10 Apr 2024
They Cried For Their Mothers - A Poignant Anzac Poem
They Cried for Their Mothers
The words in my poem They Cried for Their Mothers are an evocation of my personal connections to Gallipoli and explained as follows:
My Great, Great Uncle Herbert Hare and his brother Charles ‘I think of all those farm-boys’ landed at Gallipoli with the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on 25th April 1915.
A few months earlier Herbert had written home from a village called Mena in Egypt, the Christian pilgrimage centre in late antiquity, ‘in the lands of Bible Lore’ to advise (left) that he was
“leaving Egypt for the Dardenelles to fight the Turks”.
Lt Rev. Herbert Hare. Herbert was wounded at Gallipoli, repatriated in Malta then re-joined his battalion on the Western Front in France where he died on 8 August 2016 from severe gunshot wounds ‘in action…right arm blown off by shell…’ ‘smashed and shot and shattered’.
Official Australian war historian CEW Bean described the fighting in this area around Pozières ridge as "more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth". ‘.. the killing fields of France’.
Herbert’s brother, Charles, who was wounded twice at Gallipoli, and his other brother Henry, who served in France, both returned to Australia.
In the early 1970’s, renowned artist Lloyd Rees who, during a library lecture in Hobart, recounted the words of his brother in a letter home from the Western Front: “these boys are keeping me awake at night, crying for their mothers” ‘some cried for their dear mothers’.
Lloyd’s story was seared onto my consciousness as an expression of the unimaginable fear these boys were experiencing. ‘yet the din of war continues…as it echoes in my head’. Lloyd said that Vivien was later killed in the quagmire of the Somme ‘amongst the blood and guts and gore’.
I visited the Lone Pine cemetery on the Gallipoli Peninsula in 2019 and read the pained words inscribed on the headstones of our boy soldiers by their grieving families.
They Cried for Their Mothers includes words from these headstones (above) ‘when their lives had just begun’. I also stood below the sheer cliffs at Anzac Cove which these boys had to climb whilst under heavy enemy fire ‘they didn’t stand a chance’.
Tributes from both the Anzac and Turkish families to their fallen sons stand together on the Gallipoli Peninsula. (right)
They Cried for Their Mothers acknowledges the lost sons on all sides of the conflict. ‘I think of all the mothers…who lost a darling son’.
They Cried for Their Mothers also references Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Turkish commander at Gallipoli, and later to become known as the Father of Modern Turkey, who is said to have paid tribute to the loss of these young lives with the following words:
You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well. ‘our weeping sons…’.
He later said “the sound of those broken men crying for their mothers is something I shall always have in my ears”. ‘it’s not the sound of cannon…but our weeping sons instead’.
His famous painting merges the images of men and their weapons such that their very humanity appears subsumed into the machinery of war ‘all for King and Country’. His words and painting jolted my previously silent reflections of these boys at war whilst, at the same time, realising that there was a shared experience across generations and across countries and cultures.
I recently read the story of the WW1 English artist CRW Nevinson who painted Mitrallieuse (right) after his experiences of the Western Front.
He later said “the sound of those broken men crying for their mothers is something I shall always have in my ears”. ‘it’s not the sound of cannon…but our weeping sons instead’.
These unconnected emotional touchpoints were lodged in my private thoughts for decades as ‘echoes in my head’ until Anzac Day 2020 when the annual Dawn Service was cancelled due to the pandemic.
As usual, I rose early on that Anzac morning ‘on each and every Anzac Day…I rise before the dawn’ but was alone, in an empty city and at a loss as to what to do. So I walked to the Shrine in defiance of the police advice that everyone should stay away or risk arrest. The Shrine was Closed. Fenced-off. Forlorn. I felt emotionally truncated and denied ‘a nation’s time to mourn’.
I wandered around the area. Some people had trespassed and laid wreaths (right). I walked across to Ataturk’s Tribute near the Botanic Gardens.
Then, at that moment, I received Sam Paynter’s photo of the proud Brighton Digger standing that morning at the end of his driveway. The image was the embodiment of the Anzac spirit expressing ‘our sorrow and our pride’. A pandemic was not going to stop him from remembering ‘those who bravely died’.
It was in that instant that the words in They Cried for Their Mothers surged forth and I sat down and sketched them out hurriedly on a piece of paper, all the while looking at the empty, fenced-off Shrine thereby adding an eerie poignancy to the moment. ‘…the solemnity of…’
They Cried for Their Mothers is a requiem for lost lives and describes the emotional scarring that reverberates throughout the world to this day ‘yet the sound of war continues’. Still.
