UNCLE HARRY NEVER CAME HOME

A young man, his life ahead of him wounded at Gallipoli returns home to his grateful family. He recovers, re-enlists goes to Duntroon, receives his commission and departs for France where he wins the Military Cross and later is mortally wounded and bleeds out through a femoral artery .

My great uncle Harry was 22 years of age, as a child I thought of Harry as an adult, now as an elderly man I think of him as a brother to my sons, a boy who never came home. One of thousands of young men who had faced the blood, fire and flies of Gallipoli yet went back to war through a sense of duty.

Great uncle Harry has long since passed on. But the photograph above shows an area in Northern France near Michael St. Maur Sheil at the site of the Battle of the Somme. A century on the scars of the war Harry fought in remain.

Lest We Forget

By Robert Wall