Removing death's cloak of invisibility



This was published 7 years ago

Removing death's cloak of invisibility

By Owen Richardson

A hundred and one men from the 9th, 10th and 11th Battalions were the first to die at dawn at Anzac Cove on April 25, 1915, and their names have not gone down in history.

They didn't make an appearance in the account on which so many later writers relied, C. E. W. Bean's The Story of Anzac, which concentrated largely on officers from a small group of battalions; and, dying so early, that first wave of soldiers didn't leave many letters and diaries behind.

<i>Lost Boys of Anzac</i>, by Peter Stanley.

Lost Boys of Anzac, by Peter Stanley.

Peter Stanley has found out who these men were and where they came from and as far as is possible how they died.

He has discovered reasons to think that some of the men may have made it further up the beach than historians had previously supposed, and that the image of the Anzacs wading ashore only to be cut down by Turkish machineguns is false.

But Stanley is not so much concerned with combat, which was over for these men so soon after it began, as with the aftermath. What happened to their remains? Who mourned them? Where are they commemorated? Stanley describes the efforts of the ''searchers'', the volunteers whose task it was to find soldiers who had been declared missing, and the vast labours of the Imperial War Graves Commission after the war to record and properly bury the dead: this book represents a continuation of that work.

Those left behind, in some cases insisting on believing their sons were still alive because they had not been officially notified of their deaths, have a presence here as strong as the dead men themselves: the patience and respect the relatives showed in their dealings with officialdom are marks of a more deferential age.

As far as possible Stanley tries to avoid using names other than those of the lost boys themselves, and when theirs first appear they are in bold.

He ends with a lost boy who but for his name, William Walker, and a couple of other details could almost be the Unknown Soldier: ''He is not mentioned in anyone's diary, nor in any official file. He has neither Red Cross file nor Roll of Honour file; he has no grave, no photograph, no in memoriam notice; his AIF file contains no letter from his family.''

It's an invocation that seems like a form of magic, as if such invisibility and forgetting were a second death to be warded off by the recording of a name.

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