His job was to stay behind and protect the troops by blowing up the Turkish trenches by crawling through tunnells to lay over six tons of explosive.

He later wrote, “I had no men I could trust to lay the charges and had to set the detonators and wire for firing myself. I personally put in place every tin of explosive, 3000 of them.”

After Gallipoli, Consett was promoted to Major and moved to France.

I admired him, but I’m not sure I understood his serenity in that environment.

I suspected he may have blotted from his memory the horror and the carnage, and left room for only beauty.

“The little villages, all red tiles and white walls with their pointed church spires half hidden in the small gullies, all look so quiet and happy and so unlike war.

“The twin towers and slender spire of a cathedral stand up against the sky showing one of the most beautiful sunsets you can imagine. All shades of colors from delicate pinks to the palest lilacs, against which the broad red sun glowed like fire and a faint mist rising from the river gradually caused everything to fade.”

Consett was still aware of the war, but to him there was another way of seeing it.

“Two balloons hanging high above us like two soft grubs, greenish yellow in color, remained up to catch the last of the light and were lit up long after the sun had dipped below the horizon.

“And to remind us why we were there, four giant howitzers along the railway would, every few minutes, wake up and fire in quick succession a number of huge shells.

“First, the brilliant flash among the trees and the faint yellow smoke almost instantly vanishing. Then the smashing double report from each in turn, followed by the rushing noise of the shell like a giant wind among trees.”

The enemy in France was never far away and Consett knew that artillery fire and shrapnel could tear a man to pieces, at times leaving no trace of his existence. But he seemed to accept the firing as a matter of course.

Then again, he had been at Gallipoli. Or perhaps he had been at Verdun.

After that, a couple of shrapnel shells would seem incidental. On the first day of the Verdun battle more than a million shells fell on Allied positions.

It was said that by 1918 about one in four shells fired by both sides in France was a gas shell and Consett remarked on them.

“One of the small woods still smells after a tremendous gas bombardment about a month ago, and is now full of torn up trees and rabbits, hares, birds and horses poisoned at that time. Modern gas warfare has little effect on plant life so the remaining trees are just as green and beautiful as ever.

“Today has been quite hot and the evening one of those absolutely still, breathless periods we so often get at home. But here, all nature seems to pause and catch its breath, standing silently in admiration of its own beauty.”

After seeing what happened during a gas attack, there couldn’t have been much to discuss, apart from the weather.

Perhaps that was just it. It was estimated that a subaltern’s life expectancy at the front was about two weeks, so serious discussion would seem to have been pointless. Better to just admire nature.

Consett was an educated man.

I imagined him reading Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon after the war, and liking the way John McCrae described the poppies and the larks in Flanders fields.

I wondered if Consett could have imagined what lay ahead when he joined up. If, in the trenches one day when he was about to lead his men forward, he ever reflected on it.

Almost half of Australia’s men between 18 and 45 volunteered to serve in the First World War.

Eighty per cent served overseas of whom 20 per cent died and half were wounded or maimed.

Towns and cities throughout the country lost great slabs of their men all at once and those that weren’t killed had to put up with conditions in the fields and the trenches almost beyond human endurance.

Old soldiers say that the true test of a man’s character comes in the heat of battle and Consett ruminated on the men who joined from his home town.

“One of the things this war teaches us so clearly is that some of the people we knew and perhaps did not think much of, are really the finest people.

“And some we imagined great things for are barely worth troubling over. So many of the almost unknown boys at school and later on at college have proved themselves to be so wonderful in their tenacity, kindness and courage and some that we thought would have all these qualities have failed.”

Consett knew all about bravery.

According to 1st AIF records, he was Mentioned in Dispatches twice and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. Twice, he was wounded in action.

I started to think about Consett’s men and wondered how many of the almost unknown boys at school or college had been killed.

How many of them still lay under the churned up muddy waste near the Somme?

How many were killed by the gas or the continuous shelling?

And I wondered how the others he mentioned had failed.

How anyone could fight in such a place and emerge with mind and body intact is hard to understand.

Easier to understand are the deep and abiding friendships that were formed.

And Consett understood.

“The war gives us a truer measure of our friends than ever peace could have done, and has shown us that both our men and women are so much finer and better in the average than we believed, that to some extent it justifies itself. It should leave us rather more thoughtful, rather kinder and rather more united than we have ever been before.”

When I finished the letter I sat silently for a while thinking about Consett.

I didn’t know anything about his life after the war, except that he returned to Australia on October 9, 1918, but I hoped he had lived to become like Sassoon’s “ancient man with silver locks” and I wondered if, in the years afterwards, he still thought there was an extent to which the war justified itself.

But most of all I wondered if, as he wished, we had become rather more thoughtful, rather kinder and rather more united.

• This is an edited version of an article that first appeared inThe Age.