Goodbye Girlie

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  Jim Bryant (8th and 60th Battalions) survived Gallipoli, Belgium and France, and was taken prisoner by the Japanese at Singapore in the Second World War. ‘I always thought I ought to sue them for restitution of conjugal rights’ said Jim, aged 87 years.

  A colour party was being drilled to take part in the cermonies that were to follow and the colour-sergeant was being, well, sergeant-majorish. ‘Listen’ said Kim Kimber (50th Battalion), ‘they tried to teach us that sort of thing in 1914 and failed, so how in hell do you think you’ll manage it now?’

  They trooped colours first at Menin Gate, that portal at the entrance to Ypres in Belgium where the names of 56 000 men are listed, many of them Australian. When we had passed through Germany on our way to France we had been invited to dinner by the Afrika Corps and Manfred Rommel, mayor of Stuttgart and son of the ‘Desert Fox’. One German asked Les McCarthy (7th Field Battery) where he had fought in the First World War. ‘Ypres’, said Les. The German threw up his arms and cried, ‘Ypres, Ypres, Ypres,’ in horror, and the men embraced.

  Now they stood with colours furled, waiting for the town clock to strike 8 pm. As on every night since 1928 when Menin Gate was built, a gendarme stops the traffic, a trumpeter plays ‘The Last Post’, the citizens hesitate for a moment, then life goes on. That night, the traffic was stopped for a little longer as four trumpeters sounded the call, the Anzacs lowered their flags, and we stood in zero temperatures beneath the names of Australian battalions who were lost here in the mud before I was born.

  The young men killed in that battle are buried under Picardy roses in the large cemetery on the edge of the town. Those who lived through it were there these many years later; stoics all, no muscle moving on their faces, as we walked between the graves, row on row on row, up to the memorial. Past the rows marked ‘Australian Soldier Known Unto God’, past those identified by name. ‘Some of my mob’ Kim Kimber said. He was not quite 20 years old when he went into this battle. ‘Oh, there’s poor old Tom. A wonderful fellow. And Bob … now there was a funny man! The stories he could tell! Ah, this boy. I was with him …’ No muscle moved. ‘It’s damned cold,’ Kim said, shivering. It was a good excuse to blow a nose, wipe an eye. The eyes betrayed these men.

  Tension was mounting, you sensed it in the old men as we drew nearer to Armistice Day. We were taken by buses to Villers Bretonneux. Armistice Day in Villers Bretonneux didn’t so much as ‘dawn’ – it rolled a blanket of heather-grey mist and fog over the land. The lament began, the piper appeared and disappeared from view as the dark fog swept across like a ribbon and swept back again. The pipes came closer. As the chimes began to beat out the slow strokes of 11 am some of us glanced at the mist-swept scene, but the old men stared unblinking across the gap that they had crossed and can never forget, and we who were not with them can never fully understand. The old men will not come again. One had already died on this trip, one returned home unwell. Kim Kimber wrote:

  And on this day of solemn things,

  The bell within the tower rings

  And just a little closer brings

  The living and the dead.

  We could hardly see the town for the Australian and French flags which the people put up in their streets. A French lady said, ‘I was a young girl in 1918. The retreat was on. The Germans were coming.’ I asked her, ‘What did the Australians do?’ ‘Oh, they marched through us and we gave them some bread and a bottle of wine and ran after them with it. The Australians called out to us, “no need for you to go, we’ll hold them!” And they did.’

  The school in the town was en fete for Australie. Rebuilt with the help of the pennies collected by Victorian schoolchildren in the 1920s, the leitmotiv on the blackboard read in French and English: ‘Never forget Australia’. Australian and French flags fluttered over the tables set for two-hundred people, both nationalities mixed together. We ate and drank and talked and laughed and sang for six hours and marvelled as the language barrier got smaller as the hours got longer. There was a lot of hugging. An old lady kissed and kissed me and her husband held my arms: ‘Australia.’ Like the rest of the group I bathe in the aura that spills over from the old soldiers. The only time we hush is when the children of the school troop in and sing to us: ‘Once a jolly swagman …’

  On the following morning, 12 November, 12 km from Villers Bretonneux, we assembled in front of the steps leading to Amiens Cathedral. The French General in charge of the Picardy region escorted our leader, Major-General Sir William Refshauge, up the steps to the Bishop of Amiens. And so it began, the most remarkable hour, a unique experience. Every seat in the cathedral was occupied. As we entered, the huge congregation stood.

  Sixty years ago on the day after the Armistice, the then Bishop of Amiens had spoken at a service here when the Australians were leaving. The present bishop now reminded us of promises of sixty years ago – to care for the dead the Australians were leaving behind (They are now sons of France’). Perhaps most poignant was the prayer that these dead youths would be taken without trial past the seat of judgement and into ‘life everlasting’. In 1918 the bishop had then turned to the living and spoken of their exploits in Picardy: ‘You made a rampart of your breasts behind which my diocese of Picardy sheltered, behind which my people were saved.’

  For a moment the organ was silent and then, like the distant rumble of an underground train, there was a slow beat like muffled drums – or was it the sound of feet that would never march again? The silence in the cathedral was ear-stretching as we strained to catch the noise of the footfalls. Suddenly, the colours on the altar dipped, our starry cross spread out like a woman’s dress on the scarlet carpet, and a thin cry rose and quivered and crept almost noiselessly down upon us – ‘The Last Post’. It sounded not as a military thing, but more as the breath of a young boy’s farewell.

  Not in a lifetime of music have I heard such a thing; one could not expect to hear it again, surrounded as we were by the spectre of a generation whose endurance is tattooed on our folk memory. ‘In the whole of history we cannot find an army more marvellous in its bravery,’ the Bishop of Amiens had said in 1918. Marshal Foch had said, ‘You saved Amiens, you saved France. Our gratitude will remain ever and always to Australia.’ Now the present bishop said no less. Having thanked the Anzacs he bowed low to them. Our colours were brought down off the altar, three of our old men and a war widow led us back up the aisle past the standing French congregation as the organ played a slow march and ‘Advance Australia Fair’.

  I tell you, it was not a day to be wearing mascara.

  Ceremony followed ceremony, flag followed flag, tear fell on tear; the French in Picardy asked us to as many remembrances as we could fit in. At 9.30 pm on the 12th we came on the lanterns of a group huddled in the cold by a small graveyard where Australians were buried. They were waiting for us. Beneath the starry Southern Cross of the flag of Australia there was a final brief prayer.

  At the Arc de Triomphe, a French military band marched through off the Champs Elysees playing the ‘Marseillaise’ and ‘Advance Australia Fair’. Looking at the old soldiers I wondered what Australia would be like today had their companions lived; if many of those who had come home had not been marked physically, mentally and emotionally. As ‘Wolla Meranda’ wrote in 1916:

  And beauty weeps in the land of the morn,

  For the flowers of love that will never be born.

  Sixty years on we walked in the shadow of the survivors and saw people who still remembered and paid tribute to them and, through them, to every Australian.

  My work with the Anzacs provided me with many valued friends and wonderful contacts. It also stirred in me a desire to honour those soldiers who, so often, receive little honour – the men who had been taken prisoner. Not just those who had been prisoners of the Germans or the Japanese in the Second World War – the Australian people had, finally, some inkling of the horrors endured by those prisoners – but those who had endured imprisonment in the First World War, and in the Korean
War. After many years of gruelling and emotionally draining work, my book Prisoners of War was submitted to the publisher on the same day that I collapsed and was taken to hospital for major heart surgery.

  Some say that today’s generation of young men would not enlist for war as the generations before them have done. But this is peacetime talk. History teaches us that the panoply and mystique of war is most seductive. ‘Which boy,’ Jim Gordon, an old soldier of the First World War asked me, ‘can resist falling in behind a drum? Which boy, bursting with the energy and excitement of youth, can resist the urgency of shrilling trumpets, of fluttering pennants? Particularly when they are poor or excitement is lacking.’

  Add to this the almost irresistible magnet of the songs that have filled the ‘ranks of death’ with the ‘bravest and the best’. These songs have not only seduced generation upon generation of men to battle, but have convinced those who stayed at home that it was a holy cause. Australians went to the Boer War singing ‘Dolly Gray’. We went to the First World War singing:

  For England, Home and Duty

  Have no cause to fear;

  Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot?

  No! No! No! No! No!

  Australia will be there …

  Australia will be there

  Soon we were singing:

  What’s the use of worrying?

  It never was worthwhile!

  So! Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and

  Smile! Smile! Smile!

  a song with the most wicked of intentions. There was a time when cannons were called ‘the queen of weapons’ and young girls would place flowers in the cannons’ mouths, but songs were more seductive than cannons.

  American composers sold the war to that unwilling nation with even more brilliant songs, including ‘Over There!’:

  Send the word! Send the word!

  We’ll be there.

  For the Yanks are coming! The Yanks are coming!

  They’re drum-drum-drumming everywhere!

  My generation sped out of the depression and off to war with a song that had become a war song by accident. Gracie Fields had made a film in 1939 Shipyard Sally and in it she sang ‘Wish me Luck’:

  Give me a smile, I can keep all the while

  In my heart while I’m away,

  Till we meet, once again, you and I,

  Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye.

  As the film was released, war was declared. The boys I danced with were singing it as they disappeared to ‘jump the rattler’ from the depression-hit bushlands to ride to the city to enlist. They fled the depression that had tried to rip their pride out, but that song helped them to escape. All day, every day, it danced out of the big wireless in our home.

  In two world wars we damned the munitions giants, Ruhr and Krupps; perhaps we should have attacked the subliminally seductive song-writers instead.

  In the 1960s the media and most of the older generation were throwing up their hands – and voices – because of what they called ‘four-letter words’ being used publicly by young people. ‘Obscenities!’ they accused. Obscenities? I always thought that the greatest obscenity was a three-letter word – war – and I still claim that war is the ultimate obscenity.

  We seem not to have the answer that will stop fit young men from going to war. No man goes to war thinking he will be killed. Letters from men at two world wars show no horror at death; wounds, yes, ‘Thinking of a bullet, thinking if it hurts’ wrote a young Australian in 1917. But not death.

  Untold hordes of the world’s population love danger at a safe remove – just look at the box-office takings for films such as Rambo. The most popular books are still murder, mystery and horror. Those drums and flags have little trouble overcoming any resistance. Men who fought in the Boer War rushed to join up for the First World War, and First World War men joined up for the Second, and the Second World War men for Korea.

  Perhaps those of us who later attempted to try to ban war did not address ourselves to the cause but rather to the effect of war. There were all our fine words, marches, attempts to ban war toys, shops attacked by us – the young mothers of the late 1940s and early 1950s – we wrote letters, told what the war had done to fathers of our children, to us and our homes. But the toy guns became even more popular as time went on. We had wasted our energy attacking ephemera instead of researching the alternatives to war. Are we as afraid of ‘obscenities’ as were our parents?

  Society responds only as it has been conditioned, for fashions change, trends alter. It was always thus. But must it continue? The end of war has traditionally been signalled by mothers searching the battlefields for the bodies of their dead sons. Must our daughters and granddaughters creep out across the no man’s land of their minds to the battlefields of the future, searching, anxious to spread ceremonial burial dust over a young body as did my generation (and as Antigone did 2000 years ago, near where the first great numbers of Australians died on Gallipoli)?

  Some of us come from families whose mothers and grandmothers, until their dying day, searched wastelands of their hearts for their sons. We have weathered half a century without a ‘world’ war. Can we manage another fifty years? Can we keep our sons, our brothers, even our grandsons?

  * * *

  In 1985-86 I was engaged to work with the BBC (British Broadcasting Commission) for a year. It was fun, interesting, laborious, with good travel and good companions. I had been commissioned by the BBC to do a one-hour documentary for the Australian Bicentennial in 1988. The documentary was shown three times on the BBC and in Europe, and once in America. It was titled ‘Australia Will Be There’ and covered the fortunes and vicissitudes of the seventy-year period of my life.

  The critics’ columns in the English Listener carried two antime letters stating that I was anti-British. These were promptly replied to by a Welshman from Cardiff who wrote, ‘If she was criticising the British for their poor treatment of the colonies then she was right and courageous to do it.’ Another thought it all was ‘Grand’. But the best thing that came my way was a letter from an English lady who had just returned from a journey to Australia:

  I was just home and turned on the telly while I unpacked my case and I thought, ‘I know that voice’, and looking round to the telly it was you! I had seen your show first time round on BBC and it made me want to get up and go – so I did. I got the little money I had together and went down to Australia for as far as the money lasted but that two weeks was marvellous so when I got back home I began to save again and I’m just back again from Australia for the second time and there you are again on the telly and I sat down and watched it all again and it was right!

  One doesn’t often get fans as faithful as this. But I do regret that it was not shown in my own country. The ABC had, so the BBC told me, ‘too much of the Bicentennial’.

  I loved that year planning, writing and making ‘Australia Will Be There’. The BBC film crew was a great team. We filmed on Gallipoli – with the English director expecting me to leap out of the boat at dawn and wade ashore and both of us forgetting I am only five feet tall. So they had to haul me back in when I came up for air – I can’t swim.

  A Country Funeral

  DAD HAD LIVED UNTIL HE was 86 years of age, and the cause of death was that common to old men: he was so modest that he hadn’t even told my Mother that his bladder was in such a bad condition. Eventually, after operating, they realised there was no hope.

  I wrote a memoriam for him but, at that time, it was just for my own eyes, not for the public or for the family. There was something I had wanted to say:

  They are burying the old navvy in the bush by the track this morning. Listen, you railway repairers, raise your banjos – that is, if you still carry shovels in this day and age – in salute to all the old navvies who are buried out on the hills from one end of this continent to the other.

  Give a pop on your whistle, all you Big-Wheel men, blow a cockle-doodle-doo for the men who kept the tracks in r
epair for your engines to ride safely when they were young and so was our land. Cry the traditional Banshee wail of the railmen – Wah, Waaahhhah – all you drivers of the goods, the coalies, the Ghan, the Bunbury Belle, the gippies, the lines that ran from north, south, east and west of this land.

  Many is the time in the drought he has off-loaded half-dead sheep for you, watered and fed them until they were fit to travel on and that wasn’t his job, or any navvy’s job, but they just did what they thought was right and necessary and told no one of it.

  Out of bed at all hours with the cow-cockies coming in whenever they could manage it in those hard times. ‘Put a kettle on Mum, the poor bloke’s hide is cracking.’ Never again will you get men like these. Honest, loyal, modest.

  Dad: remember the day we were in Melbourne, you and Kathleen and me, when we were young and we needed to phone the hospital where Mum had gone for an operation, and we went across from Flinders Street to where there was a telephone booth and we pushed the money in and this amazing thing happened? The phone box absolutely spewed out silver, two-shilling pieces by the score, one shilling, sixpence, it just poured out and we stood staring at it, trying madly to stop it all from falling to the floor.

  Dad said without a moment’s hesitation, ‘You two girls stay here and watch that no one steals this money. I’ll go and find a policeman to come and take it away.’ And so we stood there as he’d ordered, and back he came with the policeman and the money, to the last threepence, was gathered up and then we walked away never having touched a penny of it.

  When Dad became sick there was a nightmare drive to the hospital in the city. I dashed off to park the car, rushed back and found the old bushman in a four-bed ward with three down-and-out alcoholics for companions. He was in pyjamas many sizes too big for his wiry labourer’s body, in a corner with his teeth out, cramped up in a chair by the wall looking like an old sheep cornered in a paddock. I rushed out shouting. Nurse said ‘This is a public hospital’. Quickly I got the young resident on the phone. ‘He was trembling. I thought it was the DTs. Can he speak? Or move?’ Dad was a teetotaller.