Barbed Wire and Roses

(and a surprising welcome on the former First World War battlefields for Aussie visitors)

In 2001 my wife and I were in London, and went to Paris by the Eurostar to meet up with our son and daughter-in-law. In company with them we visited the towns along the Somme. Predictably we toured the cemeteries, the monuments and war museums, and I learnt for the first time of the great affection the French hold for Australians who fought on the western front of the 1914-18 war.

There is a school in the town of Villers-Bretonneux that has a sign the length of its playground with just three words NEVER FORGET AUSTRALIA. Each morning the young children begin their day by singing Waltzing Matilda, the sound so rare and beautiful in the French language. There are streets in other districts named after our towns, or after native flowers like Waratahs; a council chambers flies an Aussie flag, another bears an engraving of our coat of arms. And there are countless memorial plaques like the one at Pozieres in celebration of a victory — by Australian troops who fell more thickly on this ridge than on any other field of war.

We so often think of Gallipoli, and tend to overlook that Australians came to France, many of them after evacuation from the defeat in the Dardanelles, and died here in their thousands. For what? For an empire of which we were a rather distant part? For a King across the world, to whom we felt we owed allegiance? Or was it, at the start, a great adventure in a time when the rest of the world was a romantic place, and the chance of crossing oceans to be there and take part was irresistible?

It was a thought like this that started me on the task of trying to create a character who might have been one of those soldiers. It’s never an easy process this first step, for this is the person you’re going to live with and dream about for the next many months or years — however long it takes. You need to think a lot about him or her, this central character, because if you get it wrong you can find yourself tearing up an aborted manuscript and wasting a serious amount of time.

I called him Stephen Conway, because I’d written about a family called Conway in a book called The Currency Lads, and I wanted him to be a descendant. (This was a minor conceit that has little relevance to the story.) I made him nineteen years old, a law student in his first year at university. I did this because I wanted him to come to an informed decision about enlisting; it meant putting a career on hold. So did he join up out of patriotic fervour, or the prospect of a “great adventure”?

Perhaps a little of both. To me it seems logical that in those days, when travel abroad was an expensive impossibility for ordinary people, that young men did visualise the war as a chance to temporarily give up their normal lives and see the world. After all, everyone thought it would be over by Christmas.

I also gave Stephen a girlfriend of the same age whom he marries before embarkation, and their three day honeymoon, which is all the army will allow him, produces a child when he is overseas.

So that was how it started, back in 2001. A holiday tour of the district that is now so picturesque, where towns have been rebuilt and cattle graze in lush green fields, and where it is difficult to believe that millions died there in the four horrific years of war. That sentiment remained with me, and became a driving reason for this book.

I wanted to write an anti-war novel. It has taken several drafts. I made construction changes then did another two drafts in consultation with my publisher and editor who have been wonderfully supportive. Hence the relatively long six years since my late wife and I first saw the towns along the Somme, where we marvelled at how human beings had survived such a dreadful time.