Militarism
I have recently researched and downloaded a lot of material relating to family members who enlisted in the AIF or the NZEF for WW1. The list includes 2 Quennell’s, 1 Johnson, 4 Migans and 2 Heslops and the battlefields they endured include Lone Pine at Gallipoli and Pozières and Amiens on the Western Front in France.
It’s hard to get an image out of my mind which was implanted by way of an anecdote I read in a Lone Pine infantryman’s diary. Besides the hellish slaughter, mud and fear, it was his comment that it was “so cold that the water in his canteen kept freezing” which struck home.
All of these men, bar the one at Lone Pine returned to their families in Australia – some minus limbs, some mustard gassed.
I look forward to developing feature pages on all these gentlemen.
