Michael O’Donnell
20th Rein 14th Batt, 1916
It is 100 years since the end of WW1. That seems like a long time ago. When I explain that my grandfather’s elder brother Michael O’Donnell was killed in that war at Bullecourt, France in 1917, the story loses the dust of history and sounds closer to us.
This is the story about a young man who was Court Martialed 3 times, held with enemy prisoners and finally allowed to go to war following a Senate Inquiry.
It is also a story about duty, loyalty and honour and how much we Aussies have changed today.
…………………………………………………
Michael O’Donnell
Postcard 1911
Remembering 1910 March Melbourne to Bendigo
The sound that distinguishes Anzac Day from others is the bugle call. The solitary call of the Last Post reverberates down the generations as a mournful cry for the loss of war.
In the First World War it was the loss of so many young lives and for what? A toehold on some peninsula, a futile charge into no man’s land? The loss swept into every Australian household. Mothers lost their sons.
Young women lost brothers, boyfriends, lovers, husbands. And for fathers, adding to the pain of loss, was the bitter aftertaste of guilt summarised so succinctly by Rudyard Kipling, who lost his own son in that war:
………………………………………………………………………
“If any question why we died/Tell them, because our fathers lied.”
Yet the generation of Australians who served in the First World War had qualities we no longer possess and this is our loss.
Read Full Article here: Echo of the Bugle
Read Edited article published in the herald Sun Anzac Day, 25th April, 2007: Echo of the Bugle
