This gets personal. In fact, should I even be saying all this to people I have never met? What do I say? How far do I go? These are things I never talk about with strangers.
Anzac Day is one of those mysterious days. We know the meaning, only what is the meaning precisely? I relate more readily to certain family birthdays and to Easter; more readily to All Souls' Day with its call to remember the departed, surely one of the things that makes us more human, than to Anzac Day. The day is a memorial for the dead, especially now that none of the original men at Gallipoli are alive to tell the story, but what else is it?
My paternal grandfather, Edgar Harvey, was not only an Anzac but among those who landed nearly 100 years ago at the Turkish cove, later named Anzac, on 25 April 1915. Yet the family almost never talked about this, or subsequent events in his wartime experience. It was passed over in silence. It still is, largely.
In a country where Gallipoli is treated as a moment of great national importance, it might be expected that I would feel proud to have a grandfather who fought there and survived. While that is the case, it was never instilled in me to feel that way.
My father rarely if ever talked about his father Edgar's wartime experience. Silences in childhood may come to say that there must be secrets, or there are feelings too hard to express. Just being alive, I came to learn, is what is important, not being proud about knowing someone who was there.
One thing my father, an Anglican, did repeat while I was growing up in the 1960s was Daniel Mannix's claim that the Great War was nothing but a trade war. The vehemence with which he repeated this assertion told me it stung, he was hurt by the truth of it.
Such vehemence, I could see that probably Edgar himself agreed with the archbishop's proposition. It was for someone else's interests that young men had died in the trenches. It was an experience they had to go through, that they treated as an adventure, or took as it came. But did they know what they were doing? They were told it was for God, King and Country, but did they understand the politics?
After Gallipoli, Edgar was moved to the Western Front. Wounded at the horrific theatre of Passchendaele, he remained unattended in No Man's Land for one and a half days. He was shipped quickly over the Channel to Wandsworth Hospital, where subsequently his right leg was amputated. That much I always knew.
It was there he met a Hospital Visitor, Elsie Crabtree, my grandmother. This was a familiar pattern for the young men sent into that strange European nightmare. It was the familiar story for me. That most of the survivors came home halfway sane is itself a wonder.
By talking to your family you learn more. For my mother, Edgar was part of the forgotten generation. The Returned Soldiers' League was the driving force behind pensions and repatriation, working at a level that the average politician would not have thought about. Edgar was president of the Blackburn RSL, went in the local marches, and did everything he could as a member of the Limbless Soldiers Association for fellow amputees and others in similar condition after the War.
To their credit, consecutive governments to this day have supported these people.
Edgar took it as it came, be it the war, or life afterwards. He was a vicar's warden, a chorister in church and chorales, and played golf regularly. But the loss of his leg meant for the rest of life there were episodes where for two days at a time he was on morphine, would stay in his bedroom, with total silence required. The phantom leg pains never went away. He always had a walking stick.
Edgar was like many healthy young men who were permanently damaged for the rest of their lives, both privately and in their career. I will never know what he really thought of Anzac Day.
My maternal grandfather, Charlie Hulme, also went to the Great War. The silver teaspoons from Beaulieu and Ypres gleam in the family cabinet. Charlie's experience was different from Edgar's. He was a machine-gunner, and I was often told as a child that most machine-gunners survived the war for the very simple reason that they were protected by the gun shield.
He used to say that he was only wounded once, when he cut himself in the mess with a tin-opener. This story is family folklore. One can only imagine the things he must have seen.
Charlie hated war and never talked about what he really saw. He rarely mentioned the brother who was killed in 1917; the loss was important to his silence. The war was not a point of conversation at family occasions, even if he wanted to talk about it. He also detested the jingoistic patriotism that came later.
He never attended an Anzac Parade. He avoided the march, probably because the men would all reminisce and drink. It was all about getting drunk and Two-Up later, as far as he could see. Charlie was abstemious, but not a wowser. Self-indulgence was not an option for that generation.
Charlie was a leader of Blackburn Rover Scouts and laid wreathes at the Shrine of Remembrance on behalf of the Scout movement, out of honour and to demonstrate to the boys how to show true respect.
For Charlie the whole experience of the war was about survival. Young men, thrown together, quickly came to depend on one another. Themselves a mixed-up lot, they worked together in the trenches simply in order to get through it. Sticking together made tolerable a situation that was hostile, vicious, and ludicrous. You could die at any moment. They would watch their brothers and friends being shot to pieces right before their eyes.
It was in these baffling and desperate circumstances that the men worked together. Later the term 'mateship' would be used of this behaviour, which is why the term today has changed. Mateship was about dealing every day with meaningless terror.
Once arrived on the Front it quickly became obvious to these teenagers that the officers didn't know what they were doing. An acre of mud could be won then lost again within days. Consequent disrespect for the officers informed Charlie's disapproval too of making the chaplains officers, because they became distant from the soldiers. It tended to make it difficult for the chaplains to minister effectively to the men.
Charlie married Evelyn McKeown in 1921. She never talked about the war either, but when I visited her at Cabrini Hospital in the 1980s she was on powerful painkillers and not her usual composed self. Staring out over the rooftops of Malvern her mind was fraught by the past.
I might have said something about her youth because she suddenly burst into uncontrollable crying and yelled out, 'Oh the waste! All those boys! The waste! The waste!' I was silenced by the sight of her distress.
I still think about that day when I hear our glib modern throwaways like 'Haven't you got over it yet?' Trauma can never go away, it stays inside and changes how people relate to the world, how they understand everything, sometimes. Sixty years later my grandmother still mourned the young men she had loved and lost to the war.
The war affected everyone's lives, got into every family. Two brief lives are presented here, the lives of two skilled artisans who were lucky and came back. One became dedicated to helping those in a similar wounded condition, the other to nurturing the next generation.
Armistice Day (now Remembrance Day) was more significant than Anzac Day for my grandparents' generation, because it commemorated the end of a traumatic experience in their own lives. There was an ending.
Those who came later ponder the distance between our way of remembering the War and theirs. Many of us live with uneasy thoughts about what our grandparents actually thought of Anzac Day, and the critical things they would say about how Anzac Day is celebrated now. It's a different world.
Philip Harvey is Eureka Street's poetry editor and head of the Carmelite Library of Spirituality in Middle Park, Victoria.
Image: "Wild Eye", the Souvenir King (National Media Museum) - Flickr Commons.