There is coverage of every conflict in which Australians have been involved, including the war against the Aborigines. Curiously, the drawn-out struggle to control the continent gets just eighteen pages in this long book. There are other anomalies. For instance, an Australian account of the Boxer Rebellion, in which only 600 Australians participated and none was killed, is given greater space than the Boer War, in which 16,000 Australians participated and more than 600 died.

A further anomaly results from the desire to cover all wars, which leads to the inclusion of some pedestrian writing. It is not until ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s brief piece from the Boer War that the reader is regaled with writing that really conjures the thrill and terror and horror of war. At one point in his passage, Paterson describes sheltering behind a bush with a mortally wounded soldier as Boers commanding a nearby hill take potshots at their prone forms. Later he reflects on ‘what a frightful thing war is. “God save Australia from war for ever and ever.”’

But it seemed that Australians could not get enough of it. When the clarion call went out in 1914, men rushed to enlist. Charles Bean went as a war correspondent and provides, in his diaries, a distant glimpse of the Gallipoli landing. As a destroyer returns from the beach, Bean hears that ‘her decks are a sight – simply slippery with blood. I didn’t go to see – somehow if that sort of thing has to come it will come of its own accord; no need to go and look for it.’ And come it did over the following four years.

While John Monash’s letters give the detached and clinical view of a brigadier at Gallipoli, Albert Facey’s memoir reveals the plight of the ordinary soldier who is caught up in the madness and behaves nonetheless with extraordinary stoicism and courage. When a piece of shrapnel tears through his mouth, Facey insists on being patched up so that he can rejoin his mates in the trench. Facey and his elder brother Roy were soon part of a diversionary attack, during which many Australians were killed and wounded, including Roy. ‘This was a terrible blow to me,’ recalled Facey. ‘I had lost a lot of my mates and seen a lot of men die, but Roy was my brother.’ Facey helped to bury him and fifteen mates side by side in a single grave. ‘Roy was in pieces when they found him. We put him together as best we could – I can remember carrying a leg – it was terrible.’

World War I is even less sanitised in Walter Downing’s account of his time in France, as the wintry wet and decomposing corpses turned everything to slush and slime. As they dug out the trenches, the terrible cost of war was plain to see. ‘Knees, shoulders and buttocks poked from the foul morass,’ writes Downing.

The account by Joseph Maxwell of an attack on Anzac Ridge in September 1917 says all there is to say about war and its wantonness, as death and decent dealing are distributed randomly by the awful fickleness of fate. Amid the roar of battle, Maxwell engages in conversation with a wounded German soldier, recently drafted from Bonn University, who tells him: ‘I cannot understand you Australians … You travel twelve thousand odd miles out of what you regard as patriotism to the motherland. It is all wrong …’

For Patrick White, the horror of World War II was the tedium of working as an RAF intelligence officer in Eritrea. The reality of war only came close when he reached Egypt and spent his time rifling through the pockets of drowned enemy airmen for some piece of sodden paper that might indicate Rommel’s future intentions. Then he was off on a nocturnal drive by truck into the encircled port of Tobruk, where White tucked himself away ‘with Dickens, my stained Everyman volumes propped on the steering wheel of the Dodge’.

While it was more Dickens than death for the budding Nobel-winning novelist, there was death aplenty for Russell Braddon, who gives a gripping description of the desperate retreat that he and his companions made down the length of Malaya in 1942; while poet David Campbell writes of a dangerous reconnaissance flight over Japanese-controlled Rabaul, which turned into a claustrophobic fight for life after his two-engine bomber was shot to pieces by a Japanese fighter.

And so Australia’s wars go on, through Vietnam and Korea and Iraq and Afghanistan and the so-called ‘war on terror’. There is not much reflection in these writings, which are more about the unthinking reflexes of battle and its atmospherics. The ‘why am I, or we, here’ questions are rarely raised. If not entirely satisfying, there are many gems in this book that make the reader hanker for the longer pieces from which they came.