Kenneth Seymour Kingsmill (1895-1970) was a country boy; he lived and went to school in Albury NSW. When World War I broke out, less than a month past his 19th birthday, he was a rouseabout on a sheep station near Tocumwal NSW. As soon as shearing was over he rode his bicycle some 160kms to Albury (in 8¼ hours of riding) to say “Goodbye” to his parents. He then caught the train to Sydney and enlisted as No.733 Driver Kingsmill KS in the 1st Brigade Ammunition Column. In October 1914 he left Australia as a part of the 1st Division of the Australian Imperial Expeditionary Force, and did not return until June 1919.
During this time he tried to write every week to his parents. For the most part he succeeded, even though he was sometimes unsure of the day or the date. There are 207 surviving letters. He went first to Egypt, where he spent much of the next two years looking after horses of the Australian Artillery. He made a brief foray to the Gallipoli Peninsula in April and May of 1915 but there was no room on the beach for the Artillery’s guns so he was taken back to Egypt. In June 1916 he went on to France, and it was on the Western Front that he spent the remainder of the war. He was quickly promoted to Lance Bombardier (Corporal) and to Bombardier, then to Sergeant and, after attending a greatly foreshortened officers’ training course at the Royal Artillery Cadet School in London, to Lieutenant.
While many of those who had enlisted in 1914 were returned to Australia before the war ended, Ken did not see Albury again until June 1919. After nearly five years of war, the untried 19-year-old station rouseabout of August 1914 had become a veteran of experiences beyond most imaginings.
In the 1960s, Ken wrote a memoir. In it he was much more frank than he could be in his letters, where he largely spared his parents from hearing about moments of danger and tragedy and, no doubt, of fright. When writing more than 40 years later he does not shirk from telling something of the death and horror that was for so long a part of his daily life and of some of the dark moments that he fortunately survived.
Donald Kingsmill has edited both the letters and the memoir, for Ken to tell the story of his war in his own words in There Are Roumers. His writing is a tribute to his Albury education. His grammar and his punctuation are good, given the strain under which he must at times have been writing. His spelling, too, must be considered good (including when he was writing place names in French) but one word whose spelling always defeated him was "rumours". Even when he was writing the memoir so many years after the war he spelled it "roumers". In all wars, it would seem, the ordinary soldier is less than well- informed and this war was was no different. So Ken could report that "There Are Roumers".
There Are Roumers is an A5 paperback: 21.5 x 15cms (8.5 x 6"). It has 262 pages.
