It was a mere footnote. A scrap of reportage in a book about Australians in the Great War. The book was forgotten but the note remained in my memory: in a Sydney repatriation hospital a sad queue of people would file past to view an AIF soldier motionless and silent in his bed in the hope of identifying him as their son, brother, husband or lover.
The boy had been retrieved unconscious from the mud of Flanders and shipped home. But that simple and abject fact raised so many questions. How could he survive the injuries—presumably from continued shelling—and the long journey home sustained by nourishment only through primitive tubes? Why Sydney and not another city? Who had recorded him as coming from New South Wales? And what were the thoughts of these men and women who had received the dreaded cable informing them of the loss of their son and were now clinging to a vague hope that the boy may be theirs?
Such was the basis of Patient 12. A body in a bed. A jaded hospital doctor trying to do something decent. A small collection of folk taking a deep breath before stepping through a curtain to look at a body beyond ready identification. The hospital full of men with ruined bodies and disordered minds.
The play offers no more than a snapshot of postwar Australia, of a country injured and confused by the carnage of 1914–18. No family was immune from its effects. No town could escape the memories of loss and civil division. Time seemed incapable of healing; in many repat hospitals, in places similar to Caulfield, men would see out their years in both physical and mental agony. Bedridden men were still coughing out the bloodied contents of their lungs decades after their return.
In the light of a trend to a mindless celebration of ‘blood sacrifice’, of our nation being formed in battle, it can be argued that nothing good, not one damned thing, came out of World War One. This play is a pillar of that contention.
Kevin Summers
March 2014