A Rose for the Anzac Boys (19 page)

Behind the servicemen and women came the children, wearing the medals of their grandfathers, greatgrandfathers; then the fire brigade, the scouts, the school cadets. And leading them all were the Biscuit Creek Light Horse Brigade, the horses groomed and shiny, the men with feathers in their hats, recreating the heroes of so long ago.

The drums of the community band began to beat.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

It was strange too, marching in the parade as an adult; up the same hill he had marched up as a child, pushing Pa in his wheelchair, the same shops along the street. But there was no wheelchair to push today. This time his body instinctively followed the beat of the march. This time, some of the medals were his.

Lachie glanced at the faces lining the street: people who thought they knew about a war because they’d seen it on TV; boys who read books about army heroes; those who were here for sentiment or memory, or because it was a festival like Heritage Day, with uniforms instead of costumes.

What would you have thought of it all, Pa? he wondered. The politicians’ speeches, using the memories of heroes to sell themselves. The TV spectacle. The shadows he’d seen in his friends’ eyes, that Mum said she saw in his. What would Pa have thought of Afghanistan? Of Rwanda? We did our best there, too, Pa. We did what we could. The Iraq war?

Pa would have understood, he thought. Pa knew the difference between those who ordered war and those who fought it. ‘They called it a noble cause,’ Pa had said once, in one of those speeches he sometimes gave after the long silences of his deafness, as they drove home on a day much like today. ‘But we were the ones who gave it nobility.

‘You go with such idealism. You fight, because doing nothing would be worse. And then you find that wars are run by the same men who run everything else, who make the money, give the orders. All they give you in return is a little bit of glory.

‘And the friendship. But that isn’t theirs to give.’

The watching crowd was thick about the memorial. Men waved digital cameras; women held the hands of grandchildren and whispered explanations. One couple had pinned rosemary to the knitted coats on their dogs. Mum had that look that said she was crying, but didn’t want to let it show. Alanna held Jack higher in her arms, so he could see.

One by one the wreaths were laid—fourteen of them today. A toddler in pink yelled ‘Daddy!’ as the Air Force wreath was laid. Another child demanded a biscuit. But mostly there was silence.

The wreath from the CWA, all dark green bay leaves and red flowers. The wreath from the Central School, from St Pat’s. The wreath from the Light Horse Brigade, the wreaths from Legacy…

The naval helicopter roared up the street, just above the roof tops, circled, and flew back across the memorial.

The Last Post’s echoes trembled down the silent street. Then it was over.

The crowd moved off to the rotunda in the park, mostly silent still, with murmurs, not loud voices. The speeches were in the park these days, now the crowds were too big to fit around the statue in the street; the hymns, the anthem. Only Mum and Dad, Alanna and Jack stood on the footpath by the memorial now.

Lachie waited. Waited till the street was empty, till his neighbours, friends and strangers had all gone. Just as he had waited with Pa, year after year. Even that last year when Pa had insisted they bring the wheelchair to the hospital (Great-Gran’s photo beside his bed—he’d had it in his hands with her locket when they found him that last morning), and insisted too that they bring her rose from the bush by the kitchen door.

Now Lachie laid the rose among the wreaths. It had wilted a little more in his hand, just as it had wilted when Pa carried it. But the colour was still bright, stronger in this drought year than the wet years of his childhood.

‘A rose for the Anzac boys,’ he whispered. ‘Rest in peace, Pa. We shall remember them.’

Sergeant Lachlan Harrison saluted.

How many women fought in World War I?

We’ll never know. But there were thousands, or even millions—as many, perhaps, as the men who fought there too.

Few women in World War I carried weapons. But these days we say a soldier ‘fought’ in World War I or II if they were in transport, or administration, and not just one of the relatively small proportion of soldiers who actually faced the enemy. The women of World War I fought in other ways, and often in battles as hard as the men’s. And mostly their war was unrecorded. It is only over the past few years, as the diaries and letters of participants in World War I have been published, that it’s become possible to glimpse the unofficial war. It is those diaries and letters that show just how many women left their homes and became unofficial volunteers in France and Belgium. Military historians and journalists wrote about the men, the tactics, the regiments. For obvious reasons they left out the stories of the unofficial volunteers. (There is only so much any one person can
write, especially when his or her duty is to record official organisations and engagements.)

But for every man who fought there were even more women—the uncounted volunteers, doing what the armies of those days weren’t equipped to do: tending the wounded, often with the shells exploding around them; driving ambulances or even moving troops on trucks or carts; feeding the men—often starving because the army couldn’t supply food while they were travelling, or only gave rations like the hard biscuits that the men of those days with crumbling or false teeth couldn’t eat. These women faced danger and hardship, too.

Even the women who stayed at home helped to clothe and feed the men: they knitted socks and balaclavas, made and washed bandages, and starved themselves to send food parcels and ‘comforts’ for the men.

And when the war was over the survivors of this extraordinary army of women went on to fight other battles: for schools and libraries and hospitals for all; for the right to vote; for so many other things you and I take for granted today.

They are the forgotten army. This book is for them.

This book is also the first one where I have thought, I don’t know if I should keep writing this. I don’t know if anyone should read it.

This is a grim book. It is based on letters and diaries that
make even grimmer reading. Much of the time, reading and

writing, I was in tears, hearing the voices of so long ago.

Finally, I kept writing.

War is perhaps humanity’s craziest invention. But it is also in war—in any adversity—that humans sometimes show their greatest courage, loyalty and love. It is important, I think, to understand the difference between glorifying war and celebrating the triumphs of the human spirit amid the battles.

And I do believe there are times when you need to fight. I don’t think any war has ever achieved what it was started for. But I can think of many wars where it was necessary to join a fight that someone else began, to defend a country or a cause, to protect people that others were persecuting, to establish law so there could be peace. Australia and New Zealand’s armed forces today are mostly ‘peace keepers’ in the truest sense. Yet often, too, war is the first resort, not the last, the decisions made by politicians who have no idea of what their orders mean.

It is easy to blame politicians. But we are the ones who elect them; the ones who make the ultimate decisions.

There is another reason I wrote this book. The men and women who lived through World War I are gone. But the words they wrote down survive, and those are the words I’ve used to write this book.

Sometimes it is almost as though I hear a whisper from the past, calling, ‘Remember me’.

We need to know the past to understand today. We need to listen to the past to learn that things can change—and
that we can change them. We need to hear those voices, no matter how terrible their stories—perhaps especially when the stories are so hard to bear.

This is not a true book, but it is made of true things.

There was a war, and there were men and women who fought and died, and many who did their best to ease the pain. Every episode and character in this book is based on the words of those who were there, taken from their letters, diaries, the oral history collected years later. I have taken the stories and woven a piece of fiction from the facts.

But because these things
did
happen I’ve avoided using real place names; to do so would be to rob the memories of those brave girls and women who really were there. I have even avoided naming the battalions and the battles—the ‘pushes’ in this book—though any reader can look at the dates and probably work out which they were. So all the places and people in the book are imaginary, but the things that happened are real. ‘The Duchess’, for example, is based on the Duchess of Sutherland (mentioned on page 23), that indomitable lady who crossed to France and Belgium as soon as war was declared to open an ambulance service. Midge’s, Anne’s and Ethel’s stories are based on the tale of four schoolgirls who really did open a canteen in France. And Dolores is based on a dog called
Marta, who wasn’t there, but I suspect was pretty much like a few of the much-loved dogs who were.

This book is a tribute, not a history.

World War I was a stupid war—probably one of the most stupid wars that humankind has fought. It was run, on both sides, by mostly incompetent men who had their jobs because they had been born into the class that officers and politicians came from. In many cases they had only minimal, if any, training for the roles they played and no idea of strategy or tactics. (There were, of course, many exceptions to this too, including the brilliant strategies late in the war of General Monash, and the almost unbelievable ‘secret’ evacuation of Gallipoli.)

These days we think of war as something fought by professionals. But when World War I broke out, the armies on both sides had few doctors or nurses, no dentists or other health professionals, and nowhere near enough people to feed, clothe, transport and care for the soldiers.

From 1914 to 1918 about 65 million men marched to war. Over 8 million never returned; more than half of the men were wounded.

At the same time, tens of thousands of women left their homes and families and journeyed to the battlefields. Many were there officially, as army nurses or with the Red Cross.
But an even greater number had no official role at all. Some were patriots, some adventurers, some felt the need to nurse and cosset; others were simply desperate to ‘do their bit’ after their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons had marched away into the most terrible battles the world has known.

The men—mostly—are remembered. In many cases, the women are not. Often, too, they had a worse war than many of the men.

World War I was unlike any war fought before or since. It was a weird war, especially on what was known as ‘the Western front’. Two armies dug trenches facing each other in a long line across France, Belgium and Flanders, with a small stretch of no-man’s-land and barbed wire between them. And for the best part of four years these armies hardly moved at all.

There were times when the men were ordered to advance, when tens of thousands of lives were lost over a couple of days just to win a hill or a few kilometres of ground. But mostly they just sat there, in the mud and smell of death, firing at anyone silly enough to put their head above the trenches, sending in mortars or bombing with planes, or trying to burn each others’ lungs and skin with canisters of poisonous gas.

Men didn’t spend all their time ‘at the front’, though there were some horror stretches of months, especially for the Anzacs, who were often regarded by British commanders as expendable ‘cannon fodder’. Mostly they stayed there for days or weeks, then were given a break ‘behind the lines’, and put to building roads, or performing
forced marches, even playing football. It was horribly grim, but it wasn’t a constant four years of fighting.

The women often had no break at all.

I first caught a glimpse of this extraordinary group of women when I was reading, of all things, a cookbook—
The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book
—by the friend and partner of the writer Gertrude Stein. Miss Toklas recorded memorable meals and recipes during their life in France, including those during World War I as she and Gertrude Stein drove army officers, the wounded and supplies around France and Belgium in their car, which they’d nicknamed Aunt Maud.

How did two women, neither with any official training, come to be driving around the battlefields? And taking their job so much for granted that Miss Toklas didn’t even feel the need to explain how they got to be there?

As I kept researching, reading the newly published (and often self-published) diaries and letters of people who were there, I found more women doing similarly fantastic things; an extraordinary number. At first I thought there were dozens—then hundreds—then thousands. I finally realised that if you counted all those women knitting uniforms, cooking and packing food parcels, making bandages and other medical supplies, then perhaps there were millions.

These days the armed services supply the uniforms, the rations, the transport of their units. But in World War I most supply chains seem to have been run by volunteers. The ‘official’ units were recorded in war histories. The unofficial
efforts—by far the larger, at least until America came into the war with all its resources—were mostly unrecorded.

But echoes remain in letters and diaries, and as the often very private people who did those amazing things have died, their descendants are publishing the private records of those times—an extraordinary collection of voices from the past that often gives a very different picture of the war from that of the history books.

The women who actually went to the Western front to help the men were mostly English, but they came from America, Australia and New Zealand as well. They simply took themselves and, in many cases, their cars or trucks for ambulances, as well as occasionally their dogs, horses, evening dresses, maids and chauffeurs, over to France. Many set up canteens. Others drove ambulances, or assisted medical officers and nurses. Often wealthy or influential women (like Lady Dudley, the estranged wife of a former Australian Governor-General) gathered together whole medical teams and sailed off to help the wounded. Some of these groups were later gathered into the official net of the army or the Red Cross. Others continued to operate independently. And there were countless other women and girls who just turned up, hoping to help.