Pens and Bayonets

Book excerpt: Pens and Bayonets gives voice to the young Australia soldiers who volunteered to fight for our freedom in the Great War. They answered the call willingly, with many thinking it may be all over before they got there. How wrong they were. South Australia, and Yorke Peninsula in particular, were proud to provide soldiers for their country. The letters were written during quiet periods and give us an insight and sometimes graphic account of the day-to-day encounters during the Gallipoli campaign and various offensives on the Western Front and Palestine. Communication options abound in the modern age, but imagine the challenges of 100 years ago, with your son, brother, uncle or nephew on the other side of the world, fighting in what we now know to be horrendous conditions, writing a letter home. It would take months for the letter to arrive. With the letter came a connection with family that gave a belief that their loved ones were safe and, importantly, the needed hope that the end of the Great War would bring them home. The letters the soldiers received, many weeks after being written, gave comfort and solace to these men, and provided their only contact with loved ones. Don Longo has gathered many of these moving letters, and set them in their historical context, to bring these soldiers back to life.