Australasia Triumphant - With the Australians and New Zealanders in the Great War on Land and Sea

Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, London, 1916, 1st edition, no dustwrapper but white covers fairly clean and bright, occasional foxing

It is too soon to attempt the telling at large and in detail of all that has been done by Australia and New Zealand in the Great War. There is much that has, for military reasons, not yet been revealed; and what has been told has come to us from various sources in more or less fragmentary fashion, so that one must read several accounts of the same event in order to get anything of an adequate idea of it. All I have done here is to collate such documents as are available and gather together a connected narrative, not only of the actual campaigning, but of the spiritual and mental experiences the Australasians have passed through since August 1914, the way they have faced this crisis in their history, and the effect the war has had on their national life. I have drawn on official documents, on the dispatches of Sir Ian Hamilton, the reports of the various correspondents of our English and the chief Australian and New Zealand newspapers, on the Speeches of public men and letters of private citizens, and on a few conversations I have had with some of the wounded Anzacs whom I have met in these latter days about London. In all which I have been little more than an enthusiastic and, I hope, faithful compiler, endeavour ing to set down as vividly as I could the impressions I formed from my reading and hearing of these things, and trying occasionally to guess, according to my lights, at the spirit and inner significance of this wonderful uprising of our Australasian kinsik - at the ideal for which they are fighting with such glorious heroism and for which so many of them have ungrudgingly laid down their lives. Some, who have had no hand in the fighting, have very confidently criticised both the commander-in-chief who has led these gallant soldiers in the sternest of their battles and the Government that has been responsible for the campaigns they have undertaken; but I have not ventured to compete with such critics, chie?y because I accept the judgment of the sturdy New Zealander who said to me, discussing the nagging diatribes of a certain newspaper. 36 photographic plates.....