A NEW WORLD

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20150, 19 May 1928, Page 7

A NEW WORLD

THE “UNKNOWN SOLDIER” McQUAY LEAVES FOR HOME [ Australian Press Assn. J Received May 18, 11 p.m. SYDNEY, May 18. : The soldier, George McQuay, and his mother were passengers by the Maunganui which left at 5.30 p.m. for Wellington. Out of the silence of 13 empty years, lost in the mazes of a fantastic world of shadows, the “unknown soldier" of Callan Park, spoke the other day to an eager woman, trembling with nervousness, which she tried hard to conceal, who came post-haste from Stratford, New Zealand, to see —her son. “Mum, your eyes are sore," he said. So, abruptly, George McQuay, late of the sth Reinforcements, New Zealand Army, and later “George Brown" unidentified patient in an asylum, renewed touch with the reality he lost—no I one knows how—in 1916. The sun was shining brightly when this lonely man broke from his nightmare of loneliness into the promise of new life. Ho could hardly realise the stupendous meaning of the change. He passed his hand wearily over his eyes and asked after “Sis." When his mother, tears of joy in her eyes, showed him photographs of what he had long forgotten was home, and of the people there, he exclaimed delightedly: “And what about Lil Melville, and Lottie Doughty and the Cunninghams, and—and— ' ’ Mrs McQuay could not contain her joy in rediscoverying her boy. “Think of it!" she said. “Never a word since 1915; never a sign of George since the landing at Gallipoli! Not to know even that he had been killed, no report of him as 1 missing’— just silence. “He remembers me—that’s the groat thing. When I have him home again, among the places and people he loved, he’ll ‘come back.' So many years here, with nobody to prompt him, nobody to care. He was only a number." The doctors at Callan Park think that there is good ground for believing that much of McQuay’s mental wreckage may be restored by the influence of old associations. “I am very grateful to the papers-" Mrs McQuay said. “If it had not been for them I should never have found George. “The New Zealand authorities could 'do nothing for me. They didn’t want me to come to Australia to bring him home. But it would take more than a Government to keep me from my boy!"