Series 03: John Brady Nash letters, January 1914-December 1915 - Page 662
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[Page 662]
In the Sydney Mail of date Jany 13th 1915, are pictures of the Broken Hill Turks & the shooting, which came here first in your letter which was posted in Moss Vale and reached me just 28 days thereafter. A Lieutenant Resch was head of the party who went to bring in the men who had shot the people in the picknickers train. He is probably a nephew of Edmund Resch, the brewer, of Sydney, a man well known to me. It saved a lot of trouble when the two savages were killed. They were in our own country and had no right to fire on any one let alone a defenceless lot such as would be in an excursion tram on New Years day. They were silly fanatics.
The war drags its terrible length along. When will it end? No prospect of its doing so is in sight, but the great battles of the approaching summer should so weaken one or other side that either termination will be measurable, else will another winter be utilised to accumulate power to be launched into the fray once again during the summer of 1916 A.D. At our table some officers without training or experience in military or other matters talk the most purile of silly nonsense, it almost makes fills me with disgust to have to listen to them. However it cannot be helped. A Dr Springthorpe from Melbourne is the most ignorant and silly of the lot, he is over fifty years of age but has not yet grown up, nor has he ever learned the rudiments of ordinary civility, he is a boor of the highest order. God forgive me for so writing of any one?
7.3-15. 9 p.m. How strange it is to sit in my bedroom, look out at the starlit sky, raising my eyes from the 41st chapter of genesis, and read the history of Joseph as set out therein? The bugles of an Australian army sound the last post, warning all that the hour has come when all must to bed.
["The Battle of Broken Hill". On 1 January 1915 two men, flying the Turkish flag, fired on picknickers, travelling in an open ore train, from the protection of an ice cream vendor's cart. Several people, including the two men who carried out the attack, were killed.
Lieutenant Colonel John William Springthorpe, physician of Melbourne, aged 59, embarked from Sydney on 28 November 1914 on HMAT A55 Kyarra with the 2nd Australian General Hospital.]