Twelve months on from the pomp that marked the 100th anniversary of the landing at Anzac Cove, it is time to reflect on an even deadlier phase of The Great War.
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In 1916 most Australian troops were living in camps in the Egyptian desert as units were being divided and restructured to incorporate the tens of thousands of willing new recruits arriving from the antipodes.
The more seasoned diggers, who in the wake of the Allied failure to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula and bring about the capitulation of the Turks saw their efforts dismissed as a ‘’sideshow’’, would have been watching events in France with interest.
Anzacs began departing for Marseilles on May 31 with the first arriving at the front line on June 28. Members of the 14th Battalion went "over the top" on July 2.
What was not realised was that the meatgrinder of the Western Front, which eclipsed the fighting in the Dardanelles in every awful particular, would have a far more lasting impact on the national psyche than the events of 1915.
The nation it was later said had been forged at Gallipoli was left orphaned, consumed by grief in 1916 and the years that followed. The Australians had arrived just in time to be caught up in the horror of the Battle of the Somme.
Even a century after the event, the numbers of the dead and wounded remain staggering. On July 19 and 20, during the senseless attack on the village of Fromelles, a position of little strategic importance or value, 5,553 Australians were cut down.
One Battalion, the 60th, was virtually wiped out with 757 men killed and wounded. It remains the worst night in Australian history. Worse was to come. The Battle of the Somme destroyed more than 1.1 million lives before it spent itself in November. Both sides thought they could win the war by bleeding their enemy dry. The price of this absurd arithmetic was beyond belief.
The Somme, and subsequent Western Front campaigns fought on the same bizarre logic, shaped the lives of "the Greatest Generation".
These are the people who, in the words of Australian War Memorial director, Brendan Nelson, were "born in the aftermath of the war that was, grew up through the Great Depression and came to adulthood under the shadows of the war that was to come".
Unlike the first Anzacs, this heroic band were under no illusions of the price to be paid for going to war.