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The Big Fight (Gallipoli to the Somme)

Chapter 33: CHAPTER XXI The Gray Mother
By David Fallon
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About This Book

A first-person memoir traces a soldier’s journey from recruiting work and enlistment in Australia through amphibious assaults, the Gallipoli campaign, and later fighting on the Somme. Chapters blend vivid front-line episodes—landings, trench warfare, raids, sapper work, spotting and close-quarters actions—with quieter interludes of recovery, honors received, and reflections on comradeship, fear and endurance. The narrative records practical tactics and soldierly ritual, the psychological strain of long campaigns, encounters with espionage and night dangers, and the cost of battle on body and spirit, concluding with convalescence and the personal reckonings that follow sustained combat.

I will close this book with words far nobler and more graceful than any I could pen which speak for the spirit which has brought to England, from East and South and North and West the hundreds of thousands, the millions who have taken up arms for her in this great trial of her future life, her prestige and her honor and for the humanity, democracy and civilization which history grants she has always championed.

I got it from an Anzac private crippled for life, as he lay on a hospital cot in London, and he told me he had it from his father, a veteran of the Boer War, who had treasured it from that time. It was a clipping from the London Spectator, deeply yellowed in the passing of nearly a score of years. And it reads:

THE GRAY MOTHER
(To an Old Gaelic Air)
From the Spectator

Lo, how they come to me,
 Long through the night I call them,
 Ah, how they turn to me.
East and South my children scatter,
 North and West the world they wander.
Yet they come back to me,
 Come with their brave hearts beating,
 Longing to die for me,
Me, the gray, old, weary mother,
 Throned amid the Northern waters,
Where they have died for me,
 Died with their songs around me,
 Girding my shores for me.
Narrow was my dwelling for them,
 Homes they builded o’er the ocean,
Yet they leave all for me,
 Hearing their mother calling,
 Bringing their lives for me.
Far from South seas swiftly sailing,
 Out from under stars I know not,
Come they to fight for me,
 Sons of the sons I nurtured,
 God keep them safe for me.
Long ago their fathers saved me,
 Died for me among the heather.
Now they come back to me,
 Come, in their children’s children
 Brave of the brave for me.
In the wilds and waves they slumber,
 Deep they slumber in the deserts,
Rise they from graves to me,
 Graves where they lay forgotten,
 Shades of the brave for me.
Yet my soul is veiled in sadness,
 For I see them fall and perish,
Strewing the hills for me,
 Claiming the world in dying,
 Bought with their blood for me.
Hear the gray, old Northern mother,
 Blessing now her dying children,—
God keep ye safe for me,
 Christ watch ye in your sleeping,
 Where ye have died for me.
And when God’s own slogan soundeth,
 All the dead world’s dust awaking,
Ah, will ye look for me?
 Bravely we’ll stand together
 I and my sons with me.
L. MacLean Watt.