‘I am wretchedly sad’: Bertha Monash’s letters and women on the first world war home front

Bertha Monash – the daughter of battle commander John Monash – was 21 at the outbreak of the first world war, and an eager participant in Australia’s war effort.

Together with tens of thousands of other Australian women, Bertha’s voluntary patriotic work involved knitting socks, sewing shirts, organising fundraising events, making warhorse bandages and assembling comfort parcels to send to the front.

But her most regular patriotic work saw Bertha volunteering for the Red Cross as a civilian orderly in a south Melbourne rest home for returned wounded soldiers. Determined to support the war effort however she could, she wrote to her father, “it’s all a woman can do in these times”.

My new research into the letters Bertha wrote to her father reveals the agonising struggle of women on the home front to remain committed to the war effort and not be overwhelmed by its costs.

‘I am wretchedly sad’

Bertha’s patriotic work was built upon an intense emotional battle. With her father, two cousins and many friends at the front, the war represented a time of relentless fear, loneliness and sadness.

When her friend Harry was killed in action, she expressed herself desolately to her father:

I am wretchedly sad […] Oh this wicked wicked war! All for pure greed & these fine young lives must be the cost. We all think we can sympathise sufficiently with those who lose dear ones, but it’s not until the sorrow hits right home that we can possibly realise what it really means.

Such open expressions of pain were, however, rare. For the most part, Bertha worked hard to disguise her emotions:

it wouldn’t benefit anybody to show my discontent, so I always smile & try to appear happy, as I’m one of those who believe happiness is reflected, & that by appearing bright & brave, others round me are influenced. But what shows on the surface is not always felt beneath, & sometimes, I could just cry & cry, for wanting you back so badly!

We see in Bertha’s letters a determination to prioritise her father’s emotional state above her own. Following the Gallipoli landings in April 1915, Bertha wrote,

with all the anxiety & sorrow we are feeling, we know that the time you are experiencing must be far, far worse in every way, & my sympathy goes out to you.

Meeting loss and tribulation with stoicism was seen as women’s duty. Some newspaper articles of the time even stated that women on the home front had a responsibility to be cheerful as this would affect the outcome of the war.

‘It’s always best to keep going’

Patriotic work was an excellent outlet for the anxiety and grief Bertha was suppressing.

It meant supporting the war effort – to which she remained dedicated, despite the suffering it caused – while keeping herself too busy to dwell on her sorrows:

I could never be satisfied in being idle, as long as the war lasts […] I fill up every single minute of my time […] [otherwise] I start thinking & brooding & get unhappy at once. Unless I am absolutely tired out with work, I simply can’t sleep, so it’s always best to keep going.

That emotional burden only grew heavier as the war progressed. In an effort to stave off her terrible anxiety, Bertha filled her days more and more with patriotic work, revealing to her father,

[I] just keep on working till I drop, it’s the only way to forget.

Instead of “waiting and weeping”, as the saying went, Bertha’s was a case of “waiting and working”, both to contribute and to cope.

Behind the men fighting and dying on the battlefields was an unofficial army of women like Bertha, steadfastly labouring for the war effort while endeavouring to navigate the pain it caused.

‘Many sad hearts’

By the time the war ended on November 11 1918, Bertha, now 25, was physically and emotionally depleted.

Rather than greeting the armistice with great excitement, Bertha told her father she felt only “a deep & whole hearted thankfulness that this longed for time has really come”.

She explained

The ones who have lost & suffered least are those who get most excited & demonstratively enthusiastic, while there are many sad hearts, – & there will be, till the end!

Bertha had managed to sustain her commitment to the war, but the toll was enormous. She had suffered the loss of loved ones during the war. Years of living with anxiety, fear and the constant battle to repress these feelings had left her exhausted.

Women across Australia faced similar struggles.

Over 400,000 Australians enlisted in the war, leaving behind an even greater number of mothers, daughters, wives, sisters and friends.

The war tested these women, whose efforts to endure are the integral counterpart to the fighting on the battlefields.

Bertha Monash’s letters testify to the emotional torment women withstood. They remind us we cannot understand this war fully unless we recognise what it demanded at home, as much as on the battlefront.