BLOOD, DEATH &

Ada Smith can’t sleep. The noise of the guns doesn’t help, but the real reason is the crushing knowledge that, within hours, thousands of men will be slaughtered and maimed.

For days, Diggers passing through her Trois Arbres nursing station in northwest France have been talking about the next “big one” – a push on some ridge called Messines. Engineers have tripled the number of operating tables in the surgery tent, and Ada is told she will be in charge of wounded men with no chance of recovery: “the moribund ward”.

“I felt things were almost beyond me,” she writes.

Today we remember Messines as the site of a spectacular Australian victory.

But Ada’s fears more closely mirror the reality of 1917 – and they would be validated at the front and at home.

The third year of World War I, 1917, was the most dev- astating year in Australia’s history in terms of lives lost overseas and domestic upheaval in a country looking anything but lucky.

“It was without a doubt the costliest year,” noted historian Peter Stanley says. “Australia lost as many men in 1917 as in the first three years of fighting combined – almost 22,000. It was the year of the heaviest death toll and the most social division.”

That’s not just the costliest year of WWI, but of all time. Twenty per cent of all Australia’s deaths in war happened in 1917. Behind the military losses, which we pause to remember today, were social and political disruptions of a scale never seen before or since.

The bitter conscription debate, setting communities against each other in rifts that would not heal for decades; the Great Strike that sowed bitter enmity between “disloyal” unionists and “scabs”; a plague of mice that devastated crops; food riots; and a constant undercurrent of tension and suspicion that had innocent men hounded, impounded and banished for the crime of having a name that sounded a bit foreign.

At the front, we remember battles such as Messines, Polygon Wood, Beersheba, Passchendaele, and Gaza. All marked by tales of heroism, but always set against horror and loss. For example, the ex-