100 years but not forgotten...

Day 2,445, 02:38 • Published in Australia Australia • by Send love to Plato


G’day Aussies,

Well i thought i’d put a sombre break into recent eAus proceedings with just a few thoughts on recent days that have passed. On the 28th July it was noted all around the world as the 100th anniversary of the start of World War One, The Great War as it was then known. A war to end all wars apparently and although it never reached the brutality of genocide and pure hatred of World War Two it did leave countless millions of soldiers and innocents dead, families without husbands, incomes and support and tens of millions of children without fathers...something which impacted on generation after generation. Towns and cities that were on the front lines of the conflict were wiped from the map as if they never existed and still even now artifacts and more sadly the remains of brave soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice are still being uncovered.

It was sad that not much was made of this date but in the next few months you’ll see newspaper articles in that thing we call real life, documentaries and other forms of remembrance in the media. It is easy to brush it aside and ignore it...after all it was a century ago so who cares right?

One thing I would suggest is that you go talk to the eldest member of your family and you might be surprised to have had a relative who fought in that conflict, go look in your local library at the cencus records and military records of Ancestory.com (i know they are free to use in UK Libraries and hopefully in Australian ones too) and you might have had links to the Great War that you never knew existed.



I was always fascinated by WW1...if fascinated can be the right word, ever since i watched a documentary at school called the Lions lead by Donkeys (a term used regarding allied troops) and never thought much of it. My family were of coal mining stock and had been for countless generations, still i watched more documentaries, brought books and became interested in other fields of conflict. Then one day a few years before he died my father mentioned his grandfather had died in the Great War, this was quite a bombshell and so i began researching this man who i knew nothing about, but who’s bloodline ran through me.

Within a short period i uncovered he was a tunneller in the Royal Engineers 175th Tunnelling Corp and worked on packing explosives underground underneath the German front lines, he was posted at Ypres and worked on Hill 60 (some of you Aussies may have well heard of that region as Australian troops were later posted there). He left behind a wife and five children, one who was 5 weeks old at the time of his death when he finally succumbed to his wounds from shrapnel in his hip. The more i researched the more of a heartbreaking story it was, especially to his now widow who had to write to the war office for her war pension after they contacted her requesting birth certificates for her children. His company’s war diary recorded the day he was injured along with a couple of other soldiers, and it leaves you with some cold thoughts when you see a copy of the bluntly written telegraph his wife would have received with news of his death.

I urge all who read this to just spend an hour to go look, research, talk to relatives and you could be surprised that you had a relative serve or sadly die in the Great War. This can lead to avenues of interest on battles he might have served, areas he was positioned, diaries and letters published by soldiers in the same regiment...some of it really does leave you at a loss for words when you read what these poor souls experienced and had to live through, and they are only just a few clicks away on the internet.

So, if possible spare a thought because the Great War robbed a generation of innocence, destroyed families and lives and sadly laid the foundations to the greatest slaughter of lives that mankind has ever seen between 1939-45. Whether it be Gallipoli, Ypres or the Somme chances are you have a relative that witnessed that carnage and that’s a story that deserves to be at least given respect.

100 years ago to this year the guns came alive and countless millions fought to survive...