REMEMBER WHEN

GOLD COAST BULLETIN Thursday, June 24, 2004

HE always said his most successful operation was the wooing of his wife, but it was his time in the trenches that made Queensland’s last World War I Digger a national treasure.

Ted Smout, who died aged 106, did not like to dwell on his WWI experience.

When asked about his impressions of the Great War, his answer had been succinct: ‘Mud, cold and near-death’.

As one of just six surviving Australian veterans of that world conflict still alive at the time, it was inevitable that he would be asked again and again in later life to recount his formative wartime days.

Edward David Smout was born on January 5, 1898, in Brisbane. In 1915. When he was 17, he joined the army, lying about his age in order to join friends who had enlisted.

However, for Ted Smout and thousands of other Australian boys, the great adventure turned into the nightmare reality of trench warfare.

He served in France and Belgium with the Australian Medical Corps, where he suffered shell-shock which affected him for the rest of his life.

Mr Smout recalled the day the German flying ace Baron von Richthofen was shot down by an Australian machinegun and he chipped some timber off the plane for a souvenir.

He also told journalists about the time he spent at the Follies Bergeres in Paris at the end of the war.

“I was the only Australian soldier there,’’ he recalled.

“All this silk came pouring down and suddenly everyone broke out singing La Marseillaise. The whole thing was so emotional.”