"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else". Emily Dickinson. Mizzling around here again but the cloud formations are glorious & the colours delicate & fey.
Not so out west. The mythical inland sea is in all actuality a fact; at least for the present. The Condamine has over run its banks ~ along with all the minor rivers, creeks, rills, brooks & billabongs; ditto most of the major waterways. 56% of the state is presently under water. I think the drought might have broken. The images are amazing. Thousands of hectares of land a sloshy muddy brown as this sea of water moves inexorably southwards, spreading over the floodplains from the gulf into N.S.W ~ & hopefully into the Murray River to deal with that river's saline problem. You wait long enough even our inland will provide water views!
This is bull dust country. The red dust is usually everywhere. This is country that has been in serious drought for over a decade. Now it's all under water. For the farmers this is seriously good news despite the fact some of them are now airlifting sheep onto higher ground & all that is keeping the water from their own doors are the levy banks they built to keep it out.
When it rains like this the desert suddenly flowers abundantly. OK, so I don't need the crocodiles floating down the local street, washed out by the floods, & I'm not keen on snakes looking for somewhere dry to hole up in my house but the hordes of swans & pelicans that suddenly arrive, the insect life & wildlife that suddenly sprouts for such a short season is fascinating & abundant. Go google. It hasn't flooded like this in 100 years.
Meanwhile I am waiting with anticipation for the release of Under Hill 60 ~ presently being shot in Townsville. Now I need to say I did a bit of caving back in the day. I know about chimneys & squeezes & the proper meaning of, "Boy, it's dark down here." I know how the earth smells when you're burrowed into it & the smell of fear & while I will never be the proud flag waving Aussie at the ANZAC day parade stories like Hill 60 give me goosebumps. The sheer unmitigated courage of these men blows my mind.
Hill 60 is in Belgium. Well, it was. It's a crater now. It was part of the German's front line in WWI. Some bright spark, no doubt an engineer, decided burrowing under the German lines & blowing them up was a really top~notch idea. Unfortunately a German engineer had the same bright little idea so here you had, all along the western front [eastern if you belonged to our allies] 2 underground armies burrowing away like mad to try & blow each other to blazes. Now the fact they got a bunch of miners to be so absolutely mad is one thing but these poor sods then lived in terror of the Germans suddenly breaking through into their trenches ~ which they were rather wont to do. In the ensuring scuffle what little light they had tended to go out & the only way to tell friend from foe was by their epaulets! Yikes!
My blood runs cold just thinking about it but it gets better. Having burrowed under the German lines these guys then had to lug some phenomenal amount of dynamite along those tunnels & set the charges! The Aussies dug their tunnels & set their charges & blew the Germans to Kingdom Come. 10,000 Germans died in the blast. The sound could be heard across the channel in London. It caused the ground to squeeze together trapping German soldiers at their posts in the trenches. It probably changed the whole course of the war because those Germans who escaped dropped back behind the second & then the 3rd line of defence opening a huge breach in the German defences for the Allies to surge through.
And these brave, brave men who dug those trenches & lugged the explosives & set those charges were labeled sewer rats & cowards! I get irate about Gallopoli, which was a mistake & British stupidity at its finest, because the colonials were expendable, but we've gone about celebrating that for the best part of 100 years. Time to remember that this was a European war & fought for the most part on European soil & that our boys, average age 42, changed the whole outcome of that war.
[Yes, people, I'm totally anti~war, but bravery & courage in the face of insurmountable odds is always to be admired, however misplaced] And for the record, there is a farm house near what's left of Hill 60 that remains uninhabited to this day. Underneath it's unprepossessing exterior remains the charges that for some indefinable reason did not discharge on that memorable day. Probably a good thing given how big the bang was.
3 comments:
You wrote: "Yes, people, I'm totally anti~war, but bravery & courage in the face of insurmountable odds is always to be admired, however misplaced"
Me too... both the anti-war thing and the bravery thing. I still well up with tears when I think of those first responders in NY on 9/11, charging up the stairs of those towers even as the building itself was collapsing.... all in the hope that they could save even one or two of us civilians. We owe so much to all of these men who are willing to spend their lives so that we don't have to♥
We just sand a song in Church recently "Freedom isn't free" it was part of an ensamble put together by West Coast Baptist College, and it speaks of this very thing. I remember bits of it "freedom isn't free it cost the lives of those who died to defend our liberty" then the song goes on to speak of our freedom being paid for at Calvary. Your post reminded me of the song.
Although I am not for wars and I certainly do not like studying them, which is probably why I never liked history that much, I also believe this: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. ~Edmund Burke
I do not wish to romanticize wars, but men who have fought with death all around them and kept their integrity should be described with words like valor, gallantry, fortitude, and lion-heartedness. Amazing story!
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