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| Words inscribed on the Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne |
Old Harry looked at me through his dark rheumy
eyes as he flicked through the magazine on the table.
“Y’know”, he said in his raspy old voice as he
paused at a page and pointed to a photo, “I was very surprised to see that picture...” He hesitated before he went on “…that’s me
there!”
The photo showed a group of seven soldiers wading
through mud up to their knees. Six of them were man-handling a stretcher upon
which, covered in an army blanket, lies a critically injured man. The caption
to the photo said something like: ‘It takes six men, six hours to bring one
wounded man out of the mud of Passchendaele’.
Old Harry’s finger was resting on the man closest
to the camera; a moustachioed, stocky man with his tin helmet pulled down to
just above his eyes. “That’s me,” he repeated “I remember seeing the
photographer…” His voice trailed off and
perhaps I detected tears in his eyes and a quaver in his voice as the memories
flooded back. “I remember seeing the photographer.” He repeated again but said
no more.
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| Old Harry, centre, in the mud of Passchendaele, 1917 |
Harry and his wife Gwen had lived next door to us
until about a year before. They had
originally been farming near Whangarei but had come down to Auckland in
retirement with Mate, their old sheep dog. Harry walked rather stiff-legged and
had a raspy gruff voice. Gwen told me that he had been gassed at Passchendaele in
an attack that had killed his best mate and no doubt the stiffness in his walk
was due either to a war injury or to arthritis exacerbated by the mud and wet
of the Western Front. Harry, understandably, did not talk about those days. Both
Harry and Gwen were devoted to their old sheep dog, Mate. Gwen would often send
Mate, carrying a basket of beans or eggs in his mouth, around to our house.
Mum, after taking the goods from the basket, would give Mate a treat, before he
happily trotted back home, empty basket still in his mouth. We were all rather
sad when Harry, Gwen and Mate moved away.
I was 14 when Harry had pointed to the photo. It
had appeared in a special magazine published by the New Zealand Herald to mark
the paper’s centenary in 1963. I’m not sure how old Harry was then, maybe in
his mid-seventies.
A century has passed since this photo was taken. Each
time I see it, and it has been in numerous publications and even on book covers,
I think of old Harry, his gnarled finger pointing, saying “That’s me.” In 1963
I was too young to understand the full impact; the horrors that men like Harry
went through. How they were unable to talk about it; how they knew that unless
you had been present, there was no way you could ever understand the full impact
of their horrific experiences and it was better to remain silent. It has only
really been in recent years that we have begun to understand the full horror of
what these men went through. I will never know whether the burning mustard gas
of that attack in 1917, which had affected Harry’s voice, still troubled him
when he spoke, but undoubtedly the memories would have haunted him.
We owe a lot to men like Harry; men who suffered
in silence; men whose battlefield demons haunted them for the rest of their
lives. I can still see him with that magazine, pointing to the picture. Perhaps
it was a mixture of pride, but there was also an innate sadness as the memories
flooded back, a mixture of emotions that I was then too young to perceive or
understand. Unknowingly that photo was Harry’s claim to immortality.
This was the last time I saw Harry, but the memory
of that kindly, haunted old soldier has always remained, deep within my sub-consciousness,
triggered whenever I see that picture, and on the morning of each Anzac Day. Requiescat
in pace!
© Neil Rawlins text & photography
© Neil Rawlins text & photography
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