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.

Shortly before, Trooper Ion Idriess had lived through the day when his Australian Light Horse squadron wrested Gaza from the Turks in fierce hand to hand fighting. As a skilled writer, he put words to Harold’s experience that helped me understand his deep scars.

Bayonet fighting is indescribable - a man’s emotions race at a feverish speed and afterwards words are incapable of describing feelings … The horse-holders grabbed the horses while each man slashed with his bayonet to cut a hole through those cactus walls … Then the fiercest excitement – It was just berserk slaughter. A man sprang at the closest Turk and thrust and sprang aside and thrust and thrust again – some men howled as they rushed, others cursed to the shivery feeling of steel on steel – the grunting breaths, the gritting teeth and the staring eyes of the lunging Turk, the sobbing scream as the bayonet ripped home.

It was all over in minutes. Men lay horribly bloody and dead; others writhed on the stained grass … It was a terrible sight of massed human courage. I wonder what other madnesses the human race will go through before the end of the world.

British Army Chaplain Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, decorated for repeatedly venturing into No Man’s Land between the trenches on the Western Front in France to retrieve the shattered bodies of young soldiers like Harold and Ion, poured years of grief and anger into a short poem called ‘Waste’’.  

Waste of Muscle, waste of Brain,
Waste of Patience, waste of Pain,
Waste of Manhood, waste of Health,
Waste of Beauty, waste of Wealth,
Waste of Blood, and waste of Tears,
Waste of Youth’s most precious years,
Waste of ways the Saints have trod,
 Waste of Glory, Waste of God – War!

Good reasons to pause for thought? 
You can hear the whole Harold Smith interview I produced for Outback Radio 2WEB in the early 1980’s on the Outback Historian YouTube channel. I gave the oral history program the name ‘Bourke and Beyond’ and I’ve taken that name for my new book of 25 stories from the Western Plains. You can order it now from my website theoutbackhistorian.com.au