AUSTRALIA AT WAR
A WINTER RECORD
MADE BY
WILL DYSON
ON THE SOMME AND AT YPRES
During the Campaigns of 1916 and 1917
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
CECIL PALMER & HAYWARD
Oakley House Bloomsbury Street
LONDON W.C. 1
FIRST
EDITION
:1918:
COPY-
RIGHT
CAHILL & CO., LTD., PRINTERS, LONDON AND DUBLIN.
DEDICATION
TO THE MEN OF THE A.I.F.
To you who tread that dire itinerary
Who go like pedlars down the routes of Death,
Grey in its bloody traffic, but who gaze
Inured upon its scarlet merchandise
With eyes too young to have yet wholly shed
The pity moving roundness of the child—
To you, like cave men rough-hewn of the mud,
Housed in a world made primal mud again,
With terrors of that legendary past,
Reborn to iron palpability,
Roaring upon the earth with every wind—
To you who go to do the work of wolves
Burdened like mules, and bandying with Death—
To hide the silent places of the soul—
The ribald jests that half convince the blind
It does not wholly anguish you to die—
To you who through those days upon the Somme,
About you still the odours of our bush,
I saw come down, with eyes like tired mares,
Along the jamming traffic of Mametz,
Creeping each man, detached among his kind,
Along a separate Hell of memory—
To you, and you, I dedicate these things
That have no merit save that they, for you,
Were woven with what truth there was in me
Where you went up, with Death athwart the wind
Poised like a hawk a-strike—to save the world,
Or else to succour poor old bloody Bill
Beleaguered in a shell hole on the ridge.
W. D.
ARTIST’S NOTE.
This selection of drawings, made during the winters at Ypres and on the Somme reflects more the misery and the depression of the material conditions of these campaigns than it does any of their exaltations or their cheerfulnesses.
Here and now—here on the new Somme and now when Spring is about us in a land upon which War has not had time to fully wreak his wicked will—these two latter qualities are dominant. In the spirit of Dernancourt and of Villers-Bretonneux the selection made from my drawings may seem to overstress this winter note. They are not primarily cheerful—but it is open to doubt whether we are behaving generously in demanding that the soldier who is saving the world for us should provide us with a fund of light entertainment while doing it.
The truth is that War has many moods and nothing more is hoped than that the selection made from my drawings and my notes may record something of the one of its moods to which I was temperamentally most attuned during those bad seasons on the Somme and at Ypres.
W. D.,
France,
May, 1918.