Remembrance Day

​These are first-hand experiences that have given me pause for thought.
 
I glimpsed the grim reality of war one quiet morning at Bogghi Bend on the Darling River near Bourke. For a brief moment, the 86-year-old veteran sitting opposite me melted into an 18-year-old-boy back in the Jordan Valley in Palestine fighting furiously side by side with men of the Australian Camel Corps, desperately thrusting his bayonet into the teeming ranks of Turks pouring over their trenches.
 
Private Harold Smith shook violently and tears coursed down his cheeks as he recalled the sheer terror of those repeated bayonet charges. Eight decades after the slaughter of World War One had ceased, 10,000 kms away in the Australian Outback, the nightmare still made an old man shudder and weep.

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