It was Kaiser Wilhelm who called it “The war to end all wars.” How wide of the mark that was!
Yet who could have dared to prophesy that it would be more than four years before the warring nations would sign their peace treaties, or that fifty-eight million men and women would be mobilized for battle? Who could have estimated that nine million men and women would be killed, and countless millions seriously injured?
Never before had one war been so complex, so costly. Twentieth century inventions combined to make the conflict more deadly – the tank, machine gun, gas warfare and a gigantic system of trenches were successfully used for the first time. Before all weapons were laid down, twenty-seven nations were involved in one or another of the warzones – the Allies, represented by Great Britain and the colonies from her far-flung Empire, France and her overseas empire, Russia, and finally, the United States. Our enemies were known as the Central Powers, comprising of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey, bound together by their various treaties.
Of the sum total of those War years my memories of fugitive, hazy, for as a schoolgirl I was mainly interested in learning my sixth-class lessons, working my way through the late Primary school days, knowing that much depended on my passing the school-year finals.
This meant that I was leaving North Kalgoorlie School for all time, then a preparatory year at Kalgoorlie Central, and then moving on to the prestigious Eastern Goldfields High School, mid-way between Kalgoorlie and Boulder Cities, finally entering my brief high school education. That would be a complete break with the past. For the first time all students were required to wear school uniforms, bearing the High School colors of gold, Royal Blue and black. We wore ties and hats banded with the well-admired colors, and dark gloves.
There were more absorbing interests to fill my thoughts, even though father was part of some battlefront.
We received letters from father as often as the exigencies of a total war allowed, for our enemies had thrust into every ocean a vicious new form of warfare – the submarines, with their torpedoes. We were to experience their deadly power when Great Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand were involved in the new warzone. Their soldiers were deployed to join forces to attack the coasts of Turkey.
In that tragic battlefront Australian and New Zealand forces passed through their baptism of fire. There was forged the undying name of ANZAC, an acrostic formed by the name “Australian New Zealand Army Corp.” The date of that costly battle on Turkish shores – 25th of April, has been chosen as our national day of remembrance. The ANZACs were repulsed with shocking losses, and as a family we knew we were part of the World War when Uncle Douglas Eastwood, father’s youngest brother, paid the supreme sacrifice when his ship was torpedoed and sank with all hands in the Aegean Sea, near the coast of Turkey.
A memorial of his death was sent to Grandmother Eastwood. It is now in my safekeeping, given me by my Aunt Gladys on my first visit to the Isle of Man in 195x. Under the seal of Buckingham Palace, London, and bearing the seal of the King of England, the memorial reads:
“I join with my grateful people in sending this memorial of a brave life given for others in the Great War.”
Through the first years of the war my father’s letters continued to be delivered to us at 68 Campbell Street, Kalgoorlie, always written in his beautiful free-flowing handwriting, despite the difficulties which trench living must have hampered one and all. In pride, I remember our postman delivering a bundle of letters, and commenting on the good handwriting, a fact I confirmed many years later.
Father’s letters reached our home at infrequent intervals, as his regiment was moved from one warzone to another, reaching the trenches in France in due course, and there bogged down in a holding front between the opposing armies of Britain and France and the combined forces of our enemies. In the trenches father stayed until at some forgotten time he was wounded in action, and sent to England to recuperate.
All letters from him were heavily censored: at no point could we be sure where he was stationed until we received the word that he had been wounded in action, and had been invalided to England. It provided us with the first definite news of his whereabouts. This was an encouraging development for us for we knew that he would be able to meet his mother and other relatives after so long a stay in Western Australia, and the Goldfields in particular.
I am sure his stay was all too short but eventually he was returned to his regiment, lifted a notch or two in military rank, a promotion he never at any time coveted, for he was not a soldier at heart. Then he transferred to the Military Records Department, which was more to his liking and ability, a position he held until the armistice was signed. He was later awarded the Meritorious Service Medal for war duties other than active war service.
Then followed various peace treaties of the nations, which climaxed in the Treaty of Versailles, signed in the Palace of Versailles in June of 1919.
Jack Axford was the first, but not the only Victoria Cross winner during that first world war, but well remembered by us, for his sister was in my class at school, and helped us to appropriate the award to us in particular.
During these months I had moved along with my education through the seventh grade, then to the Eastern Goldfields High School, midway between the towns of Kalgoorlie and Boulder. It was a prestigious school, providing a complete break with my past. It offered me a chance to make a new beginning in my education, in effort to utilize the best of our state school system could provide. I determined to make the best of my new approach. I wore the school uniform – navy blue, and the school colors of royal blue, black and gold. Our straw hats were banded in the same colors, as were also the ties we wore over the white blouses. Most of the high school students rode the tramcars to school, monitored by a school prefect to ensure that we observed due decorum. There was no doubt such a regimen had its desired [effect], bestowing on us all an added importance, and a disposition to represent well our School. The same spirit [pervaded] in the team of new teachers and in some instances the new subjects we were assigned, and the Sports program required of us.
Yes, our Easter Goldfields High School was a turning point in my life, I am sure, for it offered me a chance to do better than I had ever done before.
However, my commercial course was of short duration, carrying me along for three years only, apparently sufficient to prepare students for secretarial work in the first instance. Year by year three sisters had stepped into the same program, choosing office work as offering the best chance of finding work in a gold mining town, year by year producing less gold, and the more so as so many of the mines closed due to lack of trained miners and general personnel. There appeared to be slight chance of improvement on the Goldfields until the war ended, and who could gauge when that would be, or of the final outcome.
The all-important school motto is now forgotten, even though we promised to live up to the principles it enjoined.
So passed the days of high school, leaving behind a memory of precious times of learning and thankfulness for our Australian State school education, limited though it may have been.
I had built up preparation for a commercial career in shorthand, typing, and commercial methods, which prepared me for the only paid position I ever held: secretarial work.
Those four years of war were the framework of my formative years when father had been absent from my home. I had gained an education, made new friends, and entered a changed world of un-thought of inventions. There were movie houses the length of Hannah Street, and new‑fangled motorcars threaded their dangerous ways on the macadamized roads.
Startling events became part of my memories. How I could ever forget the saga of the Russian revolution when our ally on the Eastern front collapsed under the weight of the Bolshevik revolution, and the murder of the royal line of the Romanoffs. It was a shocking end to what we regarded as a noble line, with roots deep in English royalty, but brought low by the evil monk, Rasputin. It augers ill for the future. Who could predict what lay ahead, or that the backward nation of Russia would in coming years have the power to challenge the world?
I was just a schoolgirl, proud of my high school training, still in the commercial field, deeming that as the most likely to provide work for me after attaining my high school diploma. I had counted the costs, for few jobs were available to us – shop assistants, nurses, housemaids and the like. To be a secretary was the pinnacle of ambition.
I would await the opening of Providence!
When I left high school mother advised that I enroll at Stotts Business College to keep my typing and shorthand in trim, which I did. What a new world father would soon return to! Most alarming of all was the decline in the gold production on which he depended. His once flourishing office in the Exchange Building had been closed for some time during those years, with so many resources and personnel employed on food and munitions of war, replenishing the warzones with raw materials for the clamant war. His deputy had fled the scene.
In such a setting our family waited the return of our father from the long war. It was four years since he had waved us goodbye from Blackboy Hill; four years for each one of his family of girls; four years of aging for a burden-bearing mother, and four difficult years for father!
How well I still recall that morning when we dressed in our Sunday best, rode the tramcar over Maritana Street Bridge. We walked to the Kalgoorlie railway station and there waited impatiently for the arrival of the Kalgoorlie Express from Perth, some 375 miles distant.
It was the construction of the railway that had first brought father from Liverpool, Yorkshire, England to Western Australia in 1895 or thereabouts, in the capacity of a railway clerk. A brief lifetime of living dangerously, successfully, had passed since those daring days. Now they were gone forever, and an uncertain future lay ahead for him and his family.
Puffing and panting, the heavy engine drew to a slow halt, and from every carriage spilled out crowds of khaki-clad soldiers. Somewhere in the crowd was father. Mother recognized him first, then I did. My sisters did not know him. He was a tired looking father, with a bulging kit bag strapped on his back, plus an ugly gas mask and a souvenired empty copper shell.
How he had changed! So had we. We were five years older than when he went away; five years of growing and forgetting. How would each one of us react now that he was home from the war?
Following the “Welcome Home” speeches that had been said, we walked to the tramline again, and rode our tram to Campbell Street, Kalgoorlie back to the home he had prepared for our wonderful mother so long ago. Were they the years that the locust had eaten? No, indeed. It was a father and mother, their four daughters who sat around a well spread table which our Auntie Edie had prepared for our father’s homecoming – roast beef and Yorkshire Pudding, father’s favorite meal.
That’s how father returned from the wasteful war. Ahead of us all lay the future years of beginning a new life, – for a tired father the greatest challenge of all.
