no other nation lost more men as a proportion of population in the First World War than Australia. Out of a national population of under five million, Australia suffered a staggering 210,000 casualties – 60,000 dead, 150,000 injured. The casualty rate for its soldiers was 65 per cent. As John Pilger has put it: ‘No army was as decimated as that which came from farthest away. And all were volunteers.’ Only a few days earlier, in one of the weekend papers I had read a review of a new history of the First World War by the British historian John Keegan. In passing, the reviewer had noted, with an
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