The Maitland Mercury would like to thank you all of our entrants. 

My father Najdo was born in Bitola in Macedonia in January 1913. His ­parents endured the horrors of World War 1 and several of his ­siblings died as babies from the effects of the mustard gas used by the enemy during this war.

 My father’s parents owned a farm in Macedonia during WW1 and survived the poverty of the region by working hard on the farm in Macedonia to produce enough food for their family of three boys – my dad being the ­eldest.

When my father was 15 he became an apprentice cabinet­maker and excelled in his trade and became an independent tradesman and helped support his family with his income.

He had completed his com­pulsory army service at age 18 and when he was 27 he married my mother Vera. 

My brother Michael was born during the first year of WWII.

When WWII erupted in Europe my father was called up to fight for his country against the invading Germans and had to leave my mother with a toddler son and pregnant with me to fend for ­herself as he went away to war

 The Germans were advancing toward Serbia, Macedonia and Greece in April 1941, to try to reach the Mediterranean Sea to stop the British taking hold of the seaport there. 

During the Germans’ raid through Serbia and Macedonia the small Serbian army was over­powered and my father was taken as a prisoner of war by the Germans at the young age of 29. 

My father Najdo’s experiences with the Germans were horrific – his army companions were very rarely fed and when they were fed it was a “soup” made of vegetable skins left over from the German soldiers’ meals. The Germans forced my father and the rest of the prisoners of war to walk hundreds of kilometres across Europe – “a concentration camp on the move”. 

My father and the rest of the prisoners of war walked as far as Romania and other nearby European countries, where they were turned around and forced to walk back the way they had come.

 My father’s health began to fail and he had lost an extreme amount of weight and had developed a very painful gastric ulcer, which was made worse by the infrequent and poor-quality meals they were fed.

 My father Najdo had many Jewish friends in the Serbian army with him who mysteriously ­disappeared overnight when the German Army had identified them as Jews.

Many of the civilian population witnessed these weary prisoners of war as they trudged through their towns and threw them pieces of fruit and morsels of bread as they could plainly see that these poor men were starving and in very poor physical condition. 

My father Najdo spent three years as a prisoner of war under these conditions and saw me for the first time in 1945 as a three-year-old toddler.

 I migrated to Australia in 1965 and also became an independent cabinetmaker like my dad and I am very well known in the Newcastle region as a master craftsman in my chosen profession. 

My dad died in 1990 in Macedonia, but had come to visit Australia on holiday in 1973 and thought life was very easy here!  

It was my first night back to the front line after a few days break in the French town of  Mouquet Farm. It was late in the evening and I was on first watch. 

The sky was dark and it was  unusually quiet. There was no shellfire anywhere close to the Pozieres trenches, where I had been reassigned to. I felt uneasy in the quiet, as if something very bad was going to happen. 

But then again, we were at war, not on holidays, so that was highly possible, and so many of the British had already been mown down in this stupid new offensive from Sir Douglas “Bloody” Haig. 

All of a sudden I heard the familiar sound of aircraft coming from the east. Whether they were German or allies, I was still trying to decide when I heard the rat-a-tat-tat of one of our gunners half a mile to my left. That meant that they must have been German. 

Then, to my surprise, I saw the sky light up with a large orange flash, accompanied by the booming sound of  an explosion. 

The wreckage of the fallen plane was heading in the direction of Thiepval. It was a long way away, but I decided to go to it anyway, because it was behind our line. I thought I may be able to recover a couple of souvenirs.

It was a long walk, but I made it eventually. I was the first there. Soon I saw the measly English  crouching nearby, but they were too scared to come too close. 

Being a brave and unafraid Aussie, I simply walked right up to it and started to search through the wreckage. Some bits of the plane were still smouldering, and I was careful not to touch them. The pilot and gunner were dead. I tried to stay as far away from them as possible. I didn’t want to go near any more dead  bodies.

I rummaged through the rubbish strewn everywhere and found a couple of destroyed weapons, but there was nothing of value around, so I turned to head back to the trenches, when something caught my eye.

I spun around and saw the ­barrel of a light Machine gun, not too far away from the deceased gunner. I bent down and picked it up carefully. When I examined it I realised it was of German make, unlike any I had seen before. It had a knuckle action with Deutche Waffer of Berlin inscribed on it.

I headed back to the trench. When I returned my officer was extremely interested in this new gun I had found. He said the English would have never seen one of these before and promptly seized it to hand in to the British authorities.

 So much for my souvenir!

A week later the Germans played one more trick. They gassed our trench and I was ­heavily  affected. Although it ­wasn’t fatal I was sent home, without my souvenir, never to return to  those fields of war again.

* Adapted from a personal letter written by the main character in this story to his son. He was my great-grandfather Jack Lyall who served with the First Battalion AIF in 1916 at the Somme. Further details were taken from the book  The Big Push by RB Gardner, which Jack also gave to his son, in 1962.