne, a small town near the Franco-Italian border. Italy urged that recent back-channel peace overtures from Austria-Hungary’s new Emperor, the young Karl, be rejected. Shunning any peace overtures, the British, French, and Italian leaders then haggled out an agreement to hand out to each other second-helpings from Turkish booty at the heart of the Ottoman Empire. Now Italy was to gain a vast share, the ‘green’ area on an updated Sykes-Picot map, that is the southern third of Anatolia (now Turkey) including Smyrna, and an area of indirect control to its north, on the Aegean coast and hinterland. These deals were confirmed in follow-up secret conferences between the British, French and Italians in London in August 1917. Such were the purposes underpinning Beersheba. 
Whether Australians fought gallantly or not is in fact a question of little importance in the scale of things. Whether Australians received their fair share of the glory of this or that particular victory is also an unworthy nationalist obsession. 
Much more important is this: in a war of manufactured murder on a grand scale, of industrialised killing and mutilation, victory would eventually go to the side that brought its overwhelming industrial power to the front line in Europe. And so it did.

The results of this splendid re-ordering of things has led to the ongoing peace which has been such a singular mark of the success of the British role in the middle east ...

And then the good prof outrageously concluded with this par ...

In Australia, the battle at Beersheba was above all grist for the pro-war propaganda mill. A spectacular victory in a corner of the Middle East boosted the efforts of the Hughes government to impose conscription in Australia. The government launched a second effort to persuade the people to accept conscription at a referendum in December 1917. The government resorted to a phoney question, and held the referendum on a work day rather than on a Saturday. Still a majority of the Australian people voted NO. Thus they refused to give the government and the British generals a blank cheque to spend as many men as they wished in their prolonged war. It is probably the most important event of all in the record of Australia’s war.

I say, I say, that's sounding a bit Irish.

And dammit, while away from the front line, the pond had also read a piece in the Graudian here which inter alia mentioned ...

Relations between the Australian Imperial Force and the Palestinians, the nomadic Bedouin and the Arabians were more nuanced, complex and often difficult. While TE Lawrence’s Arabian force was disrupting the Hejaz railway, constantly attacking the Turks and fomenting anti-Ottoman dissent in Palestine to cultivate support for Britain, the Australians – as part of an invading imperial force – repeatedly clashed with some Palestinians and the Bedouin. The tensions boiled over at Surafend after war’s end in December 1918, where Australian light horsemen, some of whom had been in the battle of Beersheba, participated in the orchestrated revenge massacre of, by some accounts, at least a hundred male Palestinian villagers and Bedouin camped nearby.

Invading imperial force? Steady old chap, as a result of the British intervention, there's been a singular peace in the middle east ever since ...

Never mind, it's time at last for Polonius to trot up and do his duty, by jingo ...

Indeed, indeed.

Enough of this sort of petulant carping here ...

There is, of course, a law of consequence operating here. Beersheba, for one, is now in Israeli territory. If we were advocates of Pascal’s Cleopatra nose theory of history, we could say that even a victory of this small magnitude altered the political geography of the region. The point is again made by the ABC. “The victorious campaign redrew the map of the Middle East.” 

Prime Minister Turnbull was even blunter, almost to the point of boasting. These men “spurred their horses through that fire, those mad Australians […] and took the town of Beersheba, secured victory that did not create the State of Israel, but enabled its creation.” ... 

Since that painful redrawing, nation states have warred, bickered and slaughtered. New states emerged, the offspring of part treachery, part opportunity, and colonial fantasy. Undertakings were ignored as the Ottoman Empire sundered. Irritable tribes were artificially captioned by fictional boundaries. Fitting, then, that the Beersheba commemorations should take place on Israeli soil.

Polonius is perfectly correct. The first world war was such a splendid success, it's little wonder that everybody happily lined up again for a second world war, which let's face it, was also a tremendous success ...

And if you happen to hear some silly Indian or Pakistani person talking of the British tyranny or what a prize doofus of the first water that Boris Johnson might be, speak to them sharply and remember to join Polonius on the front line ...

Relax, all that means is sipping on a very dry sherry in a creaking leather chair and celebrating the glories of war and noble deaths, with a bit of luck won't include your own ... hopefully you too once had bone spurs and now can fly off to Vietnam as a tourist ...

Oh and you might also get to do valiant service routing the infidel wretched leftists on The Insiders on the ABC ...

Yes, you can't keep Polonius away from an appearance on their ABC ... how he loves to pontificate and blather, and what a valiant warrior he is as he smites the infidels ...

And speaking of the empire and Boris, a few cartoons, three by Bell and one by Rowson, with many more reminders of empire at the Graudian here ...