To take just one example. Private Bertram Byrnes' war service record has long been available on the National Archives website. It tells us, in sparse, bureaucratic language, that Byrnes enlisted at the age of 24, served in France and was twice wounded in action. The last injury, a gunshot wound to the face in September 1918, saw him invalided home. Private Byrnes' service dossier runs for barely 22 pages. There is only one letter from him, one chance for him to speak. It's written in 1938, the year before the Second World War breaks out. Byrnes asks for duplicates of service medals lost in a bushfire. He wants to wear them on Anzac Day.

Reading the service dossier tells us very little about Private Byrnes or his family, or his wound and what it actually did to him and those he loved.

A medical report by Repat doctors refers to ''much facial disfigurement'' - but Private Byrnes puts it much better himself: ''my face'', he says, ''is practically shot away''. The wound was so severe that he dribbled constantly and there was a discharge from his nose. Bertram Byrnes had to live on what was called ''slop food''. His disfigurement, altered little by a series of painful operations, was such that most employers rejected him - he was shunned, ostracised, took up a remote block of land as a soldier settler, and found himself too weak to work it. Reading the service record you would learn nothing of this - nothing of his post-war ordeal.

The repatriation records tell us this - and they tell us so much more. You can hear the hushed voices of what they called ''the whispering men'', men whose lungs were corroding, who died, years after the war, from the effects of being gassed. You can see the shaking bodies of the ''nerve cases'' - a ''war-wrecked'' generation crippled by physical and psychological scars. And what makes the repatriation records so remarkable is that these are not just soldiers' stories. Women's voices are threaded through this extraordinary archive; wives struggling to survive on inadequate pensions; mothers pleading the case of disabled sons; daughters afraid of violent, traumatised fathers.

But history is much more than an endless catalogue of horrors. There is a great dignity in Bertram Byrnes. A man whose face was shattered but who dressed in a suit the day they took his photograph, a father who struggled to provide for his family, a veteran who wanted to wear his medals on Anzac Day. Like a generation of our countrymen and women, his battles didn't end in 1918.