Читать книгу There and Back: The Story of an Australian Soldier 1915-35 - Edward Lording - Страница 3
Оглавление"
FOREWORD
by
L. A. ROBB, C.M.G.,
State President, R.S.S.I.L.A., N.S.W.
I could hope that those who have not known war will be privileged to read this really sincere and unvarnished autobiography of a young soldier who, like very many of his boyhood fellows, was cruelly shattered, in war. Something very much more than a plain simple tale this; something more than a wartime autobiography. It breathes a spirit, a faith, and an idealism that used to be—and still is.
A war story, to sadden and to inspire, by one blasted and wrecked in that disaster which was Fromelles in 1916; by one whose optimism has survived uncomprehended tortures since the tide of battle left him stranded, a pathetic fragment of humanity, on the forbidding shores of post-war. A man who is still the light-hearted, fearless boy that used to be, looking back, glad and proud, while not ignoring the tragedy and the futilities, that he was there.
It is a story that, in parts, might perhaps have been written by any one of the 316,000 members of the Australian Imperial Force who felt that their duty called overseas in 1914-18, could their pens trace the inspiration—convert the inner thought. Here is real atmosphere, so elusive always, and difficult to capture and imprison on the printed page—the atmosphere which only the soldier knew and none other can ever create.
The spirit that was of the famous battalions permeates this book and there is stark reality, humour, and incident that take the memory back down the dimming avenue of the past to vivid, wild, joyous, bitter, tragic years, the axis upon which the thoughts and lives of all ex-service men turn.
Here is also an epic of indomitable courage in the after-war, and of a happy spirit, invincible in torture and suffering that cannot even be imagined by those whose bodies have not been torn and hacked in the ghastliness of war and brought again and again to the operating tables, and who have not waged grim war with the leering, luring, drug fiends.
A soldier's soul is here bared.
L. A. Ross.
Sydney, 17 September, 1935.
