Quotes of the Day

The first world war ought to be dead by now. The soldiers who fought in it, the generals and politicians who ran it, are gone. The flickering newsreels show a world we hardly recognize. On the battlefields, the trenches have scarred over, and grass covers the shrapnel and shells. The corpses are now crosses on cemetery lawns. For Australians, the war is not only 90 years in the past but immensely far away. Yet Anzac Day ceremonies and battlefield pilgrimages are more popular than ever—and even the indifferent can't ignore the memorials in every town. When Les Carlyon passes one, "I find I just stop and read the names," he says. "You might be in a little hamlet in the bush and you'll see the same name three times, and you think, They might be brothers, cousins. Maybe a father and his sons. It still affects you."

Carlyon has spent eight years erecting his own monument to those half-forgotten men. He started with Gallipoli (2001), about the doomed campaign that launched the Anzac legend. Now, in The Great War (Macmillan; 860 pages), he looks at the Australians on the western front, the 750-km line of trenches that snaked through France and Belgium. In the national memory of the war, Gallipoli is the big event. Places like Fromelles, Bullecourt, Mont Saint Quentin are "hardly spoken of," Carlyon writes. Yet they should be bywords for valor—and tragedy. Most of the 324,000 volunteers who sailed off to the war, and many who survived Gallipoli, served in the cold and mud of Flanders and the Somme. There "they did things Australians have never done since." One in five never came home. "There were so many of them," he writes, "and we never really saw them."

Conjuring them up among today's neat French farms was harder than on the barren cliffs of Anzac Cove. "You almost think, This couldn't be a killing ground, it's too pretty," says Carlyon, 64. A journalist of the old school, he believes in seeing what you write about. With history, he must be content to recreate things, like a detective at a crime scene. "You try to redraw the landscape," he writes. "You try to draw in trench lines ... and khaki bundles hung up on barbed wire." Near Ypres, he watched archaeologists probe the spot where a man's bones had been found. They unearthed a belt buckle, bullet casings, bits of leather. The unknown soldier kept coming into Carlyon's mind for weeks. "What was he doing when the shell hit?" he writes. "Who wept for him?" Near Pozières, whose capture in 1916 cost 8,000 Australian lives, Carlyon stood on a height known as the Windmill. From there, "you could almost sketch in what a German would have seen on the first day of the Somme," he says, hands sweeping an imaginary horizon. "The observation balloons, a great arc of gray smoke where the British were attacking on this very long front. You would have heard the artillery, seen the planes. It came alive at that moment."

As he talks, Carlyon screws himself up in his chair, crossing his lean legs and leaning forward in emphasis. His writing style is resolutely plain. "I've got a fear of decoration," he says. "I hate adverbs." That mix of passion and clarity gives you the sense of being led through a dark landscape by a guide who's determined to make you see what it looks like in sunlight. In short takes "like scenes in a film," Carlyon plunges from the tranquil present to the midst of battle and back. "All is quiet, and the place speaks to you," he writes at Villers-Bretonneux. "You can hear the chatter of machine guns and the shouts of men on the ground." He doesn't see himself as a military historian. "I'm telling a story," he says. But "I don't go beyond the facts." Digging like an archaeologist through mountains of material—histories, news reports, letters, diaries, photos—he picks out the details that bring the past, and the dead, to life. Brigadier-General Harold "Pompey" Elliott, a solicitor, describes men "going down before the machine guns like corn before the reaper ... I am sure there was some plan at the back of the attack but it is difficult to know what it was." Sergeant Archie Barwick, a farmer, writes of the German bombardment at Pozières: "Men were driven stark staring mad ... Any amount of them could be seen crying & sobbing like children." Corporal Arthur Thomas, a tailor, writes home on his 40th birthday, "I should be out of it by now, but men are wanted, so will stick it to the end." Sgt. Jimmy Downing recalls the fighting at Villers-Bretonneux in 1918: "We charged—charged like hell hounds ... We were Berserk, every one of us." After the battle of Fromelles, where Australia lost 2,000 men in a night, medic Alfred Langan records the courage of the wounded: "God it made you humble and brought tears to your eyes."

In the four years it took him to research and write The Great War—"my subterranean world," he calls the seven-days-a-week slog—Carlyon spent more time with the men he wrote about than with his friends. "Reading their letters, you get to know them," he says, "and in a funny way it makes you very sad when you find out they're going to die." He was especially fond of Philip Schuler, a handsome, talented journalist who went to Gallipoli as a war correspondent, then enlisted in the Army and was sent to France. Writing home from Messines, he signed off: "Keep on remembering." Four days later, he was killed. "There were so many like him that we lost," Carlyon says. They belong to "a lost world, a world where people were simpler and braver and more generous of spirit. They talked about duty as if it meant something."

The racetrack used to be Carlyon's beat, but a visit to Gallipoli in 1998 left him "completely besotted with the place. I wanted to know more and more." For a writer, war offers an incomparable canvas, he says: "It's life and death. Everything's there." The titanic scale of the First World War and its domination by machines—artillery, bombs, tanks, planes, machine guns—only underscored the humanity of the combatants. For Carlyon the war was "the biggest tragedy in our history." But those who took part did "astonishing things," he writes—like the capture of the heavily defended fortress of Mont St. Quentin by a few hundred Diggers. What Carlyon writes of them could stand for all the Australians on the western front: "The spirit of these men was extraordinary." And his book is a hymn to it.

• Elizabeth Keenan
• The author of a bestselling account of Gallipoli looks at Australians' equally valiant but less heralded deeds on the western front