She was a small woman in a farmhouse on a windswept hill.
Fading pictures of racehorses clipped from newspapers were tacked to the walls of her kitchen.
She would not remove one of them. They had been fixed there by one of her sons, George, who doted on horses and dreamed of training one for the racecourse one day.
Instead, he was away at what would be called the Great War, as if it would be the last.
He was a driver in an ammunition column, which is to say he rode the lead horse in a team of six big-boned draught animals hauling wagonloads of ammunition to the artillery batteries of the Western Front in northern France and Belgium.
George had already done his time on Gallipoli. There, horseless, he and his mates carried boxes of ammunition and water by hand along the aptly named Shrapnel Valley to the parched snipers and trench dwellers on the high front lines. Sometimes, they hauled artillery pieces – 18-pounder field guns and howitzers – up cruel slopes.
Later, he joined the defence of the Suez Canal before shipping off to France to ride wagon horses to the battle lines.
At home, his mother clung to the wild hope that if George’s yellowing pictures on the family’s farmhouse walls were to remain undisturbed, her boy would magically survive.
She could not allow herself to think otherwise. She knew the grief would bring her undone.
She’d seen other parents in the district plummeting into wells of misery, never quite climbing out, after the pastor came with a telegram.
Her irrational belief in the fading pictures on her wall was rewarded. George, having made it through all the faraway battles, came home.
He was not physically injured. But he was altered.
He could not harm a living thing for the rest of his life; not even a column of ants, a fish in a creek or a snake curled on a bush track.
He never trained a racehorse. He had seen too many beautiful horses screaming and dying beneath artillery barrages.
His mother, who was my great-grandmother, gathered her shredded nerves and rejoiced, though it was years before she could bear taking down those tattered old pictures.
Most of us might imagine her trepidation. Many have suffered the agony of losing a child, others have grieved at the death of a brother or sister, and most of us dread the day a parent dies.
We learn in these sorrows the meaning of emptiness and wonder how we can go on.
And yet, daily now, more than a century after the Great War left nations like ours adrift in such unimaginable loss that ouija boards and fraudulent spiritualists became an industry to compete with the churches, we are visited daily by the news of hundreds and sometimes thousands dying in new wars.
So frequent are the reports of deaths in Ukraine or the Middle East they have become little more than a blur.
The number of casualties – dead and wounded – has been so unimaginably immense during the years of war in Ukraine that estimates range from 400,000 to 2 million.
About 1200 people were killed in Israel during the attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
The toll of Palestinians killed during Israel’s war of retribution stands at more than 73,000, at least 70 per cent of whom were women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Those killed in Iran since US and Israeli missiles began raining down number around 1500, about 1200 of whom were civilians, according to Iran’s Health Ministry, news agencies and human rights groups. This includes 168 people, more than 100 of them schoolchildren, who died when an Iranian girls’ elementary school was destroyed on the first day of the US-Israeli assault.
Iran’s government itself admitted to the deaths of about 3000 demonstrators in the weeks before the war, though other estimates of the regime’s brutal crackdown range as high as 33,000 dead.
And now the death tally has topped 1000 during the latest Israeli strikes on Lebanon, with up to 1 million people rendered homeless or displaced.
Here is a paradox. The recitation of such vast numbers deadens their impact.
Big numbers bamboozle. We can readily comprehend the worth of a few hundred dollars, but a billion or two is beyond understanding.
But these are not dollars. These are lives taken.
Each death represents anguish profound enough to consume mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and extended families in torment for decades to come.
Each broken body described as “wounded” often means a lifetime of suffering requiring the support of a family that might itself have been blown away.
We don’t hear the leaders of the warring nations mentioning any of this, of course.
After four years of war, Russia’s Vladimir Putin insists he has no option but to continue his “special military operation” because Ukraine is properly part of Russia.
Donald Trump keeps spouting his ridiculously offensive and contradictory gibberish (“I’m glad he’s dead,” he sprayed this week about the former head of the FBI, Robert Mueller), “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth tub-thumps as if this were America’s holy war, and Trump’s treasury chief Scott Bessent declares “sometimes you have to escalate to de-escalate”.
It sounded not a million miles from a US military officer of the Vietnam War, reported in 1968 by Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett, allegedly declaring after napalming the town of Ben Tre, resulting in the death of hundreds, that “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it”.
Iran’s new supreme leader promises “that we will not refrain from avenging the blood of [our] martyrs”, as if the continuing bloodshed of his own citizens matters not at all.
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu promises to keep striking Iran and tells Lebanon’s citizens to move out of their homes – just as Palestinians in Gaza were ordered – to give his forces a clear run at Hezbollah.
The rest of us worry about fuel prices.
Few, we can be sure, spare a thought for lonely mothers desperately placing their hopes in magical objects.
In a world of heartache, could the voiceless have anything more eloquent to rely upon?
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Tony Wright is an associate editor and special writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.
