JOHN HAMILTON
Pan Macmillan, 2012, 393 pages , $34.99 (pb)
Stunning his home-town audience of patriotic Australians in
1919 with his statement that ‘the war has made me a Socialist’, Captain Hugo
Throssell, one of nine Australian soldiers to win a Victoria Cross for supreme
bravery at Gallipoli in 1915, made headlines, and enemies, on the anniversary
of the signing of the Allies’ World War 1 peace treaty with Germany, says John
Hamilton in his biography of Throssell.
The civic authorities of the town of Northam in Western
Australia listened with increasing disbelief as Northam’s own war hero went on
to denounce war for enriching armaments makers, war profiteers and rival
national capitalist classes in their competition for territory, markets,
resources and profits.
Throssell, the privileged son of a conservative State Premier, had married Katherine Susannah Prichard, the
journalist and feminist who went on to fame as a novelist and founder of the
Communist Party of Australia.
Throssell, the dashing cavalry officer, who, in the first
flush of battle, wrote how it was ‘most glorious’ to see a bayonet charge and
what a ‘wonderful thing’ it was to see men running through an artillery
bombardment, had become war-weary and disillusioned after seeing his mates
killed and after suffering severe mental injury himself.
With what would now be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress
disorder, Throssell’s days were filled with nervousness and headaches (he had
taken a head wound) and his nights were tortured into sleeplessness by what he
had seen at Gallipoli and by the death of his brother who had signed up with
Hugo in the belief that war was a thrilling adventure.
Prichard’s communism, and her profound love for a handsome,
vital, selfless man, helped Throssell make sense of his ghastly war experiences. Reading Engels may not have been easy –
‘Hell, girl, what the blazes does this mean?’, he would holler – but ‘usually
our political discussions ended in love-making’, wrote Prichard. Throssell, without becoming a party member,
accepted Prichard’s political views as his own.
Australia’s political police put Throssell’s radicalisation
down to ‘his wife’s influence’, or ‘his mind perhaps having been affected’ by
the cerebro-spinal meningitis he contracted during the war. Throssell’s biographer hedges his bets,
saying it is possible that the brain injury Throssell received from a botched,
war-time sinus operation made him “more vulnerable and easily influenced”. Socialism, apparently, can only be
understood as a psychological disorder, the product of a weakened mind.
Throssell, however, knew his own mind – on the back of his
will he wrote ‘I have never recovered from my 1914-18 experiences’, shortly
before committing suicide by his army pistol in 1933. He also added an appeal that ‘my wife and
child get the usual war pension’. Owing £10,000 with just £10 in the bank, Throssell’s
financial disasters during the economic Depression had been exacerbated, writes
Hamilton, by his “enemies at work within the government” who helped ensure his
economic projects were costly failures, and by conservatives in the Northam
Returned Soldiers and Sailors League who got the government to remove Throssell
from his job as soldiers’ representative on the government’s Discharged
Soldiers’ Settlement Board.
The Repatriation Department added insult to tragedy by
disputing the Coroner’s finding that Throssell’s war wounds were the cause of
his suicide. Prichard angrily defended
her husband who ‘believed he would be ensuring a pension to me and my son by
his last act. I consider that his
“grateful country” made it impossible for my husband to live. He thought he had to die to provide for his
wife and child’.
It was not until 1999 that a “modest memorial the size of a
backyard barbecue” was erected to Throssell in Northam by his ‘grateful
country’ whilst during the Depression, Throssell had been forced to try to pawn
his Victoria Cross but was offered only 10 shillings for it – the ‘price of
valour’ for a war hero who had, as his son, Ric, said later when donating
Throssell’s medal to People for Nuclear Disarmament, ‘declared his commitment
to peace’.
Throssell has not been well served by official history, nor
by his biographer, Hamilton, whose conventional war narrative focuses on
Throssell the warrior not the socialist and which includes a disapproval of
Throssell’s decision to choose a patriotic occasion of military celebration to
denounce war – “not the time nor place”, says Hamilton – but what better time
or place could there be. It took
political courage and Throssell had just as much of that as he had bravery on
the battlefield.
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