A few months earlier, Edith Bridges heard that her husband Sir William Throsby Bridges, the first Commandant of Duntroon and Commander of the First AIF, had been shot by a sniper while inspecting his troops at Gallipoli less than a month after the landing on April 25, 1915. Even after more than 30 years married to a soldier, Edith never recovered from the shock of the loss of her husband.

They were among the many thousands of Australian women who lost their husbands during World War I. Widows were left devastated and unprepared to face the years of responsibility ahead without a breadwinner and often without a home of their own. Many, particularly young widows with children, had to fall back on support from their extended families. Sabina Dale and her baby returned to board with her mother.

Sabina Daffodil Wootten and Charles Coning Dale married in Melbourne on November 10, 1914, a week after Dale graduated from Duntroon Military College in Canberra and enlisted in the First AIF in C Squadron, 8th Light Horse. He had been training at the College since 1912 and was in the guard of honour of cadets at the naming of Canberra as the National Capital on March 12, 1913. Once war was declared his course was accelerated so that graduating officers could serve with the first AIF. Dale landed on Gallipoli in May 1915 and was promoted Adjutant a few months before he was killed.

Sabina was pregnant when she married, and gave birth to their daughter, Valda Rita, in Melbourne on April 15, 1915. She was granted a war widows' pension at the rate specified for the widow of a lieutenant and an allowance for Valda and returned to live with her mother to whom she paid board.

In 1919, four-year-old Valda became ill with what was diagnosed as diphtheria but is now known to have been meningitis which left lasting effects. On June 18, 1923 when she was seven, Valda was admitted to Beechworth Mental Asylum where she died in 1957, aged 42. Following these years of tragedy, Sabina began a new life in 1924 when she married Rennie Wright Henderson and had five children. She died in Melbourne in 1981, aged 85.

Lady Bridges was much more aware of the risks of military service than Sabina Dale, but she never recovered from the death of her husband and the strain of the very public ceremonies that followed the return of his body to Australia and his burial in a grave on Mt Pleasant overlooking Duntroon. She resigned from her position as the first president of the Friendly Union of Soldiers' Wives and Mothers and withdrew from public life, telling her friend, the founder of the organisation Lady Helen Munro Ferguson, wife of the governor-general, that she had become just "a poor thing" unable to carry out her duties. For the rest of the war she worried about her son Major Noel Bridges. When he was wounded on the Western Front in 1918, her daughter Dorothy begged the army to keep his name out of published casualty lists because her mother was not strong enough to be told the news.

Lady Bridges had already lost three of her seven children: a son soon after birth, a twin daughter who drowned in Sydney Harbour while celebrating her seventh birthday and a son aged 17 from peritonitis while at boarding school in England. She had also survived a difficult childhood. Born near Moruya in 1862, Edith Lillian Francis was the third child of her mother's second marriage. Following the suicide of her father when she was about 18 months old, her mother, unable to support all her children, left Edith with a childless couple at Batemans Bay who raised her.

Lady Bridges died in Melbourne in 1926 aged 64 and is buried in St John's Churchyard, Canberra. Financially she was well off compared with other war widows as by a special Act of Parliament she was granted the large sum of £4500 in compensation for the loss of her husband.

All over Australia, war widows struggled to adjust to lives without the emotional and financial support of husbands. The war pension for widows of privates was set initially at only £1 per week, making them reliant on family help or charity. Some remarried, some spent their lives looking after their children with the help of Repatriation Department allowances towards their education. Others started home-based industries. Isabella McKean, the widow of a soldier who had worked as a plasterer at Duntroon before the war, started a poultry farm north of Sydney and Grace Yates, the widow of a former Duntroon sergeant-major, took in paying boarders. Other widows trained for new occupations such as milliners.

Their stories are told in War Widows of the ACT: The Forgotten Legacy of World War I, an online exhibition which will be among the achievements of the Australian Women's Archives Project at womenaustralia.info.