Crack Hardy can be read within this frame and, despite its ominous title (to crack hardy means to ‘be a man’ and ‘tough it out’), as a narrative of men at war, it raises some surprising questions about what motivates the creation of such history, including the author’s impetus for writing the book. Crack Hardy is the story of three brothers’ experiences of World War I, told by their great-nephew, who uses their diaries and correspondences home as his primary sources. It is also, then, the story of the family they leave behind, and the small Tasmanian town to which they long to return.

Nineteen-year-old Ray Searle, the ‘baby’ of the family, is the first in Westbury to enlist at the outbreak of war. Level-headed Viv, who is bound for the ministry, follows his younger brother, ‘to do the right thing’, he says. Oldest brother Ned, the larrikin of the family, cannot understand his brothers’ rush to relinquish their freedom for king and country, but enlists in the hope of winning back the affections of an old girlfriend.

Much of what propels the narrative is the three brothers’ differing experiences of enlistment, training, and heading to war; their stories interweave as paths cross and then diverge. One brother fails his medical and, to avoid the indignity of returning home a failure, absconds and shoots himself three times to create a legitimate reason for his discharge. He is arrested for desertion, but later acquitted and successfully re-enlists to bolster the falling numbers of new recruits. Another brother fights in many of the key battles at Gallipoli, only to be killed by asniper’s ricochetingbullet months before the withdrawal of Allied troops. The third, a veteran of Gallipoli, goes on to fight alongside his shamed brother (who is bent on redemption) at Flanders and the Somme. One dies on the Western Front, the other returns home a decorated hero.

Peter Stanley, in his cover endorsement, praises the author for ‘balancing the family’s experience and tragedy against the broader canvas of a nation’s war’. In fact, the way that the national and personal are not always commensurate experiences becomes a telling theme of the book. The true casualty numbers at Gallipoli are hidden from the Australian public in order to bolster enlistments, while a bureaucratic blunder sees a neighbouring family informed that its dead son is injured but recovering nicely. However, Dando-Collins shows that while the official history typically obliterates the individual, the reverse may also occur. Describing key events such as the shooting of General Bridges at Gallipoli, the author notes that his death ‘was not even commented on by Viv Searle in his diary or letters […] such deaths did not touch Viv or his comrades. [His] focus did not extend beyond his platoon, while his one abiding interest was in surviving each day.’

Dando-Collins has authored numerous books on Roman and American military history, and his resumé shows in his deft handling of the book’s gripping battle sequences. A brief prologue establishes his reasons for taking on this most personal of projects, and one may wonder how his family history may have impelled him into his chosen genre. In comparison with his books on Ancient Rome, the archives Dando-Collins draws upon here are far richer both in detail and in pathos. At times, however, I wanted him to be more speculative or rhetorical, rather than merely authoritative, in his pronouncements. The occasional acknowledgment that we cannot imagine what someone must have felt during the horror of war enriches rather than limits a book like this.

Despite the three strongly drawn figures of the Searle brothers, the enduring presence of Crack Hardy is their mother. The no-nonsense matriarch of the family, Elizabeth Anne refuses to sign her letters ‘Mrs George Seale’ and never forgives the Australian government for robbing her of her favourite sons. Fascinatingly, each son in his own way conceives of his duty in war largely as a performance for his pacifist mother, rather than for his father – or, for that matter, the Motherland. Their father, illiterate and barely verbal, remains a shadowy, indistinct presence throughout the book. Following news of the first son’s death, Dando-Collins writes, ‘George would slip into a silent, solitary shell of despair’.

A key aspect of the fraternal memoir is the ‘dark brother’ motif, where one sibling feels that he is not the preferred son. As critic Martin C. Redman describes, ‘That status belonged to a now bequeathed sibling, for whom the surviving son becomes an inadequate substitute.’ In Crack Hardy, the two brothers on the Western Front are framed as fighting in order to live up to their favoured brother’s memory. In the epilogue, the author’s mother attempts to comfort an ageing Elizabeth Anne with the thought that at least one of her boys came home from the war, to which she retorts, ‘The wrong son came home!’ For the remaining son, who honoured his brothers by naming his children after them, the ultimate tragedy of the war may have been surviving only to live with the knowledge of his familial inadequacy.