WAR veteran Ernest Brough has been to hell and back, GENEVIEVE BARLOW reports
It had been a good day for Ernest Brough, all things considered.
The son of a Drouin slaughterman had survived the infamous and ill-disguised trenches of Tobruk.
He'd also just survived the World War II Battle of El Alamein, which had forced the Germans into retreat.
A raid on a German dugout had yielded a stash of grenades, Sten guns, Lugers, ammo, binoculars, coloured pencils, a camera, an important map, preserved pears plus a wounded German.
The pears Ern and his fellow Australian soldiers devoured on the spot. But what would they do with the German with the mangled foot?
The instructions came. "Do whatever you like but he's going to need treatment."
"We could have taken him back to our own unit, but that was 400 yards away," Ern recalls.
Instead he lifted the wounded man on to his back and set out for the Red Cross tent about 300 yards away in No Man's Land, on what had been German territory.
Overhead, missiles from an 88mm German gun burst in the air, releasing a savage shower of ball-bearing shrapnel. Ern, then 22, stumbled. Again he picked the German up and kept walking.
Then the guns fells silent. Ern kept walking.
"I walked right up to that tent and pulled out my stolen Luger. One of their officers came out as if to say 'don't get too aggressive'. I said "Here's your bloke".
"I put him down, turned around and began to walk back. My mind was racing. I thought do I run? Do I crawl? What do I do?
"In the end I decided that I would bloody well walk all the way back with my backside to the enemy. And I did, as if I owned the place, hoping my confidence would rub it in for those watching. I bet it did. They were, after all, losing to these Aussie attack dogs. And no one fired a single shot."
The next day on November 1, 1942, Ern was taken prisoner, transported to Italy and moved to a POW camp at Graz in Austria.
Seventeen months later with another Australian and a New Zealander, Ern escaped.
The men's escape, their journey through hostile territory, their wild living and endurance, and their eventual take-up (for protection) with the brutal Tito-led Partisans in Yugoslavia, before their final freedom, makes extraordinary reading, 64 years later, and is told in his book Dangerous Days: A Digger's Great Escape.
Today Ern Brough, 89, lives a quiet life in Geelong, Victoria.
He returned home after the war to marry and have one child.
He was a butcher at Drouin, grew potatoes near Warragul, then ran a butcher shop at Lakes Entrance before eventually moving to work in the abattoir at Camperdown, and eventually for Fred Herd as a meat seller at Colac.
But it wasn't all plain sailing. He drank for many years.
"I was lucky I could always turn those things off," he says now, explaining why he didn't fall victim to booze.
But it was his way of recovering.
He'd seen men blown in half, fellow prisoners shot in broad daylight at point-blank range.
At home again after the war he'd copped the post-war savagery of night sweats and screams, dreams and an inexplicable shake in his hand.
He woke one night with his wrists around his wife's throat.
The desolate moment came when he sat on his veranda with his gun loaded, ready to shoot himself.
He supposes it was shell-shock or, in today's parlance, post-traumatic stress.
He's recovered from the war now, although the hand tremor continues.
Perhaps the telling of his extraordinary experience has helped.
It came about when he donated $300,000 to Melbourne's St Vincent's Hospital after his wife's death.
The director of the hospital's coronary care unit, Dr Andrew MacIsaac, heard his story and in March this year Dangerous Days was released.
It was ghost-written by Kim Swivel, an editor working for Harper Collins. The pair worked on it from 2007.
Since its release, Ern has been busy doing interviews and being photographed.
He's in demand as a guest speaker at local primary and high schools.
He says he was lucky.
Today's wars don't follow the rules that Montgomery (Allies leader) and Rommel (German leader) stuck by.
There was respect then, even for the enemy, he says.
He doubts anyone would make it across No Man's Land to deliver a wounded enemy soldier to medical care in today's war zones.
