Brothers in war: Why my grandfather wanted to fight Kaiser Bill

All risked death and heartbreak in the hope of glory and, by war's end none of the Ellery boys of Neville had been disappointed.

Samson, the eldest, apparently had an unremarkable and hard-to-document military career that saw him return home unscathed, marry and raise a family.

Joseph, the next eldest, manned a "bombing post" in no man's land along one of the worst parts of the line during the horror winter of 1916/1917. He was awarded the Military Medal before being sent home as a result of wounds shortly after.

Stephen, the third eldest, found both glory and death. He was killed in action while serving as a driver for his trench mortar battery at Pozieres on August 9, 1916.

John, my grandfather, found disappointment. Born with "hammer toes", a condition in which the balls of his feet were drawn up, he tried to enlist twice (and possibly more).

On the final occasion, on January 13, 1916, John was passed by the doctor at Victoria Barracks as fit for both the light horse and the artillery. He was then sent to Casula Camp where it all came crashing down.

A Captain Stafford, writing on behalf of the medical review board, concluded: "The Board assembled examined Private Ellery and find that all toes of both feet (except big toes) are hammer toes. The Board… recommends he be discharged as medically unfit."

After 16 days as an Anzac John (known as Jack) was sent home. He was paid four pounds. His discharge certificate, in addition to the words "medically unfit", bears the bracketed notation "not for misconduct".

As late as 1943 he was writing to the army for the badge awarded to those who, like him, had desperately wanted to go but weren't considered fit enough to be killed on the Western Front.

While my grandfather did not fight, his willingness to do so, surely based on the knowledge his dodgy feet had never interfered with his work on farms and in the Cobar mines or his becoming an expert horseman, shows the spirit of country Australia at the time.

That willingness never abated. His later attempt to obtain the "Medically Unfit Badge", expressed in a letter to the army on June 21, 1943, was intended to support his unsuccessful attempt to join Australia's "home guard", the Volunteer Defence Corps.

"I never applied for a badge at the time but as my boy is in the VDC and I have an application in to join I would like it if I am entitled to one," the then 49-year-old, who was already suffering from the arthritis that would soon cripple him, wrote.

The army, while sympathetic, could not help: "The issue of the Medically Unfit Badge ceased in 1919 as stocks became exhausted. As further supplies have not been made available, it is regretted your request cannot be complied with."

Joseph, the second eldest brother, had enlisted on June 11, 1915, and sailed for Egypt on August 8 that year. He was on the Western Front by mid-1916, just in time to be caught in a grenade explosion on August 14. Shrapnel wounds to the stomach, head, chest and left leg, hospitalised him for two weeks.

The encounter with the grenade came five days after his younger brother, Stephen, was killed at Pozieres. This led to their mother, Emily Jane Ellery, receiving a letter, dated October 9, 1916, that could only be described as grim.

"Concerning your son Private J. Ellery, 13th Battalion, I have to inform you the only advice received here was a cable from London briefly intimating that this soldier has been wounded… He is not reported as being seriously wounded however and, in the absence of further particulars, favourable progress may be assumed."

Then came the bad news.

"As regards your other son, the late artillery driver S. Ellery, 2nd Divisional Trench Mortar Battery, I regret to advise you the only advice received was to the effect that this soldier was killed in action on August 9, 1916."

It is only now, almost 100 years after Stephen's death, I have been able to clarify when, where and how he died and what became of the body.

An entry in his Red Cross "Wounded and Missing Persons" file, dated February 2, 1917, quotes his mate, Driver E. Mayne, as having said Stephen was "shelled while having dinner in his trench".

Private W. F. Dillon was present when he died.

"He (Stephen) transferred from the 2nd. D.A.C. to X2 A.T.M.B. to which I belong. He was badly wounded by a shell at Pozieres on 9th August (1916). The shell blew the dug-out up in which we were sheltering. He died almost immediately. I helped to pick him up. I know nothing as to the burial of his body."

Another friend, Gunner J.S.G. Wilson, filled in that blank in a letter to the Red Cross researchers on March 6, 1917.

"Happening to come into contact with a comrade (probably Dillon) who informed me that you were making enquiries re Gnr S Ellery No 1550 who was reported missing on the 9th of August. I regret to have to inform you that he was killed on that date at the rear of Pozieres and is buried at a place known in military circles as Sausage Gully (the resupply area). I was associated with him for many days before his death and was actually with him when he was killed."

The society thanked Gunner Wilson for his information and noted:

"The only further information we could require would be the location of Gunner Ellery's grave in order to obtain a photograph for the Next of Kin, through the Graves Registration Union, but we can understand from the nature of the fighting round Sausage Valley at that date it would be impossible that the grave would be marked."

Stephen's body was never recovered for relocation to one of the official war cemeteries.

AWM records state: "He has no known grave and is remembered with honour on the Villers-Brettonneux Memorial, France".

The Red Cross file noted Stephen had a brother, Joseph, who was also in France and "knows all about it".

Joseph, who had been promoted to lance corporal on September 23, 1916, fought on and by November 27, 1916, was at Gueudecourt.

The "Somme Winter" of 1916 and 1917 etched itself into the memories of all who fought. Conditions around Gueudecourt and the neighbouring community of Flers were particularly appalling.

"They (the trenches east of Gueudecourt) were half full of a thick, viscous mud which made traffic almost an impossibility," Lieutenant Leslie Newton of the 12th Battalion wrote.

"There was literally nowhere for the men to sit down and many of them spent the whole 24-hours in a standing position with this wet, clammy mud up to, and in some cases, over their knees. Sleep in the front line was almost an impossibility."

Trench foot, a particularly nasty mix of frost bite and gangrene, was endemic.

Lance Corporal Ellery was, if anything, worse off than most. According to the citation for his Military Medal he was "in charge of Company Scouts during operations north of Gueudecourt (from) November 27 to December 6. From November 29 to December 3 he commanded a bombing (grenade throwing) post in No Man's Land and himself captured a German despatch runner who was carrying valuable information. In addition to his other duties he, on several occasions, acted as a guide, the duty taking him over heavily shelled areas".

The only thing possibly worse than being in that front line would be being stuck out in front of it like a shag on a rock.

So who were these men? Why did they enlist? And how were they able to endure the unendurable? Were my forebears, as Paul Keating asserted on Remembrance Day 2013, "dragooned en masse" because they were "young innocents who had little or no choice"?

While I cannot speak for other families and the veterans they honour, I don't believe the Ellery brothers were anybody's pawns or dupes.

Their father, Mark Pascoe Ellery, had arrived in NSW aboard the Samuel Plimsoll on July 28, 1878. Listed on the ship's manifest as a carpenter, he travelled out with his parents, Joseph and Prudence Ellery and younger brothers, Joe, 9, and Sampson, 1.

They were from Egloshayle, a small rural community with roots dating back to the bronze age in north western Cornwall on the River Camel, a kilometre from Wadebridge.

The outwardly idyllic pastoral community with a population of just under 1500 souls was already reeling from the collapse of British agriculture that sent nearly a million people from England and Wales abroad in the 1880s.

Mark Ellery married Emily Jane Strong, who had come out from Sussex when she was one, at Blayney in 1886. They had six children in total but Alice and Frank did not participate in WWI due to age and sex respectively.

Emily Jane was, by all accounts, a strong and determined woman who was left to bring up a 10-year-old boy on her own following Mark's death at the age of 50 in 1910.

It is believed all four of the older boys worked at the Canbelego Goldfield, probably in the Mt Boppy mine, near Cobar before the war. A hard rock mine with shafts up to 800 feet (250 metres) deep, Mt Boppy was not a school for sissies. Contemporary photos show work-hardened men performing dangerous jobs with primitive tools and rudimentary safety equipment. The brothers had lived with the risk of sudden death long before the first troop ships sailed.

Stephen was working at Canbelego as a fireman in the mine when he signed up on July 22, 1915. By then he and his brothers would have been under no illusions they were off on a grand lark and that it would all be over by Christmas.

Paul Keating got it right the first time in his moving eulogy for the unknown soldier on November 11, 1993. In that speech he acknowledged the enormous gulf between the Australia of WWI and the Australia of today.

"This Australia and the Australia he (the unknown soldier) knew are like foreign countries," he said. "The tide of events since he died has been so dramatic, so vast and all-consuming, a world has been created beyond the reach of his imagination."

In the Ellery brothers's world the gulf between Australia and Britain, especially for the British-born and their children, just did not exist. They had heard their parents and grandparents talking about "home" all their lives.

For them the unconscionable thing, as happened to John through no fault of his own, was not to go when Britannia called.