Dear Inner Circle,

Anzac Day was a special one for me this year. I spent several days moving around the various battlefields on the Western Front where thousands of Australian soldiers lost their lives and where thousands were so traumatised that they spent the rest of their lives suffering from what we would now call, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. My father used to visit old soldiers at Concord Hospital when I was just a school boy. I saw men in the 1960s still hiding under beds and shaking uncontrollably. That was when Dad first explained "shell shock" to me and it was my first attempt to understand the phenomenon that still today causes me to struggle.

At Fromelles I found the headstone of Private C Myers who enlisted at 15 years. After failing his first attempt to enlist, he applied again as C Morgan, this time successfully. Fromelles was his first taste of battle and at 16 years, the end of his life. There are more than 2,000 cemeteries dotted over France and Belgium as a result of World War I and in one place I visited, there were over 45,000 mostly young men buried.

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