Fromelles, finally

 Sunday 6 October, 2024. I'm standing on a dirt track running between two paddocks. From my years farming, this situation is a familiar one to me and the freshly harrowed ground is rich black soil. Good farming country, I think. But what I have come to look at is the far view across the paddock, to the village of Fromelles, rising on a gentle slope about 400m away. I move away from the tour group - I want to be with my own thoughts. Fromelles. A place which has lived strongly in my imagination for the past eight years.

I remember the day vividly. A hot February day in 2016, the first meeting for the year of the Canowindra Historical Society. I'm the society's president, and this is our planning meeting for the year ahead. Our resident honorary historian, Dorothy Balcomb, asks the meeting : "What are we going to do to commemorate the centenary of Fromelles?" I didn't have a clue what she was talking about. "What's Fromelles?", I asked, voicing the question in all our minds.

As Dorothy explained that Fromelles was the first battle to involve Australian forces on the Western Front, in July 1916, that it cost more Australian lives in any 24 hour period than any other event, and that her husband Harold's father had been taken prisoner of war, we quickly determined that we had a topic for a "History in the Club" event that year, as part of our First World War centenary commemorations.

From that day on, Fromelles has lived large in my imagination. I have read widely about this battle, and in my tours at the Australian War Memorial I honour the memory of men lost that day. 

And now I am here, standing where Australians launched themselves into a battle that was carried out in the face of grave doubts at the time, and long since understood as a byword for murderous incompetency of British command.

I look over to my left. A copse of trees marks the edge of the paddock and is close to the boundary line for the furthest Australian unit, the 8th Brigade. From there, my eye travels to the right, where the 14th Brigade are ready, and over to the far right to the 15th Brigade. It's a sunny afternoon, with a cool breeze of early Autumn, and I'm pleased to be wrapped in my jacket, wrapped in my thoughts.

Horace Balcomb, Harold's father, is in the 54th Battalion, one of the units of the 14th Brigade. He is joined by four of his mates from the farming district of Cranbury, to the north of Canowindra. Harold has written movingly about this day, and I will let his words tell the story :

"They were rushed into battle with no time to learn the realities of trench warfare. Dad had contracted mumps in Egypt and then put in another company. He always said the Army bureaucracy saved his life. His three close mates went over in the first wave and were either killed or wounded. He went over the top when the first German trench was in Australian hands and the artillery had found their range accurately.

 

His company had orders to proceed to the next German trench. No such trench existed in that section and they were forced to improvise and ‘dig in’ during the night. The Germans counter attacked and cut them off. The next morning only 29 out of 200 answered the roll call.

 

With no further ammunition, the remaining men, cut off by the Germans, were told to split up into twos or threes and try to regain the Australian line. Most were captured, including my father.

 

The prisoners went to the Ruhr Valley and spent two years as prisoners of war until the end of the War in 1918.  Dad praised the Red Cross parcels for keeping him from starving. He said he was lucky he could use a cross cut saw and was put to work cutting down pine trees for pit props for the coal mines.

 

Some men from Newcastle were coal miners and were put down the mines. The casualties down the mines were nearly as bad as in the front line, as safety was not a high priority for prisoners. 

 

After two failed escape attempts, Dad was finally returned to England in 1919 and then back to Australia."

The other Cranbury men suffered different fates. Clarrie Nash was killed in action in the first assault. Keith (Barney) Davis, wounded, his tunic covered in blood, managed to make his way back to the dressing station but died from his wounds a few days later. Harold Whitmee, also wounded and able to return to the dressing station, survived Fromelles but died from wounds received at Dernancourt in 1917. Jim Jones survived Fromelles and although subsequently wounded in later battles, returned to Australia after the war.

I now move down the paddock track. I want to be on the spot where the 15th Brigade "went over". This is 'Pompey' Elliott's Brigade, and I have been a keen Pompey student since my first research into Fromelles in 2016. This is the widest part of "no-man's land", being 400 m between the German and Australian trenches. A distance that was twice the maximum advised for direct attack. Pompey knows that it will be a bloodbath. He is unsuccessful in persuading his superiors of this. The attack is directly into the path of a German machine gun nest - the 'Sugarloaf Salient'.

Today, I feel again Pompey's anguish. He had predicted the disaster, tried to prevent it, and now had to come to terms with its aftermath.  "I.... will always have before my eyes the picture of Pompey....the morning after Fromelles, tears streaming down his face, shaking hands with the pitiful remnant of his brigade", wrote one of his officers over two decades later. Charles Bean wrote at the time that Elliott "looked down and could hardly speak - he was clearly terribly depressed and overwrought". Pompey's 60th Battalion had gone into the battle with 887 men. One officer and 106 Diggers emerged unscathed to answer the roll call.

Today that killing field is this peaceful ploughed paddock. But I am tearful as I look across it. I am trying to get my head around the sheer scale of what happened here. 1917 killed. 3146 wounded. 470 taken prisoners, 1334 missing and unaccounted for. 5533 Australian casualties - the worst day in our history. This is sacred ground for Australia, and I have wanted to be here for the past eight years.

Our group moves on. There are 13 of us, signed up for a four day tour of First World War battlefields. Our tour leader Jo is already showing herself to be an excellent historian, and she tells us of her own military experience as well. We can forgive the fact that she is English  -  she understands the Aussie experience of this war and is fully aligned with the tour's purpose of investigating that Australian experience.

Another narrow track leads us onto a narrow but sealed road. We are heading towards the Laes Brook. This is still a channel which runs through the paddocks, but in 1916 it was a watercourse and another obstacle to attacking Australians. It's like a dry creek bed, but greener and with more vegetation than what you'd expect in Australia. About 100 metres on we stop at VC Corner Cemetery. An intriguing name, as none of the soldiers buried here are VC winners. Is the message that all who lost their lives in this first battle, facing an impossible task, deserve special  recognition for their bravery? Is this Australian egalitarianism at its best?  I don't know. What I am struck by is that this is a cemetery which appears to have no bodies buried. There are no individual graves and no headstones.

There are in fact 410 bodies buried here, all Australian soldiers killed on the ground just behind me, and not a single one of them could be identified. Their names are recorded on the memorial which stands with embracing arms at the far end of the cemetery. In time, the names of all Australians killed at Fromelles and who had no known grave, were added to this memorial. It is a quiet and peaceful place now, poignant in its open spaces of garden beds with bodies buried below, and the protecting folds of the memorial almost speaking "you are safe now".

A short distance down the road, heading towards Fromelles village, is the Australian Memorial Park. It's close enough to walk, and most of us do.  Jo, our guide, is walking through the edge of the paddock and finds a small piece of shrapnel which she gives to me. All these years later the detritus of war continues to surface through these paddocks. There's a group of about 6 locals, I suppose, walking through a freshly ploughed paddock, looking for these relics. Do you ever escape - do you want to escape - the memory of such trauma to your country?

The Australian Memorial Park is small, maybe the size of a few tennis courts, and arresting in a completely different way. It's surrounded by corn fields, and is built on the site of the heavily fortified German front line. An ugly, heavy cement bunker frames the rear of the park, and another half buried one nearby. How do you attack such fortified behemoths? 

Their counterpoint, and the central feature of the Park, is an extraordinary sculpture. "Cobbers". This was completed in 1998 by Peter Corlett, and shows Sergeant Simon Fraser rescuing a wounded compatriot from no-mans land after the battle.  The title comes from a letter that Fraser, a farmer from Byaduk in Victoria, wrote a few days after the battle and that was also quoted in Australia's 0fficial War History, edited by Charles Bean :

"We found a fine haul of wounded and brought them in; but it was not where I heard this fellow calling, so I had another shot for it, and came across a splendid specimen of humanity trying to wriggle into a trench with a big wound in his thigh. He was about 14 stone weight, and I could not lift him on my back; but I managed to get him into an old trench, and told him to lie quiet while I got a stretcher. Then another man about 30 yards out sang out "Don’t forget me, cobber." I went in and got four volunteers with stretchers, and we got both men in safely."

It is a statue which resonates deeply with Australians. I am privileged and humbled to be here contemplating it, in this place.

We are now ready to leave the battlefield and move back to our arrival point in Fromelles, its battle Museum. It's a new building, with an interesting mixture of static displays of trench and dug-out recreations, objects, photos and stories. It does a good job at telling the story of the battle of Fromelles. I'm pleased to have visited it, but my real interest is outside, and that's where we are heading back to now, to the new Pheasant Wood Cemetery which is adjacent to the museum.

Phillippe, our driver, is masterfully navigating a large coach through narrow streets and lanes. Aren't the French supposed to be emotional and excitable?? Phillippe is the very model of the unflappable chaffeur. Already I feel I can trust wherever his coach takes us. He's taking us now down yet another road where I wonder what will happen if another vehicle comes the other way. He stops outside a farmhouse. Jo has spied something she knows we will be interested in. This farmer has a habit of displaying the bits and pieces of war junk his paddocks unearth. What we are looking at is a 4 - 5m segment of narrow gauge railway line, twisted, rusted, fascinating. These were the lines which would bring supplies of ammunition and food to the front lines. There's something different seeing these objects where they have been pulled from the earth, now mute witnesses to a task long completed.

The story of Fromelles was largely unknown in Australia for many years. A niche interest for war history buffs. That began to change during the 1980's and 90's but became turbocharged - for want of a better word - in 2007 with agreement to investigate the 'missing of Fromelles'. Lambis Englezos, an Arts and Crafts High School teacher from Melbourne had become convinced that not all the dead from Fromelles had been accounted for. He had calculated that the number of men missing after the battle did not correspond with the number of unknown dead registered at cemeteries in the region. It's a fascinating story of how he came to this realisation and the immoveable bureaucracy to be conquered to finally get an investigation and action.

And the end result? Discovery of mass graves containing 250 British and Australian soldiers. These men are now re-buried in this Pheasant Wood cemetery in which I'm silently standing. It looks like any of the hundreds of war cemeteries scattered across France and Belgium, with its neat rows of uniform white headstones. Most of these here are Australian, and I see that many are still anonymous : "A Soldier of the Great War". But many are named, thanks to DNA taken during the recovery and re-burial process.

I find the name I am looking for. Albert Williamson. 54th Battalion.  I know Albert's story, and have often used it in my War Memorial tours. Albert Williamson came from Nyrang Creek, today just a locality with a grain storage silo and a cemetery, a few kilometres out of Canowindra.  It is very close to where my farm was at Canowindra, when we lived there from 2006 until 2018. Driving through Nyrang Creek was one of the ways into town. I knew the area well. In 2016, one of the members of Canowindra Historical Society launched a book she had written on the history of Nyrang Creek, once a small village in its own right. Mim Loomes had herself lived in the area, and she led a bus load of us out to the area to see 'on the ground' where that village had been.  Mim had also told Albert Williamson's story at our 'History in the Club' event on Fromelles, in that same year. And I am now looking at Albert's grave.

 Tearfully, I read the inscription at the bottom : "A mother's love endures. RIP". What family member provided these words? Mrs Williamson was long dead by the time of her son's re-burial. But these simple words tell of a lifetime of grief not knowing where her son lay, what wounds suffered, whether death was instant or prolonged. Was love enough, in time, to fill this void of un-knowing?  Rest in peace, Albert. And rest in peace, now, Mrs Williamson. 

Stories of service and sacrifice stand out in all sorts of different ways. I am always struck by the stories of brothers, and inside the Fromelles museum, I had come across some names that were new to me. I now search for the graves for Samuel and Eric Wilson. Given their story, I'm puzzled that their graves are adjacent but not closer together.  I will repeat their story as told within the museum.

Samuel Wilson, and Eric Wilson

"Samuel and Eric Wilson, aged 29 and 21, both labourers from Port Macquarie, NSW, enlisted together in the AIF on 26 July 1915. Two days later their younger brother James, aged 18, also joined up. On 19 and 20 July 1916, the Wilson brothers fought together with the 53rd Battalion in the Battle of Fromelles where Samuel and Eric were both killed and James wounded. In 2009, when the remains from the mass grave at Pheasant Wood were exhumed, brothers Samuel and Eric Wilson were found to have been buried side by side by their German enemies. Today they again lie side by side in this new Pheasant Wood Cemetery."

Our group moves on, and we are noticeably more silent now. Are we already in process of moving from tour group to pilgrims? Clearly something has changed. 

We are heading to our hotel for the night, in Ypres, but there is one final stop. Two of our group, sisters Margaret and Gillian, had taken up the invitation from the tour organisers to submit names of graves they would like to visit. We stop at Rue de Bois  Cemetery. The neat rows hold the remains of 845 soldiers, mostly Australians. There is also a mass grave holding 22 soldiers.

 Margaret and Gillian are here to find the grave of Geoff McCrae, and I am immediately interested. The sisters' interest comes from their reading of an Australian historian who also interests me, Ross McMullin. He is the biographer of Pompey Elliott, and through this work I have also come to know Geoff McCrae. "If I am to be killed in this war", writes Pompey, "let me be laid next to dear Geoff". The older commander had a special affection and regard for his young Battalion leader, a regard built on his bravery and resourcefulness at Gallipoli, and the leadership after the evacuation from that place.

Gillian has brought gum leaves from home to lay at Geoff's grave and I silently watch this beautiful and moving act of remembrance. "You are home, dear boy" it seems to say. But no words are said - none are needed.

Geoff McCrae. His photo is also in Fromelles Museum

Returning to the bus, I thank Gillian and Margaret for their thoughtfulness in finding a way to express what all of us think but have been unable to put into words or find the right gestures. It has been a perfect ending to our first day in the battlefields of northern France. I have wanted to - no, I have needed to - stand on this ground for the past eight years. I silently thank Dorothy and Harold Balcomb for setting me on this journey.