Review of Big-Noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing by Robin Gerster, and *Frank Honywood, Private: A Personal Record of the 1914-1918 War, by Eric Patridge, introduced and annotated by Geoffrey Serle

Abstract

Early in 1915 the Sydney Morning Herald published a piece by Amy Mack, who had been commissioned to file an occasional column from England, recording a visit to a military hospital in Cambridge. On her tour through the hospital she first met a couple of British lads who had been in the retreat at Mons, had fought at the Aisne and Ypres—those names electric with meaning and already inserted into British military history—and were recovering from frost bite. They told lively tales but didn't wish to return to the Western Front. Having shown her one or two of their own souvenirs, they turned to the Turks. '"But you ought to see the souvenirs the Turcos get. Ears! They keep them on a string,"' she wrote, getting it down for Australian consumption. '"And one man had a head in his handkerchief. They made him throw it overboard."'