Brothers In War by Michael Walsh (2008, Unabridged, Audio Cassette)

Michael Walsh is a good writer and perhaps the only pity about this work is that he did not contribute more of his own writing to it. He had some difficult choices to make, as he wandered backwards from an epistolatory work to the main narrative, which he created himself. For my money, there was just too much material taken from old letters, but it could not have been easy knowing what to include and what to leave out.

This is the story of a Victorian-era family whose eight sons participated in the First World War on many a different battleground, but frequently with the same result. They wrote many letters home and occasionally to each other and this is what informs the story and indeed forms much of the narrative itself. It turns out that, many, many years after the events and when all of the protagonists were gone, the material for this book, including the voluminous correspondence, suddenly turned up after having been more or less neglected for decades. It was fortuitous that it fell into the hands of Michael Walsh who has contrived to render the story, awful though it is, an interesting one.

In a way it is a happy thing that no one is left who directly recalls these years, because we can look into the background of it all with slightly less emotion, knowing them all now at peace. Yet this is a heart-rending tale nonetheless, as are all the stories that have come down to us about this awful period, and as we read we can only begin to imagine the suffering that was entailed for the soldiers while they lived, and the people they left at home, who had to live with the pain of loss and separation for the rest of their lives.

One aspect of the book which of course the author could not control, but which added much interest for me, was the different campaigns in which members of this one family took part. One tended to forget that it wasn't just trench warfare in France and Belgium that claimed all the millions of lives, even though the losses (wastes?) there were disproportionately large. And there is also an Australian angle, which brings in tales of Gallipoli and the Sinai, since two of the brothers had emigrated before the war and joined up in Perth.

Altogether an admirable book which achieves its purpose of paying tribute to this family which, so far as Michael Walsh could determine, suffered the most significant losses of any single family in that awful war.