TOLL OF THE WAR

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21480, 2 May 1933, Page 15

TOLL OF THE WAR

ANZAC DAY TRAGEDY THREE HOSPITAL PEATHS POIGNANT COINCIDENCE [from our own correspondent] SYDNEY, April 27 Tho war still takes its toll. While the dawn watchers waited at the Sydney Cenotaph on Anzac Day, and the clear notes of the Reveiile echoed through the quietened city, the Last Post might well have sounded at the Handwick military hospital. Eighteen years, almost to the minute,, after that glorious dawn on Anzac Beach, there was another zero hour at the Randwick Hospital on Tuesday—three more ex-soldiers "went over the top" to join that heroic army that had gone before them. It was a poignant coincidence, but, more than anything else could have done, it brought home all that Anzac stands for —sacrifice. The new names added to the roll of glorv were John Coakley, a member of the 3rd Pioneers; Alfred Burling, 13th Batt.; and Richard Kent, R.A.N. The deaths of three comrades on the Day of Remembrance may have cast a shadow over this hospital, but tho same amazing spirit which has written Anzac in golden letters still survives. Every man in the hospital who could leave his bed did so. and joined his comrades, who were marching through the city. Few indeed there were who were fit to march. Others were taken in motor-cars, but in spirit they all tramped side by side with their living and their dead comrades. Though the Returned Soldiers' League is not in possession of authentic figures of the number of deaths among retun ad soldiers since the Armistice, st-r.ve calculators have put the figure at 60,000, equal to the toll oil the actual battlefield. Tho fortlfcoming census will reveal tho number of returned soldiers who are still alive. The pensions officer of the league, in a general survey of deaths that have occurred among returned soldiers, considers that the average ago at the time of death was 42 or 43. The strain and privations endured by the "Diggers" during the Great War, he says, has obviously shortened their lives. In most cases returned men aged prematurely, and one case in point was that of a man who was only 37, though he looked to be 65, and his capacity in the labour market was that of a man of 75.