Poem - Oliver Hogue

Anzac

By

Oliver Hogue

Ah, well! We’re gone! We’re out of it now. We’ve got something else to do.

But we all look back from the transport deck to the land-line far and blue:

Shore and valley are faded; fading are cliff and hill;

The land-line we called “Anzac” . . . and we’ll call it “Anzac” still!

This last six months, I reckon, ‘ll be most of my life to me:

Trenches and shells, and snipers, and the morning light on the sea,

Thirst in the broiling mid-day, shouts and gasping cries,

Big guns’ talk from the water, and . . . flies, flies, flies, flies, flies!

And all of our trouble wasted! All of it gone for nix!

Still . . . we kept our end up – and some of the story sticks.

Fifty years from on in Sydney they’ll talk of our first big fight,

And even in little old, blind old England possibly some one might.

But, seeing we had to clear, for we couldn’t get on no more,

I wish that, instead of last night, it had been the night before.

Yesterday poor Jim stopped one. Three of us buried Jim –

I know a woman in Sydney that thought the world of him.

She was his mother. I'll tell her – broken with grief and pride –

“Mother” was Jim's last whisper. That was all. And died.

Brightest and bravest and best of us all – none could help but to love him –

And now . . . he lies there under the hill, with a wooden cross above him.

That's where it gets me twisted. The rest of it I don't mind,

But it don't seem right for me to be off, and to leave old Jim behind.

Jim, just quietly sleeping; and hundreds and thousands more;

For graves and crosses are mighty thick from Quinn's Post down to the shore!

Better there than in France, though, with the German's dirty work:

I reckon the Turk respects us, as we respect the Turk;

Abdul's a good, clean fighter – we've fought him, and we know –

And we've left a letter behind us to tell him we found him so.

Not just to say, precisely, “Good-bye,” but “Au revoir”!

Somewhere or other we’ll meet again, before the end of the war

But I hope it’ll be in a wider place, with a lot more room on the map,

And the airmen over the fight that day’ll see a bit of a scrap!

Meanwhile, here’s health to the Navy, that took us there, and away;

Lord! They’re miracle-workers – and fresh ones every day!

My word! Those Midis in the cutters! Aren’t they properly keen!

Don’t ever say England’s rotten – or not to us, who’ve seen!

Well! We’re gone. We’re out of it all! We’ve somewhere else to fight.

And we strain our eyes from the transport deck, but “Anzac” is out of sight!

Valley and shore are vanished; vanished are cliff and hill;

And we’ll never go back to “Anzac” . . . But I think that some of us will!