In the last devastating months of the First World War, the British Fourth Army pursued the Germans to their final defensive position — the Hindenburg Line, a formidable series of defensive positions studded with concrete dugouts and thickly set barbed wire.

As a UN peacekeeper, I joined the East Timorese fight for life. By then, the earth had drunk the blood of one third of their population. But worse was still to come.

The versatile and gifted Douglas Grant was stereotyped in the media as the Black Digger with a Scottish accent. He was much more than that. Well educated by White parents who rescued him from an 1886 massacre in the frontier wars, Douglas became an engineering draftsman, woolclasser, charismatic public speaker and storyteller.

‘I woke to the sight of a hospital ceiling. For that first blissful second, I forgot that I was paralysed.’ On 31 December 2014 Billy Hedderman suffered a catastrophic injury to his spinal cord while body-boarding on the Sunshine Coast, paralysing him almost completely from the neck down.

Few Australians realize that of the 62,000 Anzac soldiers who died in the Great War, over one-third are still listed as 'missing'. With no marked graves, the only reminders of their sacrifice are the many names inscribed on aging war memorials around the world.