Cirrus@Austlit

Gertrude Hart's first war story was a story of the Boer War–but, unlike the World War I stories that proliferated, this one posits staying behind as the the more noble act.

The first in a pair of inter-linked stories, 'What the Fire Keeps' is set against a backdrop of war, but not within the war itself: when a man dies on his way to the front (' "You'll be very sad when you see what has happened, Nancy, dear; but he's given his life for his country just as much as if he had fallen in action'), his friend on the home front must decide whether or not to keep his secrets.

In this sequel to 'What the Fire Keeps', the dead man's secret is exposed through the persistence of his sweetheart back home.

In The Minx, the war is both literal and metaphorical, as Jack Bethune enlists to find another battlefield on which to fight his own, old demons.

Somewhat unusually, this story–while about the courage and devastation of the front–focuses on the nurses, not the soldiers.

A soft, sweet romance, 'Her Billy Soldier' is the tea-room meeting between a soldier wounded home from the front and the woman with whom he has been corresponding:

She'd only have loved you the more. Don't you know, you boys who have faced death for us that the only man we haven't room for is a shirker? That the men we loathe are the ones who stay at home and try to get as near the khaki as possible in their suits, and are whole and comfortable while you have gone down into hell! Don't you know it, in your souls?

This short story concentrates on the slowly drawn-out agony of the waiting woman at home, while positing the war as a crucible in which the unregenerate young man can be forged into 'a brave soldier ... and a gentleman'.

Through an epistolary exchange, a husband and wife work out the mechanics of enlisting for war and keeping the home fires burning at the same time.

One might almost argue that the war component of this story is negligible, but it shows aspects of the post-war Australian culture and the returned soldiers' reintegration: "There were usually ways out of a difficulty wrhere an Anzac was concerned!"

Another story written years after the end of the war, 'The Red Wind' explores other ways in which the war disrupted lives, outside the battlefields itself, in the mass upheaval and movement of otherwise static households:

She had only known that, added to the horror of war, there had been this other; it had loft her blind and dumb to reason. While she had been waiting in agony of suspense, every hour burdened with fear and dread; while he had been writing home the letters that had been meat and drink, Max had become entangled with another woman! Soften it as she might, she must face that fact.

Ten years after the war ended, Gertrude Hart wrote this demi-ghost story, in a man finds healing after the cataclysms of the past decade:

ALL the important things, in Allard's life had been decided in a hurry. He was one of the first to enlist, and his promotion was rapid. His war career was breathless, and he escaped with minor injuries until within a fortnight of the Armistice, when a shell treated him badly, and sent him to hospital while his men were enjoying welcomes. From that time on, the pace was more or less andante instead of presto; his left leg dragged, and his nerves were uncertain. There was the matter of a girl, too; a girl who changed her mind. He squared his shoulders at life, and he laughed, sometimes; but when the world was shut out there were adjustments to be made.