Could We Accept The Miracle Of

The War Dead Returning?

I found myself thinking of the Anzac missing this morning more than of the Anzac dead. The missing are of course dead too, but we refuse, even after 38 years, to accept the fact. The imagination keeps returning to impossible possibilities and the heart sighing for miracles which the mind immediately sweeps away. I am not one of the parents condemned to these recurring tortures, but I know that if I were I would be clinging still to that hopeless hope. 1 would not believe, but I should never close the door on belief absolutely and forever. I should not be strong enough. Week after week, month after month, year after year I should find myself surrendering to mocking deceptions which mv will would never be ruthless enough to destroy.

And if the miracle did happen, who would be strong enough to accept a? What would the mother do, or the father, if a man of 60 walked in after 38 years and said “I am your son”? What would the boy himself do when he saw his parents? Could emotion or reason bridge such a gap?

One of the men not seen after the Gallipoli landing went to school with me. We were not only boys together: we grew up only a few miles apart and only a few weeks separated us when we went into camp.

I came out of camp without going overseas. He went and disappeared without trace, vanished during the landing and was never seen again or reported or clearly accounted for. What should I do if he walked in on me today— not the generous, open, smiling boy I knew, and have so often seen since, but an ageing, anxious, stooped man with white hair, the sparkle gone from his eyes and the spring from his step, worried about his food or his family or his bronchitis or his bank balance, and remembering me only as a shadow from his vanished youth? i T ] ie ,f ntry for Anzac Day, April 25, 1953, quoted in Oliver Duffs “Shepherd's Calendar ’. Angus and Robertson Ltd. Reviewed previous page P s