Digger Smith

“Before the war,” sighs old Mar Flood—and in a farmer’s parlour, over tea and cake, one man hears a mother’s grief beneath the familiar words.

In wartime rural Australia, life goes on among neighboring farms, family visits and weekly games of bridge, while the war reaches every parlour. In C. J. Dennis’s lively, colloquial verse, Digger Smith and the people around him meet sorrow with plain speech, humor and stubborn kindness. Mar Flood mourns one son lost at Suvla Bay and waits anxiously for news of Jim, who left home years ago. Then a letter arrives from France, and the cards are forgotten as the family’s hope fills the room. How much can a few words from the front change—and what will the war ask of those waiting at home?

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