Voices from the trenches: letters from home. Noel Carthew. 2002

        As 1914 drew to a close, little did anyone in Australia know that four years of warfare lay ahead. Mothers could not foresee the anguish they would suffer, nor wives and sweethearts their heartbreak. Young men, bronzed and debonair,, had little idea of the grim reality of war as they marched off to do their patriotic duty for King and Country.

Among these young men were three brothers: Charles, Fred and James Carthew. This is their story, told through the letters they wrote from Gallipoli, North Africa, Palestine and the Western Front to their mother and sisters back home in Victoria. Vivid and compelling, their letters tell the true story of war - not the dusty facts and figures of the history books, but the very real emotions of hope and fear, love and longing, life and death. To read these letters is to live, a little, the life of an Anzac digger, deep in muddy trenches and bloody battlefields, and to share the lonely, empty days endured by the women waiting at home; longing for the familiar scrawl of a letter and dreading the bleak anonymity of an official telegram.