'hello, Soldier!': Khaki Verse

These are the voices of Australian soldiers, rendered in the raw, irreverent slang of the diggers who actually fought. Edward Dyson collected these poems in 1919, capturing what the war was actually like for the men in the trenches: the black humor, the fierce loyalty to mates, the longing for home, and the particular Australian way of facing death with a laugh and a curse. The opening poem celebrates Australia coming of age through conflict, but the subsequent verses pull no punches about what that costing. You'll find Billy singing ribald songs while shells tear men apart, old men telling recruits that war is a ghastly thing while the young ones laugh. There's the rattle of cavalry, the smell of 'seven hells,' the machines that turn soldiers to scraps. But there's also the deep bond between men who shared the unimaginable. This isn't sanitized memorial poetry; it's the real thing, written in the colloquial voice of Australian workingmen who survived and who lost mates. It endures because it tells the truth about what war does to the people who fight it.