7 - Dispatch From the Stones

My ancestors were a tribal society who spent the cold Scottish winters burning peat while inventing whiskey, bagpipes and golf.  The summers were for stealing other clans’ cattle - and fighting.  They developed an simple way to tell who won and who lost a battle.

Just before the fight, each man would pick up one stone and make a pile.  After the fight, each would come back and remove one stone.  The stones that remained become a reminder of those who fell, a cairn, a monument. 

We still do it.  Solders’ gravestones roll over countrysides from Xian to Flanders to Gettysburg to Gallipoli.  None that fell at Gallipoli ever came back to Australia, many were not buried until the war was over - 4 years later.  They now have stones.  My grandfather, Lt. E.J. Howells, came Precious close to being one of those stones - one Corporal John Henry Precious, to be exact.

 

1915, late in September, Granddad and his mates were in their trenches underground - listening.  “Jocko,” as they called the Turks, was digging.  Tunnel under the enemy trench, pack in explosives, and blow him up.  Like submariners, each side would listen for their enemy digging toward them. With crude measurements and guesses, the Australians plotted the sounds of their enemy’s underground progress - then dug a long deep tunnel to intercept. We found the letter Lt. Howells sent from the hospital afterwards. Granddad had set off the charge himself.  He doesn’t remember much after, nor could have Cpl. Precious, but eye witnesses wrote:

They both made it through the war, and no record was found of them ever meeting again.  But I did find his grandson, Mr. Graeme Precious.  We went to the grave of Cpl. Precious to pay our respects and place a stone by his name - a ceramic poppy, the symbol of remembrance.

Since those Scottish cairns, the stone piles have gotten far larger.  162,000 Aussie stones were left overseas after WWI.  Only one body, a general (and his horse) were brought home.  In 1993, another, an Unknown Australian was exhumed and placed under the dome of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra - a building also made of stone.

 Melbourne too has a big pile of stones - the Shrine of Remembrance.  Inside are parchments with the names of all those who volunteered from the State of Victoria.  I asked to see Granddad’s and they obliged.  

He died just up the road in a veteran’s hospital.  He has no stone.  That will change.

- Stoned Stew