Word: anzacs
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Each April 25, on ANZAC Day, Australians honor the valor of their soldiers in wars past and present. In recent years, thousands of troops-more than at any time since Vietnam-have served in harm's way in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their actions have won praise at home and abroad. But one soldier's fate suggests that once they leave the military, some veterans face a hard and lonely time...
...flickering newsreels show a world we hardly recognize. On the battlefields, the trenches have scarred over, and grass covers the shrapnel and shells. The corpses are now crosses on cemetery lawns. For Australians, the war is not only 90 years in the past but immensely far away. Yet Anzac Day ceremonies and battlefield pilgrimages are more popular than ever?and even the indifferent can't ignore the memorials in every town. When Les Carlyon passes one, "I find I just stop and read the names," he says. "You might be in a little hamlet in the bush...
...Carlyon has spent eight years erecting his own monument to those half-forgotten men. He started with Gallipoli (2001), about the doomed campaign that launched the Anzac legend. Now, in The Great War (Macmillan; 860 pages), he looks at the Australians on the western front, the 750-km line of trenches that snaked through France and Belgium. In the national memory of the war, Gallipoli is the big event. Places like Fromelles, Bullecourt, Mont Saint Quentin are "hardly spoken of," Carlyon writes. Yet they should be bywords for valor?and tragedy. Most of the 324,000 volunteers who sailed...
...Conjuring them up among today's neat French farms was harder than on the barren cliffs of Anzac Cove. "You almost think, This couldn't be a killing ground, it's too pretty," says Carlyon, 64. A journalist of the old school, he believes in seeing what you write about. With history, he must be content to recreate things, like a detective at a crime scene. "You try to redraw the landscape," he writes. "You try to draw in trench lines ... and khaki bundles hung up on barbed wire." Near Ypres, he watched archaeologists probe the spot where...
...when he returned in 1946. The pale gums and sheep fields were just the same, but the VC changed Kenna's life for good. In between raising four children and being town hall curator for 34 years, he's met royalty, traveled the world for reunions and ceremonies, led Anzac Day marches, given countless talks, sat for his portrait, and been depicted on postage stamps. When the Duke of Gloucester presented what Kenna calls "the gong," Marjorie was only 20 and not sure she'd cope with all the attention. "But Ted said I should just be myself, and that...