STRETCHER BEARER, Jeanell Buckley; Ginninderra Press, 2018
There are limits to telling war stories on the screen and stage; rarely can the story only be about those who find themselves in war, who are made to face death and who die; about those in service who are themselves victims of the wars they fight.
A filmed or staged production about soldiers is, necessarily, a product for a market, compelled to do more than tell the true stories of those in service, of ordinary people, from ordinary lives, who keep trying to be ordinarily human in the surreality of war. The fourth series of the British television show Blackadder managed it well, showing the hapless, tragic – and, therefore, blackly comic – way that soldiers just kept being themselves.
Such stories are told most effectively in poetry and prose, undistracted by the plots, settings, music and dramatic devices of film and theatre. Although prose, too, of course, can tell a bigger story; Sebastian Faulks’ acclaimed novel Birdsong depicts the horror of a soldier’s life in the First World War trenches, but at the same time it is a love story. There is a filmic quality about it, and indeed it was made into a successful play and television series. There is little that is filmic about Jeanell Buckley’s novella, Stretcher Bearer, and I mean that as a good thing. Jeanell’s sources are words on a page; the handwritten words in diaries and letters of Australian soldiers in the First World War. A poet and writer of fiction, and at the time a librarian, Jeanell worked on a NSW State Library project to preserve these documents.
The First World War is widely regarded as among the most arrogant, cruel and pointless mass slaughters in modern times. Bizarrely, that same war was seen by many in Australia at the time as a romantic adventure, and young men volunteered to fight and die for King and country (England). Of course, they were literally half a world away from the reality of the war, with little but propaganda and censored correspondence to tell them what was actually happening.
Those men didn’t write from the trenches for drama or pathos or an audience; they didn’t write for any purpose other than to find some normalcy in their hell, some way to feel connected to home, parents, siblings and friends. The tragedy of what the soldiers wrote is in their determined attempt to remain balanced, measured and humorous in the midst of grim and irrational circumstances.
In Stretcher Bearer, Jeanell has crystallised her sources into the imagined letters and diaries of two fictional/ composite characters; Giles, a Private and stretcher bearer, and Sidney, a Captain. Both are somewhere [censored] on the Western Front, and both write – in the manner of their respective social classes – about what they are living through, and what they miss and want to know about home.
The truth of Jeanell’s writing is remarkable, unerring in capturing the expression, the cadence and the sensibility of the writers. These diaries and letters are utterly convincing as the private correspondence of a soldier and an officer from Australia in 1916, a masterful distillation of the writing of so many soldiers, capturing an emotional essence that couldn’t be conveyed on film.
The simple power of portraying unremarkable lives puts me in mind of realist literature; think Emile Zola or, closer to home, Christina Stead, Ruth Park, Frank Hardy, and the journal Overland. In Stretcher Bearer, Jeanell, too, conveys people’s recognisable ordinariness, in the context of the extraordinary circumstances of war.
Jeanell Buckley died of cancer in early 2021. She has left us with a story that is a testament to her talent, and that prompts us to reflect on the resilience, suffering and loss of soldiers who are people, just like us.
Published in 2021 in Vol 46(2) of the Alternative Law Journal in the ‘Law and Culture’ column