Lest We Forget

Sourced from Bolt's blog
My origins are Italian. My father migrated here in the 1950s, my mother in the 1960s.

Logically, I suppose I should have little emotional attachment to Armistice Day in so much as what it means in Australia and the great sacrifices made by the the Anzacs nearly a century ago now.

Growing up in country Victoria, I remember being rather indifferent to the commemorations every year. I had no distant Australian relatives who were involved.

Italy during the Great War eventually allied itself with Britain and France, although it entered the war for different reasons against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later Germany.

High in what are now the picturesque Italian Alps the destruction of human life was no less shocking in the scale of carnage when compared to Gallipoli or the campaigns on the Western Front. Nor the brutality and incompetence of military leaders who sent their countrymen to be needlessly slaughtered.

The mindlessness of it would be impossible to justify or even comprehend today. Italy lost almost 750,000 men in just 4 years with nearly one million wounded. The Austro-Hungarians half as many again.

My paternal grandfather served on Monte Ortigara where the key battle resulted in 32,000 casualties (he survived) but with the usual stalemate.

The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919, by Mark Thompson, is a gripping account that had me repeatedly laying the book down as I tried to absorb the enormity of the sacrifices it describes.

With maturity and as an Australian, Remembrance Day now is an event tinged with emotion as I think of the thousands of diggers who ventured into hell and in so doing forged such an essential element in the fabric of my country.

It is difficult to explain the depth of respect and affinity I feel, inadequate as the latter may be, to those who are remembered. And it extends to those who are on active duty today.

My thoughts are with them.

Lest we forget.
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Green Fields of France (Lyrics) :Eric Bogle

Well, how do you do, Private William McBride,

Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?

And rest for awhile in the warm summer sun,

I've been walking all day, and I'm nearly done.

And I see by your gravestone you were only 19

When you joined the glorious fallen in 1916,

Well, I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean

Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did the play the pipes lowly?

Did the rifles fir o'er you as they lowered you down?

Did the bugles sound The Last Post in chorus?

Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind

In some loyal heart is your memory enshrined?

And, though you died back in 1916,

To that loyal heart are you forever 19?

Or are you a stranger without even a name,

Forever enshrined behind some glass pane,

In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,

And fading to yellow in a brown leather frame?

The sun's shining down on these green fields of France;

The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.

The trenches have vanished long under the plow;

No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.

But here in this graveyard that's still No Man's Land

The countless white crosses in mute witness stand

To man's blind indifference to his fellow man.

And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.

And I can't help but wonder, no Willie McBride,

Do all those who lie here know why they died?

Did you really believe them when they told you "The Cause?"

Did you really believe that this war would end wars?

Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame

The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,

For Willie McBride, it all happened again,

And again, and again, and again, and again.