Across Australia on 25th April every year, people stop to remember the fallen soldiers of past.
My personal reflections of this national day are a bit more real.
My father-in-law was a World War 2 veteran who served in the Australian Army. He enlisted in the army in 1941 with visions, like most young soldiers I guess, of serving his country and having some type of adventure. In October of that same year, 6 months after his enlistment, he was marched into Singapore to fight. As fate would have it, he was still serving there when Japanese soldiers invaded in 1942 and consequently he was captured as a prisoner-of-war in February of that year.
His war service record from this date on reads like a travel brochure for the horrors of POWs and include places such as Changi, Tavoy Burma, Burma Railway, Thailand, Saigon, Singapore and Omuta. His illnesses during this time included dysentery, malaria, pellagra and beri-beri. I can only speculate from this information as to what he lived through.....at most of my speculation is scary.
When the war was over he came back to Australia and later met and married my mother-in-law. To say that he was a broken man is, I guess, something that I'll never know. What I do know is that throughout his married life, he had emotional issues that consequently affected his entire family. He also had long term sight problems that could have been attributed to nutritional starvation. And I'm certain that there were other medical conditions that I haven't been told about. Given the events that he'd experienced and lived through, it amazes me that he survived at all.
I didn't know my father-in-law for long before he died from complications following a cancer operation. My impressions of him were that he was a hard man who had had a hard life (a 'glass half empty' kinda guy). He lived to an old age with lingering memories of a time in his life that made the history books. He never spoke to me of his ordeal although there were times that he talked about it to my husband. Regardless though, his DNA lives and breathes through my children and his survival fated their existence.
So on Anzac Day we think of him and those like him who served (and are serving) to defend the beliefs of their country. We remember victims and survivors and that even today, victims and survivors are the side effect of war.
Picture: Anzac Biscuits that we made today to commemorate Anzac soldiers of past.
