For Australians, the 11th of November is the date to recall our war dead and wounded, especially of the catastrophic Great War (1914-1919). It is difficult to overstate the enormity of Australia's losses in that war. From a young nation of almost 5 million people, approximately 420,000 enlisted, representing just approximately 40% of the male population aged 18 to 44.
Of those who enlisted for the war, over 60,000 were killed in action and 155,133 were wounded (a figure that includes gassing and what was then called “shell shock”). Another 4,000 Australians were taken as prisoners of war, while over 430,000 Australians suffered from sickness or injuries unrelated to combat. It is unknown how many Australia veterans of the Great War would die in the 1920s as a result of their wounds, or, given the horror of that war, at their own hands.
Wherever one goes in Australia, whether in city or country, suburb, town or village, one finds local memorials to those who served in the wars and, at the least, the names listed of those who made the ultimate sacrifice. These memorials, especially those built originally for the Boer and Great Wars, are, more often than not, straightforward, rather than plain, sometimes with a celebration of Edwardian heroism, often with a Biblical verse deposing to no greater loves, perhaps representations, also, of an ancient representation, perhaps a classical torch to symbolise ancient virtues being passed by the generation lost in the war to those coming after and benefiting from the heroic sacrifice. Australians of the war generations were a stoic, laconic people, not given to agonising self-reflection, and the memorials were a practical gesture to assure those who had lost loved ones far from home that, at home, their sacrifice would never be forgotten.
My grandfather served as a 19 year old reinforcement subaltern in the British Army at the very final stages of the Great War and then Armistice. He was not a career soldier, but was, rather a product of a Catholic public (ie private) school and the officer cadet training units that by 1918 were producing Second Lieutenants in a matter of weeks, whose war service offered a similar life expectancy once in the front lines.
But for the collapse of the German Army in late 1918, I have often wondered whether his life expectancy would have been that of the short duration of others of his generation. While proud to have done his very small part in late 1918, my grandfather was reluctant to ever share very much with my late father of the details of 'his war', with our only knowledge passed on through some photographs and some stories. My late father only ever very reluctantly raised the war with my grandfather, because of the pain it caused him. One of my great regrets is my grandfather's death so many years before my birth.
My grandfather, though a very young survivor, nonetheless lost his world in the Great War, as did so many of that "lost generation". The Great War destroyed the Edwardian age that my grandfather had been raised in, a loss which, if anything, afflicted British Catholics, with their determinedly medieval sense of right and wrong, more than most. Similarly, all of that golden age for the empire "on which the sun never set" was destroyed by the Great War. As a result of the enormous loss of young men, it meant that many of grandfather's school friends had died or were grievously wounded, many of their sisters would be doomed to spinsterhood as their great loves or future beaus perished on the Somme, while for grief-stricken parents, the war would mean the sale of homes and estates that dead sons could never inherit.
The scale of the enormity of the losses throughout the British Empire cannot be overstated. And in our family's part of western London, where a new repatriation hospital was nearby, the sight of the wounded and the maimed was ever present long after 1918 and the guns falling silent. Seeing the 'living dead' of the Great War, recognisable instantly by their government-issue blue suits, was a feature of my own father's childhood in the London of the Second World War. The Armistice may have taken effect at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918, but for that generation, the war had no end. Its effects were felt on every birthday of the fallen, every anniversary of their death, at every family Easter and every Christmas, at every event at which the chairs once occupied by fallen loved ones would be, henceforth, forever empty and their distinct voices unheard.
My grandfather worked in the Connolly family business, well, if not brilliantly. He married well and was a very good father. The war had not shaken his devoutly Catholic faith. By all accounts, he was grateful to have survived albeit he had been exhausted. The war had robbed him of his youth, as it had robbed so many of their lives, their bodies and their sanity. My grandfather was a gentle man, a kind man, and a man of formality, who even in the Australia of the 1960s, would always, I was told growing up, be dressed properly, acquit himself in the day's work, manfully, answer correspondence promptly and would, on any given Sunday morning, be with my grandmother in their pew for what they called "Maaaas". Yet, in the ghastly chaos of the world destroyed by the Great War, those surviving and continuing institutions, such as the Crown and the Papacy, had never been more important to him.
In the years since my parents' passing, amid the grief that envelops one at this time, it has been something for me to go through my mother's and father's belongings and find there some momento of the grandparents that I never knew, like their commemorations of Royal events and old Bibles and Missals, and to see that, where "Johnny Foreigner" had destroyed his country in the wake of the Great War, the innate good sense of provincial Britons like my grandparents saw them instead hold fast to the Crown, to their traditions, and to the faith, whatever it was.
Unfortunately the Luftwaffe’s bombing of London in 1940-1941 meant that the official military history of my grandfather’s Great War service is unavailable and all that is left are his records, some photographs, some stories, and some cryptic notes on the back of photographs. My grandfather did think very highly of “the Australians”, as he apparently called them even when living among them, as well as their imperial cousins, who rallied to the imperial cause. Indeed, the story of how my late father and his parents came to Australia is intimately connected with the War.
My grandfather’s older cousins had all served in the Royal Artillery in the Great War from 1914 onwards and some had served in the Boer War as part of the “Hooray Henry” yeomanry units formed in the City of London.
Finally, my great uncle was a merchant mariner and then a Sub-Lieutenant, RNR, in the Royal Navy in the Great War. Family lore has it that, after the scuttling of the German fleet at Scapa Flow in June 1919, he applied for demobilisation and was then back at sea, quickly thereafter. The rest of my father's extended family include numerous soldiers, including two sound uncles who are retired Majors, one of which Major lives in Gloucestershire and has been known to write letters to the editor expressing his dismay at the decline of everything.
The Connollys and others past, such as they are, loom large, always, in my mind, especially at these times of national remembrance.
As for me, I used to spend every Anzac Day and Armistice Day with my parents. My father grew up during the Korean War and national service and, choosing the Royal Australian Navy, was one of the few of his intake selected for officer training. Fortunately for the Navy, if not for my father, the "Midshipman Connolly" life of the regular Navy was not for my father and he completed his national service, as did his friends, with a spirit of "doing their part", as did every Australian of his generation. Despite being too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, my father and his friends also served their country, for as Milton said, "They also serve who only stand and wait". My late mother, too, was also a stalwart, as well as the most wonderful mother that one could have been blessed with. It is hard for me to do justice to the enormous support given by my late mother when I was deployed overseas. The "care packages from Mrs Connolly" arrived regularly and sustained morale wherever I was, with more than enough tea, chocolates, biscuits, cookies and the like to share among the ship or unit that I served in for the duration. I still, with the distance of almost a decade, feel responsible for putting my late mother through all the worry and turmoil that I learned, after her passing, that she had gone through, and I have often worried, myself, had I had been a source of unnecessary concern for her? But my late mother was of a proud Portuguese and Scottish ancestry, a lifelong doer of her duty and, I was assured by the extended family, she wanted me to fulfil what I felt was my duty "over there".
Sadly, my parents' passing means that my ANZAC Days and Armistice Days are now spent without them and their irreplaceable presence. Nothing can ever prepare you for the loss of your parents. However, as my devoutly Catholic parents passed in the friendship of Christ, I know that they, too, still muster and march with me, hopefully as proudly each year as ever before.
"Lest I Forget"
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