In my final year of school, we did a unit on war.
I was introduced to Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est, David Campbell's Men in Green, and Redgum's I Was Only 19.
As a kid, I'd wondered why my grandparents didn't talk about their WWII service, or join in the Anzac marches, like other grandparents did.
Maybe if I'd been older, they would've told me, but they'd all died by the time I was 14.
I'll never know why they kept their silence, but these poems gave me an inkling.
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est
But to their right I gazed.
For fifteen men in jungle green
Rose from the kunai grass
And came towards the plane. My men
In silence watched them pass;
It seemed they looked upon themselves
In Times's prophetic glass.
Oh, there were some leaned on a stick
And some on stretchers lay,
But few walked on their own two feet
In the early green of day.
And the Anzac legends didn't mention mud and blood and tears
And the stories that my father told me never seemed quite real.
I caught some pieces in my back that I didn't even feel
God help me, I was only nineteen.
The Herd did a cover version of Redgum's I Was Only 19 the year after I was introduced to the original in English. It was for Triple J's Like a Version and is well worth a listen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yfuR5b-hBo
Kai Ash