This year marks the 90th anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli and 60 years since the Second World War ended. Both of the wars are very important to Australians as well as the people that migrated out here after the war to start a new life. Australia was a much younger country during the First World War; we were a lot more closely associated with the Commonwealth and many of the people who enlisted were from Commonwealth countries. They, as well as the people who were born here, considered it their duty to enlist - ‘For God, King and Country’. The First World War took, as a rough figure, 29 million lives.

The First World War wasn’t as mechanised as it was in later wars. Instead horses, donkeys, mules, camels, dogs, pigeons and canaries were used for different purposes and there were 20 million animal casualties. Australia sent about 250,000 horses to the docks by rail and once they were on the ships, they were off the books! About 136,000 of those were for cavalry, or light horsemen as we call it. One-third of the 250,000 were lost during their journey, dying from pneumonia, colic and seasickness. They were shipped in crates on the decks or they were stowed in standing stalls in tiers under the decks. The journey took about two months.

A large crowd meeting in Franklin Street, Traralgon - it is thought
 to have been a Red Cross Rally or a Conscription Drive held around 1916-1917

Once in Egypt, sand got into the horses’ stomachs and they suffered from sand colic. While training, the weight they had to carry, including their soldier, was up to 22 stone; they travelled 50-60 miles per day and had their water rationed for a set period - if they didn’t return to camp by the cutoff date, their tongues began to swell up and they choked. During the Boer War, Australia sent 16,400 horses to South Africa. England had declared the assault on Africa right in the middle of their summer and when the horses arrived they were sent directly onto the roads without any opportunity to acclimatise. Those horses died in their thousands and it became known as ‘the war of waste and cruelty through ignorance’.

After the training came the amphibious assault followed by the landing at Gallipoli. This took thousands and thousands of lives. Between the darkness, the current and all the other reasons we’ve heard as to why the landing was in the wrong spot, the soldiers did the best they could. The Turks lost 280,000; the French 115,000; the New Zealanders 2,500; the Australians 9,000; the British 26,000; and there were 10,000-12,000 ‘coloured’ labourers and Jewish donkey-pack transporters who also lost their lives.

Nurses on the ambulance wagons were also shot at Gallipoli. It was during the Boer War that Australian and British nursing sisters were allowed to assist doctors in a war zone. Prior to that it was all orderlies and male staff. Florence Nightingale, a very brave, ambitious and forward-thinking woman, had started the Red Cross at the time of the Crimean War but it wasn’t until 1899 that women were officially accepted in a war zone. Between the Boer and First World

War, 2,000 women served overseas. There was no transfusion, blood typing or anaesthetics used for most amputations. At a base hospital in Alexandria, 3,000 amputations were performed within a 48 hour period. Many of the soldiers died from shock, gas gangrene and septicemia.

After Gallipoli came the fighting in France. It lasted for three years and involved heavy artillery bombardment, machine gunning, cavalry, infantry, gas, and flame throwers. Humble pack animals had to get supplies to the front line trenches while in mud up to their bellies. Army Veterinary Corp. hospitals were introduced in the First World War and the British had 11 of them across the western front. They were designed to treat donkeys, mules and horses and each one could handle about 220 animals per day; however such was the influx of casualties, they were treating over 1,000 per day. Out of over 500,000 donkeys, mules and horses that England put into service across the western front at one stage, over 270,000 (used for pack transport only) were lost. The pack animal’s handler (or muleteer) had standing orders not to leave his animal unattended unless the load was delivered and off. A lot of gas was used in the First World War and it was just as bad on the animals as it was on the soldiers, particularly in the front line trenches where the pack animals were more-or-less a ‘beast of burden’ stuck in mud.

Hundreds of thousands of dogs were also used during the First and Second World Wars. They were used by the Red Cross and wore a harness on their body with a loincloth that had the Red Cross symbol. They carried emergency bandaging and were trained to go out over open ground to be of aid to wounded soldiers. Once they reached their target, they were taught to sit and bark to alert the stretcher bearers and field ambulance drivers; however sometimes, unfortunately, the Germans were alerted first. Dogs were also used by all sides for night raids in trenches; the Italians used sheep dogs for carrying hand grenades in a pack saddle; there were dogs used by the signal corps for running messages; and ‘suicide dogs’ were used whereby they had a harness with an explosive and trigger mechanism on their backs and they were trained to run over open ground and under a tank or a truck.

Soldiers were only in the front line trenches for a couple of days on the western front and then they were sent back to the remedial lines to stop them going mad with the noise, boredom or terrible conditions. Looming was dysentery, trench fever, septicemia, and trench feet. There were also rats living off the corpses so England sent across highly trained terriers called ‘rat dogs’ who were placed over the corpses to keep the rats off. Before the rat dogs there had been orders to dig graves in the walls of the trenches but when the rains came the bodies washed out and hence the dogs were put into service.

Pigeons were used for communication. The Germans trained hawks to kill the pigeons in flight as they went over their trench lines so that they could get the messages being carried; the British in turn trained falcons to kill the hawks. Birds were largely demobilised after the First World War with the introduction of newer planes and newer forms of wireless communication. But the more one thinks about the First World War and the more stories one hears, the sadder it seems to be.

                                                                                                      A procession in Franklin Street after the First World War