Pens And Bayonets

Pens and Bayonets gives voice to the young Australia soldiers who volunteered to fight for our freedom in the Great War. They answered the call willingly, with many thinking it may be all over before they got there. How wrong they were. South Australia, and Yorke Peninsula in particular, were proud to provide soldiers for their country. The letters were written during quiet periods and give us an insight and sometimes graphic account of the day-to-day encounters during the Gallipoli campaign and various offensives on the Western Front and Palestine. Communication options abound in the modern age, but imagine the challenges of 100 years ago, with your son, brother, uncle or nephew on the other side of the world, fighting in what we now know to be horrendous conditions, writing a letter home. It would take months for the letter to arrive. With the letter came a connection with family that gave a belief that their loved ones were safe and, importantly, the needed hope that the end of the Great War would bring them home. The letters the soldiers received, many weeks after being written, gave comfort and solace to these men, and provided their only contact with loved ones. Don Longo has gathered many of these moving letters, and set them in their historical context, to bring these soldiers back to life.

The bayonet is an essential item of a soldier's kit even on today's modern hi-tech battlefield. This work examines the origins of this humble weapon and the 'cult of the bayonet' as espoused by the Russian General Alexander Suvorov who asserted that The bullet misses, the bayonet does not. The first bayonets appeared in France in the early 17th century and soon they were being used by every army in Europe. The author examines the spread of this simple weapon and how it led to fundamental changes being made in battlefield tactics. Over 300 years later, in the age of hi-tech warfare and weapons of mass destruction, the bayonet is still in service with armies around the world. British and US forces in Afghanistan regularly have their bayonets fixed. Fix Bayonets illustrates how tactics changed and the design of the weapon, although fundamentally the same, has evolved over the centuries.Much myth and legend surrounds the subject of bayonet charges and the weapon has become an icon of defiance and the determination to do whatever it takes to win. The author examines evidence for the reality of such actions. How did the ordinary soldier feel to be told 'fix bayonets'? John Norris draws on personal accounts of soldiers using bayonets in combat from the Napoleonic and Crimean Wars, various Colonial campaigns, through the World Wars, Falklands War and into the 21st century in Afghanistan. In so doing he explains the seemingly anachronistic survival of this simple weapon on the modern battlefield.

Mosaic Fictions reveals the tensions between national and global affiliations in Spanish Civil War literature, highlighting writers such as Leonard Cohen, Dorothy Livesay, and Mordecai Richler.