Review: Dangerous Days: A Digger's Great Escape

As a schoolboy, one of my favourite books growing up was The Wooden Horse. This told the exciting true story of three British servicemen, prisoners of the Germans during World War II, who used the cover provided by a vaulting horse to dig a tunnel and escape. I must have read it at least half a dozen times, taking delight in how pluck could overcome adversity, while sitting safe and snug at home myself.

Dangerous Days: A Digger’s Great Escape, by Ernest Brough, immediately took me back to those days of reading pleasure. His writing style reflects the spare, easy manner of that period, with an immediately accessible and very Australian self-deprecating tone.

Even better, for my adult sensibilities, Brough goes beyond the story of his war days and escape to cover what it was like to come home after living on the run in Eastern Europe “like a dog”. This is an honest account of a difficult ongoing period of adjustment, of what it was like to come back “wild” in a time when post-traumatic stress was not well understood.

Brough covers his early years growing up in country Victoria, his enthusiasm to enlist, and his part in the battles of Tobruk and El Alamein — including an incredible account of carrying a wounded German back to his own lines, while under fire. ‘War without hate’, Rommel called the fighting in North Africa, and this exploit certainly gives credence to that claim.

Brough’s capture shortly after is followed by accounts of life as prisoner-of-war under first the Italians, then Germans, culminating in his daring escape with two others and their perilous journey with the partisans through Croatia into Bosnia and eventual freedom.

Icy rivers, snowy mountain passes, enemy patrols and the barbarities of the internecine fighting in the Balkans must all be survived — and then somehow left behind as ‘normal’ life resumes when the fighting is over. This is a story of love and redemption as much as a war memoir.

Brough writes: “I didn’t really talk about the war much until recently. For a long time, no-one wanted to listen; it wasn’t fashionable. Now, fortunately, lots of people are curious about where we went, how we fought, and what we endured during those years.”

How fortunate that men such as Brough have the courage to not just face the war and its aftermath, but to revisit it in such detail so that we may share in those dangerous days.

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