(In Loving Memory of) My Dear Son Jim

My name is James Sullivan and from East Geelong I hail
Young man with a life still left to live
Who in 1915 on an army ship set sail
To sacrifice all that he had to give
I left my legal practice and I left my family
Broken-hearted mother standing crying on the quay
To fight a war in Europe and of that here is my tale
I trust my loving mother will forgive

Our first port was in Cairo and the hot Sahara sands
Where we were taught the art of war
And then sent off to Turkey for reasons no one understands
A beach few had as yet heard of before
For months and months we toiled to take the hills of Dardanelle
Nine months lived and dying in a living dying hell
From Lone Pine to the Nek and all across those foreign lands
Then we left that bloodied ANZAC shore.

We answered the calling
The standing the fallen
Like school children answering a bell
But no war’s a great war
We were lambs to the slaughter
Many still lay where they fell

We then rolled into Picardy like a fog upon the Somme
Gathered round the town of Pozieres
Through a night so black and dewy we tried hard to hang on
Waiting for the moment we all feared
Like a hand across a piano, run from high to low
Shells rained down red flames leapt up blow after deafening blow
And 30,000 men were dead or dying, lost or gone
After all the fog and smoke had cleared

Along the western front we ranged, the mud was deep and thick
Friends and comrades side by side
Fletcher and Mahoney, Stanley Bennie and Hardwick
For a commonwealth we were allied
Bullecourt, Broodseinde, Passchendaele, Hamel and Amiens
Battle after battle fought with loses and with wins
Till we stood atop Mount Saint- Quentin to play our final trick
Honour all the diggers who had died

October 1918 through a dark and frosty morn
We marched upon the town of Montbrehain
With our gas masks and our rifles and our threadbare uniforms
We readied there to stake our one last claim
Before the fighting started as the night turned into day
A shell fell close beside me and it blew my life away
One score year and seven from the day that I was born
A forgotten town in France is where I’m slain

Then my broken hearted mother, her grief still raw and strong
The twinkle in her eyes now softly dim
On the second anniversary of an act that felt so wrong
A notice for the Argus placed there in
She mentioned Stanley Bennie and William Hardwick too
How both were killed in action and she bade them fond adieu
And of Captain Sullivan she wrote from East Geelong
“In loving memory of my dear son Jim”

© JAMESONGS 2016