Rodney Smith’s generation lived with the memory of war. His mother lost two of her brothers. Edward Sadler was killed on 27 January 1917 in France, and four months later her older brother John died at the Second Battle of Bullecourt.

‘My mother’s family did not forget,’ Rodney remembers. ‘The feeling of sorrow and loss was obvious to me even as a small child. There were two large portraits of John and Ed where everyone could see them in my grandfather’s house in Warrnambool.’ Rodney’s mother would mourn the loss of those two boys to the very end of her life. Both were in their early twenties when they died.

The feeling of sorrow and loss: A portrait of Edward Sadler, a dairyman from Allansford who went to war. A portrait of Edward alongside his brother John hung in the family home in Warrnambool in Victoria and Rodney remembered the pictures vividly from when he was a child. Edward was buried in Péronne. A few personal effects – some photographs, cards, a watch, wallet and devotional books were sent home to the family. DA15403 courtesy Australian War Memorial.

The two portraits of long dead soldiers were not the only reminders of the war to young Rodney. The maimed and the crippled were a frequent sight all throughout Rodney’s childhood, blokes hobbling on ‘crutches with one of his trousers pinned up’ or ‘the sleeve of a shirt pinned because the arm was missing’. Rodney remembered the gassed men wheezing for breath, and the blind who stumbled about in their darkness. But he also remembered a rare kind of courage:

I was about 12 at the time when I stopped to watch a game of bowls. One of the players appeared to be a dwarf but I soon saw that he had lost both legs at about the knees. His legs ended in what looked like rubber cushions and he used all four limbs to get from end to end. He protected his hands with wooden blocks which looked like black board dusters, which in those days were common.

This chap saw me looking at him and in a cheery voice called out ‘I have an advantage over the others, I am closer to the ball’. I still remember that – in quite fine detail – even after more than seventy years.

Rodney started work straight after leaving school. It was 1948 and he came into contact with a number of old ‘Digs’ on an almost daily basis. He realises now that what he saw in their behaviour was the result of what we’d now call post-traumatic stress. Back then they were just called ‘nervy’.

‘M’ was a sergeant in the First AIF in France and was wounded more than once. He wore evidence of one such wound on his face: a massive scar that extended across his face from almost ear to ear. He said something which shocked me at the time – the subject of suicide had come up when he said that he had been buried in a trench collapse, a result of a shell burst nearby, ‘I had a side arm and if I had been able to get at it I would have shot myself’. He did not want to suffocate but a couple of his mates dug him out. ‘M’ drank during the day – every working day it seemed. His job allowed him to move around the city so he made a few ‘calls’ as he referred to them. He did his job reasonably. He fathered a family and seemed to be on good terms with them.

‘H’ was another case altogether. He was able to function for much of the day but lost it sometimes. He was a bad alcoholic who secreted his bottles of booze in hiding places, which became known to the boss ‘F’, who took them into his office to be returned at knock-off time. ‘H’ had lost most of his teeth when hit in the face by a sniper’s bullet.

‘F’ protected ‘M’ and ‘H’ from the powers and understood their suffering. ‘F’ had served in the RAN in the First World War and was typical of how the ‘Returned Men’ looked out for one another.

Rodney began to work with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs in the 1970s. He can still remember many of the cases he dealt with. His job was to help veterans in a broad sense to cope with their injuries. And it wasn’t the physical wounds that were the hardest to deal with.

‘P’ was the eldest of a large family who showed great promise before the war. He was commissioned in France but failed to ‘settle’ back in Australia. He retreated to a bush shack and lived the life of a hermit, except for weekly visits by members of his family who kept him supplied with the necessities of life. He was one of the sad cases, one of the men whose remembering overwhelmed them.

There were men who ‘just couldn’t cope’. What they had seen and what they had done was simply too much for them. And there were some, he continued, whose memories were so ‘stark’ that society came to fear them.

These were the ones who we kept out of sight and out of mind. Most were institutionalised, at Mont Park, for example. While at Veterans’ Affairs, I stumbled across a number of cases involving men in institutions overseas who never came home. We forgot these men completely. And their war never ended.

We forgot these men completely: Amongst the cases Rodney dealt with were the physical and psychological casualties of war; men who lived in repat hospitals, were incarcerated in asylums, or spent years confined to iron beds like this one. Cases that, as Rodney puts it, became almost too painful for society to remember. By exhibiting items like these, Melbourne Museum’s ‘Love and Sorrow’ exhibition invites visitors to grapple with the difficult memories of war. Courtesy Bruce Scates.

Rodney left Veterans’ Affairs in 1981. By that time he had worked his way through the ranks of the public service and gained a wealth of experience. Early in his career he went on a cycling tour of France, and journeyed across the same land many of those ‘old Digs’ had fought on. ‘My conversion to pacifism happened then,’ he told us, ‘when I rode my bike through the mile upon mile of cemeteries that surround Verdun and read the words on headstone after headstone.’

Now in his eighties, Rodney Smith can still visualise those portraits of John and Ed hanging in his grandfather’s hallway, two bright young lives full of hope and promise snuffed out on the battlefields of France. And for Rodney there’s still a purpose in remembering:

I fear that ‘Lest we Forget’ has taken on a very different meaning than when it first entered our consciousness. As we hurry towards 2015 it seems it is being used to promote commercial ventures . . . My concern is that the awfulness of war and its aftermath are slipping away and even conflict is becoming glamorous again. The men of 1914 deserve better than that. At the very least we owe them honesty.1

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story is based on a letter written by Rodney Smith to Bruce Scates in response to the One Hundred Stories Project. It also draws on the service dossiers of John and Edward Sadler NAA: B2455, SADLER EDWARD JOHN and NAA: B2455, SADLER JOHN WILLIAM; and their Red Cross Wounded and Missing files, AWM 1DRL/0428.

1 Rodney Smith to Bruce Scates, 24 January 2014 (letter altered slightly with Mr Smith’s consent for the purpose of publication).