If you’re looking for a typical “trench warfare” memoir filled with bayonet charges and mud-caked heroics, Robert Crack’s Until a Dead Horse Kicks You might surprise you. It is a deeply personal, often wry, and technically fascinating look at a side of the Great War rarely explored in mainstream history: the life of a wireless operator. While the infantry dealt with the physical geography of No Man’s Land, Crack dealt with the invisible geography of the airwaves, offering a unique vantage point on the chaos of the Western Front.

The memoir follows Crack’s journey as he navigates the high-stakes world of early military communication. He does a brilliant job of explaining the primitive nature of radio without getting bogged down in jargon, allowing the reader to feel the frustration of hauling heavy, temperamental equipment across broken terrain. There is a profound sense of isolation in his narrative; despite being “connected” via signals, being a specialist often meant being an outsider among the regular units, a social friction that Crack captures with sharp, honest observation.

One of the most compelling aspects of the book is Crack’s exploration of the physical burden placed on signallers. Unlike the infantry who carried a standard pack and rifle, wireless operators were often burdened with cumbersome “portable” sets that were anything but light. Crack details the gruelling logistics of moving lead-acid batteries, hand-cranked generators, and delicate vacuum tubes through knee-deep mud and artillery barrages. This logistical nightmare created a constant tension between the need for mobility and the requirement for a stable signal, making the reader realise that the war of communication was as much a feat of physical labour as it was of technical skill.

Crack also spends significant time reflecting on the psychological toll of being a “listener.” In the silent world of the headset, operators were often the first to hear the frantic calls for reinforcements or the chilling silence when a forward position was overrun. He describes the heavy responsibility of being the sole link between a doomed platoon and the artillery support that might save them. This perspective adds a layer of emotional weight to the narrative; while he may have been physically removed from some of the frontline bayonet charges, he was mentally plugged directly into the terror and desperation of the entire sector.

The narrative further delves into the surreal contrast between the silence of the radio room and the cacophony of the battlefield. Crack describes the strange, ghost-like experience of sitting in a cramped, dark dugout with headphones pressed tightly to his ears, tuning into the “voices” of the ether while the earth literally shook from heavy bombardment. This sensory dichotomy created a form of mental displacement; he was physically in a hole in the ground in France, but his mind was stretched across miles of invisible wire and frequency. It highlights the unique mental fatigue of the operator, who had to maintain surgical focus on the rhythmic “dits” and “dahs” of Morse code while the world was being torn apart just feet above his head.

Moreover, Crack provides a candid look at the bureaucracy and skepticism that the Signal Service faced from old-school commanders. In the early stages of the war, many high-ranking officers were suspicious of wireless technology, preferring the traditional—and often suicidal—method of sending human runners with handwritten notes. Crack recounts instances where vital intelligence was ignored because it came through a “newfangled” box rather than a mud-stained dispatch rider. His frustration with this rigid military hierarchy is palpable, offering a scathing critique of how the refusal to adapt to modern technology directly resulted in unnecessary loss of life.

The memoir also captures the haunting atmosphere of the “listening sets” used for intercepting enemy communications. Crack describes the tension of scanning the dials, hunting through the static for a German signal that might reveal an impending attack or a shift in the enemy’s line. These sections read almost like a psychological thriller, as he details the intimate, voyeuristic experience of listening to an enemy he would never see. He notes the chilling realisation that on the other side of No Man’s Land, a German operator was likely doing the exact same thing—two technicians caught in a private, silent war of wits that existed entirely apart from the mud and the blood of the infantry.

Ultimately, Until a Dead Horse Kicks You is a must-read for military history buffs and those interested in the evolution of technology. It strips away the romanticism of war and replaces it with the cold reality of technical failure and human endurance. Crack reflects on the “invisible scars” of his service, noting the difficulty of adjusting to the quiet of post-war England where the absence of static felt like a physical weight. It is a gritty, authentic, and surprisingly witty account that ensures the “sparks” of the Great War—the men who held the lines together with copper and code—are not forgotten.

A forward artillery observer in the World War II sits right at the point where information turns into effect. He is forward with the infantry or recce elements, not back with the guns. His job is simple in concept but demanding in practice. He sees what the guns cannot and turns that into fire on the ground. Without him, artillery is largely working off maps and plans. With him, it becomes responsive.

He works forward because that is where the information is. From there he identifies targets. That might be a machine gun position holding up a section, movement forming up behind cover, or vehicles coming onto a track. Once he has that, he calls it in. Grid, description, type of fire. It is done in a set format because it has to be clear and fast. There is no room for ambiguity once rounds are in the air.

When the first rounds land, the real work begins. He watches the fall of shot and corrects it. Over, short, left, right. Small, controlled adjustments. The aim is to bracket and then close. When it is on, he calls for fire for effect and brings the weight of the battery onto the target. Just as important, he controls when it stops or shifts, especially when his own infantry are moving. That timing matters. Get it wrong and you either lose the effect or hit your own.

Everything sits on method. Map reading, grid work, judging distance, and clear communication. He is usually not alone. There is a signaller at least, sometimes more, but it is still a small team carrying what they need. Radio, binoculars, maps, compass. If the radio goes down, the whole system starts to break. At that point the guns are back to being blind.

Tactically, the value is in responsiveness. The observer makes artillery immediate. He can suppress, break up an attack, or support movement as it happens. At platoon and company level that can be decisive. It is not about weight of fire in the abstract. It is about putting it in the right place at the right time.

The position itself is exposed. To see, he has to be where he can observe, and that usually means forward and often high or open ground. That draws attention. Small arms, mortars, anything that can reach him will. Opponents understood very quickly that if you remove the observer, you blunt the artillery.

Across different theatres the details change. In open country you can see further but you are easier to find. In jungle you are close in, visibility is poor, and adjustment is harder. The fundamentals do not change. He is still the link between what is happening and what can be brought to bear.

In practical terms, the forward observer is what makes artillery useful at the level most fighting actually takes place. He takes something that is otherwise indirect and makes it immediate. That is where the role sits.

More KNIL tomorrow.

Two Steps to Tokyo was originally written straight after the war in 1946, The Hodder version I picked up is the revised 1958 edition. Normally books written eighty years ago do not stand up today. Despite an older style this one holds its age well.

Two Steps to Tokyo by Gordon Powell is a compact and often overlooked memoir that captures the experience of an Australian soldier in the final phase of the Second World War, when the expectation of a costly campaign against Japan still shaped daily life. What distinguishes the account, however, is Powell’s position as a chaplain, a role that places him both within the military structure and slightly apart from it, giving his observations a particular depth.

Powell writes in a direct, unadorned style. There is no attempt at literary embellishment. The strength of the book lies in its immediacy and restraint. He records the rhythms of service life, the uncertainty of movement, and the persistent sense that the war is not yet finished. The title itself carries that tension. Tokyo is imagined as close, almost within reach, yet dependent on events beyond the control of those preparing to advance.

His role as chaplain shapes the narrative in important ways. Powell is not concerned with directing operations, but he is present at the points where cohesion is most under strain. He moves between units, speaking with men, listening, and absorbing the undercurrent of anxiety that comes with the expectation of future combat. The work is quiet and continuous. Conversations, shared silences, small personal burdens. These are the moments he records, and they reveal a dimension of military life that sits outside formal reporting.

The Reverend Dr Gordon Powell AM MA BD c. 1986 by David Cameron

There is little overt preaching. His faith is evident but understated, expressed through presence rather than instruction. Religious services appear, but they are not the centre of his work. More significant is his accessibility. As a chaplain he exists outside the strict hierarchy of command, and this allows men to approach him in ways they might not with officers. His authority rests on trust rather than rank, and this gives him a stabilising role within the unit.

The memoir is particularly strong in its portrayal of anticipation. Powell is dealing with men who expect to fight on in a major campaign against Japan. Fear is present, though rarely stated outright, and there is a sense of suspended tension. His role is to contain that pressure rather than remove it. In this respect, the book provides a clear illustration of how emotional and psychological strain is managed within a military formation. It shows that cohesion is not maintained solely through discipline and command, but also through quieter forms of support.

When the war ends abruptly with Japan’s surrender, the narrative shifts. The forward momentum implied in the title dissolves into uncertainty about purpose and direction. This transition is handled without drama, but it underscores the central experience of the book: a force prepared for one outcome, suddenly confronted with another.

As a historical source, Two Steps to Tokyo is valuable precisely because of its modest scope. It does not attempt strategic explanation. Instead, it offers a grounded account at the small unit level, attentive to relationships, morale, and endurance. Through Powell’s position as chaplain, the reader gains access to the interior life of the unit, the management of strain, and the quiet mechanisms that allow men to continue in conditions defined more by expectation than by action.

Well worth picking up. Again it is one that I wouldn’t buy new for $29.00 (available on Amazon), but second hand I wouldn’t hesitate.

This figure came with the Bolt Action “Artmies of Imperial Japan.

Hiroo Onoda was an intelligence officer of the Imperial Japanese Army whose war did not end in 1945. He was trained for irregular operations, instructed to operate independently, to avoid surrender, and to continue the mission for as long as possible. In December 1944 he was sent to Lubang Island in the Philippines with orders to disrupt enemy activity and hold out. Within months the island was taken by American and Filipino forces. The formal war ended the following year. For Onoda, it did not.

He withdrew into the interior with a small group of soldiers and settled into a pattern of survival and intermittent action. They lived off the land, raided for supplies, and maintained weapons as best they could. Their understanding of the situation hardened early. Leaflets were dropped announcing Japan’s surrender. Messages were broadcast. Personal letters were delivered. Each was assessed through the lens of training and circumstance and dismissed as deception. In that environment, doubt did not lead to reassessment. It reinforced the assumption of enemy trickery.

Over time the group diminished. Some surrendered. Others were killed in skirmishes with local inhabitants or security forces. By the early 1970s Onoda was alone. The years had not softened his position. If anything, isolation had stripped it back to first principles. The war continued because his orders had not been rescinded by a recognised authority. Everything else was noise.

In 1974 a young Japanese traveller, Norio Suzuki, set out specifically to find him. Against expectation, he did. Suzuki was able to establish contact and build enough trust to open a line of communication, but Onoda remained fixed on a single condition. He would surrender only when formally ordered to do so by his commanding officer. That officer, Yoshimi Taniguchi, was located in Japan and brought to Lubang. Standing in uniform, he read the order relieving Onoda of his duty. Only then did Onoda lay down his arms.

The duration of his holdout, close to three decades, draws attention, but it is not the most instructive part of the case. More telling is the way training, doctrine, and environment combined to produce a closed system of belief. Onoda’s role as an intelligence officer matters here. He was taught to read information critically, to assume deception, and to prioritise mission over circumstance. In the absence of a trusted command channel, every external signal could be reinterpreted as hostile. The jungle did the rest. Isolation removed competing narratives. Time did not erode conviction. It stabilised it.

There is also a harder edge to the story. During those years, Onoda and his companions conducted actions against local people, resulting in deaths and injuries. These were not abstract consequences. They were lived realities for those on the island. When he returned to Japan, reactions reflected this tension. Some saw discipline and endurance. Others saw the cost of a war that, for them, had never truly ended.

After his return, Onoda struggled to settle into postwar Japan and later spent years in Brazil before eventually coming back. He died in 2014. His account was published as No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War. It reads as a record of persistence under a set of assumptions that were never successfully broken.

What remains is a case study in how men operate under constraint when the usual structures of command, information, and relief are absent. Orders framed in absolute terms, a permissive environment for concealment, and a mindset conditioned to distrust external inputs can sustain action far beyond any reasonable expectation. It is not an outlier in kind. It is an extreme in duration.

Back to the KNIL tomorrow.

There is a stillness to this morning that feels different from any other day of the year. It is not just the quiet before dawn, though that is part of it. It is something held, something shared. A pause that stretches across time as much as across place.

ANZAC Day has always been described in large terms. Gallipoli. Sacrifice. Nationhood. These things matter. On 25 April 1915, Australian and New Zealand troops landed on the Gallipoli peninsula in what became their first major action of the First World War. It was a campaign marked by courage, confusion, and heavy loss.

But the day does not live at that scale.

It lives in smaller things.

It lives in the names read out, not as history, but as people. It lives in the way a medal is held, or worn, or sometimes left in a drawer. It lives in the stories that are told carefully, or not told at all. It lives in the understanding that those who went did not return unchanged, and many did not return at all.

There is often an effort to define the day. To say what it stands for. That has never quite held. ANZAC Day is not a single idea. It gathers together memory, loss, pride, discomfort, gratitude, and at times unease.

It is not a day that celebrates war. It reminds us what war takes, and how completely it takes it.

That is why the silence matters.

Not as ritual alone, but as recognition. In that silence there is space. Space for those who served. Space for those who waited. Space for those who were never asked. Space for those whose stories do not sit easily within the national story.

Time has widened the day beyond Gallipoli. It now holds those who served in later wars, in conflicts, and in peacekeeping. It recognises that the experience of service did not end in 1915, and that the cost has not been confined to one place or one moment.

But even that is not the whole of it.

Remembrance is not only about those who served overseas. It also sits alongside the histories of conflict on this land. Those stories remain, whether they are spoken of or not.

Perhaps that is where the day is most honest.

Not in certainty, but in reflection.

Not in a single story, but in many.

This morning I will stand in that quiet. I will listen. I will think about those who went, and those who did not return, and those who carried it with them for the rest of their lives.

I will leave the meaning of it open.

Some things are not meant to be resolved.

They are meant to be remembered.

Lest we forget.

Tonight I am speaking at the Connections conference midnight AEST or 10.00AM US EDT. The Youtube live link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZO2LbFV_TE

The conference paper, slides and presentation script are available on my website from here.

Courage and Compassion: A Stretcher-Bearer’s Journey from No-Man’s Land and Beyond by Don Farrands is best understood as a personal and reconstructive narrative rather than a work of analytical military history. Its purpose is not to explain the First World War in structural terms, but to recover and give shape to one individual life within it, and more importantly, to trace the long consequences of that experience. Read in that light, it becomes a work concerned less with combat than with endurance, memory, and the persistence of damage.

The book’s greatest strength lies in its chosen perspective. By focusing on Nelson Ferguson as a stretcher-bearer, Farrands shifts attention away from combat action and toward exposure, aftermath, and obligation. Ferguson is present at the Somme, Bullecourt, Ypres, and Villers-Bretonneux, but always in a role defined by response rather than initiative. This produces a narrative characterised by constant proximity to violence without the release or resolution typically associated with combat accounts. The experience is one of sustained pressure: movement through danger, repeated confrontation with the wounded, and the accumulation of strain over time. The effect is to foreground a dimension of war often treated as secondary, revealing instead how central such roles are to the functioning—and human cost—of the battlefield.

The book is at its most effective in its treatment of the post-war period. Ferguson’s gassing and subsequent blindness are not presented as a tragic endpoint but as the beginning of a prolonged struggle that reshapes his identity, work, and family life. The loss of his teaching career, the necessity of adaptation, and his eventual work in stained glass all demonstrate the long arc of recovery and adjustment. The later restoration of sight, occurring decades after the war, introduces a note of resolution, but it does not erase the years of impairment that precede it. In this sense, the book insists that war’s consequences are not confined to the battlefield but unfold across a lifetime.

Farrands’ use of family diaries and letters gives the narrative immediacy and authenticity, grounding it in primary material rather than retrospective invention. At the same time, this method shapes the work’s limitations. The story is mediated through a familial perspective, and the tone often leans toward reverence. Suffering is clearly conveyed, but it is not always subjected to deeper interrogation, and the broader structures that produced that suffering remain largely unexamined. The narrative tends to preserve rather than challenge inherited frames of memory, including elements of the Anzac tradition.

There is also a degree of narrative smoothing inherent in the reconstruction. Events are arranged into a coherent arc in which hardship leads toward resilience and eventual resolution. While this gives the book clarity and emotional force, it risks obscuring the fragmentation and discontinuity that characterise much lived wartime experience. The result is a story that feels shaped by hindsight, imposing meaning where the original experience may have been far less ordered.

As history, the book is therefore limited in analytical scope. It does not engage in sustained examination of stretcher-bearing as a system within trench warfare, nor does it explore the organisational or logistical structures that governed medical evacuation and exposure to risk. Instead, it operates as a micro-history centred on lived experience and its aftermath. Its contribution is ethical rather than explanatory, emphasising the centrality of care roles and the enduring impact of war on individuals and families.

In sum, Courage and Compassion is a strong work of human history and memory, but a restrained one in terms of critical analysis. It is most effective when read alongside more structural accounts of the First World War, where it can serve to deepen and complicate understanding. On its own, it offers a compelling but particular perspective, shaped by both its sources and its purpose, and best approached as a study of endurance rather than a comprehensive account of war.

I picked this up fro AU#2.00 and it was worth that. I wouldn’t purchase new.

Another part Daemon part machine for the Blood God.

The Chaos Skull Cannon is a grotesque fusion of infernal machinery and demonic entity that serves as a mobile artillery piece for the legions of Khorne. Built from the scorched brass of the Blood God’s own forges, this engine of war grinds across the battlefield on spiked rollers, macerating the bodies of the fallen into a bloody pulp to fuel its dark appetites.

Within its gaping mechanical maw, the spirits and remains of its victims are transmuted into searing bolts of supernatural fire. When the cannon fires, it launches flaming skulls that scream with the agony of the damned, exploding upon impact to scatter white-hot shrapnel and soul-chilling terror among the enemy ranks.

Operating with a predatory instinct, the machine-beast thrives in the thick of slaughter, as every life harvested by its crushing wheels provides more ammunition for its relentless, pyroclastic barrage.

Beyond its role as a long-range devastator, the Skull Cannon possesses a savage sentience that drives it to seek out the densest clusters of infantry. The Bloodletters who crew the machine do not merely aim a weapon but guide a beast, directing its hunger toward those who attempt to flee the carnage.

As the engine accelerates, the gnashing grinders at its front consume both the living and the dead, stripping flesh from bone with mechanical precision to ensure the furnace within never grows cold. This constant cycle of consumption and combustion makes the vehicle a self-sustaining nightmare, capable of maintaining a terrifying rate of fire so long as the blood continues to flow across the earth.

The psychological impact of the weapon is as lethal as its physical payload, for the projectiles it hurls are infused with a fragment of the victim’s lingering malice. Those struck by the blazing craniums are often incinerated instantly, but survivors are left to contend with the psychic echoes of the screaming ammunition.

The air around the cannon grows thick with the scent of ozone and charred marrow, a sensory assault that breaks the morale of even the most disciplined defenders. In the grand hierarchy of Khorne’s arsenal, the Skull Cannon stands as a testament to the Blood God’s belief that every death should serve a dual purpose, acting as both a sacrifice and a means to harvest even more skulls for the throne.