My grandfather found it difficult to speak about the war. He didn’t join the RSL and he refused to march on Anzac day. In 1972 I sat on his back verandah and we watched the Murray River pass slowly by. He spoke to me as memories from half a century resurfaced.
“I was hungry, and the army promised me three meals a day,” he said.
The War Memorial holds 42 documents in his name. When he enlisted on January 9, 1918 as an 18 year old, Harold Macklin measured 168 centimetres and weighed only 55 kilograms. His training started on February 1, and five weeks later he sailed from Station Pier in Port Melbourne, on the RMS Ormonde.
Recently I spent a wet and cold Sunday afternoon tracking the lives of the men who took that fateful voyage. The Argus newspaper reported that a large crowd gathered to farewell their husbands and sons. Unfortunately I discovered that 13 per cent of them would be dead or horribly injured within a year.
My grandfather arrived in France just as the German army was preparing its last, desperate attempt to turn the tide of the war. Historians call this time the hundred day push.
My grandfather was in the thick of it, and he carried a scar across his thigh from a bayonet wound inflicted that day.
“I spoke to a chaplain,” he confided. “He said that a lot of men were fighting and a lot of men fell. Never assume that you’re the one who caused another man’s death.”
Somehow these words helped him.
The war broke my grandfather. My mother remembers the day someone dropped a pot and her father fled the house. An hour later they found him weeping behind the woodshed.
More than 60,000 Australians died in World War 1. A further 156,000 were horribly injured from gas and artillery.
War takes the best of us. The army only wants the strongest, smartest and healthiest.
How many future judges, businessmen, farmers and teachers are buried in Europe?
My grandfather left me with these words - “We have to find a better way to sort out our problems.”
