Most bookshops today devote an entire bookshelf to militaria. It’s a growth area. Much of what is on sale is almost unreadable: long-winded revisionism by armchair generals that tell where the commander of the day went wrong, or clumsy attempts to distil an essence of ‘mateship’, like an expedition for the source of the Nile. Other books focus on images and statistics.
On the Warpath is none of these things. It is a well-crafted little book which brings together mostly first-hand accounts of many aspects of Australians at war and arranges them in a way that reads well and allows each piece to breathe, to relate its tale on its own terms. Its authors are soldiers, officers, nurses and journalists. Its subtitle markets the book as ‘an anthology of military travel’, but this sells the book short, for there are insights into the human condition contained here that you would be hard pressed to detect in most travel literature.
There are 57 individual contributions to On the Warpath and almost none of them focus on the fighting. Instead, we hear from Louise Mack, a correspondent in World War I, who resists calls to evacuate the threatened town of Antwerp and wanders through a fallen, deserted city, awaiting the new owners.
Elsewhere, we see a different side of General Sir John Monash, as he writes in letters to his wife Victoria of his days spent in France travelling from village to village; personally organising farmhouse billets for his troops while ‘making friends with the children, or the dog, or in one case the pet pig’. From the other side of the world, in another war, Army nurse Jessie Simons recalls lazy tropical days spent sightseeing in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Malacca. Six months later, with Singapore fallen, her ship would be sunk and she and other survivors would spend three and a half years as prisoners of the Japanese in Sumatra.
On the Warpath offers good descriptions of the physical conditions in which these men and women toiled each day. Perhaps nowhere is this environment more confronting than in the jungle campaigns of New Guinea and the islands. Kenneth Slessor writes:
‘the jungle has deadlier adversaries than the Japanese; it hits back at the fightingman with sharp claws, with matted roots and vines and thorns, with tiger-toothed branches and barbed undergrowth; it mocks him with tremendous ribs of mountain, with vertical peaks, deep torrents, agonies