There wasn't much doing in the tiny New South Wales town of Quirindi on Christmas Eve, 1914, but the Federal Hotel in Whittaker Street was riotous with shouts and laughter. The young blokes were full of talk about the war in Europe and, as the beer flowed, several boasted they would enlist and find excitement in exotic foreign lands.
Harry Edward Hogan, great-grandfather of my mate Gary Hogan, was one of the more determined, though maybe also one of the more inebriated. But Harry was stone cold sober when he travelled down to Sydney early in the new year. He stayed at his sister's Kings Cross pub for a couple of rowdy nights, then enlisted in Liverpool.
Harry was 18, a knockabout bush larrikin ready to give just about anything a try. He joined the Second Machine Gun Battalion on 10 February 1915, trained for four months, embarked on 25 June and set foot on the beach at Gallipoli on 16 August, a few days after the start of the doomed August offensive that was the Allies' last throw of the dice before their retreat from the peninsula.
For the next four months Harry Hogan, like so many of his fellow soldiers, had an undistinguished, brutalising time, memories of which would stay with him forever. If, in his happy-go-lucky, thoughtless way, he had imagined performing daring, perhaps dramatic deeds, it took no time at all for such notions to founder amid the chaos, the blood, the wounds, the deaths.
Never shirking but always scared stiff, Harry staggered through the months until serious head wounds were added to his more or less constant and worsening state of shock, and he was taken to hospital in Alexandria on 23 December.
He was following in the wake of many wounded fellow Australians, including 21-year-old Albert Facey, repatriated from Gallipoli after a direct hit on his trench and a gunshot wound to the shoulder. He had been 'on Gallipoli only six days short of four months'. As for Harry Hogan, having arrived virtually on the eve of the August offensive, he left as the great retreat from Gallipoli was beginning.
Harry recovered after treatment but, still not 19 years of age, he had seen gruesome sights, experienced indescribable horrors and confronted his own crippling fears. He was scarred beyond any treatment that the hospital in Alexandria could give him or even knew about. And this was only the beginning.