Recollections of a Soldier's Life

Here’s another book that I missed along the way. Although the title suggests a short memoir, this little book, published in 1918, contains two short fictional items along with a collection of verse. The first short story, Four Soldiers, is set at Gallipoli, the formative campaign of the Australian Imperial Force, on 6 August 1915. It tells of an afternoon meal of goat curry shared by an Australian soldier and three Indian soldiers with very little English and the humorous conversation that is exchanged between them in spite of the language gap. That night the Australian with the representative name Digger (the Australian slang term for a soldier) was killed in the first exchanges of the Battle of Lone Pine. The second short story, The Game, describes an infantry assault on a German trench on the Western Front. As they rest after the assault, one of the soldiers tells his comrades “a story of a greater, more silent battle than [this] one... a story of hardship, work and privation” back in Australia.

The author, Herbert Scanlon (born 18 September 1897), grew up in rural Victoria. When enlisting in the Australian Imperial Force in July 1915, he claimed to be 21 and amended his surname to Sanlon. Serving with the 59th Battalion, he was wounded in France on 19 July 1916 and was discharged from hospital in October to return to Australia. Unable to return to farming, he set about making a living as a writer. His first publication (this one) appeared in 1918. He went on to write dozens of short stories, many of them with a wartime setting. The numerous pamphlet-style publications were sold in the 1920s by door-to-door salesman drawn from the ranks of returned soldiers, many of whom were unable to make a living in a conventional way due to physical injury or mental health conditions.

The author accurately describes the preparation for the bayonet charge on the Western Front:
“Again we get the order, ‘Fix bayonets!’ This order is the height of a soldier's ambition. What we have been trained up to is to take this order. ‘Fix bayonets!' calmly and as a matter of course. This is the moment men have waited for since enlisting. How many men have tried to picture this moment when training on the sands of Egypt? It could be fittingly described as the climax of a soldier's life. What will follow in the next half-hour is what the soldier has been trained to; and that, in a nutshell, is to kill, as quickly as possible, and, at the same time, to be careful of his own life. Is it any wonder men's hands tremble and shake as they fix bayonets to their rifles?”