When Harry Hogan went to war

There wasn't much doing in the tiny New South Wales town of Quirindi on Christmas Eve, 1914, but the Federal Hotel in Whittaker Street was riotous with shouts and laughter. The young blokes were full of talk about the war in Europe and, as the beer flowed, several boasted they would enlist and find excitement in exotic foreign lands.

Harry Edward Hogan, great-grandfather of my mate Gary Hogan, was one of the more determined, though maybe also one of the more inebriated. But Harry was stone cold sober when he travelled down to Sydney early in the new year. He stayed at his sister's Kings Cross pub for a couple of rowdy nights, then enlisted in Liverpool.

Harry was 18, a knockabout bush larrikin ready to give just about anything a try. He joined the Second Machine Gun Battalion on 10 February 1915, trained for four months, embarked on 25 June and set foot on the beach at Gallipoli on 16 August, a few days after the start of the doomed August offensive that was the Allies' last throw of the dice before their retreat from the peninsula.

For the next four months Harry Hogan, like so many of his fellow soldiers, had an undistinguished, brutalising time, memories of which would stay with him forever. If, in his happy-go-lucky, thoughtless way, he had imagined performing daring, perhaps dramatic deeds, it took no time at all for such notions to founder amid the chaos, the blood, the wounds, the deaths.

Never shirking but always scared stiff, Harry staggered through the months until serious head wounds were added to his more or less constant and worsening state of shock, and he was taken to hospital in Alexandria on 23 December.

He was following in the wake of many wounded fellow Australians, including 21-year-old Albert Facey, repatriated from Gallipoli after a direct hit on his trench and a gunshot wound to the shoulder. He had been 'on Gallipoli only six days short of four months'. As for Harry Hogan, having arrived virtually on the eve of the August offensive, he left as the great retreat from Gallipoli was beginning.

Harry recovered after treatment but, still not 19 years of age, he had seen gruesome sights, experienced indescribable horrors and confronted his own crippling fears. He was scarred beyond any treatment that the hospital in Alexandria could give him or even knew about. And this was only the beginning.

Discharged for duty on 13 January at Ras-el-Tin, Alexandria, he was attached to the British Expeditionary Force and disembarked at Marseilles on 23 March 1916. For nearly two years he slogged robot-like through the cauterising life of the trenches, succumbing periodically to agonising bouts of trench fever and the maddening itch of scabies.

By the time Harry Hogan was sent to England for treatment, his whole personality seemed to be faltering. He began to figure on charge sheets for various offences — drunkenness, refusing to obey an order from an MP, absence without a pass while under treatment, AWOL for a month and picked up by MPs in London.

Recovering yet again, however, he returned to France on 23 July 1918 with the Second Machine Gun Battalion and saw out the war in scarifying encounters with the Germans' last ditch offensives. During this stint his arduous path crossed that of 18-year-old James Lovell, 8th Battalion Royal Berkshire Regiment, whose forward lookout post was threatened by one of the last massive German pushes of 1918 but who kept reporting under fire on enemy movements and won the Military Medal for bravery in the field.

Harry embarked at Le Havre for England on 15 January 1919 but, defeated again by serious illness, spent six months in various British hospitals before at last sailing for Australia on the Karmala, on 1 July.

Once he was as fit as he was ever going to be, Harry Hogan — a raddled, stooped and haunted looking 23-year old — went bush and stayed there. He worked as a jackeroo and a fencer and, though he eventually married, he would disappear into the backblocks for months on end, returning broke, hung over and impenitent.

His obdurate, grieving silence was as eloquent a statement about his shattered spirit as the luckier James Lovell's summary of those years: 'I lost a lot of friends. It was a massive waste of lives, a slaughter that should never have happened.' Or Albert Facey's anguished recollection in his marvellous memoir, A Fortunate Life: '[The time] on Gallipoli were the worst four months of my whole life. I had seen many men die horribly, and had killed many myself, and lived in fear most of the time. And it is terrible to think it was all for nothing.'

Machine gunner Harry Hogan would surely have agreed.