The war took charge of countless thousands of people’s lives and reshaped them. The names of Gallipoli, Messines, Menin Road, Passchendaele, Bullecourt and Pozières became etched in local memories as places of death. Everyone knew a neighbour who had been killed and mothers prayed every night that their boys would come home. Some prayers were answered but others were not so lucky. In 1918, Mrs Ada Wellings, a distraught mother of Glebe, composed this in memoriam to her son, two years after his death. The poem would reappear frequently in funeral notices testifying to other soldiers’ mothers’ grief.
Oh the anguish of the mother
Oh the bitter tears she shed
When she heard her boy was missing
And she wondered ‘Is he dead?’
Oh the weeks and months of torture.
Oh the agony and pain
And she wept and prayed and wondered
Would he come to her again
‘Killed in Action’ came still later
Oh the awful truth is bare.
The funeral of returned soldier John Lynch in 1918. Lynch enlisted with Carmichael’s First Thousand and was repatriated after being gassed in France. He left a widow and five children who lived at 13 Junction Street, Forest Lodge. (SMH,19 June 1918)