The editor of the Goulburn Evening Penny Post of 1916 may have been a poetic soul because 100 years ago this week, he ran in full (we can only use a little of it) witness Patrick Macgill's The Romance Dear To The Heart Of The Young Soldier.
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By "romance" Macgill didn't mean the usual jingoism about war's glory, but rather the strangeness of wartime's vistas, wartime's emotions.
"When the young soldier takes the long, poplar-lined road from [a French village], his heart is stirred with the romance of his mission. It is morning and he is bound for the trenches; the early sunshine is tangled in the branches, and silvery gossamer, beaded with iridescent jewels of dew, hang fairylike from the green leaves . . .
"By night . . . under the moon and stars the line of a battle, seen from a distance, is a red horizon, ominous and threatening, fringing a land of ruined villages and blazing funeral pyres. There the mirth of yesteryear lives only in a soldier's dreams, and the harvest of last autumn rots with withering men on the field of death and decay. Nature is busy through it all, the grasses grow green over the dead, and poppies fringe the parapets where the bayonets glisten, the frogs chuckle in the ponds . . .
"In it all, the watching, the waiting, and the warring, are the mystery, the enchantment, and the glamour of romance, and romance is dear to the heart of the young soldier."
More of Macgill's piece in Friday's column.
