I didn’t know my grandfather – Angus McSwain. He was hidden from us as children growing up in a small Victorian town, and not knowing him meant we never knew, never understood that for briefest of times, was involved something extraordinary. It is only now – reaching back in time through technology – that I have started to build an understanding. It is only now I understand that Angus, like many others could not, did not, stand in the glare of the ANZAC light. On the contrary, they were kept to the edge, never allowed into the light.

They were the ones, the 90,000 or so who suffered from gassing or shell shock, who returned to the hospitals and the asylums and who died slowly, their graves marked in suburban cemeteries; or returned and struggled, who lived in a shed out the back, who lived rough and couldn’t sleep in a bed and who relied on booze to make it all bearable.

So, when you stand to remember the fallen, remember too, those families, who faced never ceasing weekend visits to the repatriation hospital, who saw uncles, fathers, brothers destroyed by what they had seen and what they had done and who died slowly, painfully after they returned. Men, like Angus, carried appalling memories of the war to end all wars . They saw friends, colleagues, mates, slaughtered in the mud and the blood of Gallipoli and the Western front. On average 38 Australians were killed each day of the 1580 days– giving the young country one of the highest casualty rates of the war. It stole the boyfriends and the fathers, leaving a generational imbalance. It consigned a generation of mothers and wives to the unpaid position of carer and put families into poverty. There is not a community in the country where families, wives, mothers, were forever haunted by that faded photo on the mantelpiece.

“We bow us down to a dusty shrine, or a temple in the East,
Or we stand and drink to the world-old creed, with the coffins at the feast;
We fight it down, and we live it down, or we bear it bravely well,
But the best men die of a broken heart for the things they cannot tell.” Henry Lawson The things we dare not tell.

Angus enlisted on Australia Day 1915, a single, 31 – year old labourer. Now, looking at his enlistment papers, you see handwriting that was strong and determined. He wasn’t one who was caught up in the patriotic fever to serve God, King, Empire and Country. Early in the war, there is a recruitment pamphlet which talks of the European tour, and in a Monty Pythonesque way, does not mention the war. But when Angus enlisted the volunteers were older, in their late twenties, early thirties. This wasn’t about the grand adventure. This was the handwriting of a man who had a good idea of what he was enlisting for.

As part of the 21 battalion, Private Angus McSwain was on the troop ship, Southland, when it was torpedoed. He survived in the water for eight hours or so until he was picked up.  Family mythology has it that once, looking at one of his children’s geography books, he pointed to the ocean and said: “I once took a bath there and didn’t much care for it”; he was in the second wave of troops at Gallipoli (the greatest respect you could show your mates was not to stand on their face he is reported to have said)  and then fought in most of the major battles on the Western front, where the war was bogged down in trenches, blood and mud.

I know this only because of my father. Not that he told me . No one really explained Angus -he was hidden from us, but there was a clear, unspoken understanding that the man who enlisted was not the same one who returned.  Angus was a man not prone to explaining much, not at ease talking about his experiences.  I know this because of the journey to try to understand my father. To understand what shaped him means I have to understand a man I never met, never talked with, never saw, the man whose voice I never heard. The only contact is through technology, his military records and bits of remembered family mythology, some of it accurate, some perhaps not.  But technology is a wonderful thing.  It allows you to reach back through time, across the decades. It allows you to explore and deal with, as Patsy Adam Smith said, “the generation whose fathers, uncles, and sometimes elder brothers were either dead, or ‘returned’”. It defined that generation – that and the great depression.

“So they gathered the crippled, the wounded, the maimed, and they shipped us back home to Australia,
The legless, the armless, the blind, the insane, those proud wounded heroes of Suvla” – And The Band played Waltzing Matilda

In Angus’s records, there is the term shell shocked; and the list of wounds and sicknesses; and there’s the occasional court-martial for going AWOL.

You wonder what he saw and what he experienced. How he and his mates survived.  He was with the 57^th Battalion at the Battle of Fromelles now described as “the worst 24 hours in Australian history. Not the worst in Australian military history, the worst 24 hours in Australia’s entire history. The Australians suffered 5,533 casualties in one night – 1917 of which were killed. The Australian toll at Fromelles was equivalent to the total Australian casualties in the Boer War, Korean War and Vietnam War put together.”

In his book To The Last Ridge which tracks a young man’s experience with the 57^th Battalion, W.H Downing gives an idea of that world:  “Stammering  scores of German machine-guns spluttered violently, drowning the noise of the  cannonade. The air was thick with bullets, swishing in a flat criss-crossed lattice of death … Hundreds were mown down in the flicker of an eyelid, like great rows of teeth knocked from a comb … Men were cut in two by streams of bullets [that] swept like whirling knives … It was the charge of the Light Brigade once more, but more terrible, more hopeless”.

There is a reference in the documents to Angus being wounded, ‘blown up’, which fits together with the story of how he stopped to relieve himself only to see mates killed by a land mine. On such small acts did survival turn.  I’d like to think his history of going AWOL – he made it all the way through France to London – was because he had trouble with authority. The romantic notion of him rebelling against the structure is appealing. After all, his Scottish grandparents came to Australia as boat people after being forced to leave their homeland; and clearly, he was not concerned about being arrested and court-martialed. There were a few such times.  His handwriting, when he was discharged 20th January 1919 with the notation, shell shocked, is spidery, uncertain. He was awarded the  1914-15 Star and the British War Medal and Victory medal 1914-1919.

He married at 40, late in life, to a woman half his age, a returned serviceman whose hands would shake and tremble. He suffered nightmares and trench feet – where bacteria would cause large green painful blisters that stank when they burst. He could not speak of the war and when he did, it was with tears.  Some war wounds remain hidden.

It would seem he was already losing his battle with the bottle. He married, trying to settle back into the small country town life – trying to come back to normality after the mud, blood and death.  Apparently, he didn’t make the transition – according to his children the nightmares, the drinking never stopped.  He largely disappeared from the lives of his six kids; lived rough until finally, he died in the local hospital.

Somewhere there is an Honour Board which marks those who did not die on the battlefield but left much of themselves in the blood and the mud, these very ordinary men who, for a brief period in their lives, did something extraordinary.