In a world maddened by blood, has death lost its meaning?

March 26, 2026 — 11:30am

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She was a small woman in a farmhouse on a windswept hill.

Fading pictures of racehorses clipped from newspapers were tacked to the walls of her kitchen.

She would not remove one of them. They had been fixed there by one of her sons, George, who doted on horses and dreamed of training one for the racecourse one day.

Instead, he was away at what would be called the Great War, as if it would be the last.

He was a driver in an ammunition column, which is to say he rode the lead horse in a team of six big-boned draught animals hauling wagonloads of ammunition to the artillery batteries of the Western Front in northern France and Belgium.

George had already done his time on Gallipoli. There, horseless, he and his mates carried boxes of ammunition and water by hand along the aptly named Shrapnel Valley to the parched snipers and trench dwellers on the high front lines. Sometimes, they hauled artillery pieces – 18-pounder field guns and howitzers – up cruel slopes.

Later, he joined the defence of the Suez Canal before shipping off to France to ride wagon horses to the battle lines.

At home, his mother clung to the wild hope that if George’s yellowing pictures on the family’s farmhouse walls were to remain undisturbed, her boy would magically survive.

She could not allow herself to think otherwise. She knew the grief would bring her undone.

She’d seen other parents in the district........

© The Sydney Morning Herald