ANZAC DAY

and I am wondering about "unknown" soldiers.

There was a news piece recently about the way in which non-European soldiers who served in European armies have been treated in the past. It is the sort of history which troubles me deeply.

The Senior Cat never served in the armed services. He tried to join the navy - it being clan tradition to join the navy rather than the army. They turned him down because of his eyesight and his very flat feet. In the end he wasn't sorry. He volunteered out of a sense of duty rather than desire. WWII was on and I suspect many young men did the same. My godfather was one who did go to sea. 

But the Senior Cat was sent to work in a munitions factory, something he loathed and detested. He was not given a choice but he was not happy at the thought he was helping to produce anything which could be used to kill other people. One of his motivations for going teaching was because he wanted children to know there are alternatives to violence.

And in his first teaching appointment, to a tiny one teacher school in a remote settlement on the rail line that runs north-south through the centre of Downunder, he came across one of those unknown soldiers. There was an old man had served in WWI and was legally blind. He  had returned from the war and gone to work on a cattle station. He lived in a tin hut he had made himself and an indigenous woman cared for him. 

Nobody knew her name. She had nothing to do with the local indigenous community. All the Senior Cat ever found out was that this woman cared for the old man because her husband had also gone to war - and not come back. The old man had cared for him when he was dying and then seen to it that he was buried in one of those far distant foreign fields without any marker. He had brought back the few personal belongings and searched for the woman. Now all the years later she was watching out for him. She lived away from him in another tin hut. The Senior Cat said she never spoke about herself, indeed rarely spoke at all even to the old man she cared for. 

I often wonder what she was really like. Who was she? How did she really cope with losing a husband who must have been young? How did she feel about his remains being buried in an unmarked grave? Were the war conditions really so bad and those men thought so little of that they could not even be acknowledged by name? 

The Senior Cat used to go and read the papers to the old man. They talked in the way that men can sometimes talk about the things that really matter.  The old man and his carer have stayed in the Senior Cat's memory as people who really mattered but were largely ignored by everyone else.

The old man and his carer will have gone long ago. It's too late for them but I hope something may come of a new push to recognise those men who gave their lives. They don't deserve to be "unknown".