Charge the windmill

“Charge the windmill” is Dorrigo Evans’s private command to move forward when circumstances make success uncertain and ordinary confidence impossible. Repeated at moments of crisis, the phrase links his wartime medical work to his postwar life and his final words. It is not a promise that action will prevail: its force lies in Dorrigo’s decision to act despite knowing that hope may rest on illusion.

A credo built on illusion

Dorrigo explains the phrase to Squizzy Taylor after Taylor asks what comes into his head. Dorrigo describes his one idea as to “advance forward and charge the windmill,” then gives the thought a sharper edge: “It’s only our faith in illusions that makes life possible.” He contrasts that faith with belief in reality, which, he says, does people in. The windmill is therefore not simply an obstacle to be overcome. The expression names a way of proceeding without mistaking determination for certainty: the imagined possibility of action sustains him where a clear view of circumstances might instead paralyze him.

That credo does not remain a private explanation. The narrative shows Dorrigo making life up each day and trusting his fancy because it seems to work. Yet trust does not make the situation safe. In the operating hut, he suspects that the stream feeding its bamboo water pipe may carry cholera; even efforts to help seem capable of worsening the deaths around him. He asks himself how to advance, then returns to the practical sequence of preparing for surgery. The expression’s imaginative resolve and the routine’s exacting attention coexist: belief supplies a way to continue, while cleaning and preparation give action its immediate form.

The phrase under wartime pressure

The hut’s makeshift equipment makes the gap between medical purpose and available means concrete. Its operating table is bamboo; the steriliser is assembled from kerosene tins; surgical instruments made from honed engine steel are kept in a suitcase away from rats and mice. Dorrigo steadies himself by following the familiar preoperative routine, washing his hands with precious distilled water poured by Jimmy Bigelow. He has no belief that he can perform what is required, but knows that others believe he can. The possibility that he can hold on to himself by believing in their belief echoes his credo: resolve is not a secure inner possession but something sustained through an act of trust.

The words become an immediate command during Jack Rainbow’s amputation. After the few instruments have been boiled and the preparations are complete, Dorrigo gives instructions to Jimmy Bigelow, Wat Cooney, and Squizzy Taylor. Taylor raises the bent spoon in a mock salute; Dorrigo says, “Charge the windmill.” The line enters a scene of coordinated practical work, not a declaration that danger has vanished. Its recurrence connects the earlier conversation with a moment when he must lead others through a task whose outcome he cannot guarantee.

Rehearsal and action after the war

Seven years after Dorrigo and the people from his earlier life last met, he arrives in Sydney to begin civilian life. He resolves to face it with charm and daring, believing that time will wash over old follies. As he walks towards the waiting crowd, he whispers, “Forward,” then repeats, “Charge the windmill.” The phrase now accompanies a social performance rather than an operation. Yet the reunion exposes the limits of that performance: he feels outside the emotions the woman’s greeting is meant to convey and cannot immediately remember her name. When it comes to him, he identifies her as Ella. The motto enables him to enter the encounter, but it cannot make him feel the expected intimacy or erase his disconnection.

Its most literal enactment comes during the bushfire. Dorrigo reverses the car towards the fire front, gathers speed, and drives through burning bush near the house with Ella and the children inside. “Charge the windmill” accompanies the decision to take this route. The action carries risk, but is also a gamble based on his judgment that the branches will be smaller near the house. The car breaks through the burning area and a fence, and Dorrigo continues towards Hobart, steering while clearing burning sticks from the back seat. Here the phrase is joined to a specific, consequential choice to try to get his family through the fire; resolve alone is not the whole action, which also depends on calculation and driving skill.

The final transformation

At the end of Dorrigo’s life, the expression returns in altered form. A Sudanese orderly witnesses his last words: “Advance forward, gentleman. Charge the windowsill.” The familiar windmill has become a windowsill, and the change is left unexplained. The line preserves the imperative to advance while its central image shifts at the point of death. It thus closes the pattern without turning the phrase into a straightforward victory motto: earlier, it accompanied action amid uncertainty; at the end, it remains as language, changed but still urging movement when movement is no longer possible.