The Decline and Death of a War Hero

John Hamilton offers us a highly readable book, far-ranging and varied in subject and focus, subtle in its survey of the paradoxes of the human heart. The very title is itself a bundle of veiled conjectures; the author might well have completed his title for us with his own question-mark, so that it would read: The Price of Valour?

Can valour have a price? Turn to John Manifold’s deeply moving poem “The Tomb of Lt John Learmonth, AIF”. Manifold laments the death of his boyhood friend who, without the faintest hope of survival, died fighting singlehanded against the Germans on Crete in the Second World War; his courage, “chemically pure”, existed only “as a lightning stroke”, beyond evaluation. (Strange that this personal epic happened in eastern Mediterranean waters, where Gallipoli had befallen Australian warriors just one generation earlier.)

By cruder, market methods we may insist that everything has its price, valour being no exception. If that is so, we should pity the pawnbroker who, shortly after the First World War, unsuccessfully offered Hugo Throssell ten shillings for his VC insignia; the poor man missed out on the killing he could have made not all that many years later, when VC medals attracted bids in the millions.

The Light Horseman, uniformed and kitted, who stands tall and handsome on the cover of Hamilton’s book is Captain Hugo Throssell, VC, for a time one of the most celebrated Australian heroes of the First World War. Both in London, and later back home in Australia, he was a ready participant in official occasions promoting recruitment and Empire loyalty. Among my older acquaintance of today I found a slight recollection of him: “Throssell? VC, wasn’t he? Did he come from the West?” Among my younger friends, a total blank.

The ancient doctrine of sic transit gloria seems nowadays to draw its veil earlier and earlier—a shame, denying folk memory any chance to deepen and mature the authentic character of our nation. That is one importance of authors like Hamilton.

Gallipoli was a singular horror. While their ships were still far out to sea, reinforcement troops sailing in could smell the stench which was their own destination: the trenches high up on the hillsides where men had been fighting for months among the unburied corpses, friends and enemies alike, mingled underfoot in death and putrefaction. Throssell’s resolution and bravery in this sort of fighting were beyond words, enough to win him the Empire’s highest award many times over.

John Hamilton has been to Gallipoli often: “Lone Pine”, “Quinn’s Post”, “Hill 60” are to him not mere names on a map. He responds—without wholly submitting—to the mystique of the place for Australians. There are poignancies of his own, as when he lays a bunch of Australian wildflowers at the foot of the memorial at Lone Pine, where the names appear of 300 Light Horsemen who perished in the ill-fated charge at The Nek on August 7, 1915. The flowers had been gathered back home in the bush by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander White, who led the charge; they had asked Hamilton to lay them for the family.

Hamilton has won numberless tributes and awards for his writings of all kinds, some of them about Gallipoli and war. The sensitive yet exact style of his prose amply performs that duty Joseph Conrad named as the first obligation of a writer: “To make you see”. In The Price of Valour he extends his view, for now he writes also of passionate love, of betrayal, and the crumbling of a brave man’s mind.

Hugo Throssell, son of a former premier of Western Australia, was educated as a boarder at Adelaide’s toney Prince Alfred College, an upper-crust background which never deterred him from hopping into the hard yakka of pioneering the ploughing of new-settled land, living as he did so in a tin-and-chaff-bag humpy.

In 1915, just a couple of weeks out of Gallipoli, he was being “patched up” in a London hospital when he met a petite young woman who (Hamilton’s words) “rushed forcefully” into other people’s lives. Hugo noted in his diary for September 14, 1915: “Met Miss K.S.P.” She was his fate. Their relationship was soon one of hot mutual passion. John Hamilton lets their story, based on his immense and meticulous research, unfold itself before us, from ecstasy to Throssell’s undoing.

Katharine Susannah Prichard was one of our most outstanding and truly enduring authors. I admired the fact that, in youth, she had doggedly taught herself her own trade, from the ground up. No one less than Katharine resembled certain young ladies today, who take a first degree in some dim college of creative arts, and then bewail the lack of government grants “to get my career started”.But she could be pushy. I met her several times, mostly with Vance and Nettie Palmer; a shrinking violet she was not.

Many Australian literary lives prove that a blend of true love and Lenin are no sure recipe for domestic bliss. The lately republished Wild Card of Dorothy Hewett is a reminder.

And so it proved to be with the marriage between Hugo and his K.S.P. Her abundant observation of current life for ordinary people in Europe, the deaths and cruelties of war, their poverty, hunger, deprivation and oppression made her feel that there must be a better way; and that better way was communism. She became a founding member of the Australian Communist Party, and was still an active member in good standing on the day she died in 1969. But it did only harm to the married life of Hugo Throssell (hero) and K.S.P. (famous author).

After careful—indeed enthralled—reading of The Price of Valour, I concluded that Hamilton, like a judge instructing a jury, may have left certain questions for his readers to answer for themselves, if they could.

One such question is: What, precisely, was happening inside Hugo’s increasingly “not-coping” mind? Where was its former sharpness going? That instant sense of relevance and recollection? And why was his unhappy heart sliding oftener and deeper into the pit of black depression?

Certain hints on medical/empirical grounds help us up to a point: a botched nasal operation had penetrated his brain space, exposing him to meningitis, a classic possible cause of depression; he had malaria; many veterans of the Second World War, even seventy years later, can testify to the enduring black malignity of that horrible disease. And had constant exposure in the trenches to the stunning concussion of high explosive produced actual cerebral damage?

Perhaps Hamilton has read and taken warning from Frank Honywood, Private, an engaging memoir by Eric Partridge, Australia’s great lexicographer,of his hard and long service in the First World War. Partridge says that no writer who tries to treat of active service, without first-hand experience, can possibly know what he is talking about.

Doubts may still surround the cause, but the result was clear. On Sunday, November 19, 1933, a bright morning with birds singing in the garden, Hugo took in hand his old Army revolver, stretched out comfortably with his feet supported on the veranda rail, and shot himself: one bullet.

We need not doubt Katharine’s true and generous motivations in embracing communism. Her lifelong adherence to it is more equivocal. She was sharp as a tack, and anyone so acutely perceptive must have had doubts that perhaps she had backed a fraud. Did pride and stubbornness make her pretend? Touring the Soviets and Siberia for many months, she certainly experienced at first hand the cynicism and corruption of the Soviet bureaucracy, and the servile self-seeking of the Party supporters. She let none of this shake her faith—at least not openly.

Evidences of the truth about the Russian “experiment” continued to mount. Arthur Koestler visited Australia for a lecture tour here in 1968. The best counter the Left could mount was to accuse him of marital infidelity—quite possibly true.

George Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge and Bertrand Russell all presented their shrewd and sceptical testimony. Perhaps most impressive of all, the remarkable American war correspondent and foreign reporter George Seldes published his book The Truth Behind the News. Seldes had unrivalled contacts and personal grasp of European affairs. He knew Lenin and Trotsky and Maxim Litvinoff. The Truth Behind the News was published in England by Faber & Faber in 1929. Few Australians seem to have read it.

None of this seemed to weigh with Katharine. What a savage irony! Shocked with pity for the 8 to 10 million of all countries (both sides) who died in the First World War, she continued her unwavering loyalty to Stalin, who in short order had already killed more than twice that number of his own people.

There was an even less attractive aspect to Katharine’s politics. When the Party’s needs conflicted with the interests of her husband, it seemed to be Hugo who got sold down the river. In 1919 she wrote for him a public speech, which she saw that he delivered, saying in effect that he had abandoned his old loyalties and values, war having turned him into a socialist. At her urging, he went from national hero to pariah in one short speech.