CHOCOLATE CREAM SOLDIERS - CHOCOS

While growing up, I lived with a never ending ill feeling towards the militia. My father and his AIF friends had an ongoing antipathy towards chocos. They were the chocolate soldiers who melted in the heat of battle.

There was a play by George Bernard Shaw called Arms and the Man with a hero who went to war but did not carry ammunition in his pouch. He filled his pouch with chocolate creams. Then there was a song by the post-war film idol Nelson Eddy who sang “I am just a chocolate cream soldier”. Was he making a political statement?

As a teenager, I once visited the home of a friend and spoke to his father. His name was Jack Neary. The subject came around to the war and I made the comment “bloody chocos”.  I was on solid ground as my father had told me so. He was AIF 9^th Division.

The father exploded demanding to know why I had said that. He shouted that the bloody chocos were fighting on Kokoda. “What about that? I was a choco on Kokoda.” He died about a year later which would make him in his 40s. So many men I knew from the war suddenly died as young men. My father died at 53 years.

I wish I could go back to Jack Neary and apologise now that I know what I know. I can see that the AIF would have resented the fact that their own battalions had to go up to do the work of the militia on Kokoda. That is how they saw it. That is how my father saw it. But it was not as simple as that.