When someone suggested that the most disturbing cases be cut from the presentations and be replaced with “positive, nation-building stories”, he bristled. “We owe the truth to a generation that suffered so much,” he said. “And the truth is the effect on most lives was devastating. If you try to make me put a positive spin on it, I shall resign.” And he meant it. Loading His point was incontrovertible. The war that finished 100 years ago today was tragic for our nation and catastrophic for the world – a global conflagration that took no fewer than 16 million lives, violently. In Australia, we had sent 332,000 Australians to serve overseas. Of them, 61,000 never came home. That’s right. Sixty-one thousand families around Australia in the course of that war received the dreadful death knock, and opened the door to be given the horrifying cable: Your son, flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood, has been killed, and will not be coming home. Our starting point for all commemorations thus must be deep sorrow, not only for the lives lost, but the effects on those who remained – survivors and families that lasted for generations after the war was over. As one who, with my own researchers, has delved deeply into five battles of World War I – Gallipoli, Fromelles, Pozieres, Villers-Bretonneux, Hamel – I think today of so many of those who didn’t come back and the circumstances of their terrible deaths.

I am still haunted by the battle of the Nek at Gallipoli, in the early hours of August 7, 1915, when four waves of Australian soldiers – that is 600 Diggers, including Hugo Throssell – followed orders and charged straight at Turkish machine guns just 40 yards away, only to be cut down like young blades of wheat before death’s swinging scythe. Before the third wave went out, the Turks themselves were shouting at the Australians a strange ... pleading .. call. “Dur!” “Dur!” “Dur!” (Stop! Stop! Stop! Do not keep running into our guns, slaughtering yourselves.) Too late. The whistle blows, and with a cheer for the ages ... for all eternity ... the vast wave of Australian humanity rolled out, eager to crash upon the enemy trenches, even as the five Turkish Maxim machine guns started chattering at the oncoming wave, and some 500 Turkish soldiers all around kept loading again and again the five-bullet magazines into their Mausers and firing into the throng. They just couldn’t miss. In the space of mere minutes, no fewer than 372 of those Australian soldiers went down. Australian troops at Gallipoli. Credit:Phillip Schuler, Australian War Memorial. I am infuriated by what happened at Fromelles on the Western Front where, again following orders, 7000 Australian soldiers charged across low swampy grounds at German machine guns as far as 400 yards away. Our blokes never had a chance and in just 14 hours there were 5500 casualties, including 1900 Diggers killed. Yes, that many, in 14 hours, for not a metre of ground gained. “The sight of our trenches that next morning is burned into my brain,” one Corporal Knyvett would recount. “Here and there a man could stand upright, but in most places if you did not wish to be exposed to a sniper’s bullet you had to progress on hands and knees. In places the parapet was repaired with bodies – bodies that but yesterday had housed the personality of a friend by whom we had warmed ourselves. If you had gathered the stock of a thousand butcher shops, cut it into small pieces and strewn it about, it would give you a faint conception of the shambles those trenches were.”

Out in No Man’s Land, hundreds of wounded Australian soldiers lay dying. A brave Australian officer waved a white flag with a red cross on it and walked out to successfully arrange a truce with his German counterparts so that both sides could retrieve their own and get them to medical help they so desperately needed. But the orders from higher came back to the Australian officers on site. No truce. "[British] GHQ orders and all subordinate orders,” the Australian commanding officer General James McCay would later explain, “were extremely definite, to the effect that no negotiations of any kind, and on any subject, were to be had with the enemy ... Orders were at once sent to put an end to the 'truce'." Men lie dead at Montbrehain, scene of the last battle involving Australian infantry on the Western Front. Credit:Australian War Memorial I shudder at the story of what happened in the French village of Allonville, in the early hours of May 31, 1918, when the Diggers of A Company of the 14th Battalion – “Jacka’s Mob” – were in a barn just back from the Western Front, either asleep or talking. Their numbers include the company bugler, Bertie Englert, and his lifelong mate Willie Wooton, both from Sydney, lying in their swags softly talking of home and particularly of their wives, Ruth and Ina – Willie having married Ina between enlisting in March 1917 and leaving Australia the following June. They’d had such a short time together before he’d had to go. Twelve miles away, at a spot called Bray-sur-Somme, the German artillerymen prepare to unleash a few high-explosive shells in the general direction of where they were told the Australians were. Following their strict routine, the German officer yells, “Feeertig!” as in “Reeeeady”, and then ... “Feuer!” “Fire!” The gun gives an almighty blast, exploding like an angry volcano, and an instant later the first shell – the size of a child – roars forth and soars to the west, lobbing towards the Allied lines and revolving clockwise more than 100 times a second as it goes.

Those Diggers not asleep could hear it approaching – a screeching, getting louder now, squealing ... is this it? ... as they grit their teeth, and involuntarily flex their whole bodies and cover their ears, as if that might possibly save them. And now it’s starting to roar like a train coming down the bloody Bulli Pass, coming straight for them, getting louder and louder and louder. The first shell lands right at the apex of the barn, hitting the very beam that holds the whole roof together. On the instant, all is blown asunder as the shell explodes with 48 pounds of TNT, sending not only the heavy beams tumbling down, not only the shattered shards of the shell scything off in all directions but, most damaging of all, the razor thin slates from the roof tumbling down like so many hundreds of guillotine blades onto the Australians below. Only a few seconds later, another shell hits another nearby barn, the one occupied by C Company, for a similar result. The first shell kills 13 men outright, while another 12 die from their wounds. The second kills four. And Bertie and Willie? As one of their comrades Private Clarence Carroll, will note, “[Bertie] and his pal were dead alongside one another in their billet. He was much torn about on the whole of one side of his body ... His mate Wooton only got shifted from another [company] about a week previously so as to be with Englert and they both died at the same time alongside one another – buried alongside each other.” Bertie’s crushed bugle lies by his side. He has played his last Last Post. The trenches at Lone Pine. Credit:Australian War Memorial Look, of course the war was not all such terrible disasters and useless deaths. It is important to note that, by and large, the Australians fought magnificently well throughout the war and there were both individual feats of extraordinary valour and vast collective Australian actions that take the breath away for their audacity and courage. I have been proud to help bring more focus on some of them. But overall, looking back, 100 years on, I keep going back to something I saw when I was just 23 and playing rugby in Italy, when I took my little Fiat 127 through the Iron Curtain and all the way to Gallipoli for the first time.

At Lone Pine Cemetery, amid all the gravestones marked with such words as “Duty Nobly Done”, “He Died In A Far Country/Fighting For/ His Native Land”, “A Mother’s Thoughts Often Wander To This Sad And Lonely Grave”, I noted an epitaph that quite shocked me, recording the name and date of death of a Digger above the words, as I remember them: “Died In A Foreign Field. And For What?” After all the books, all the research, all the field trips, all the talking to the descendants of the shattered families, I am still not sure there is a satisfactory answer to that question. In fact, I go a fair bit of the way with PJK – Paul Keating – in his assertion five years ago today at the Australian War Memorial that: “The First World War was a war devoid of any virtue. It arose from the quagmire of European tribalism. A complex interplay of nation-state destinies overlaid by notions of cultural superiority peppered with racism.” And I am all the way with Professor Scates, that our primary emotion on this centenary of Armistice should be enduring grief not just for those that were killed and maimed but for what it did to the families left behind. And just be glad that 100 years ago today it really was, at last, over. Lest we forget, indeed.