Veterans remember the Somme: ‘all those lads slaughtered, it broke my heart …’ Soldiers returned home from the Great War from 1918, with their battalions ‘slowly dissolving and becoming a mere memory.’ Decades later, some veterans returned to the old battlefields. Ninety-one-year-old Fred Hocking returned to the Somme in 1988 to commemorate ANZAC Day. While standing at the Australian National Memorial, Hocking recalled when a shell exploded a few yards in front of him, taking off his commanding officer’s head and wounding him. A journalist asked Hocking if he had known a certain soldier killed at Pozières. Standing among rows of uniform headstones that converged into the distance, Hocking replied in the only way he could: ‘There were so many killed at Pozières.’ In 1996, Donald Hodge and Mike Lally (pictured) were part of a veterans’ pilgrimage that returned to the Somme. The men took the gruelling schedule in their stride, laughing and joking, but ev...