Short Story (Warriewood Words) - 19 years old with a rifle in his hand

His eyes shoot open at the first touch of the soldier's hand on his shoulder. It is the call from the front line; they are out of ammunition. In the darkness, he wakes his horses and harnesses them to the cart. He is sodden to his core. The rain plummets down in buckets, flooding the dugouts. The 19-year-old soldier has not changed his clothes for more than a month and his uniform is stained with mud and blood. The supply roads are long gone. Twenty-foot shell holes dot the battlefield like landmines for the heavily-laden horses, who must navigate around them at speed. He leads his six horses up the hill, guiding them straight over scattered bodies. There are too many now to try to avoid. Blurred lines of white crosses dot the landscape, marking the shallow graves of his comrades. The ground trembles from the impact of falling shells, like the aftershocks of an earthquake. As he rides, he does not think of the danger but of home, and what a hot bath and decent feed might feel like. On half rations of bully beef and hardtack biscuits, he finds his thoughts creeping to his mum's baked ham and caramel custard. Slowing his horses as he reaches the front line, he sees soldiers knee deep in mud in the trenches, yelling to be heard above the cacophony of battle – shells bursting, the noise of whizzing bullets and the roar of planes overhead. As he leads his horses back down the mountain, the sun peers over the horizon. He removes his steel helmet and notices a shard of shrapnel lodged in its side.

Donald Connely was one of more than 400,000 soldiers who volunteered for the Australian armed services in 1914. Posters lined the streets of his home town, Kempsey, shouting ‘Australians! The Empire needs YOU‘ and ’We want YOU at the Front‘, with pictures of soldiers climbing mountains and aiming guns. The promise of adventure, and boys signed up in droves, jumping at the chance to escape their quiet country lives and become national heroes. Donald returned in 1919 after five years service in the 13th Battalion, at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, never to speak a word of the war again.

Donald's story died with him. The Connely family silently endured the pain of war. He never stepped foot in a Returned and Services League club. He would not attend an ANZAC Day march. He did not accept a penny of his war pension and he barely remained in contact with the men who had become like brothers during the war. When Donald died in 1983 he was buried next to his wife Johanna, with an identical gravestone that bore no mention of the Australian Imperial Force.

I slide open the back door of my grandfather's house to find him sitting in his cane chair, hunched over a styrofoam cooler full of old photographs and faded newspaper clippings. Another open box is on a dining chair, its contents strewn across the table. At 87 years of age my grandfather, also called Don, looks exhausted; his fine hair is dishevelled, standing on end and his collared shirt is unevenly buttoned. I spot
the photographs of Nan and immediately understand. He tells me he has been looking at old photographs for four hours. "I'm feeling a bit emotional, darling,” he says. I know what he is searching for; a photo from 1914 of my great grandfather in his uniform. We make room at the table for lunch and over tuna and tomato sandwiches he tells me the story again of how he lost his father's war medals in a game of marbles when he was 10 years old. His memory of that day 77 years ago is so clear, his description so vivid, I feel like I am there.

The sun sits high, belting down on Arden Street, Coogee, on that summer afternoon of 1937. The afternoon heat burns the boys' knees as they scrape along the baking concrete. Their faces furrow into intense squints, from the blinding heat and gathering concentration. The children are huddled around the big ring. Don steps up to the crowd, his heart racing, clutching his precious bag of marbles with both hands. Naturally his archenemy Dicky is in the action, studying the game with his expert eye, patiently planning his attack, when he will strike, pinging his rival's marbles out of the ring and claiming them for his own mounting collection.

Don pushes forward, now standing at the edge of the ring. The swelling crowd of onlookers are jeering and whistling like hooligans. Dicky is the best big ring marble player in Coogee and Don is well acquainted with his reputation. He is undeterred, armed with the unfounded self-confidence that only a 10-year-old boy can have. Months have been spent collecting the marbles, free in cereal boxes. Tired of watching on the sideline, Don dares himself into the action by placing 10 marbles in the centre. Dicky flicks his prized 'shooter' marble, sending his rival’s marbles whizzing in every direction. All Don can see through a
haze of disbelief is Dicky greedily stuffing all his precious marbles into his shorts pockets. Don is motionless, like a statue. He did not even get to lay his hands on a single marble. "You got anything else?" Dicky directs at Don, knowing he is all out of marbles. Don is heartbroken. It had taken him months to collect all those marbles so, like a fool, he says "Oh yeah, I might have something”. Don races home and bounds up the stairs to his parents' bedroom. He knows exactly where they are kept. He has played with the colourful ribbons countless times before; but only when his father wasn't home. He yanks open the bottom drawer of the lowboy and snatches the ribbons, stuffing them into the pocket of his school shorts, and races out the front door, back to Arden Street.

The significance of those three coloured ribbons, hanging from Dicky's pocket as he gleefully skipped home that afternoon in 1937, would be realised by Don years later. His father's seeming indifference towards the war and the medals tossed in the lowboy meant the son had failed to understand their importance. The medals had no voice and consequently their story was lost.

Curled up on the cane lounge chair in the back sunroom, I am absorbed by the sound of my pop's voice, telling stories of times past, as though he is reading from a book. "My father was a bit toey, an exceptional runner,” he said. The Army would hold sporting events to help entertain and revive the men when they were on leave and Donald always represented the 13th Battalion. His brothers in war, the three Croak boys, knew he was a sure thing for the 100-yard dash, hollering from the sidelines and collecting their winnings at the finish line. When he took his leave from France’s Western Front, Donald travelled to London where his three cousins lived. The girls were thrilled to see him. "Australian soldiers were the best paid soldiers in the world in those days, at six shillings and sixpence a day,” my pop told me. Donald would treat his cousins to a night on Drury Lane; dinner, drinks and a show. If ever a word of war was spoken, it was only of the 'good times'. "Many a time I'd say ‘Dad when d'you do this?’ But I could never get an answer out of him,” said Don. "’I don't wanna talk about war‘ he would say." Eventually Don stopped asking.

Don always wondered if there might be an intriguing reason for his father's silence. Ten years ago curiosity led him to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. The chap at the war memorial revealed to Don the most staggering piece of information. Donald's service record indicated that he had been shot through his right hand on the Gallipoli Peninsula, five weeks after landing at Anzac Cove. He was evacuated in May 1915 to Alexandria in Egypt. I was stunned. Never a whisper of this was revealed to his wife or to his three children. Don has no memory of his father having a scarred or stiff hand.

After a lifetime to reflect, Don believes that, like thousands of other returned soldiers, his father suffered from post traumatic stress. He suffered quietly. He packed all the horrors into a neat box and stored it in the attic of his mind and tried to forget it was there. He endured his secrets for 64 years.

I had travelled to Gallipoli on a pilgrimage of sorts. Donald would not understand why I would travel to a place that he determinedly chose to forget, but it was my choice to commemorate him; to stand where he stood. The following year would mark 100 years since my great grandfather voyaged to the other side of the world with 20,000 other Australian soldiers. He was a 19-year-old bootmaker with a rifle in his hand. To stand there, on that shore, was to know something of the man who died two years before I was born.

The peninsula is a long stretch of crushed rock and white shell. The sea is flat and inviting as my boyfriend and I trudge under a roasting sun, the thermometer touching 40 degrees. With no map and not a single soul in sight, scattered, empty concrete bunkers are our only indication that we are trekking in the right direction. I try to avoid eye contact with my boyfriend. He does not share the need that drives me. His eyes reflect his fatigue as we trudge along the shore. At last, we see dotted graves lining a grassy hill. Anzac Cove is stealing a moment of stillness as we approach from the water and we indulge it by silently walking by each grave and acknowledging every soldier who rests here. The cove is smaller than I imagined. Sitting at the top of the cemetery we look down, across the tops of the graves and out to the sea. I look across to my boyfriend and he silently acknowledges his thanks for the opportunity to have this place to ourselves without being shuffled along by a tour guide waving a brightly coloured flag and instructing us to be back on the bus in exactly 20 minutes.

My thoughts drift to my great grandfather. I walk down to the water's edge and stare up to the sheer cliffs, confronting and unwavering. I imagine what it was like for him, waiting for dawn to arrive. I imagine the naive excitement and impatience filling the boat. The splash of the First Division soldiers leaping into the
water and running up the sand. The sound of cannon fire in the distance, the shells raining down on the beach amid the bullets from the cliffs. I imagine what was racing through my great grandfather's mind, when his turn came to jump from the boat; before the horror began.

Elissa Connely
Published Warriewood Words, Vol 4
April 2015