Bringing the war home

Homecoming, Queenslander 6 Dec 1919 

What was it like to survive the trenches and return from the First World War?  Australian Leon Gellert enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force just eighteen days after Britain declared war in August of 1914.  He was part of the 10^th Battalion’s landing force at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915 and described the experience:

Leon Gellert in 1920s, photo by May Moore
National Library of Australia P653/46

I can remember crawling over the side and fixing my bayonet as I stood in water up to my waste [sic] and I can remember wading to the coarse land and stepping over dead men as I raced to the cliff face. Everybody was rushing madly up the cliffs. Rifles were snapping; shells were bursting; in front bayonets were glistening in the half life; and behind us was the roar of the ships…. It was nothing but charging black bushes and dark valleys for me, stumbling through streams of mud, tripping over fallen branches and hearing hurried warnings…. Everybody seemed to be getting hit. Men that we had lived and laughed with were crawling red and torn upon the grass, or lying in ragged pools of wet blood. Men touched me as they twisted and died. A man cried for a stretcher bearer near me, and asked me to kill him.  Then the reinforcements came. We had a great victory, but the sight of the dead next morning was awful—hundreds and hundreds lying in bunches near the trenches.*

Wounded by shrapnel and weakened by blood poisoning and dysentery, Gellert was evacuated to Malta in July and then sent to England for further medical attention.  There, he was diagnosed with epilepsy and declared unfit for further military service.  Gellert’s biographer, Gavin Souter, writes, “Although epilepsy was never diagnosed later in his life, Gellert had certainly been exposed to the risk of shell shock, for which ‘epilepsy’ sometimes served as a synonym.”*  Still, almost unbelievably, upon his return to Australia in November of 1916, Gellert re-enlisted in the army, but was discharged after only four days when his medical history was discovered.**

            In another account of his time at Gallipoli, Gellert related that he was part of a burial detail for a close friend of his who had been “hit by a shell when drying himself on the beach after a swim.” Gellert recalled, “All that was left we put into a sack with a shovel.  His head alone was untouched; the shell had burst on his stomach.  Every day brings its horror but no one seems to care.”* His poem “The Husband,” published in 1917, offers a disturbingly honest account of the war that soldiers brought home with them and the ways it changed them. 

1928 film poster

The Husband

Yes, I have slain, and taken moving life
From bodies.  Yea! And laughed upon the taking;
And, having slain, have whetted still the knife
For more and more, and heeded not the making
Of things that I was killing.  Such ’twas then!
But now the thirst so hideous has left me.
I live within a coolness, among calm men,
And yet am strange.  A something has bereft me
Of a seeing, and strangely love returns;
And old desires half-known, and hanging sorrows.
I seem agaze with wonder.  Memory burns.
I see a thousand vague and sad tomorrows.
None sees my sadness.  No one understands
How I must touch her hair with bloody hands.

            — Leon Gellert, February, 1916

Published eighteen years later, British writer Elizabeth Daryush also wrote of the “impassable gulf”† that the First World War erected between the men who had fought and the women who loved them.

Subalterns††

Brunswick, Australia, post-war

She said to one: ‘How glows
My heart at the hot thought
Of battle’s glorious throes!’
He said: ‘For us who fought
Are icy memories
That must for ever freeze
The sunny hours they bought.’

She said to one: ‘How light
Must your freed heart be now,
After the heavy fight!”
He said: ‘Well I don’t know…
The war gave one a shake,
Somehow, knocked one awake…
Now, life’s so deadly slow.’ 

            — Elizabeth Daryush

In May of 1916, while recovering from his injuries, Leon Gellert wrote a poem that anticipated the struggle of returning home; here are the first and last stanzas of that poem:

The Return

Graves at Gallipoli

I have come home again!
Dawn is a dream to me

Lying here, soon to be

Clinging, awaking;

See where ‘tis breaking

Mockingly, mistily!

I have come home again!

I must away again!
Since I have lived this day

Here, now I cannot stay

Back with the changing sky,

I must away to die;

Die in the proper way.

I must away again!

            —Leon Gellert

Both poets attest to the fact that the war lasted long after the Armistice was signed in November of 1918. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Leon Gellert quoted in Gavin Souter’s A Torrent of Words: Leon Gellert: A Writer’s Life, Brindabella Press, 1996, pp. 9-11.

** Gavin Souter, “Gellert, Leon Maxwell (1892-1977),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, adb.anu.edu.au/biography/gellert-leon-maxwell-10288, published first in hardcopy 1996, accessed online 16 May 2018.  

† Edmund Blunden quoted in Claire M. Tylee’s Great War and Women’s Consciousness, Springer, 1989, p. 54.  

†† A junior officer in the British army below the rank of captain (most often, a second lieutenant).

Anzac Cove

On May 10, 1916, the London Telegraph featured the story “Anzacs in France,” celebrating the arrival to the Western Front of “these splendid fighting men who have survived the heroic tragedy of the Dardanelles.” Leon Gellert had survived Gallipoli.  An Australian who had enlisted with the 10^th Battalion just 18 days after Britain declared war on Germany, Gellert landed at Anzac Cove on April 25, 1915, but shrapnel wounds, dysentery, and blood poisoning ended his war.  He was evacuated from the Dardanelles, and due to his injuries and epileptic symptoms, discharged from the military.

The Gallipoli campaign dragged on for another five months.  Turkish forces of the Ottoman Empire put up a strong resistance until the British withdrew from the Turkish peninsula on January 8, 1915.  The battle had lasted just over eight months, and neither side could claim a clear victory, but over 100,000 men from both sides of the conflict died, and over 230,000 were injured. Gellert’s poem “Anzac Cove” remembers not only the men who did not return home, but those who loved and would forever miss them.

Anzac Cove by George Lambert, © Australian War Memorial

Anzac Cove

There’s a lonely stretch of hillocks:
There’s a beach asleep and drear:
There’s a battered broken fort beside the sea.
There are sunken trampled graves:
And a little rotting pier:
And winding paths that wind unceasingly.
There’s a torn and silent valley:
There’s a tiny rivulet
With some blood upon the stones beside its mouth.
There are lines of buried bones:
There’s an unpaid waiting debt :
There’s a sound of gentle sobbing in the South. 

 The poem never details the battle, nor does it describe the men who fought there.  Instead, 9 of the 12 lines of the poem narrate the landscape of Anzac Cove, beginning with There’s or There are as they sketch a picture of the scene. There’s a melancholy tenderness in the description, as if a soldier has returned home to tell the family of his dead mate, “Here is where he fought; this is where he lies.” The hills, forts, and beaches bear witness to the lonely desolation of war: what has been left behind is battered, broken, torn, and rotting.  Sunken graves mark the lines of buried bones, and the valley is silent.

The only sound that breaks the silence is that of “gentle sobbing in the South – the grief of the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, wives and sweethearts who loved the men who fell at Gallipoli. 

Despite his efforts to rejoin the Australian Imperial Forces, Gellert was not among the Australians sent to France in the preparation for the battle of the Somme in July of 1916.  The London paper, in describing the Australian troops who arrived in France in the spring of 1916, characterized Gallipoli as a heroic tragedy, and it described the survivors as “hard fellows….with Homeric fighting qualities.”  As the Australians marched through a French market town, London correspondent Philip Gibbs noted,

Leon Gellert

“They had merry eyes (especially for the girls round the stalls), but resolute, clean-cut mouths, and they rode their horses with an easy grace in the saddle as though born to riding, and drove their wagons with a recklessness among the little booths that was justified by half an inch between an iron axle and an old woman’s table of coloured ribbons.  These clean-shaven, sun-tanned, dust-covered boys who had come out of the hell-fire of the Dardanelles…looked wonderfully fresh in France.  Youth, keen as steel, with a flash in the eyes, with an utter carelessness of any peril ahead, came riding down the street….For tough as they are, and keen as they are, many of the Australian soldiers are but grown-up children, with a splendid simplicity of youth, and the great gift of laughter.”

In less than six weeks, much of that youth and laughter would again be silenced and replaced yet once more by “a sound of gentle sobbing in the South.”