“Jim Marlow had six brothers, one died in infancy; the other five served on the bloody battlefields of the Western Front… Anzac Sons is the Marlow families story, but symbolic of so many other, a story of a family torn apart by the tragedy of the Great War. And of communities that would not recover from the loss of so many of their young men.
In 1924, Jim took the long sea voyage to walk in the footsteps of his brothers, five courageous men who went to war. Eighty-seven years later, in 2011, I journey back to France and Belgium with my father and my husband. It is a pilgrimage which is at times overwhelming. There are the green fields upon which thousands and thousands of men died. There are the relics of war stacked in the yards of the local farmer: shells, wire and chunks of broken metal. There are the hundreds of graveyards that scar the verdant fields. There are the imposing memorials with thousands of names, the missing, lost to the fields of Flanders and the hell of the Somme valley.
We are here to find the graves of my great-uncles who gallantly gave up their lives in the shocking carnage of 1914-1918. This is their story…”
