Dimensions
156 x 234 x 29mm
Even as a lad, Tag Wardpod has an extraordinary gift with animals. Growing up in western Victoria, he is followed to school by his pets, he trains lizards to eat snails in the vegie patch, and he tames brumbies on the High Plains. Then, when war is declared in 1914, and recruitment posters promise a great adventure, Tag leaves his job as a blacksmith and horse handler to join the Light Horse Brigade. But neither bush camps with his mates nor football heroism have prepared him for the horror, fury, and love that await him in Gallipoli and France. Soothing shell-shocked horses in desperate conditions, his gifts will both endanger and save him.
Barry Heard, the author of the much-loved Vietnam War memoir Well Done, Those Men, here brings new insights to the Gallipoli legend. A true storyteller, his imagination makes real for us the formative battlefield of early Australian nationhood.
Tag is a moving war story that is also a bush tale, a family saga, a romance, and a revelation of how the human spirit can survive war's inhumanity.
