Where the Line Breaks Read online

  We’re both exhausted. Battle weary. That happy dead weight of accomplishment at having finished a manual job. How I imagine the men of the 10th felt at the end of each night on The Great Ride.

  She has little dabs of wallpaper glue in her eyebrows from where she’s wiped her arm across her head, and I will fight you if you think there’s anything more gorgeous.

  Thank you, I say, now I know how easy it is, if anyone ever needs help hanging wallpaper I’ll be able to say, ‘Absolutely not, it’s horrible.’ I snuggle closer to her on the couch. She’s laughing – either at my joke or at my glue-addled hairdo. That’s Em’s superpower. She makes events happen. History. Stories we’ll tell our grandchildren. She turns heads and talks her way into clubs and gets upgrades on hotel rooms. She swears at people who block her way on the tube, she wallpapers rooms and dyes bright colours in her hair. She’s asked to come backstage after gigs by rock stars who spot her in the front row.

  I always thought Alan Lewis writing his love letters home to Rose was absence making the heart et cetera, et cetera, but now I get it. Alan wouldn’t be Alan without Rose. I wouldn’t be who I am without Em.

  She makes me want to keep charging back into the fight, forever.

  She makes fighting this war worthwhile.

  32 When I first told Curtin-Kneeling about my thesis, he was sceptical.

  But we know his life inside out, he said to me in the bar at FWWWAC, five or six beers down. I know his life inside out.

  But what if we didn’t, I slurred. What if I could prove it?

  He wasn’t entirely convinced, but I’m not sure if he’d remember it now. After a few more rounds, we decided it was our national duty to the diggers to prank the British scholars by turning all the slides for the next morning’s keynote speech upside down. Take that, you Pommy bastards.

  33 Sometimes I email Jennifer Hayden with ideas/questions/random thoughts, and she graciously responds, when she finds the time in her busy schedule. To be able to call her one of my work colleagues still makes me giddy, but to call her my friend would blow the mind of the young Matt, sitting in the library after school re-reading the Unknown Digger poems for the thousandth time, waiting for Mum to remember she still needs to pick me up.

  When I emailed her with my Alan Lewis hypothesis, she encouraged me to follow through, to delve deep into the evidence and emerge victorious, or die trying (I’m paraphrasing, she wasn’t quite so dramatic). She has been an invaluable source of inspiration.

  34 Em says to put my head down and finish this thing, then we can start our life together proper. Jennifer Hayden says to keep fighting, like the diggers would. The Prof says not to listen to doubters, prove I’m right and they’ll come around. Em says listen to the Prof.

  Lying in bed last night, Em was making these little snuffling noises in her sleep on my shoulder. I’d cooked her dinner (chicken parmie and potato gems) and we’d finished a bottle of wine, and one thing had led to another, and she’d fallen asleep tangled and sweaty in the sheets and I decided none of the backlash matters if I’m living the life Alan Lewis taught me to lead. Dive in, head first, and damn the consequences.

  Percute et percute velociter.

  CHAPTER 2: An analysis of the material evidence strongly indicating Alan Lewis’s authorship of the poems: Lewis’s wartime writings as primary sources for objective comparison.

  In his seminal work, The Annotated Letters of Alan Lewis VC, historian Arthur Pyke analysed 193 letters sent by Lewis to his family and friends throughout the period of his deployment.35 The vast majority of letters belonged to Rose Porter, Lewis’s childhood sweetheart and fiancée, who kept all his correspondence safe in the knowledge that it would be of abundant use to later generations. In 1968, she told Arthur Pyke: ‘He was my hero, even before the war. I knew, if he failed to return, he would find a way to leave his mark.’36 Porter was more prescient than she knew, as his literary achievements rank alongside – indeed, I would argue, outshine – any of his heroic triumphs.

  The most interesting letters are those partial works and early drafts that were recovered from Lewis’s possessions following his death, letters that remained unsent for motives only Lewis can have known, through which we can ascertain Lewis’s authentic, pre-edited writing voice and stylistic mannerisms.

  It hardly needs pointing out that there is no mention in any of the 193 analysed letters that Lewis was writing poetry. In this way, he is not self-referential at all, which makes him very much a man of his time. There are only four separate occasions where Lewis mentions writing letters home to the families of the fallen, and thirteen instances where he references the act of writing his own letters.37 In analysing the letters, Pyke noted their basic format: ‘most of the letters are fairly standard – describing recent events, asking Rose questions about her family and job and requesting home-style luxuries to be sent over.’38 One is struck by the easily observed devotion of a man in love, a man eager to return home. Margaret Cline, in her review of The Annotated Letters, calls the work a tragedy, pointing out Lewis’s detachment from the men around him, calling him ‘alone in the large world, equally repulsed and amused by the improper actions of his mates, a man not living, but stuck in limbo, awaiting his true life’.39 I would disagree, instead categorising Lewis’s detachment from his fellow soldiers as characteristic of the true writer: detached, observing so that he may create. In one of the earliest examples of Lewis’s unsent drafts, dated around April 1915, while his regiment trained outside Cairo, Lewis relates a story about Sergeant ‘Nugget’ McRae falling in love with a local ‘woman of disrepute’ and bringing her, as a gift, a pair of shoes, not knowing that, in Egyptian culture, the giving of shoes is considered an insult.40

  Had any of the Unknown Digger’s poems been sonnets entitled ‘To Rose, Waiting Back Home’, ‘Miss Porter, How I Love Thee’, or anything along similar lines, tracking the author would have been simple. Close textual analysis of the poems, however, notes an astoundingly complete lack of proper names and familial references, other than numerous placenames (analysed in further detail in Chapter 3) and a cryptic reference to a ‘Harriet’ in the final lines of ‘Ken Oath’.41 Jennifer Hayden maintains that this Harriet is a reference to Harrietville, a town in Victoria, which Hayden uses as further evidence to back her claim that the Unknown Digger died in the trenches of the Western Front.42 There is no evidence of anyone named Harriet in Lewis’s life, but I prefer to see this as indicating an innate reticence and urge for privacy, keeping his loved ones hidden from sight, as it were – perhaps even with the anticipation that one day his poems would be in the public eye.

  Despite the obvious lack of contextual clues, thorough investigation of the limited primary sources available about the Unknown Digger – namely the original documents found in the UWA archive by Jennifer Hayden – reveals a large body of evidence to support my thesis. When these investigatory findings are considered alongside the much larger resource of well-thumbed primary sources left behind by Lewis, one notices associations that cannot be passed over as simple coincidence.

  I have spent countless hours poring over photocopies of Alan’s letters to check whether he wrote his L’s with a flourish, or the straight up and down lines of the Unknown Digger. Having scoured both documents thoroughly, I can confirm that Alan left his L’s unblemished, just as the Unknown Digger does in every one of his poems. His signature sign-off: ‘yours, [adverbly]’, contains the same humour and playful tone as found in the lines of ‘The Billjim’ and ‘Strewth’. In his letter home dated June 1917, Alan spells the word ‘horrifically’ as ‘horiffically [sic]’.43 In ‘Mate & His Pack’, which, unlike other scholars, I believe was written in late 1917, the same word is spelt correctly; however, in ‘Blood’s Worth Bottling’, the Unknown Digger misspells the word encouraged as ‘encoraged’.44 I believe that Lewis knew full well how to spell both words, which is why we see these two spellings, but in the rush and clamour of an officer’s day, simply didn’t have the time to corr
ect his mistakes.

  Comparing the two sets of writings displays some crucial similarities, and a few glaring differences, which I first put forward in my recent article in Australian Literary Journal. Most significantly, the sentence structures within Lewis’s letters mirror the syntactical choices of the Unknown Digger, with a 63.24% similarity.45 Critics have argued that this is simply a case of culturally ingrained language choices, educational standards, and a diminished environment for creative varieties, but the similarities cannot be dismissed. Indeed, 63% is more than chance, 63% is much more than coincidence.

  Harder to measure and contrast is the tone of the individual works. Lewis appears upbeat in much of his correspondence, often recalling humorous incidents, relaying the news from the front, or telling stories of Trooper McRae’s latest misadventures.46 As with his letters, the unrelenting optimism of the Unknown Digger poems shines through. See, for example, the metaphorical sun rising on the war in the last lines of ‘The Groyne’, with its stylistic imagery of the cleansing of blood from the hands of the soldiers. Compare this to the sanguinity inherent in a draft letter found in Lewis’s notebook dated May 1917, in which he signs off:

  I cannot do this without you. I thought I knew love, I thought I knew purpose, I thought I knew the world. And then you entered my life, and I discovered a world ten thousand times larger than I imagined. Share it with me.47

  And yet, in Lewis’s unsent drafts, we also find a certain cynicism, a darkness he kept from public view, edited out in his final sent letters, and more reminiscent of the anti-authoritarian zeal of the popular anti-war poems by the Unknown Digger: see ‘Harbour Thoughts’ or ‘The Billjim’, for example, which share a tone with the poems of Siegfried Sassoon.48 I am aware that merely highlighting the similarities in tone between the letters and poems cannot equate to proof that the two men are one and the same. Tone is a subjective quality, and thus impossible to prove, but I find it important to try, as it is these similarities in tone that first led me to think about Lewis as a candidate for the poems.

  Scrutinising the poems for any mention of contextual evidence for Lewis’s authorship leads one to immediately locate a mention of ‘rose’, in the lesser known ‘Illawarra Flame Tree’, a short poem contrasting the firefights of a bombardment with wildflowers in bloom in Australia, which concludes with the lines:

  A rose in the garden climbin’ on the trellis

  That, which with heaven makes

  without which hell is.

  L.S. Herdsman argues that the long descriptive stanzas in ‘Illawarra’ are ‘a eulogy for beauty itself, so absent on the battlefield’.49 And when viewed through the prism of Lewis’s experiences, the battles he participated in and his long journey across the desert, which included leading his squadron through the streets of Jerusalem, and remembering the near-constant flow of letters home throughout his deployment, one can easily understand the metatextual sub-themes the poem is pushing: ‘life is hell without beauty’.50 The rose is a common flower, and certainly one popular in the period, frequently finding use in the poetry of the era as a signifier for beauty. Thus the mention could be coincidental. Nevertheless, when one reflects upon the contents of Lewis’s letter to Porter dated 14th April 1915, from the Mena training camp outside Cairo, one is instantly struck by the resemblance to the poem and the similarities between writing styles.51 The letter asks:

  How is your mother’s garden coming along? I miss the tangle of roses by the birdbath, and her ongoing battle with the aphids. Will you let me know if they flowered this year? Nothing grows here. I miss you, my flower.52

  This letter demonstrates that Lewis had made the simple verbal association between the rose (the flower) and Rose (his fiancée) and was able to switch between the two meanings as and when the fancy took him. Secondarily, I believe it proves the word choice of the Unknown Digger is no accident – if Lewis could switch between meanings in his letters, then it follows that the rose in the poem, if written by Lewis, may also be a reference to his fiancée. If we take it literally, the poem is stating ‘life without Rose is hell’.53

  Moving from the literal examples to be found in the texts to the contextual surroundings of the sources provides further similarities between the two authors. In a letter from Porter to Lewis, undated and unsigned, found in his pack following his death, it is revealed that Porter’s favourite form of poetry was the sonnet. She states:

  … they’ve printed another of [Brooke’s] poems in the paper, a lovely one made even more timely since his death. I think if I were to write, I’d write sonnets too. Not much call for it round this way though. The other nurses prefer the funny pages.54

  It would have to be a major coincidence indeed were we to discover that the majority of poems written by the Unknown Digger were, in fact, sonnets or forms thereof. Hayden, on discovery of the poems, identified eighty separate finished poems, and half a dozen unfinished drafts, of which fully half are sonnets. No other form of poetry has such an ascendency within the selection.55 Of the eighty officially confirmed Unknown Digger poems, 50% are sonnets, a further 20% are variations on the simple ABAB rhyming couplet, 11% are more complex rhyming systems, and the remaining 19% are free form, that is to say, they contain no readily discernible rhyme or metre. It is obvious, to me at least, that Lewis was writing his poems for Porter, though, tragically, he never had the opportunity to show them to her. Once he discovered that she adored sonnets, he began to write more sonnets. Indeed, the argument will be made in the following chapters that the clear majority of sonnets (64% of the original 50%, or 26 full poems, when one takes into account the half-finished ‘Untitled’ and adds it to the three-quarters complete ‘Untitled #2’ and ‘Spinifex Snippets’) in the collection are written after the events of Gallipoli, well into the ‘Great Ride’ which accounts for the largest proportion of Lewis’s service history.56

  Through my examination of the available physical evidence, and statistical analysis of the two authors, I have come to believe there are compelling links between the poems of the Unknown Digger and the letters of Alan Lewis. Further inquiry into the ideological similarities, the parallel timelines of creation and a thorough repudiation of those facts which scholars have assumed about the Unknown Digger’s life are necessary, and will be undertaken in the following chapters, but already, using the physical evidence available – that is, those primary sources available for us to touch and read and observe closely – we have established a link between the two authors which cannot be discounted.57

  GALLIPOLI. NOVEMBER 1915.

  A cigarette in the snow.

  The match lights on the third strike. He shields the dim spark from the wind with his fingers, and brings it to the cigarette in his lips. Cheap Egyptian tobacco. Warming smoke fills his chest. He tosses the match before flame singes fingertips. Can’t see further than a yard in front of his hole. His trench fades away to obscurity on his right. The Turkish line is out there, somewhere ahead of him, the Jackos invisible, lost in the flurry. Watching, somewhere, from the white.

  Out in the bay the destroyers lie silent, the lick of icy water on their gunmetal hulls. Snowflakes land and melt on their turrets, the barrels red hot with heat from the shells that they fire at the outcrop of rock they’ve been ordered to capture, this dreary little peninsula in the Dardanelles. The sky is the murky grey wash of a winter. The battleships are dark silhouettes. The sea ink. The pier is a runway lit up in the darkness, snowflakes a carpet for boots to sink into, muffling the clamour of unloading supplies.

  He relaxes, breathes deeply, the cigarette glowing, and the bullet with his name on it finds him. It sails through the snow, from somewhere high above, and punches through the skin beneath his chin. His body collapses and drops against the wall of the trench, and the wind on the rock starts to sing.

  The men huddle in packs to try and keep warm, staring out at this strange new landscape. For many of them, this is their first glimpse of snow. It settles, like red dirt back home on verandas, a delicate
coating of freezing white ice,

  it settles on rifles, on periscope handles, on sandy brown hair teeming with lice, on moustachioed lips, on bloodstains, on duckboards, on pages left half full of words for the wife;

  on helmets and slouch hats, on trench coats and greens, on bayonets and mess tins and guns and machines, on jam-tin grenades and old bloody bandages, on shrapnel and sandbags and splinters of beam;

  on entrance to dugout, on firing step,

  on donkeys, on chickens, on parcels from home.

  On bodies, left rotting, in firing lines,

  on fresh painted crosses where dead mates lie,

  on the smouldering remains of an evening fire,

  on the loud and the boisterous, the quiet and shy;

  on the worthless, the wrecked and the tired,

  on cowards, on reckless, on ready-to-die;

  on trooper, on captain, on all rank and file,

  on diggers from Esperance to Gundagai,

  on every upturned ANZAC eye;

  forgetting, for a moment, dysentery, flies,

  the shells falling about them, forgetting goodbyes

  to mates who have bought it, those who have died;

  their eyes turned to heaven and the curious sight

  of snow on the trenches.

  A gift from the sky.

  My love. I trust this letter finds you well, safe and happy and warm – you won’t believe me, but it’s snowing. Started to fall as the sun set, and now we have a thick layer of the mess coating every surface. It looks a new world. Makes a bit of a treat for the men, and God knows we could all do with that. We continue to fight at barely quarter strength. Red sleeps by my shoulder, the first rest he’s had in the past three days. Two days of that was him talking about his mention in dispatches, and the other day was actual work. I hope everyone back home is as proud of him as we are.