Contents
Boer War
- Captain Neville Reginald Howse
24 July 1900, Vredefort, Orange Free State
2. Trooper John Hutton Bisdee
1 September 1900, Warm Bad, Transvaal
- Lieutenant Guy George Egerton Wylly
1 September 1900, Warm Bad, Transvaal
- Lieutenant Frederick William Bell
16 May 1901, Brakpan, Transvaal
- Sergeant James Rogers
15 June 1901, Thaba ‘Nchu, Orange Free State
- Lieutenant Leslie Cecil Maygar
23 November 1901, Geelhoutboom, Natal
World War 1
- Lance Corporal Albert Jacka
19-20 May 1915, Courtney’s Post, Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey
- Lance Corporal Leonard Maurice Keysor
7-8 August 1915, Lone Pine trenches, Gallipoli peninsula, Turkey
- *Lieutenant William John Symons
8-9 August 1915, Lone Pine trenches, Gallipoli peninsula, Turkey
- Corporal Alexander Stewart Burton
9 August 1915, Lone Pine trenches, Gallipoli peninsula, Turkey
- Corporal William Dunstan
9 August 1915, Lone Pine trenches, Gallipoli peninsula, Turkey
- *Captain Alfred John Shout
9 August 1915, Lone Pine trenches, Gallipoli peninsula, Turkey
- Private John (Patrick) Hamilton
9 August 1915, Lone Pine trenches, Gallipoli peninsula, Turkey
- Captain Frederick Harold Tubb
9 August 1915, Lone Pine trenches, Gallipoli peninsula, Turkey
- Second Lieutenant Hugo Vivian Hope Throssell
29-30 August 1915, Kaiakij Aghala (Hill 60) Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey
- *Temporary Lieutenant William Thomas Dartnell (alias Wilbur Taylor Dartnell)
3 September 1915, near Maktau, British East Africa ( now Kenya)
- Private John William Alexander Jackson
25-26 June 1916, Bois Grenier, near Armentieres, France
- Private John Leak
23 July 1916, Pozieres, France
- Lieutenant Arthur Seaforth Blackburn
23 July 1916, Pozieres, France
- *Private Thomas Cooke
24-25 July 1916, Pozieres, France
- *Sergeant Claud Charles Castleton
28 July 1916, Pozieres, France
- Private Martin O’Meara
9-12 August 1916, Pozieres, France
- Captain Henry William Murray
4-5 February 1917, Gueudecourt, France
- Lieutenant Frank Hubert McNamara
20 March 1917, raid on Tel el Hesi, Palestine (now Israel)
- *Captain Percy Herbert Cherry
26 March 1917, Lagnicourt, France
- Private Joergen Christian Jensen
2 April 1917, Noreuil, France
- Captain James Ernest Newland
7-9 and 15 April 1917, Boursies and Lagnicourt, France
- Private Thomas James Bede Kenny
9 April 1917, Hermies, France
- Sergeant John Woods Whittle
8 and 15 April 1917, Boursies and Lagnicourt, France
- *Lieutenant Charles Pope
15 April 1917, Louverval, France
- Corporal George Julian Howell
6 May 1917, Bullecourt, France
- Lieutenant Rupert Vance Moon
12 May 1917, near Bullecourt, France
- Private John Carroll
7-10 June 1917, Messines, Belgium
- Captain Robert Cuthbert Grieve
7 June 1917, Messines, Belgium
- *Second Lieutenant Frederick Birks
20 September 1917, Glencorse Wood, Belgium
- Private Reginald Roy Inwood
20-21 September 1917, Polygon Wood, Belgium
- Sergeant John James Dwyer
26 September 1917, Zonnebeke, Belgium
- *Private Patrick Joseph Bugden
26-28 September 1917, Polygon Wood, Belgium
- Lance Corporal Walter Peeler
4 October 1917, Broodseinde, Belgium
- *Sergeant Lewis McGee
4 October 1917, near Leper, Belgium
- *Captain Clarence Smith Jeffries
12 October 1917, Passchendaele, Belgium
- Sergeant Stanley Robert McDougall
28 March 1918, Dernancourt, France
- Lieutenant Percy Valentine Storkey
7 April 1918, Hangard Wood, France
- Lieutenant Clifford William King Sadlier
24-25 April 1918, Villers-Bretonneux, France
- Sergeant William Ruthven
19 May 1918, Ville-sur-Ancre, France
- Corporal Phillip Davey
28 June 1918, Merris, France
- Lance Corporal Thomas Leslie Axford
4 July 1918, Vaire and Hamel Woods, France
- Private Henry Dalziel
4 July 1918, Hamel Wood, France
- Corporal Walter Ernest Brown
6 July 1918, Villers-Bretonneux, France
- Lieutenant Albert Chalmers Borella
17-18 July 1918, Villers-Bretonneux, France
- *Lieutenant Alfred Edward Gaby
8 August 1918, Villers-Bretonneux, France
- *Private Robert Matthew Beatham
9 August 1918, Rosieres, near Villers-Bretonneux France
- Sergeant Percy Clyde Statton
12 August 1918, Proyart, France
- Lieutenant William Donovan Joynt
23 August 1918, Herleville Wood, near Chuignes, France
- Lieutenant Lawrence (Laurence) Dominic McCarthy
23 August 1918, Madame Wood, near Vermandovillers, France
- Lance Corporal Bernard Sidney Gordon
27 August 1918, Fargny Wood, near Bra,y France
- Private George Cartwright
31 August 1918, Rood Wood, near Peronne, France
- Lieutenant Edgar Thomas Towner
1 September 1918, Mont St Quentin, Peronne, France
- *Private Robert Mactier
1 September 1918, Mont St Quentin, Peronne, France
- Sergeant Albert David Lowerson
1 September 1918, Mont St Quentin, Peronne, France
- Private William Matthew Currey
1 September 1918, Mont St Quentin, Peronne, France
- Corporal Arthur Charles Hall
1-2 September 1918, Peronne, France
- *Temporary Corporal Alexander Henry Buckley
1-2 September 1918, Peronne, France
- Temporary Corporal Lawrence Carthage Weathers
2 September 1918, Peronne, France
- Private James Park Woods
18 September 1918, Le Verguier, near St Quentin, France
- Sergeant Maurice Vincent Buckley (alias Gerald Saxton)
18 September 1918, Le Verguier, near St Quentin, France
- Private (Edward) John (Frances) Ryan
30 September 1918, near Bellicourt, France
- Major Blair Anderson Wark
29 September – 1 October 1918, Bellicourt to Joncourt, France
- Lieutenant Joseph Maxwell
3 October 1918, Beaurevoir line, near Estrees, France
- Lieutenant George Mawby (Morby) Ingram
5 October 1918, Montbrehain, near Peronne, France
Russia
- Corporal Arthur Percy Sullivan
10 August 1919, Dvina River, south of Archangel, north Russia
- *Sergeant Samuel George Pearse
29 August 1919, north of Emtsa, north Russia
World War 2
- *Corporal John Hurst Edmondson
13 April 1941, Tobruk, Libya
- Acting Wing Commander Hughie Idwal Edwards
4 July 1941, raid on Bremen, Germany
- Lieutenant Arthur Roden Cutler
19 June – 6 July 1941, Merdjayoun and Damour, Lebanon
- Private James Heath Gordon
10 July 1941, near Jezzine (Djezzine), Lebanon
- Lieutenant Colonel Charles Groves Wright Anderson
18-22 January 1942, Muar River, Malaysia
- *Private Arthur Stanley Gurney
22 July 1942, Tel el Eisa, Egypt
- *Private Bruce Steel Kingsbury
29 August 1942, Isurava (Kokoda Track), Papua New Guinea
- *Corporal John Alexander French
4 September 1942, Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea
- *Private Percival Eric Gratwick
25-26 October 1942, El Alamein, Egypt
- *Sergeant William Henry Kibby
23-31 October 1942, El Alamein, Egypt
- *Flight Sergeant Rawdon Hume Middleton
28-29 November 1942, raid on Turin, Italy
- *Flight Lieutenant William Ellis Newton
16 March 1943, Salamaua Isthmus, Papua New Guinea
- Private Richard Kelliher
13 September 1943, near Nadzab, Papua New Guinea
- Sergeant Thomas Currie Derrick
24 November 1943, Sattelberg, Papua New Guinea
- Corporal Reginald Roy Rattey
22 March 1945, near Tokinotu, Bougainville
- *Lieutenant Albert Chowne
25 March 1945, Dagua, Papua New Guinea
- *Corporal John Bernard Mackey
12 May 1945, Tarakan Island, Indonesia
- Private Edward Kenna
15 May 1945, near Wewak, Papua New Guinea
- Private Leslie Thomas Starcevich
28 June 1945, near Beaufort, British North Borneo, Malaysia
- Private Frank John Partridge
24 July 1945, Bonis Peninsula, Bouganville
Vietnam
- *Warrant Officer Class 2 Kevin Arthur Wheatley
13 November 1965, Tra Bong Valley, Quang Ngai province, South Vietnam
- *Major Peter John Badcoe
23 February – 7 April 1967, Thua Thien province, South Vietnam
- Warrant Officer Class 2 Rayene Stewart Simpson
6 and 11 May 1969, Kontum province, South Vietnam
- Warrant officer Class 2 Keith Payne
24 May 1969, Kontum province, South Vietnam
Afghanistan
- Trooper Mark Gregor Strang Donaldson
2 September 2008, Oruzgan province, Afghanistan
- Corporal Benjamin ‘Ben’ Roberts- Smith
11 June 2010, Kandahar province, Afghanistan
- Corporal Daniel Alan Keighran
24 August 2010, Oruzgan province, Afghanistan
*100. Corporal Cameron Stewart Baird
22 June 2013, Ghawchak village, Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan
* denotes soldiers awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously.
Boer War
Captain Neville Reginald Howse
24 July 1900, Vredefort, Orange Free State
He learnt that every man’s life is worth saving.
When his mount collapsed beneath him like
a termite-rotted stockyard rail, he leapt clear
& landed like a rodeo rider, knees bent, his
joints absorbing the potential energy of his
reckless action. The trumpeter pursed his
lips in pain, not in war music, as the medico
scrambled to his defense. Immune to fate,
he heaved the bugler over his shoulder as if
he was a brass instrument & his boots rapped
out a bass crescendo as they thumped back
to their horse lines. He sang the first note of
nationhood. At Gallipoli, he saw more men killed
by the lack of medicine, than by Johnny Turk.
Trooper John Hutton Bisdee
1 September 1900, Warm Bad, Transvaal
The buzzing by their horses’ ears turned
from bushveld insects into bullets; it was a
carnival shooting gallery as six fell wounded
to the march fly stings. The ambushers hid
behind the fat guts of baobab trees; he thought
that the landscape hunted them, knob-thorns
dug into his legs as he dismounted & threw
his commander’s leg over his own saddle, like
a best man wrestling a drunken groom onto
his wedding bed. Something had bit him too,
but he slapped his horse’s wet flank & led the
scouting party’s retreat out of the stony gorge;
that eons of charged particles had scoured out
of the hill; a grave for the Imperial Bushmen.
Lieutenant Guy George Egerton Wylly
1 September 1900, Warm Bad, Transvaal
A tongue of warm air licked through the gap
in the range; the two cheeks of the pass were
bearded with stunted trees, diamond-leafed
acacias & thorny shrubs that bit at the horses’
fetlocks, their dried blood black as a mamba’s
inky mouth. In lieu of a reptilian assault, human
fangs spat brass venom from behind rocks as
the Boer struck. Horses & bushmen collapsed
as if poleaxed by a steel cable. As fresh blood
decorated their mounts like show prizes, he
dismounted & grabbed a trooper by the hair
as though he was pulling a drowning child
out of a deadly waterhole. He became a rock
himself. His steady hand hunted every snake.
Lieutenant Frederick William Bell
16 May 1901, Brakpan, Transvaal
In his dreams the guerillas morphed into lions,
their unkempt beards grew up their tanned necks
to flare into the savage beasts’ golden manes.
Their horses stumbled over the tawny savannah,
exhausted, sick like the troopers, the long rides
took their toll on man & mount. Tick-birds were
eager to loll on their animals’ backs & feast; lice
crawled through men’s scalps, only the parasites
were prepared for the long game of raid & seek.
When the pack attacked, his horse couldn’t hold
the weight of two men & fell. As the scavengers
moved in, he covered the wounded man. But there
were more lions waiting. One, as large as a nation,
took two of his brothers in the next great hunt.
Sergeant James Rogers
15 June 1901, Thaba ‘Nchu, Orange Free State
Horses are bloody great targets. He looked back
& saw Dickinson on foot, bolting after the column
as though he’d whacked a nest of hornets with
his rifle butt. Their stingers dove for the exposed
flesh of the Lieutenant’s neck. But Rogers sent
his own barbs to harangue the sniping pests. Fear
halved his officer’s weight as the wiry-blooded
Moama man lifted this lost calf up behind him.
The ultimate in camp draught competition, this
little tiff. He reigned around rock & camel-thorn,
centaur-agile, he skimmed between acacias like a
flock of swift parrots avoiding a branch’s stiff arm.
Four more times he rounded up the broken; all
the while the Boer saluted him with their guns.
Lieutenant Leslie Cecil Maygar
23 November 1901, Geelhoutboom, Natal
He was the custodian of the last acts of chivalry
on horseback as the world knew it then, before
mass industry turned out chargers with steel tracks.
In Natal he offered his own horse to saddler Short
& lifted him up, as if he was teaching his own boy
how to gallop back to the British lines. Years later
at Gallipoli, the 3rd Light Horse was knighted with
a rearguard honour, as the Australians mopped up
their bloody nose. Two years on, it was a Halloween
trick at Beersheba that surprised him. History’s
last great cavalry charge decreased the entropy of
sand, as massed hoofs thundered for the very last
time. The new weapon got him; a German aerial
gremlin’s bomb shattered the old code within.
World War 1
Lance Corporal Albert Jacka
19-20 May 1915, Courtney’s Post, Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey
Isn’t it very Australian? At times we all lose our nut.
The heart orders the head that it’s time to go & our
emotions sentence us to attack, rather than defend.
Our daily trenches are occupied by the enemy of
self-doubt, so we create a diversion, then crawl out
over the sunbaked top & surprise them from the rear;
killing our seven deadly guffs. Or the enemy suddenly
bursts in & your identity is taken prisoner. So you
charge up out of your seat & club your problems to
the ground, releasing mates & restoring the security
of your home. Or the revolver of our lives jams, so
we hurl ourselves without thinking into our enemy
& bring them down. Every day we’re still a soldier
on the line. Afterall, we’re all a part of ‘Jacka’s mob’.
Lance Corporal Leonard Maurice Keysor
7-8 August 1915, Lone Pine trenches, Gallipoli peninsula, Turkey
When the pale dust cleared & his numbed mind
retreated into his own body after fifty hours of
non-stop bombing, his right arm burned like
a fire-hollowed tree branch where the embers
of fatigue still glowed with hot dark matter.
His muscles bunched like sausage meat packed
tightly into their stomach lining, cells straining.
Gravity took him then like no Turk bullet could.
His shoulder joint slithered crazily to the trench
floor like the broken chain of his old bike. Hands
clapped him on his volcanic shoulder as though
he’d just taken five wickets. They felt like railway
spikes hammered into his flesh. They said he’d
even caught some bombs in mid-air; a true athlete.
Lieutenant William John Symons
8-9 August 1915, Lone Pine trenches, Gallipoli peninsula, Turkey
He wasn’t expected to be seen again in the flesh.
The Turks had seized a section of Jacob’s trench
like bullies pushing to the front of the tuck-shop
line, they’d shoved six officers out. Symons was
told to retake the sap, no matter what, this rank
offence was to be put to a stop. He was to lead
the migration of attacking troops, the chief gander
at the point of the echelon, the platoon flew at
the enemy, each soldier conserving energy as he
caught the upwash of their forward charge. The
formation eliminated blind spots on their flanks
& focused on the fluid dynamics of their run.
When they hit the trench, the Turks wavered in
the face of the Australians’ bloody momentum.
*Corporal Alexander Stewart Burton
9 August 1915, Lone Pine trenches, Gallipoli peninsula, Turkey
When he was a child, on those rare occasions,
the sea would dissolve his sandcastles in its vortex
field, the wet, grey molecules giving the beach back
its high degree of entropy. Its grains pressing flat as
buried bones at every high tide. Here, a khaki ocean
surged forward, again with the hope of speeding up
his decay; he stacked & restacked the sandbag wall,
their levee against death. Turkish Pioneers moved
in unison like a patrol of Clubbies; when they paused
he knew they were igniting their cricket ball shaped
bombs. They were as accurate as an A grade bowler,
pinpointing the stumps. Five seconds later, there was
a flash like the dying rays of the sun reflecting off water.
A wave of earth dumped him & his body drowned.
Corporal William Dunstan
9 August 1915, Lone Pine trenches, Gallipoli peninsula, Turkey
The overcoats smouldered next to their bodies;
both flesh & cloth singed by the attempt to strangle
Turkish grenades. To choke the five & if extremely
lucky, ten second fuses which numbered a soldier’s
life like a New Year’s countdown . A bomb blew
five men over like the storm wind from a tropical
cyclone. They did not get up. With Burton, he plugged
the rampart with smoking sandbags, their hessian
sides leaked silica like fresh blood. Their trench,
the bottom bell of an hourglass spilled what little
time they had left. A fizzing ball landed between them
& in the confusion neither picked it up. A light brighter
than an angel struck him & when his sight returned,
all that he found of Burton was his ticking watch.
*Captain Alfred John Shout
9 August 1915, Lone Pine trenches, Gallipoli peninsula, Turkey
Captain Sasse & he made the perfect dovetail joint.
Sasse used his .303, planing away at the Turk’s wooden
barricades to recapture his sap. Shout threw ‘jam tin’
grenades packed with a tradesman’s odds & ends;
barbed wire, iron nails, shell shrapnel, anything that
could punch through a solid surface wound up stuffed
inside their empty cans. They built workshops out
of sandbags as they cut through the trench, sweeping
away the enemy like sawdust from a factory floor.
That afternoon the craftsman flawed his masterpiece.
Joking like an apprentice, he lit three bombs at once,
the third backfired, his right hand evaporated, his left
eye spilled out like knocked shellac. The final gloss
on his workmanship was the renewal of Sasse’s sap.
Private John (Patrick) Hamilton
9 August 1915, Lone Pine trenches, Gallipoli peninsula, Turkey
Under occupation the young man put down, butcher.
He was schooled in separating meat from bone, blood
& viscera didn’t faze him. The earthy tang of purple
& blue gore didn’t make his gorge rise either. He knew
these were the colours that God had given death. So
the many dead men of the 3rd Battalion didn’t bother
him overly, crushed by the cattle stampede of Turks.
It was only when their flesh was fringed with green
That he swore pink. Green, the colour of decay’s
bridal bouquet. A waste of men. A waste of meat.
So that’s why he volunteered to jump up onto the
trench’s parapet & snipe the Turkish bombardiers
for six hours straight. Bullets cracked like whips
over his head; but he was home on the killing floor.
Captain Frederick Harold Tubb
9 August 1915, Lone Pine trenches, Gallipoli peninsula, Turkey
Burton disappeared in front of him as though
God had allowed him to ascend without dying.
A lone pine Ezekiel rising up in his fiery chariot.
Tubbs knew no just god could allow this murder.
But then, three times Turkish bombs had blown
him ass over tit, with only scratches to his arm &
scalp. It was all so random, how the fates chose
the way men died, so arbitrarily. He’d shot three
Turks dead with his revolver, easily, as though
they were on an invisible string he had cut; did
he suffer from Arachne’s pride? The difference
was he acknowledged his skill came from God;
there was no contest between them. Two years
later a shell splinter cut through his own thread.
Second Lieutenant Hugo Vivian Hope Throssell
29-30 August 1915, Kaiakij Aghala (Hill 60) Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey
The rising sun badge was embedded in the flesh of his
shoulder; it pinched his muscle like a meat hook spiked
through a carcass. Someone thrust a cigarette between
his blackened fingers, but he couldn’t lift his arms up
anymore. They had seized like an engine; the bloodied
muscles stiffening as though he’d been lifting hay bales
all day. Bomb splinters stuck in his forehead like pig’s
teeth in a tree, or the first stub of horn on a bully calf.
His face was a red rag, but they’d won the crazed game
of cricket, throwing the Turks’ ball grenades back at them
all night long. In Palestine, he passed into a scene from
Breughel. He crawled over the dead whistling for his lost
brother. He hooted their secret childhood tune until his
lips succumbed to drought. The war left him fallow.
*Temporary Lieutenant William Thomas Dartnell (alias Wilbur Taylor Dartnell)
3 September 1915, near Maktau, British East Africa ( now Kenya)
Not many men get to choose how to close their
penultimate scene. He didn’t need to act wounded,
his leg bled like a busted valve, but Dartnell refused
his Fusiliers’ advice to abandon his badly mauled troop.
Instead, he ordered his contemporaries to leave him;
this last act was his alone, a soliloquy on the equalising
nature of death. The audience was a mere twenty-five
yards away, firing lethal criticism at his opus magnum.
All attention focused on him. He knelt & calmly
delivered his character’s last lines; only God had
read his script. The applause was overwhelming.
His fans crept forward to shower him with accolades.
After the final curtain fell, he was found with
seven understudies in death supporting him.
Private John William Alexander Jackson
25-26 June 1916, Bois Grenier, near Armentieres, France
That night they’d pummelled the Prussian reserve.
The listening posts silenced, their ammo blown,
the raiding party retreated under heavy artillery fire.
In the fray, shrapnel dehorned his right forearm.
This was nothing. He’d known men who’d lost
arms to augers, the steel slicing blades dragging
flesh & bone & seed up into a silo of pain. They’d
have to wrench their arms off at the bone, so they
didn’t lose their whole shoulder. Then they’d strap
their bleeding stump with their belt & saddle a horse
& ride like thunder to the Hay hospital. He was young.
He would heal. He’d have trouble eating, but he’d invent
something like a fork-knife. People would ask to see his
medal. For them, he’d grin & hold up his empty sleeve.
Private John Leak
23 July 1916, Pozieres, France
There was a bottle-neck in the advance
like when too many people tried to board
a tram at once, or a team of oxen shied at
a creek crossing & overturned their goods.
The German bombers were pelting them
with ‘eggs’. He couldn’t stand the inaction,
the milling about like a mob of sick fly-blown
sheep. So he jumped the trench’s barbed-wire
fence & juggling three quick fuse grenades,
he hurled them from the boundary of his
attack. His aim was true; as the stumps of
men went flying, he bayoneted the rest. He
was a teamster afterall, used to improvising
a bloody solution for everyone else’s mess.
Lieutenant Arthur Seaforth Blackburn
23 July 1916, Pozieres, France
He’d been the spearhead of the Australian attack
at Gallipoli, the very razor-sharp tip so Bean had
said. No one had advanced further on that fateful
trip. At Pozieres, he & Sgt Inwood led bombing
parties up the shattered ridge, scuttling across the
lunar landscape of blasted trees & cratered men.
They passed limbs no longer glued by gravity to
their bodies. Dirt thickened the air, as artillery
roared in their heads. Concussion waves swept
over them, making his troops giddy as groomsmen;
most never regained their feet. Inwood fell beside
him just as they took the Hun’s trench; Blackburn
knew that he had a brother & that if this was how
the Inwood’s fought, this war could soon be over.
*Private Thomas Cooke
24-25 July 1916, Pozieres, France
His Lewis-machine gun was still glowing red-hot
like the dying embers of a campfire when the rest
of the Battalion found him. Smoke lifted from its
barrel as though its firing pin was a tiny blacksmith’s
forge that had banged out its .303 rounds in a bellows
rush of super-heated air. Or a sleeping dragon’s thin
exhalation of steam, sliding from a gap in its fiery maw.
The drum-pan magazine hissed like a saucepan boiling
dry on the stove. Eighty-one men from the 8th lay with
him. Their bodies cooling death’s internal mechanism
like the gun’s aluminium barrel casing. Cooke had
fired on alone, holding the trench after his team
were dead. It was an issue of supreme design;
both man & gun utterly reliable to the end.
*Sergeant Claud Charles Castleton
28 July 1916, Pozieres, France
The wounded man was his third puff on a cigarette.
The enemy had found him in the darkness of their
retreat. The first man he rescued they sighted on him.
The second man he rescued they aimed & cocked their
guns. There was no Boer War nobility to be found at
Pozieres. Men fought like dogs, tearing at each other
over disputed land the length of an ox bone. Neither
was there nature. Nothing beautiful existed anymore
to make men pause. Artillery rounds bludgeoned the
rural landscape beyond recognition. Caved in its skull.
Lessons in geography were reduced to finding a deep
shell-hole to crawl into. He couldn’t stand for three
hours & watch his mates bleed out. Rescuing his third
man, some green boy from Berlin shot him in the back.
Private Martin O’Meara
9-12 August 1916, Pozieres, France
A wounded soldier’s dead weight was equal
to one hardwood railway sleeper he thought.
There was something that made them heavier
when they were unconscious or dead, as though
a man’s life energy had been crushed down into
a dense ball of matter. Still he’d worked harder
jobs than stretcher-bearing before. He could keep
this rate up all day if he had to; afterall he’d worked
his passage out from Ireland stoking the coal furnace
of his ship. The mix of sweat & dust & smoke was
about the same, as was the boiler noise of men crying
in pain when some part of their body was hit. Twenty
-five times he went out, his arms turned molten lead.
Afterwards, it was memory’s weight that did his head in.
Captain Henry William Murray
4-5 February 1917, Gueudecourt, France
All he wanted to be to his men, was the father
that he never had. As a boy he’d had to learn to
steel himself with the dawn, to rise with the chorus
of birdsong that rasped like crumpled bugles being
blown. Discipline slipped into him at a young age
like the kerosene & sugar his mother spoon fed him
as a protective cure-all. As a Gallipoli machine-gunner,
he introduced the Turks to the iron will of gas-cooled
rounds. When he took Stormy Trench at Gueudecourt
it was not so much a German engineering marvel that
he’d won, but more of an ice-covered fishing hole. As
the Hun counter-attacked, he charged with twenty men
& bayonets fixed, they cracked open the frozen sea within.
In this way he passed a father’s wisdom to his sons.
Lieutenant Frank Hubert McNamara
20 March 1917, raid on Tel el Hesi, Palestine (now Israel)
He was in balance with his life, but when he saw
Rutherford’s forced landing, his bi-plane sticking
out from the desert floor like a garish diamond
on a wedding ring, McNamara kestrel-dropped
his Martinsyde to rescue the stricken flyer. To
the west, the Turkish cavalry’s charge raised a
dust-devil that spun faster & faster toward the
two airmen. Blood seeped out of his leg like a
poorly sealed beer keg, as McNamara gunned
his engine, Cpt Rutherford clawing a wing strut
like the madcap of a flying circus. Unbalanced,
the bi-plane crashed like a drunken guest into
a garden. Bolting into the BE-2c, they magicked
away just as the djinn spat its death spells at them.
*Captain Percy Herbert Cherry
26 March 1917, Lagnicourt, France
He thought that if this war was a giant apple tree
then soldiers were the good fruit left to rot in an
overstocked market. God never was a farmer.
At Pozieres he duelled from a shell-hole with an
officer; both fired, doppelgangers in action, but
the German fell from the ladder of life. He gave
Cherry a brace of letters to post; ‘And so it ends’
the working man said. At Lagnicourt he saw that
the groves were sown with rows of white crosses.
Suddenly, the chill wind felt distinctly Tasmanian
& he smelt his father’s orchard in spring; his bullets
felt like new apple buds as he packed his revolver.
Before he could raise his next order, something
black & heavy like a tonne of fruit-crates hit him.
Private Joergen Christian Jensen
2 April 1917, Noreuil, France
He walked on knives too; every step pure pain
as he approached the German machine-gun post,
afraid that he would dissolve like so many others
of his Battalion into death’s sea foam, the undertow
taking him down forever to the sea witch’s grotto.
His first grenade found its mark silencing the gun.
With two bombs held high as magic rings he used
his teeth to pull the second pin; like fashioning fine
new clothes for an emperor, or giving a blind witch a
chicken bone to caress, he bluffed his enemy & told
the forty-strong Germans to surrender. A tin soldier,
their non-fairy-tale deaths fused his heart with love;
so when his mates opened fire, he took his helmet
off & waved them down. Theirs was a happy ending.
Captain James Ernest Newland
7-9 and 15 April 1917, Boursies and Lagnicourt, France
Attack. He led his men of the 12th Battalion
towards Boursies, no more a French pastoral
paradise, but a village of the damned where gaunt
skeletal creatures shed their greatcoat carapaces
& writhed in craters of thawing sludge. During
the warming days, birds struggled to find sticks
for nests & things long forgotten & locked away
amidst winter’s chest, resumed their green-tinged
growth as if men’s bodies were lichened as stone.
The spring melt ran red with fresh blood & men
cursed as they slipped in a stinking chowder pot.
Counter-attack. He defended the broken mill by
harvesting more dead. Attack. He led a charge
& like a territorial male, he drove his enemy off.
Private Thomas James Bede Kenny
9 April 1917, Hermies, France
He was chemistry in action. If only the
dull-eyed layabouts at his old school could
see him now as they dozed on their benches,
heads drooped over their blue-tongued Bunsen
burners. There was a German trying to bar his
way forward like a maths teacher trying to stop
the tuckshop rush. A spotter for their rat’s nest,
for the enfilading fire that had caused so many
of his mates to fail their supreme test. So Kenny
bowled him over & threw his three grenades at
the blockhouse like rotten eggs at his headmaster’s
house. He remembered the explosion. Yes, their
reaction would look like these Germans. The sheer
caustic horror of being the victim of a good prank.
Sergeant John Woods Whittle
8 and 15 April 1917, Boursies and Lagnicourt, France
Shadows dropped into his trench around ten at night,
but when tested on the silver of their bayonets, these
ghosts were found to be more solid than paranormal.
He always knew that if something bled it could be killed.
Four days later, before even a rooster could crow & chase
off the undead, the Hun countered & Captain Newland
withdrew his men to a dip in the road to make their last
stand. The hammer stroke was coming; the Germans
had brought up their MG08 to exorcise the Australians.
So, Whittle flittered phantom silent & in the no man’s
land between dawn and night, sucked the life-force from
the machine-gun crew. His strength was supernatural.
He lifted the 70kg gun & carried it back to his coffin.
Later, they rose from their graves & possessed them.
*Lieutenant Charles Pope
15 April 1917, Louverval, France
At school he had not believed in Tennyson.
A man’s life should not be ended on a neat
rhyme he’d criticised. How could you personify
the charge towards destruction, make figurative
of the fly-blown real? He’d been ordered to hold
his picket post at all costs, sand-bagged by his own
dead, he would show the poet what it truly meant
to ride ‘into the jaws of death’, & spit ‘into the mouth
of hell’. He gave out the last rounds & saved one boy’s
life; Private Horatio by sending him back to the lines
for ammo & to tell the story of their last hurrah. Bullets
spent they fixed bayonets & together recited the poem.
When his Battalion opened hell’s mouth, they found
Pope & eighty dead Germans clenched in death’s jaw
Corporal George Julian Howell
6 May 1917, Bullecourt, France
Jets of bright flame leapt like the wind-blown
front of a bushfire onto 1st Battalion’s trenches
as the Germans blitzed them with flamethrowers.
The enemy jumped into a captured section like an
inferno hopping across a narrow mountain road.
Howell saw some Hun snaking along a dugout, so
he pulled himself over the parapet & saturated them
with bombs, as though he were smothering flames
with a wet hessian sack. When he was extinguished,
he bayoneted them from above until twenty sparks
from the enemy burnt into his flesh & he fell back
into the trench where smouldering bodies broke his
fall. When they saw this, his Battalion roared with a
firestorm’s rage & back-burnt until the fire was out.
Lieutenant Rupert Vance Moon
12 May 1917, near Bullecourt, France
First objective; the redoubt. Rush forward in a
direct attack, avoid the arc of the machine gun’s
hatred. Throw grenades, mute the automaton’s
clockwork brain. Then something stung him but
the fire of Moon’s adrenaline neutralised his pain.
Second objective; the trench. Lewis guns spewed
back bile & the Germans fled. Another sting to his
arm like a great hornet had welted him. His third
objective; the cutting. Trap more than one hundred
of the enemy in their dugouts, make them kneel
in a muddy ablution like blind moles underground.
Again a bite to the leg; he slapped at invisible pests.
Fourth objective; consolidate. Peering in, his jaw
was bitten & he finally succumbed to the venom.
Private John Carroll
7-10 June 1917, Messines, Belgium
He was ‘the wild Irishman’; perhaps even wilder
than Kelly had been; afterall Ned had shot Lonigan
through the eye at fairly close range, but to bayonet
a man’s guts no more than a fly’s fart away from his
face, now that took a special kind of national crazy.
At Messines ridge, Carroll bolted after the artillery
had cut off its barrage & staked out four Huns who,
numbed into blankness looked like a driver who’d
overworked his shift. It was like banging dogspikes
into a sleeper. Sometimes catching a man’s ribcage
felt like jarring his hand on piece of hardwood. He
was no number nicker, but he kept some figures in
his head. Ninety-six hours straight they fought like
a steam train running from Kalgoorlie to Melbourne
Captain Robert Cuthbert Grieve
7 June 1917, Messines, Belgium
What type of calculations were spun by the grand
mathematician so that he lived, when all others in
his line were cut down? Or what miscalculation in
the machine gun’s rate of fire, prevented the lead
drilling into him at the speed of sound? So marked,
Grieve grabbed a bag of grenades & scrabbled on
after each shell had landed; dust hiding him from
the deadly heat like a baby wrapped in muslin. All
alone, this first species crawled from water-filled
crater to bog hole like a prehistoric fish testing its
new appendages & threw bombs with an accurate
snap of his wrist, silencing the nest. As his company
reached his position, one last German slapped him
on the shoulder. In this way the numbers balanced.
*Second Lieutenant Frederick Birks
20 September 1917, Glencorse Wood, Belgium
He could feel the heat from the MG08 as it
spewed forth its four hundred rounds per minute.
It radiated through the air like the warmth from
a hundred kerosene lanterns, so he rolled in his
grenades & smashed the gun crew as if they were
the fragile glass shade that hunkered over the gun’s
hot burner. He was the incandescent point of 6th
Battalion’s advance, the flare that signalled to the
other men that they could go on through the burnt
out wood. That afternoon, a shell buried two men.
He was digging them out, trying to save his father
who died when he was eight; the coal mine tunnel
collapsing on him like a cancerous lung. There was
a white light & he joined his father in the darkness.
Private Reginald Roy Inwood
20-21 September 1917, Polygon Wood, Belgium
The shell concussion knocked Inwood in the ribs
winding him like his brother would, unannounced,
a fist of invisible oomph beating at his tired body.
Each thump in his ears, a slap to the head from his
father when he was being too cheeky; the brothers
making a mess of their dear mother’s prim kitchen.
Here, he was talking back to the enemy, a lone sprint
through their barrage surprised nine Hun cowering
under their own fire. Some he had to king-hit. That
night, he scrabbled forward 600 metres to spy on the
counter-attack, dodging under wire & shadowing guards.
Next day, he stalked a machine-gun nest into its corner
& boxed the gunners around their ears with bombs.
This is how he fought; punching above his weight.
Sergeant John James Dwyer
26 September 1917, Zonnebeke, Belgium
Deus ex machina. He rushed their right flank
alone, pouring fire on the German machine
gunners from thirty yards. They writhed as
though they were kids hit by a garden hose’s
cold spray on a tropical summer’s morning;
death’s frigid shock scrunched onto their faces.
He moved, as if immersed in the ocean’s fluid
gravity, the Vickers’s fifty kilo mass; gun, tripod,
water bottles nullified as the weapon’s atoms
glued to his body’s molecular rage. Manhandling
the captured MG08, he sent two streams of hail
to pulverise the counter-attack, stripping the heads
off rows of wheat. Turning young men into chaff.
In this way he solved death’s singular problem.
*Private Patrick Joseph Bugden
26-28 September 1917, Polygon Wood, Belgium
Fifteen lives for every yard gained as they charged
over the Mars-pitted ground, craters within craters;
the holed white skulls of comrades jagged as crowns
where they’d rolled into the centre of the Venn diagram
pits like a pupil in its iris. Some of their rounds landed
short & men evaporated into the ether like a sunshower
touching hot bitumen. Pillboxes were the canines on
the ridge’s gum, cutting men to pieces from two kms
away. Bugden filed them down with grenades & his
bayonet, clearing the way for the Battalion’s bloody
advance. He saved five men from death’s quicksand;
they lolled pink & flaccid in a shell hole like a dog’s
tongue out of its tired snout. It was his last act.
They’d covered 2000 red yards for 30,000 dead.
Lance Corporal Walter Peeler
4 October 1917, Broodseinde, Belgium
This is how he was forged. Age hardened by
Tasmanian winters, the steel of his mind super-
heated then cooled into an industrial-baked strength.
The endless rain had cast chicken-wire cracks
over the ground, his cheeks were bellows that blew
out steam as he charged up Broodseinde Ridge,
his Lewis gun’s barrel furnace hot. Thirty men
developed sprocket holes in their uniforms’ grey
casing; he never looked at the crazing on their
faces, their mouths contorted into ruined molds.
Fourteen years younger, in Java he tried to blunt
the Japanese conveyor that shunted across Asia.
He spent time laying track on the Burma railway,
forever pitying the inferior cast iron of their track.
*Sergeant Lewis McGee
4 October 1917, near Ypres, Belgium
He locomoted up the ridge, heart steaming,
his revolver fluttered like a signalman’s flag.
The enemy saw his perilous message & swung
to enfilade his trudge, but the sound of carriages
shunting ended their body’s decade’s long haulage.
His feet dragged to a stop like train wheels as he
sunk into the sludge; it was as though children
grabbed onto his legs as he tried to free himself
from Ypres’s flooded coal bed. Eight more days
he advanced, the lead engine shoving up the crest’s
slippery track until his boiler burst at Passchendaele.
In small towns all over Australia, the blinds broke
from constant drawing down. In Avoca, Tasmania
they derailed fourteen times before the war’s end.
*Captain Clarence Smith Jeffries
12 October 1917, Passchendaele, Belgium
He learnt that in the face of life’s extraction
men were so friable. Their confidence eroded,
there was a subsidence of the will to defend
the same gruesome gob of trench, which the
next artillery barrage could close as their grave.
Jeffries’s two charges switched off the panic bar
in the German’s heads & their machinery shut
down. Soldiers were the new pit ponies, hauling
death’s black ore through the war’s rich workings.
He understood gases; the white damp of carbon
monoxide that could kill a man exposed to one
tenth of 1% in ten minutes. He’d seen men piled
up in trenches like old goaf in a shaft. He was still
scaling when a percussion drill hit him in the chest.
Sergeant Stanley Robert McDougall
28 March 1918, Dernancourt, France
It was a blowdown. The Lewis-gun team were felled
so McDougall snatched up their weapon & axed two
machine-gun crews; their chests flayed open like bark.
He then back burnt the German attack using their own
fire, snuffing out the advance, his cutting cycle reduced
to ten bullets every second. He noticed half a company
of the Hun crossing behind his line, so he cut through
their stems, girdling the enemy until his belt emptied.
Unperturbed, he used his bayonet, thinning out four
more men, selecting the most dangerous foes to cut
down as if this sortie were a seed tree harvest & he
wanted to leave only the cowardly to grow. He was
the wolf tree that spread his limbs upward. Thirty
-three prisoners’ hands rose into the air like a forest.
Lieutenant Percy Valentine Storkey
7 April 1918, Hangard Wood, France
He was woken from his dream of rain drumming on a tin roof
only to discover his Battalion had left him behind; sleep mitigated
his crime of yawning desertion. Culpable, he caught up with his
team near the edge of Hangard Wood, where they suffered from
a heavily enforced curfew. Capt. Wallach was gagged by the enemy’s
machine-guns, so Storkey took over the battle’s passionate hearing.
With twelve men he pushed a circuit through the head-high saplings
to force an audience with the Germans in their private chambers.
Some Australian opened his mouth & a gavel’s sharp cry rang out,
aggravating the situation. Storkey was bound over to charge the
Hun, who like jittery defendants, believed a larger punishment
was coming. There was no higher justice to appeal to; thirty
witnesses they killed or wounded before the rest surrendered.
The German’s belief in a superior force of diggers was upheld.
Lieutenant Clifford William King Sadlier
24-25 April 1918, Villers-Bretonneux, France
There was no backing-out of the night-time deal.
New recruits had to ride-along, as the 51st showed
them the business of how to advance. It was just
another field-day; candidates lined up from both
sides as they entered the dark wood, explosions
barked like bosses & any stragglers were docked
a piece of their body’s commission. The Hun were
time-bandits stealing their progress as a company
next to Sadlier’s slumped to the ground. Gathering
a small quota, he attacked the German’s territory.
Beating their objections, he seized the advantage
with bombs & a Lewis-gun & closed three posts.
Cold-calling on the enemy; his brag-book boasted
a wounded thigh & arm from his demonstration.
Sergeant William Ruthven
19 May 1918, Ville-sur-Ancre, France
He charged at the angry buzz saw on
its fixed stand, that had been alligatoring
his men; their burnished skin puckered
with rows of red protruding knots. The fight
took on an old patina, their advance held up,
this lone figure dashed along polished mud
goat tracks until he was close enough to hurl
his bomb; his bayonet skewed a strip of rib,
collapsing a lung like a folding chair. Eight
more filed in fresh as sapwood; heads bowed
like students late to shop class. He noticed
a crazing of helmets behind a warped road.
With his best tool he made a kerf in the first two;
thirty-two hands bled into the sky’s white hue.
Corporal Phillip Davey
28 June 1918, Merris, France
They held their heads in their hands as the German
machine gun blew its fiery gob on them from point
blank range, like a furnace’s open door. Every bullet,
a sting-out that would burn their faces off in a molten
moment. They were stuck in the ditch’s batch house,
raw materials ready to be thrown in. A lone teaser, he
attacked the post only to be beaten back by the intense
heat. Grabbing more grenades, Davey turned their nest
into a hot-spot. He then started a new campaign with
the Germans’ gun. It’s old working life he swivelled,
seeding their fragile glass bodies with gaseous additions.
From this doghouse, he shovelled burning embers
at them, until some stones bubbled into his body;
creating a red imperfection in his superstructure.
Lance Corporal Thomas Leslie Axford
4 July 1918, Vaire and Hamel Woods, France
He spent his boyhood trapped in rosebushes
where tiny dorsal fins pricked his hide; a prince
in his tangled thorns struggling to free his snagged
uniform. So he could sympathise with 4th Brigade.
But the mouthfeel of their pain was more viscous,
the German wire crafty. It zigzagged over the platoon,
a high tensile strangler fig, a reversal of the Lambton
worm which cut men to pieces, as machine gunners
poked bungholes in the hung up advance. Their faces
light-struck; the sun’s exposure leaked a sulphurous
smell over no man’s land. Heavy as hogshead casks,
the living had a quick shelf-life, their bodies lagering
for days. Axford’s labour rolled ten Hun, six more
didn’t like the hang of his steel; hands lifting like gas.
Private Henry Dalziel
4 July 1918, Hamel Wood, France
He’d always had a way with gases; cut his teeth
on steam as a train’s fireman; now he crewed for
a Lewis-gun team as he coupled on a new drum-pan
mag; a minute locomotive wheel fixed on its iron track
– a dart to scrape the Germans from their Pear Trench
garrison. A coal pusher from the Tableland, he charged,
killing another boxcar of Hun, who ‘d lifted the fire up
on their flank & removed the tip of his trigger finger
like a surgeon excising an ingrown nail. Ordered to
the rear, he ignored his breath’s white feather, but
was bigholed in the end; a headshot derailed his run,
venting his brain matter like steam from a ruptured
boiler into Hamel Wood’s air. His war was a washout;
from Townsville to Atherton, crowds gaped at him.
Corporal Walter Ernest Brown
6 July 1918, Villers-Bretonneux, France
The Hun sniped like frutibats zeroing in on an orchard.
Brown packed up two Mills bombs; a gaunt scarecrow
who stalked the raiders back to their roost as their guns’
mad chatter deafened him. One pest he knocked down
with his fist, the other thirteen he boxed up neatly when
they beheld the quality merchandise he shook at them.
Killing had become the staple, but the Germans were
peace-starved & formed a line for the Australian stores.
A purveyor of action, Brown reenlisted when the Japs
infiltrated. Twenty years older, he lied about the quality
of his produce, his bruised skin long past its used by date.
In Singapore, everything began to rot, so he grabbed steel
pineapples; spruiked that there was no surrender in him.
His body’s rich harvest was ploughed back into its field.
Lieutenant Albert Chalmers Borella
17-18 July 1918, Villers-Bretonneux, France
Age did not weary him. Daly River was an early defeat.
He ring-barked trees with the zest of a galah flock &
built a slab hut amongst the dead gums, but paid a toll.
White scars where wood had nicked him, lay imbedded
in his arms & neck like quartz seams in stone. Varicose
veins witchetty grub-bulged in the trunks of his calves.
The barrage parrot-shrieked over him, but he tractored
his thirty-five year old legs over the scarified earth, a
camp of horseflies’ sawing at this ears. He injected
four rounds into the machine gun’s frothing mouth
& silenced the annoying buzz. Bullock-stubborn,
he stampeded ahead to Jaffa trench & his platoon
dynamited the dug in stumps. Thirty Hun downed
tools for an extended smoko with their new boss.
*Lieutenant Alfred Edward Gaby
8 August 1918, Villers-Bretonneux, France
On his back he beetled through a gap in the wire,
legs first, a breech birth as the scalpel sting of bullets
cut into his company, suspended like pegs on a line.
He knew what it felt like too; manger-born, unmarried
as Jesus, his lineage ended with him if he didn’t get on.
‘D’ company were his only soul mates as he rose from
the dead & dashed into Card Copse. He walked on water
his men thought, a miracle as he ran along the parapet’s
crumbling altar, emptying his revolver into the gunners’
inner sanctum. Behold the man; he stilled four MG08’s.
Six shots were all he needed to win the initiative; fifty
apostles gave up their holy cause for the god of state.
Three days later his resurrection never came. A sniper’s
bullet pinched at his temple like a crown of thorns.
*Private Robert Matthew Beatham
9 August 1918, Rosieres, near Villers-Bretonneux France
He was told at school that the only thing he’d
need to use from maths was trig, if he wanted
to measure up the height of a wall to be built.
At Gallipoli it came in handy measuring the
distances to the Turk trenches. He used the
shadow of the overhanging cliffs in the late
afternoon sun to estimate the job to be done.
At school he’d been a ratbag until a teacher
took him aside & said that he believed in him.
On the high ground of Lihons, he swept aside
ten men; captured ten & their machine guns.
Two days later, the height of his shadow was
measured by the Hun; the distance ten rounds
a second needed to travel to reach his chest.
Sergeant Percy Clyde Statton
12 August 1918, Proyart, France
He was into his Shakespeare so like a woodcock
caught in a springe, he set a trap for the Germans
with his two Lewis gun teams who hid in a wood
that moved like Dusinane. Dashing over open ground,
he ambushed the old men hiding behind the trench’s
sandbagged arras, his envenomed revolver stung
the crews with its fangs until exhausted of its unction,
he grabbed his enemy’s own weapon & stabbed him
like Laertes. Statton had delved one mile deeper than
the Germans’ mine & as they retreated from the fray,
the Lewis guns opened their drum-pan’s sealed letters
& executed them like Rosencrantz & Guildenstern.
By the fight’s end things were most grave. He found
a friend’s corpse that night; with a bullet’s kiss he’d died.
Lieutenant William Donovan Joynt
23 August 1918, Herleville Wood, near Chuignes, France
He was digging up potatoes on Flinders Island
when the war broke open; this deep tillage of
political differences in history’s blighted field.
Soldiers were reduced to annuals; a cover crop
whose job was to add their bodies to the soil.
Assuming command, daughter plants extended
out from him, refugees from 6th Battalion, then
with a platoon of his own company, he attacked
Plateau Wood. Rousing the Hun from dormancy;
the trench’s root system wound through pines,
as Joynt led the vine kill of this cohort, plucking
prisoners out of the ground like eyes off a spud.
His culling done; he evacuated three days later.
He was the last pickout of his variety from WW1.
Lieutenant Lawrence (Laurence) Dominic McCarthy
23 August 1918, Madame Wood, near Vermandovillers, France
Orphaned early on, the state raised him as its own.
A prodigal boy, he returned the service by signing up.
Gallipoli bloodied him, then dysentery. He would have
cut out a hole in his trouser bottoms & fought on,
but the authorities curtailed his ample frame. In France,
‘Fat’ fought the language as much as the Hun; Pozières
& Mouquet Farm, Bullecourt, Beaumetz. Under Madame
Wood’s coppiced eaves, east of Vermandovillers, the
thinner maverick rushed a German post that plundered
the left flank. This state’s ward tore up four hundred yards
of the Hun’s tunnels like an institution’s kitchen, killing
twenty men. He captured fifty more after they raised a
bloody hanky, took his revolver & clapped him on the back.
Later, Bougainville took his only son & orphaned him again.
Lance Corporal Bernard Sidney Gordon
27 August 1918, Fargny Wood, near Bray, France
His men were glued between the Somme’s bank
& Fargny Wood, up against it, like staves pushed
together into rows. They were barrel-shaped, the
thickest circumference in the bilge, the company’s
middle, where most of the 41st Battalion huddled
as the Germans raked their position with gunfire.
Bung-holes appeared in many of his comrades,
so Gordon took on the Boche singlehandedly,
shot a gunner through his head & captured eleven.
He then cut beneath the French oaks, crafting an
attack on the coal scuttles he saw poking above
the trenches like rivets on a barrel’s hoop. He had
a mouthfeel for war; sixty-three Frontschwein & six
machine guns he planed into the curve of his will.
Private George Cartwright
31 August 1918, Rood Wood, near Peronne, France
They writhed in the shell crater’s dirt like horses
lost to the grinding necessity of a dust bath. Bodies
of dead comrades they used as driving aprons to
protect the living from the machine gun’s biting
spray. Their arms, bellybands as they slid limbs
around each other to secure their positions, blinker-
helmets shielded their eyes from death’s periphery.
To look was to die. Cartwright launched himself
from the gates; jumped over water-logged ditches
in a mad steeplechase, scattering grenades at Fritz
like throwing feed out to desperate animals. Watering
his stock again, he threw more bombs & unlocked
a gunner’s throatlatch. Eight beasts he destroyed.
Putting to, he rode their gun down the home straight.
Lieutenant Edgar Thomas Towner
1 September 1918, Mont St Quentin, Peronne, France
There was a creep of grey bodies down the slope,
like a boulder’s invisible passage along a riverbed,
or mourners who pass a coffin gently over their heads.
A scree of khaki & flesh that tripped up their advance,
like Towner’s pet kelpie back on ‘Valparaiso’ that always
shot between his legs. The rain metamorphosed Peronne’s
topsoil into molasses; a sticky black quagmire that licked
at his company’s Vickers guns as they set on the 2nd Guards.
At the ridge’s summit, the Hun had fortified a deep caldera,
like teeth set in gums, but the burly bushman rushed them
his revolver snapping like a dog as a bullet bit into his helmet.
His machine guns led the scarification of Mont St Quentin.
Captured ordnance added to the abrasion. After thirty hours,
bodies curved around the ridge like contour lines on a map.
*Private Robert Mactier
1 September 1918, Mont St Quentin, Peronne, France
He was rough shooting again. On the farm near Tatura,
it’d been hares or wallabies that had popped up from
their beds of leaves under the Mallee, startled by the wiry
colonial’s noiseless stalking. Now, wooden barricades lined
the high ground of Mont St Quentin like show jumping
obstacles all in a row. At the first rail he flushed his prey
with a grenade, threw himself over & culled eight men,
a beater for his brigade’s zero hour rendezvous. At the
second barrier, he surprised six more targets, their arms
hung above their heads. The third gate he cleared as well,
killing the garrison. He’d bagged a dozen or more, when
at the fourth jump, trench wire flushed him into the open.
An MG08’s knockdown caused him to fall from his harness,
as a syndicate of the enemy declared his season closed.
Sergeant Albert David Lowerson
1 September 1918, Mont St Quentin, Peronne, France
Twelve machine guns embedded in the largest
coyote-hole Lowerson had ever seen excavated.
Their sheet metal water jackets shone with a dull
gleam from where the crews’ sleeves burnished
them, until they glowed like a vein of gold lit by
low candlelight. He worked at this awkward seam,
hurling stick bombs back at these claim-jumpers
atop St Quentin’s cratered summit, until he caused
a cave-in. Entering the portal, Alby captured thirty
miners caught up in the collapse of their position.
Malleable as soft ore, they were indistinguishable
from the tailings they had occupied. Mud-shod,
they drifted down the slope; a human slurry dredged
out of the earth like an exhausted motherlode.
William Matthew Currey
1 September 1918, Mont St Quentin, Peronne, France
That morning the field-guns stripped the 53rd of good
men; burnt flesh flensed from bone like black insulation
from hard wire. Every shell sounded as though lightning
had hit a transformer. Soldiers frayed in their dog holes,
an effective tool for the Germans earthed into the ground
above St Quentin, until Curry bolted out of the line, spark-
quick, he dodged machine-gun fire that moved with electricity’s
speed & put volts through the gun crew, leaving a smoking mess.
By mid-afternoon they encountered another live wire, a nest
of energy that electrocuted more men. Working alone, he cut
their cables with his Lewis gun, the drum pan mag whined
like a telegraph line strummed by a strong wind. Called
out early the next morning to rescue a lost company,
bullets crimped his respirator & gas soldered his throat.
Corporal Arthur Charles Hall
1-2 September 1918, Peronne, France
He’d seen animals treated with more respect in death.
7.92mm cartridges made dark cutter out of men’s bodies;
their muscle tissue bruised black from the high velocity
full metal jacket rounds. Hall jumped the railings of his
earthen barricade & charged the post, killing four beasts
& corralling fifteen more. There was a bull market for
carcasses that day, Australians & Germans fattened on
duty for France’s killing floor. Boys were weaned from life;
their corpses dressed by machine guns; heads, feet, hides
& organs cut away, then chopped up into smaller bits in
artillery’s boning room. The 54th crossed the Peronne
moat in single file, like cattle thirsting for water at dusk.
By night the yarding was done, the abattoir cleared.
The total number sold was some three thousand.
*Temporary Corporal Alexander Henry Buckley
1-2 September 1918, Peronne, France
Buckley called him ‘Ben’ after the famous bushranger
& was glad that Hall shared the blaggard’s courage
for their road was waylaid by a gang of the enemy.
Criminal, they charged the well-armed coach, rounds
mixed with the spring rain: wet right through, soldiers
didn’t feel their blood run into their boots, everyone
wore red socks that morning, the mud was flypaper
that trapped men as they fell twitching. Tongues flapped.
The sun sprinkled the 54th with gold dust as four Boche
fell to Buckley’s Enfield. Twenty others raised their hands,
imperialism’s precious cargo not worth the meagre pay.
The main camp retreated into Peronne’s cavernous shaft.
Gold-fevered, Buckley pursued them, but was unable
to ignore a machine gun’s strict warrant for his arrest.
Temporary Corporal Lawrence Carthage Weathers
2 September 1918, Peronne, France
He was Hannibal, outflanking Germans in Scutari trench.
His elephants; bombs that rained on their columbarium,
its boggy niches filled with flinching boys. Weathers killed
their consul, the water-logged trench deep as Lake Trasimene;
the officer dragged down to the crypt’s sodden floor.
A Lewis-gun covered the corporal, as oblivious, he scaled
the Alp-sized parapet & blasted the legion’s leftovers.
The light rain, a silken casket veil that shooed away flies.
One hundred & eighty prisoners moved cortege-slow
back to his lines, his head a door badge of blood,
his uniform bristling with souvenired pistols. Twenty
-seven days later he joined his brother, who’d fallen
at Gallipoli. His first & last defeat. Death kept him
ignorant of his honour, but his battalion kept his wake.
Private James Park Woods
18 September 1918, Le Verguier, near St Quentin, France
They let him in when the height restrictions plunged.
The war was aging well, it had matured for the Allies,
the Hindenburg outpost line beckoned, but a blockhouse
decanted his small unit into the bowls of shell craters.
The air was mousy with rot. The aroma stung his nostrils;
a field blend of the living & the dead, planted together,
they breathed in the earthy nose of bloodied soil.
Blue-green blooms chequered old bodies like tartan.
Without support, Woods & his men pressed forward
pulping the resistance. A mud pateux filled his mouth
as he lay atop the parapet throwing bombs at the Hun’s
counterattack. His shortness was a godsend; the Germans
were thrown back by his mincer, their zest gone, comrades
bloated as oak barrels. The bitter taste in everyone.
Sergeant Maurice Vincent Buckley (alias Gerald Saxton)
18 September 1918, Le Verguier, near St Quentin, France
He could reupholster torn cloth on coaches, transform
the frayed fabric for the rich into an emperor’s new clothes.
In this way he ripped out his old stuffing, called himself
Gerald Saxton & returned to the front with a new sheen.
Men clutched their ears as the barrages’ high-pitched
shrieks bansheed over them. A thousand trains braked
as one as the Hun’s lines vanished in pyroclastic eruption.
In the massed elephant charge aftermath, Buckley went
them, killing outposts with his Lewis gun. He shot from
the hip, a volunteer hosing down a bushfire, silencing field
guns & nests that tripped up his section. He fashioned a deep
buttoning into men’s bodies; pleated diamond holes he left
when he pulled together the strings of men’s lives. Death
was a horse that reared up after the war & unseated him.
Private (Edward) John (Frances) Ryan
30 September 1918, near Bellicourt, France
In that moment he was pure work. Ryan
could forget the years of hardship to come;
the Depression, the desperate wandering from
Balranald to Mildura, down & out on Melbourne
streets. The 55th were contracted to breach the Hun’s
position, to put a bulge in the Hindenburg defences.
There was no arbitration between the warring factions.
He was the first to turn up in the morning, clock on
for his shift. The strike busters came at them with
bomb & gun & broke back through their picket lines
looking to lockout the Australians from their gains.
Shouting like a shop steward, Ryan led a party to sack
them, making his grievance known as they chased off
the scabs. His only steady work was in the art of killing.
Major Blair Anderson Wark
29 September – 1 October 1918, Bellicourt to Joncourt, France
After six months of surveying mud, he flagged down
the thirty ton, diamond-tracked hulk & used its 8mm steel
plate to creep forward with his men & knock out the posts.
The war had turned; they trudged after these giants like small
children after their parents, or hunting dogs after their masters
who’d then fetch their kills. Nauroy fell, the headless Americans
accepted his solution & came on. A battery spat out its challenge,
but Wark rushed them, the field gun’s mouth hung open in an ‘O’
of surprise. Fifty more Hun compromised at Magny-la-Fosse,
but he needed three lives to function. Under the eaves of early
morning they attacked. Joncourt was a blur as he led from
the front; his appraisal was to kill the machine guns first.
His type was in service throughout the whole war;
the weathertightness of his design let no bullets in.
Lieutenant Joseph Maxwell
3 October 1918, Beaurevoir line, near Estrees, France
The Mark V would’ve superheated the crew,
a blast furnace peeling skin off the tankers like fat
scooped from a soup pot. But Maxwell released
the hatches, the crew slithered out like steam & were
lost to the fresh air. Some wire snaked double-helix
across the Beaurevoir line, but Maxwell found a
narrow passage through the prickly ductwork &
ejecting from it, he halved the gun crew. Under
pressure, he again engineered a gun team’s catastrophe,
their boiler blown, he allowed his flank company
to generate power. The Germans were running out
of fuel for the war; twenty wannabes shackled him,
but a barrage dispersed them like dandelion seed.
Valve clean, he bolted fast as a whistle’s song.
Lieutenant George Mawby (Morby) Ingram
5 October 1918, Montbrehain, near Peronne, France
They opened dawn’s corpse gate & strode through,
the borrowed light lit up the platoon’s faces like a struck
match, illuminating the rings on their foreheads from four
years of growth. A last contract. Snipers made bulls-eyes out
of their tin hats as Ingram led the assault over the crenellated
ground. B Company were deadened to machine gun chatter
as they scurried to the site of another job. The post was festooned
with Germans, but they killed forty-two of them; the green timber
unseasoned & full of moisture. An old woman’s tooth had scraped
out a quarry & here a hundred more apprentices tried to kerf them
with bayonets, but rushing the post Ingram nailed six, put weep
holes in their frames. Sixty-two did not become a dead load on
the stone floor. In a cellar’s heartwood thirty more gave up
the carcass of the war. A wounded burr on civilisation’s tree.
Russia
Corporal Arthur Percy Sullivan
10 August 1919, Dvina River, south of Archangel, north Russia
The Bolsheviks were bankrupt. Their garnishment
of North Russia was a blown safe, their promises
burnt bonds, as the Allied force assailed the Reds
on the Dvina River. Flies & mosquitoes bit harder
than bullets, there were more pamphlets than patrols,
‘Greetings to our dear brothers from the red trenches’.
No one could ski, or snowshoe, only the Canadians had
felt winter’s true colour. Their cut-off-time to cross the
swampy Shieka was now, but four men fell shrieking off
the plank’s greasy pole. Sullivan dove as full metal jacket
midges buzzed his ear & scooped up the beneficiaries
one by one. The redlining was done, as the British left this
poor neighbourhood. Eighteen years later, Sullivan slipped
outside Wellington barracks, as death called in his final debt.
*Sergeant Samuel George Pearse
29 August 1919, north of Emtsa, north Russia
His heart was a snow rabbit’s foot ready for the bolt.
Its thumping echoed down the black tunnel of his body
& reverberated from his mouth’s dry entrance. White fur
insulated him from the fear of death, gnawing through
barbed wire as though his leg was caught in a hunter’s trap.
Bullets bit into the fat pines, as Pearse made a bee line
for the Reds’ blockhouse. He had the bark on, no cold
feet as he angled his way over the crooked river, scanning
its snares & pitfalls. Incandescent dragonflies whizzed by
his ear. Grenades left his hands like stones skimmed across
water’s surface tension; their shot silenced one burrow.
He was the medicine to trap the Russians, but was long-
netted by a machine gun’s traverse as he ferreted out
the next warren. He was laid up in death’s warm den.
World War 2
*Corporal John Hurst Edmondson
13 April 1941, Tobruk, Libya
His adrenaline was Worcester sauce that masked
the bland taste of death in his neck & guts; there
were thirty targets set up on night’s long range.
He saw Mackell grappling with his own shadow
trying to pin it to the ground with his bayonet,
like a roo shooter staking out a fresh skin. Another
phantom was drawn to his Lieutenant’s steaming
back. Edmondson had blackened his own blade
with a smoke spell & so blessed, he killed both
doppelgangers with his magic strokes. The desert
sand drank greedily as this entropy was played out.
Ejected, the Afrika Corp made a trajectory for their
own lines & as the black liquid settled, his mortal
wounds reloaded & fired in the pre-dawn light.
Acting Wing Commander Hughie Idwal Edwards
4 July 1941, raid on Bremen, Germany
The air war was becoming a baby race; two year olds
that couldn’t last the European distance. Ack ack
guns built into a black music crescendo over Bremen,
as the Blenheims skimmed apartments in their tricky
steeplechase, bellies grazing chimneys as the twelve
bombers went all out. Their blind switch had been
German ships that reported their channel approach.
Boxed in between air & tile, they ducked under lethal
branches of high tension wires as Edwards’ squadron
attacked the port; their bombs dribbling out like horse
manure piling on cobblestone. Conditions were wretched.
The field was reduced; four didn’t finish the course, bearing
out into the strait as Hughie let the nags have their heads.
The purse was rich; a garrison finish from off the pace.
Lieutenant Arthur Roden Cutler
19 June – 6 July 1941, Merdjayoun and Damour, Lebanon
Their advance was shut down by Vichy tanks, H35’s
that hitched camel train slow across the Lebanese hills.
He was so low to the ground he could’ve swallowed stones,
his ostrich throat undulated as he ground telegraph wires
together like men rolled tobacco papers between fingers.
He reignited a spark, then counterattacked, trying to punch
the emergency stop on their momentum, to blow-out their
conveyer belt tracks, closing down production. Roughneck
infantry hid behind the derricks of the tanks’ turrets, as Cutler
fired, the armour too thick. The desert-ships ploughed on,
but he forced them to abandon their efforts, plugging off
their initiative’s deep well. A toolpusher by trade, he deflected
their thrust, but the French drilled a borehole through his leg.
He leaked oil for a day, until the mechanics found him.
Private James Heath Gordon
10 July 1941, near Jezzine (Djezzine), Lebanon
He was a ‘hatter’, as mad as anything Carroll created
to be bandicooting across no man’s land; the pungent
odour of crushed rosemary blessed Gordon’s elbows
& knees as he crawled over shell casings, their brassy
deposits glinting dully in the early Jezzine darkness.
He was humping the fortune of his company alone,
as bullets & grenades speculated as to where his body
was. He was trying to do the trick on the quiet, keep
his whereabouts secret from the enemy. Twenty feet
away, Gordon’s brain clocked on, a lit fuse, it sizzled
its way through his arms & legs, triggering adrenaline
to explode in his muscles, a TNT of action that lifted
his frame up, as he dropped on the post, skewering four
gunners. The rest gave up their claim as dawn rolled up.
Lieutenant Colonel Charles Groves Wright Anderson
18-22 January 1942, Muar River, Malaysia
The deadlock was broken, as Japanese Guards formed
an absolute majority in the Malayan peninsula & pushed
the Indians & the Australians back towards the Parit
Sulong bridge in a rolling humid scrimmage. The words
to ‘Waltzing Matilda’ bounced from the posts of millennia
-old trees, a proud address that fired up Andersen to take
out two nests personally as the brigade fell back. They had
to carry their wounded through the jungle, head-high like
soldier ants in a column, chewing a path back to the colony.
The Japanese cut them off. There was no confidence left,
as the artillery & mortar rounds petered out. Andersen gave
his proclamation; the heavy weapons destroyed, the remnants
of his force dissolved & fled. His freedom was gagged when
Singapore fell. An adjournment that lasted three years.
*Private Arthur Stanley Gurney
22 July 1942, Tel el Eisa, Egypt
He was a flyer, breaking away at the bell lap
of this Egyptian race as though he was riding again
for the League of Western Australian Wheelman.
Gurney surged ahead after his officers were first-
blooded by the Germans, their brain buckets spilled
over the desert tarmac like pans left out to catch
the early morning dew. Their bullets were stones
kicked up by a passing truck, but he bayoneted
three who face-planted into the golden dust.
He used Tel el Eisa’s boulder-garden as cover,
spent casings left a chainring tattoo on the sand
as Gurney pressed his attack. Two more augured
out as the Private turned down his last straight.
He bonked as a bright pedal slammed into his chest.
*Private Bruce Steel Kingsbury
29 August 1942, Isurava (Kokoda Track), Papua New Guinea
The Japanese encroached along the Kokoda track
folding the Australians’ right wing back like an exquisite
origami crease. The severe roof pitch of the crinkled blue
mountains made Pte. Kingsbury reel as though he ducked
a drunk’s flailing swing. Signals arrived to counter-attack
the steely advance, which gazumped the 2nd/14th battalion
with its forced sale. It was no act of god that made him
bolt at the Japs, his only chattel, a Bren gun, that bleated
out its thirty bullets from its mohawk magazine. Man
& machine steamed from the jungle’s humid kickback,
as Kingsbury ran, a cane cutter poleaxing his ripe crop.
The beneficiaries were his fellow platoon members, this
auctioneer who spurred his party on to gain late purchase.
His final payment was due, as a sniper closed out the bid.
*Corporal John Alexander French
4 September 1942, Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea
The New Guinea jungle was all about how the fade
blended creek crossings, vines that draped muscled
arms into the water like whalers hauling up a carcass;
the understory of palms, heart-shaped succulents &
rainforest giants that dwarfed ‘B’ company as Goroni
was assaulted. The Japanese held on snug; three posts
kept a straight razor of bullets slicing trunks & leaves
as Cpl. French charged forward, his grenades tapering
off the resistance of the first nest. A second pillbox
was undercut with more grenades, as the shrapnel
shaved men down, leaving a canopy of smouldering
blankets. His Thompson gun was the strop on which
French sharpened his resolve, but a third post clipped
him high & tight. Seventy imperials had been cut down.
*Private Percival Eric Gratwick
25-26 October 1942, El Alamein, Egypt
He needed no one else to tell him what to do,
this Pilbara blacksmith’s first battle; officers all dead,
the apprentice rose from the rocky ground, a sudden
whirly-whirly that swept up its pent energy into a fatal
funnel & blinded the Afrika Corpsmen who faced him.
He tossed two grenades into a machine gun nest’s hot
smithy & tested his bayonet’s steel, bluing a mortar crew.
The 9th Division were alloyed to their task, mixing attacks
with counter-attacks in their four day pasting to break
Rommel’s mold. Gratwick’s charge was tempered just
short of a second post by a burst of soft metal cast
for a harder cause. He rang his last stroke & died an
instant journeyman, crossing from a solid state into air,
as his mates forged ahead & took the hill’s anvil.
*Sergeant William Henry Kibby
23-31 October 1942, El Alamein, Egypt
The night was charged with blackness; luminous tracer
scratched intense white lines into the starless background
as Kibby opened up with his Tommy gun killing three
Germans & seizing their post. Five times he crawled over
the landscape’s hard & soft texture, blending the fine
hairs of signal wires back together as shells blossomed
around Trig 29. They were backlit by dawn’s bloody hue,
as Kibby roused his platoon again, his design to lift out
another ridge’s bright chroma of enfilading fire from
his unit’s picture. As the morning light gradated from
twilight’s grey flat wash & mingled into a yellow palette,
the Sergeant had almost reached the last machine gun’s
vanishing point, when his horizon tilted over. Gravity
fed, incarnadine beads formed under his body of work.
*Flight Sergeant Rawdon Hume Middleton
28-29 November 1942, raid on Turin, Italy
Some angered flak god kicked in his cockpit over Turin,
making a mockery of his twenty-eight operational flights.
His right eye melted from the lightning bolt, his cheekbone
lay exposed like Prometheus’s liver in a giant eagle’s beak.
It would not grow back. The Stirling groaned, a wounded
behemoth that dropped hundreds of feet before it found
its strength again. For four hours, the flight crew hovered
around Middleton like parent birds that refuse to leave
the nest of a storm-downed chick. He was Odin-eyed,
a hot coal burnt in his socket, his flesh sizzled with pain.
Fuel spent, he could barely croak out orders for his crew
to abandon ship over the English coast. He turned
the doomed craft back out to the Channel; his last act
was a sea burial. In February his body washed ashore.
*Flight Lieutenant William Ellis Newton
16 March 1943, Salamaua Isthmus, Papua New Guinea
Fifty-two times he’d flown through the black cocoons
of enemy flak; always his fearless metamorphosis on
the other side of that dark country, which earnt him
his nickname, ‘The Firebug’ as flames reeled out from
his Boston’s spinneret. Straight to the target, his flimsy
bomber was often holed like a spider’s web that boys
had thrown stones through. Smoke filaments trailed
behind him like a warp of ebony thread, as he landed
the plane, flooring the pedals of his rickety wooden loom.
Two days later Newton attached his silk to the same forest
above Salamaua & dropped his venom. His imago done,
a skein of anti-aircraft fire ignited his ship. A fortnight
later, a Japanese weaver’s thousand-folded steel shuttle
tied off the Flight Lieutenant’s final weft of thread.
Private Richard Kelliher
13 September 1943, near Nadzab, Papua New Guinea
The banana trees were straight as paschal candles,
their yellowy-green trunks bright as flame as Kelliher
performed last rites, collecting spare ammo from five
of his section gunned down by the hidden nest. He
knew Richards would be martyred if he didn’t reach
the wounded corporal, so up he charged, hurling two
grenades into the wooden stall where the machine-gun
sang its piercing litany. Forced back, Kelliher grabbed
a Bren gun reverently in both hands like a processional
cross & marched forward sending bursts into the post’s
slitted mouth. When incense smoke began to pour out
of the trench’s chimney, he dragged him out of danger
by his shredded khaki vestments. His sinewy arm’s font
delivered water, healing the wounded man’s holy thirst.
Sergeant Thomas Currie Derrick
24 November 1943, Sattelberg, Papua New Guinea
At Sattelberg, Derrick found a new irritation for the sand
that had stung his Battalion’s eyes at Tobruk, Tel el Eisa
& El Alamein. The edges of the kunai grass were sharp;
samurai swords slicing the company’s legs as they probed
a cliff face where Japanese marines were dug in like ticks
into a scalp. Repulsed, he had to dislodge these colonists,
so the crepuscular hunter left at last light & bombed his first
post dead. To gain the crest, the fell sergeant scaled the wall
on hands & feet; gravity, a feared enemy of his wild mission.
He attacked six more nests, who all fled from his patrolling
& then led his section to their first purchase. Three more
pillboxes he attacked with grenades, until the enemy were
overwintered by death. At Tarakan, a light machine gun’s
proboscis fired a random burst as ‘Diver’ folded his wings.
Corporal Reginald Roy Rattey
22 March 1945, near Tokinotu, Bougainville
The New Zealand corsairs swooped like Haast’s eagles
scything the Japanese dug into Slater’s Knoll with tracer
claws; the soldier’s bodies were bird fragile & fractured
into clods like freshly tilled earth. Rattey knew the way
to stop this bull resistance was to run at the livestock,
so lifting his Bren gun from the hip like a fence post
he charged forward, bellowing. The gun teams were
corralled by his fierce display, the weapon-pits ran red
as a slaughterhouse floor as Rattey’s section cleared
three pillboxes in the crush of their advance. In the
fourth post the survivors jumped their fences & bolted;
stampeding into the Bougainville bush rather than
be turned into greasy offal. The stock work done,
Rattey cleaned his knives ready for the next roundup.
*Lieutenant Albert Chowne
25 March 1945, Dagua, Papua New Guinea
There was a pattern of rottenness underfoot to all
of this, a defect; a wounded creature’s death throes
lost in the anonymity of the drunken forest. Chowne
measured the length of the path’s leg, the breadth
of the hill’s shoulders, where the machine guns
were sewn into the knoll like epaulettes on a dress
jacket. His threw grenades with a stiches’ accuracy
as though he were tossing pebbles at his sweetheart’s
window & unpicked their seams. He bundled up the
steep slope, towards the summit that would later bear
his name & stood over three foxholes, made to measure
coffins which claimed two more bodies. He made a fatal
error, standing manikin still for too long, bullets cut out
buttonholes in his left side as a cloak draped over him.
*Corporal John Bernard Mackey
12 May 1945, Tarakan Island, Indonesia
The jungle wet was an oven door opened on the face,
a heat mist that obscured the eyes with sweat & made
men blink as if crying. Mackey & ‘Yorky’ stalked along
the spur’s sharp incline as though they were headwaiters
balancing delicate plates; nothing was level, as they began
the slow climb up ‘Helens’ gnarled ridge like bread rising.
A smoke grenade dusted the air with white flour, as they
summited; four Japanese gunners reached out & scooped
them into a foxhole the size of an industrial dough mixer.
Mackey punched down on the team, kneaded their throats
until the flesh softened under his hands. He then mashed
a grenade through a pillbox’s cyclops eye-socket, scoring
their bodies’ crusts. Rushing a third post with Yorky’s gun,
he killed two apprentices, but fell, heavy as a baker’s stone.
Private Edward Kenna
15 May 1945, near Wewak, Papua New Guinea
Pinned down, he rose up from the ground like a fountain
from a broken water hydrant; a geyser of action that fired
his Bren gun at the Japanese bunker, spraying the machine
gun post. Kenna was a baffle that changed the battle’s flow.
The nest zeroed in on him, but the bullets bent around him
like water poked by an electrically charged rod. Some sped
between his arms & body like a cricket ball smashed back
at the bowler. He felt their momentum tickle his ribs; only
fifty metres from him, the rush of air like a sharp intake
of breath. Metal fatigue claimed his weapon, so he juggled
guns until a Matilda crawled up next to him, flung its brass
& shut off the pillbox’s bleed. Three weeks later a bullet
cracked the bowl of his mouth. It took a year for the doctors
to plug it. When he married, his nurse wore porcelain white.
Private Leslie Thomas Starcevich
28 June 1945, near Beaufort, British North Borneo, Malaysia
The fig trees were a headframe for the crystalline sky
reinforcing the blazing firmament as Starcey’s battalion
assaulted Beaufort. They tracked down a wooded spur
following this snaky vein that let tailings of sunlight spool
in golden middens about the soldiers’ boots. His Bren gun
jackhammered two nests of Japanese light gunners, five
died from this sudden cave-in, an avalanche of blackness
took them. In a coyote hole, seven more had dug in, but
Starcey towered over them like a union organiser ranting
about their collusion. He stopped mid-spiel, changed the
banana-shaped clip, as cool as a dynamiter walking away
from his lit fuse & blew their bodies’ ore. The Imperial
soldiers were stretched out as if asleep from a tiring shift.
His job done, the motherlode of war had petered out.
Private Frank John Partridge
24 July 1945, Bonis Peninsula, Bouganville
It was all banana growing country, high altitude,
high rainfall, steep ridges, volcanic soil, coastal;
an island like this could keep the world in vitamins
Partridge knew, as his section farmed the jungle
preparing for their assault on Base 5. A serpent in
the undergrowth struck him in the left arm & thigh,
an occupational hazard, not mortal, but irritating as
he rushed the bullet-packing shed. A grenade burnt
out the leaf litter & scattered the hired help; Partridge
finished one follower off with his bayonet, his early
years chopping down bunches heavy as grain sacks
had hardened his technique. His bruised fruit leaked
out liquid & he collapsed as if heat struck. He was the
youngest, the last of the war, the final flowering stalk.
Vietnam
*Warrant Officer Class 2 Kevin Arthur Wheatley
13 November 1965, Tra Bong Valley, Quang Ngai province, South Vietnam
He held those red dwarf twins in his palms,
their mechanisms removed, atoms danced
along his fingertips as he readied for his new
beginning. With these stars he would recreate
their future. A universe waited to spring from
his forehead, as old gods murmured in his ear,
pleased with the day’s actions. Swanton curled
at his feet, a supplicant to their glory, cheeks
a camera flash’s afterglare; their myth glowing.
Calmly, he hurled them, holding his breath like
a child testing the bottom of an unfathomable
pool with their soft powers. Gusts of gray rain
returned to buffet their hair & push them over.
death, a guilty bully, covered them with space.
*Major Peter John Badcoe
23 February – 7 April 1967, Thua Thien province, South Vietnam
He was a creature of spirit, a Scottish red cap,
some fey elemental that stalked the fields of Sia
& cavorted around Hue. Reports grew about him,
legendary sightings that children whispered to each
other; these wise siblings bent on spreading stories.
On the day he revealed his secret, dodging the spells
that flew at him, he rescued young princes caught
in the village, until he stopped at the end of school.
When he was uncrowned, the blood-coloured beret
slipping from his tired head, they saw he was fairy
handsome, his face fixed now in immortality. So
they raised a shrine, a grass mound where his deeds
were planted in the earthen memory. Where his own
children, fully-grown, would one day find him.
Warrant Officer Class 2 Rayene Stewart Simpson
6 and 11 May 1969, Kontum province, South Vietnam
Perhaps there’s something in the name, in the war genes
for belly crawling beneath wasps’ nests: once the child
rolled up his father’s old newspapers & stove lit, torched
the hexagonal hives, their grasp of mathematics collapsed
as each blind pilot in their cockpit burned alive. Here he
dressed up for killing, dead leaves for fangs, nose-pressed
into the earth, its texture like the inside of steamed pudding.
He ate dirt, his toddler’s appetite for danger placed him ten
metres from the chimera’s flame. He stirred up the hornets
spraying them with fragments of insect killer, lethal doses
to subjugate their warlike instincts as he inserted his sting.
Of his own breed, he carried them back in; broken wings
grounded some, others he knew would never soar again
as he placed his own body between the fire & each soul.
Warrant officer Class 2 Keith Payne
24 May 1969, Kontum province, South Vietnam
Prophet-wounded in the hands & hip he cast boiling
stones at every bush that burnt; a salt dressing lathered
his body stinging his mind to attention as he reeled them
back in like tired marlin. By night he stalked his own men,
green light footprints his only guide as he snaked over dead
leaves, reading the fluorescent logo of squashed roots. His
head in decay, with Odysseus’s sharpened mind, he ordered
men ‘lying doggo’ to crawl out of night’s cave. They clutched
at the camouflaged fleece & held on. Lethal glow-worms fell
from trees, the jungle itched with fire as they snuffled away
under the giant’s pockmarked gaze. As dark’s black boulder
descended upon his jettisoned crew, he lifted some light as
sugar-bags & stole away. He led them out of this raw section,
forty dog-eared pilgrims whose candle-light had gone astray.
Afghanistan
Trooper Mark Gregor Strang Donaldson
2 September 2008, Oruzgan province, Afghanistan
Can fear oxidize the heart? Corrode the legs from under you?
He logged on in the back of the truck & was jacked into his own
first person shooter. The initiative writhed around him; a green
garden hose turned on full bore, snaking out of his grip. To seize
it, he grafted anti-armour weapons to his arms as if he was a cyborg
& caught like a magnesium flare. Silica fused when his control lit up
the white earth. His situation call for finger intelligence constructed
from games of red rover? He was ‘it’, drawing heat down upon the
back of his neck, hair whispers of almost gotcha as he ran buying the
most precious of commodities, platinum time, the invisible bullion
of breathing space. They couldn’t tag him. Weighed down by duty’s
late call, he hurled off his rusted superstructure & sprinted 80 metres,
his primary school lungs topped up, to snatch first prize from death’s
air-cooled mouth. When he warmed down, all that was left was a man.
Corporal Benjamin ‘Ben’ Roberts- Smith
11 June 2010, Kandahar province, Afghanistan
They choppered into a bear market, their percentage
of success fell rapidly as the Taliban pinned them down
with accurate rocket & machine gun fire. Chunks of mud
straw brick evaporated into dust storms as the SAS wounded
hunched behind medieval clay walls, gritting teeth & hooking
They were diminishing returns whose effectiveness lessened
as units of blood were lost. ‘Ben’ read the futures; he knew the
initiative had to be wrenched back to secure their takeover bid.
He rose up; bullish, forty metres from the insurgent’s monopoly.
His strategy was to have a crack at it. In the space of a hammer’s
fall, his patrol commander knocked one nest out with a grenade,
then the corporal charged, drawing fire like investors to a blue chip
company. His hostile tactic worked. The leftover gunners panicked,
their shots went wide, as his big business raided their market share.
Corporal Daniel Alan Keighran
24 August 2010, Oruzgan province, Afghanistan
There was a throughness to his actions that day; he
moved the battle’s energy along the irrigation canal’s
spine, a fluid grace seizing the initiative from the Taliban
who poured it on the joint 6 RAR-Afghan patrol pinned
in this bespoke oasis. The distant mountains were American
paint horses; brown & white splotches covered their smooth
coats, where winter & summer contested for high-altitude
dominance. Their fight was a kind of dressage; a competition
where the highest training would win out in the end. Keighran
pirouetted & took to the bald ridge, directing & receiving fire.
His gait was counteroffensive perfect, his bare arena became
the point of contest. The firefight, noisy as a factory pressing
metal, stamped out its rapid produce. MacKinney fell, grief
converted to anger as the patrol closed the gate behind them.
*Corporal Cameron Baird
June 22, 2013, Oruzgan province, Afghanistan
The tracer bullets were Christmas tree lights that signalled
for Baird’s team to floor it; under fire they wrecked six clunkers
while tearing down their mission’s strip. He ran on all eight bangers.
He didn’t need the bolt-on goodies for show; he used stock parts
for his weapon’s drive-train as they neared the compound’s wall.
The big-block engine of his heart thumped out decibels like an
AC/DC concert. He led from the front, avoiding two more near
misses as the race drew to its end. On the third final lap his gun
misfired; very toey, it’d overheated. On the second final lap, Baird
made up lost ground, but had to pull over for a pit stop. Reloaded
with fuel, he gunned down the final straight, but the smoke from
burnt rubber obscured him from his crew. When the dust fell, it
was clear to his team who’d won. However, his muscle car was
totalled; some rival’s fan had thrown a rock onto his race track.
‘Lone Pine Sonnets’ were first published in Southerly: Long Paddock ‘War and Peace’ issue 2016.
‘The Somme Sonnets’ were shortlisted in the 2014 Newcastle Poetry Prize and first published in ‘Once Wild: 2014 Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology.
* denotes posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.
Bitter as the cud 