chapter nineteen

The Missing

‘It is only the dead who have seen the end of war.’

— attributed to Plato

While politicians redrew the world’s boundaries, back in Australia thousands of families continued their painful search for lost relatives. Four thousand Australians soldiers were posted as missing at Pozières, their bodies never recovered — or, if found, never identified. It was as if they had simply vanished. A cold telegram or a clergyman’s visit delivered the sad news. Patsy Adam-Smith noted, in Australian Women at War, that ‘some women wouldn’t open their doors to a clergyman during the first war’.1 They received little beyond the bare facts, forcing families to write to the Base Records Office, the Red Cross Society, fellow soldiers, or anyone else who might shed some greater light on their loved one’s fate. It seemed, according to historians Bruce Scates and Raelene Francis, that they had entered a twilight world somewhere between life and death.2

While on leave in Edinburgh visiting a bereaved family, Ted Rule witnessed the overwhelming anguish that the simple word ‘missing’ inflicted. Rule saw the heartache as, day after day, the mother of a missing soldier betrayed her thoughts: ‘“The missing did very often show up again, didn’t they? … Probably he was a prisoner-of-war. Maybe he had lost his memory and was in some hospital” … What could I say? I felt justified in telling lies.’3

Numerous agencies were set up to deal with the ‘missing’. In 1915, the Australian government established a department dedicated to answering the flood of enquiries that came from distraught families. The Australian Red Cross Society created the Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau to identify, investigate, and respond to enquiries made regarding the fate of Australian personnel. The Australian Imperial Force conducted its own court of enquiry in the field to ascertain the fate of missing soldiers.

How was a soldier registered as missing, and what investigations were conducted into his disappearance? Who notified his family that he was unaccounted for? Could his relatives achieve emotional closure as long as ‘missing’ was stamped in his personnel file? The stories of Sergeant Philip Browne and privates George Drosen, Robert Allen, and Stephen Allen provide some insight into these questions.

Private George Drosen, a 36-year-old stevedore from the Melbourne bayside suburb of Williamstown, had apparently disappeared without a trace on 10 August near Mouquet Farm. According to the Red Cross enquiry, he was with a party of 46th Battalion men withdrawing from the front-line trench at about 10.30 p.m. when a shell exploded; in the confusion and darkness, they scattered. Most managed to work their way back to safety, but Drosen did not answer at rollcall.

The 48th Battalion held an enquiry into Drosen’s fate in May 1917, nine months after he had disappeared. Witness Sergeant Leonard Coulson testified that he went back to search for Drosen, but all he could find was the warm and quivering trunk of a man. He could not find any identification papers on the body. When the court asked what had happened to the body, Coulson explained that it was buried quickly; however, he reassured the officers that the trunk seemed to be Drosen, as it had a similar build to him. With no identification papers, no body to examine, and reliant on the sketchy identification of a severed torso in the darkness, the court concluded on 2 May 1917 that shellfire had killed Drosen.

The Red Cross also sought information from soldiers on Drosen’s disappearance, and their evidence conflicted with the court of enquiry findings. One soldier said that Drosen was evacuated to a casualty clearing station, where he later died from his wounds. Another claimed he was blown to bits.4 Only one thing seemed certain: he was dead. A telegram informed Drosen’s mother, Eliza, of her son’s death. Weeks earlier, her younger son, Ernest, had been wounded at Pozières. It is hard to know how she came to terms with George’s death so soon afterward. The family’s in memoriam notice in The Argus in 1917 — ‘Soldiers yes, and heroes too; forget them, no, we never will’ — provides few clues.5 As a schoolboy in the 1930s, George’s nephew Colin Drosen watched Great War veterans march by the Williamstown cenotaph each Anzac Day, oblivious to his uncle’s fate. ‘It wasn’t much talked about,’ he remembered. Colin was in his eighties before he discovered, on the internet, the details of George’s death. The internet filled the silences that he had experienced as a child: both his father and mother had lost family members in the Great War.6

Privates Robert and Stephen Allen of the 13th Battalion had disappeared during their unit’s failed attack upon Mouquet Farm on 14 August. The evidence of their fate, presented at the court of enquiry in January 1917, was scant. Sergeant Albert Assenhein told the court that he had heard secondhand that Robert had died on the way to the front line, killed by the heavy German bombardment that had fallen for most of the day. On 23 January 1917, the words ‘killed in action’ were stamped in blue ink on Robert’s file, and the family was duly informed. Although their mother, Hester, later received a parcel containing their personal belongings — a few coins, a purse, and a disc — precious little other information was forthcoming.

The shroud of silence lifted when Hester received a letter from her sons’ company commander, Captain Theodore Wells, in March 1917. He apologised for not having written earlier. He explained, as best he could, the circumstances of the boys’ deaths that night. He wrote:

It was one of the glorious charges in which the Australians have participated … Our lads got right across but their losses were very heavy and as the regiments on our flanks failed we had to retire … If you have not yet received information that they are in German hands I think you must make up your mind that they fell gallantly while rushing forward in that glorious charge.7

Captain Wells, it seemed, had written many such letters. He finished kindly, ‘They were well liked by all ranks and were good soldiers and willing fighters. Although they have given up their lives they did their duty nobly and well. Please accept my deepest sympathy.’

The letter at least gave Hester and her daughters, Florrie and Minnie, a more bearable memory of Robert and Stephen to cling to. According to Wells, they died fulfilling their noble duty in the Great War for civilisation. Yet what good came from Hester eventually knowing the crushing truth: that her beloved sons were blown to bits while sheltering in a shallow trench; that their remains were quickly thrown over the parapet; and that they were later buried in a shallow unmarked grave, along with three other soldiers, which could no longer be located?

The Red Cross enquiry into the boys’ disappearance — somewhat delayed because of a backlog of work in the reports department — uncovered more details.

‘Your two poor brothers were between my brother and I. When the shell exploded I knew by the screams that someone had caught it,’ wrote Private Will Hale in response to the Red Cross’s enquiry.

‘They came across with me and were very decent chaps,’ wrote Private Eric McFarlane.8 Hale’s and McFarlane’s letters helped the Red Cross respond to the Allen family’s enquiries into Stephen and Robert’s fate.

Hester placed a simple in memoriam notice in The Sydney Morning Herald on the first anniversary of their death. She appeared to believe that this double tragedy could only have been God’s will: ‘The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’ In later years, Hester’s notice simply read: ‘In death they were not divided.’ 9

Sporadic official correspondence continued. Hester was informed in February 1917 that she would be entitled to a fortnightly pension of four pounds. Through 1922 and 1923, she received a Memorial Plaque, a Memorial Scroll, and a Victory Medal for each son, as well as a pamphlet entitled Where the Australians Rest, which aimed to inform families of the location of prominent cemeteries and the care taken to maintain them. The scroll, signed by King George V, contained the perhaps comforting words that they had given up their own lives that others might live in freedom.

James Browne, from Milton, Queensland, also searched for the truth about his son, Sergeant Philip Browne of the 9th Battalion, who had died on 22 July while trying to help some wounded soldiers. He was buried in a makeshift grave, the location of which was later lost in the confusion of battle. James repeatedly wrote to the Base Records Office in search of information about Philip’s disappearance: ‘Any particulars as to his last moments will be greatly appreciated,’ read one handwritten letter dated October 1916.10 The replies from the overworked clerks always seemed the same: ‘No details are available. They will be furnished at first opportunity.’

In January 1917, Philip’s belongings — including his lucky boomerang charm, his prayer book, and his New Testament bible — were returned to James and Jessie. In the same month, they received the letter from Philip’s friend and fellow soldier Freddie Barbour, which explained the circumstances of his death.11 Curiously, they also received a letter from the minister for defence, Senator George Pearce, who sympathised with their loss. The letter concluded: ‘I trust that your remaining sons at the Front will go through this terrible ordeal unscathed and return to you safe and sound.’12

Despite the small consolations of Philip’s kit being returned and receiving Freddie Barbour’s letter, James’s continuing search for details about the circumstances of his son’s death and final resting place continued to be fruitless. ‘We are very anxious indeed to find out how he died, whether any friends were with him or any message left,’ James wrote to the Base Records Office in October 1916. ‘What I want is to be advised is as to the best way, if there is any way to get this information.’13 No news came.

‘It is now six months since he was killed and there is no further information received beyond the bare facts that he was killed,’ pleaded James in another letter in January 1917. ‘We are still anxious for further particulars as to where he was buried.’

On 22 May 1917, Toowoomba Grammar School officially unveiled its ‘magnificent’ bronze-and-copper War Honour Board to those old boys, like Philip Browne, who had served in the Great War. If James and Jessie had attended the opening they would have heard former head of the school the Honourable Littleton Ernest Groom express his ‘mingled feelings of sorrow, of sympathy, of admiration, of pride’ in unveiling the memorial.14

A few months after the unveiling, on 21 July 1917, James and Jessie placed a simple in memoriam notice for Philip in The Brisbane Courier. It was conspicuous among the other notices that day in that it contained no poetry or verse. It simply read: ‘In loving memory Sergeant Philip Gerald Browne, killed in action in France, July 22 1916, age 21.’15

James’s correspondence with the Base Records Office continued. He maintained a dignified and respectful tone in the nine letters he sent them between 1916 and 1922, despite the anguish and frustration he must have felt. How could the Australian Imperial Force simply lose Philip? No doubt James and Jessie must have contemplated why they had signed Philip’s consent forms back in May 1915. One can imagine their feelings as they awoke each morning wondering whether there would be any fresh news about what had happened to their son.

James continued writing to Base Records well into the 1920s, his focus shifting from searching for details about his son’s death to making sure he was suitably commemorated, even though he had no known grave. He wrote on November 1922, ‘As I understand that the grave of my son has not been found will you let me know if anything has been done or is being done by way of a head stone and inscription to keep his name on record same as those whose grave has been found.’16 James even furnished details as to where his son’s unmarked grave might be found, enclosing a sketch he had been given by a returned soldier. ‘We have had so many disappointments that we are not placing much reliance on same,’ he wrote wearily. Needless to say, his endeavours again bore little fruit.

Eventually, the Australian Graves Detachment and the British Labour Corps, responsible for scouring the battlefields and locating, burying, and re-burying the Australian and British dead, disbanded. This was traumatic for the thousands of families whose sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers were still missing. In 1921, The Sydney Morning Herald reported that a Mr Windeyer of Sydney proposed a meeting of influential Australians in London to protest against the cessation of exhumation of war graves and to urge that systematic work be continued in those sectors — including Pozières — where the dead were known to be predominantly Australian.17 The Australian government discussed alternative arrangements, such as paying a bounty to French farmers who uncovered any remains on their farms; wisely, they didn’t pursue the plan.

It is hard to imagine how parents such as Browne’s must have felt in their fruitless search for information about their missing sons, although Ted Rule’s encounter with John Newton Wanliss, the father of a missing soldier, perhaps provides some insight. The convalescing Rule vividly described the visit, which occurred in 1918 in a hospital in Britain, in Jacka’s Mob: ‘I’d heard of the old man, a splendid old Victorian gentleman, and how he had followed his only boy across from Australia; settling down in London, he counted the days until the boy’s leave period brought them together again.’18 Unfortunately, they never reunited, as Wanliss’s son died in 1917. Rule remembered that Wanliss was dazed with grief; he thought and dreamt of nothing else but his boy. Rule recounted:

Afterward he haunted the hospital to interview each wounded man coming from the battalion. He asked the same questions a hundred times, he heard the same answers and was never satisfied. Seated by my bed, he no sooner introduced himself than he asked: ‘When did you see Harold last?’

Parents such as Wanliss would have read with anguish the intermittent newspaper reports of missing soldiers’ remains being uncovered. In 1937, another soldier’s remains were discovered near Pozières; a tarnished aluminium disc was found on the body, which helped identity it as the remains of James Connelly of the 52nd Battalion.19 The officer in charge of Base Records forwarded the disc to Connelly’s family, suggesting that it would be ‘valued on account of its former intimate association with the deceased’. James’s brother, William, replied a few weeks later: ‘Myself and the rest of the family can now say we have something personal belonging to him which he had at the end.’20

Yet the discovery of items such as rings and watches on a soldier’s remains didn’t always guarantee their identification. In 1937, the bodies of two Australian soldiers were unearthed in a shallow grave near Pozières. A nine-carat gold ring engraved ‘T.R. to A.R.’ was found in the pocket of one soldier’s tunic, so the Imperial War Graves Commission instigated a search in Australia through the Base Records Office to identify the soldier. Based on the burial location and the ring’s inscription, veteran Leslie Styles believed the remains were of his mate, John Rowan, whom he helped to bury in July 1916.21 Based on Styles’ claim, Base Records contacted Rowan’s widow, Margaret, seeking further help, but their enquiries proved inconclusive.22 In the same year, another Australian soldier’s remains were exhumed near Pozières. A wristwatch engraved ‘From M.P. to C.P.’ provided Base Records with some clues to assist their investigation; however, by the end of that year the soldier’s identity still remained a mystery.23 There are no records indicating whether the soldiers’ remains were ever identified.

Ninety-odd years on, there is little that connects us with George Drosen, Robert and Stephen Allen, or Philip Browne beyond their names chiselled on the Portland limestone memorial panels to the missing located at the Australian National Memorial, on a quiet hill just outside Villers-Bretonneux. By reaching up and running one’s fingertips over the coarse panels, the etched letters of each man’s name, the visitor achieves, at best, a fleeting connection to the lives and hopes of these young men who left their sunburnt country generations earlier with high ideals, only to die horribly in a foreign land. There are 10,700 names etched on these vast panels, which are located only a few miles from Pozières. Add to this the 6176 Australian names etched on the walls of the Menin Gate at Ypres, Belgium, and the tragic magnitude of Australia’s missing on the Western Front hits home.

Families yearned to express their grief for lost ones, but the traditional practice of visiting a grave was rarely possible. Travelling to France was beyond the means of most, especially widows such as Eliza Drosen and Hester Allen. They sought alternatives, such as visiting shrines and memorials, which became quiet places to reflect. Communities formed committees, raised money, and selected sites for these memorials. Within ten years, there were about 1500 memorials located in virtually every town and suburb in Australia.24

In 1917, the Australian government endorsed Charles Bean’s idea of creating a national museum to commemorate the dead of the Great War. He wished to affirm the identity of each dead man not as a soldier but as a citizen of Australia, as his own family and friends knew him. The agreed response was to etch each man’s name into panels contained within a Hall of Memory. It took another 12 years before the design was agreed. Finally, in 1941, in the midst of another world crisis, a permanent war memorial opened.

Memorials were constructed on the Pozières battlefield. In September 1917, Birdie unveiled one dedicated to the 1st Australian Division at Pozières, located near the pillbox at Gibraltar. Another was erected at the highest point of the Pozières ridge, where the old windmill once stood. Charles Bean composed the words on the memorial plaque, which explained that this sacred acre ‘was captured on August 4th by Australian troops who fell more thickly on this ridge than any other battlefield of the war’.25

The Sydney Morning Herald reported in 1920 that French authorities were ‘genuinely anxious’ to assist Australia to secure the land it desired for memorials, while French notaries sometimes refused to accept payment for professional work relating to Australian soldiers. One of the few times authorities refused permission was when Australia sought to purchase a six-acre site near Gibraltar, which locals pointed out would obliterate part of the road from Pozières to Thiepval and encompass part of the village. Locals compromised and agreed on a one-acre site. The memorial park was established after an Australian officer searched out and negotiated the purchase with many owners, some whom submitted inordinate claims for their land value.26

Not all memorials in France were of bricks and mortar. In 1918, the Bishop of Amiens promised all Australians that his dioceses would piously keep the tombs of its heroes.27 The promise was kept. Many French villagers adopted the graves of fallen soldiers as if they were their own sons. Twice a year, they visited each military cemetery in their dioceses to honour those who had travelled from all parts of the world to fight on their soil.

According to Jay Winter in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, for some widows, the thought of commemorating the dead was a distant second to feeding a family that had lost its main provider. ‘I think it would be more fitting to put the money to better use for those that are living and finding it hard to live these days,’ wrote Mrs Hinds, after she was asked to provide her dead husband’s particulars for the country’s honour roll. ‘Why worry over the dead, I’m sure that they would not wish for it, if they only knew how we who are left are treated.’28

‘I appreciate my husband’s name being erected on the “Hall of Memory” immensely but what about those left behind,’ wrote another.

Mary McNeil, the widow of Pozières veteran Percy Blythe, was one of those left behind. Percy desired, should he be killed, that she live with his parents. Instead, she moved in with another man, Leslie Thomas. It bitterly upset Percy’s mother. In her eyes, Mary was an adulteress, betraying the last wishes of her beloved son. She wrote to Base Records in 1922, claiming that Mary didn’t deserve Percy’s Memorial Plaque.29 Not that Mary would most likely have cared — what could she do with it? In an era when few women of her class worked, having a family provider mattered more.

The naming of places or landmarks was another way of honouring those who died at Pozières. As soldier settlements sprung up around the country, some streets were named Pozières, Amiens, Albert, or Birdwood. There’s even a town in rural Queensland called Pozières. Returned soldier Arthur Watkinson established a small four-hectare farm in northern Queensland and called it Mouquet Farm. He never told anyone why; in fact, he never talked about the war. Years later, some of his farmland was converted into a public park and, fittingly, a large sign explained the significance of the name. For Arthur, it was a quiet tribute to his 15th Battalion mates who died while trying to take the farm in August 1916.

First Battalion veterans formed their own association, and from 1935 commemorated Pozières Day every year, with a memorial service on a Sunday in July.30

Battalion histories published in the 1920s and 1930s paid tribute to deceased comrades. One senses that the passage of time did little to dull the veterans’ painful memories. ‘It is not easy to write the story of Pozières, the bloodiest and most costly battle in which the Battalion was ever engaged,’ opened one account.31

Veteran Donovan Joynt returned to the Somme battlefields in 1956 to pay his respects. He stood under the famous Albert basilica from which the statue of the Virgin Mary had once hung precariously.32 Near there, 40 years earlier, he’d watched the high-spirited Anzacs march, joking and singing, toward Pozières. It seemed like yesterday.

Reverend John Raws also visited the Somme in the 1920s and 1930s, wandering its fields in a vain search for the graves of his sons Goldy and Alec.33 Fred Hocking, who was wounded at Pozières on the same day that Goldy Raws disappeared, returned to the Somme to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Anzac Day. While congregating at the Australian National Memorial, near Villers-Bretonneux, a Sydney Morning Herald reporter asked him if he had known a certain soldier killed at Pozières. Standing among rows of uniform headstones that converged into the distance, Hocking replied in the only way he could: ‘There were so many killed at Pozières.’34

In memoriam notices in newspapers provide the most intimate glimpse of the grief that consumed many families. On anniversaries of heavy fighting, such as 23 July or 4 August, in memoriam notices covered the front page of newspapers. Society dictated that parents, brothers, sisters, and wives had to bear their loss stoically. Australians were supposed to have all the ‘self control of a ruling race and they will not let their private sufferings dim their eyes to the glory of wounds and death,’ preached The Argus to its readers.35 Unsurprisingly, emotionally laden language was avoided in the notices, with poems and verse preferred:

You fell at the Battle of Pozières;
We know that you fought brave and true;
You fought for your King and Country;
And the flag of the red, white and blue.36

While repressed emotion was regarded as a sign of inner strength, this veneer occasionally slipped. In the privacy of home, behind drawn curtains, many seemed to buckle under the weight of their overwhelming grief, as this notice inserted for William Johnstone suggests:

We mourn for you, dear Willie;
No eyes can see us weep;
But many a silent tear we shed;
While many are asleep.

The true feelings of Clarence Woolcock’s family were unmasked in this notice:

His unknown grave is the bitterest blow;
That none but our sobbing hearts can know.

And the passage of time did little to dull the grief. Thomas Lillie’s family wrote in 1921:

Five years have passed and, oh, how we miss him;
Some may think the wound has healed;
But little they know of the sorrow;
That oft’ beneath a smile concealed.37

Over the years, the Anzac legend, propagated by the likes of Charles Bean, flourished. Many Australians identified with the legend. It was what they wanted to be: bred in the bush, strong, resourceful, and independent. The legend was one-dimensional, but attractive in its simplicity.

It did not have much to do with Ernie Lee. Runaway Lee did not fight at Pozières, as The Herald article written in 1919 suggested. He did, however, eventually rejoin the 5th Battalion at Ypres in 1916. Within weeks of returning, he clashed with his corporal, Charles Woodham. According to court-martial proceedings contained within his personnel dossier, while Lee was performing sentry duty, Woodham told him to stop reading a trench paper and return to his post.

‘I’m fucked if I will,’ replied Lee.

Woodham snatched the paper from him. Lee apparently had his father’s temper — he reached for his rifle, shoved a cartridge into its breech, and pulled the bolt back. ‘I’ll shoot a bastard like you.’

Woodham wrestled the rifle from him and placed him under close arrest. Lee was charged with offering violence to his superior officer, tried by court martial, found guilty, and sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude. Gradually, word spread that he was only 15 years old. Eventually, the Australian minister for defence intervened, suspending the sentence and sending Lee back to Australia.

Lee arrived back in Australia in April 1917. He re-enlisted six months later. And he didn’t re-enlist to redeem himself — within a month, he’d been charged with using obscene language, refusing to obey an order, being absent without leave, and being improperly dressed. And that was before he had even left Australia’s shores. Lee returned to Europe just before Christmas 1917.

Lee’s disappearance added to his parents’ worries. Their eldest son, Jack, a quietly spoken boy who had just turned 19, enlisted in April 1917, destined for France. With a constant eye on the casualty lists, Herman and Mary Lee would have realised that the odds of both sons returning home safely were low. Mary, a devout Catholic, lit two candles rather than one at the little Bruthen church each Sunday.

Lee’s personnel dossier tells us that, upon disembarking in Italy in early 1918, he was charged with using threatening language against an officer. In April, he went absent again. He was jailed for ten days, only to escape from custody twice. In November, he went absent again, desperately trying to meet up with his brother Jack, who had just arrived in France. They never met up. Jack came down with a mild bout of influenza, and he was evacuated to No. 3 Australian General Hospital in Abbeville, France, where the influenza took a turn for the worse. He died of bronchial pneumonia only a few weeks before the war ended. His grave at the Abbeville Communal Cemetery, Plot 4, Row H, No. 22, received no visitors for the next 90 years.38

Military police eventually caught Ernie Lee in Paris. Finally — and undoubtedly with great relief to all those in the Australian Imperial Force — he was discharged in May 1919.

After the war, Lee tried his hand at farming. ‘I will settle down now,’ he told his father, ‘and get a piece of land.’39 After securing a selection through the Repatriation Committee, his interest quickly waned. On the afternoon of 22 May 1919, while hunting ducks on a swamp, he shot two birds. He stripped off everything except his trousers, leggings, and boots and swam toward them. He started to struggle, and then disappeared from sight.

That afternoon, the parish priest, Reverend Father Buckley, and Constable Howard knocked on Greville Farm’s door. Ernie’s younger sister Essie answered. They delivered the sad news that Ernie had drowned. It was less than a month since he had returned home.

On the following Saturday, a hearse transported his body to the Bruthen Cemetery. His comrades fired a three-shot volley, and the Last Post sounded as his coffin descended into the ground. His teenage fiancée, Mabel Baade, stood silently by.

Lee’s death was widely reported. The evening Herald ran the headline: ‘Youngest AIF soldier, enlisting at fourteen, lad fights at Pozières’.40 A local newspaper finished his obituary with the words, ‘this splendid specimen of Australia’s young manhood is to sleep his last long sleep in his native land on the hillside of the Bruthen Township’.41 The newspapers didn’t mention his colourful past.

Lee’s death reveals much about the Anzac legend. Whatever way you look at it, he was a common criminal with a record more like that of hardened criminals twice his age. But Lee had enlisted, left his family, and served overseas in a deadly war. For this, he was permitted to wear the cloak of the legend. The unwritten social covenant that the correspondents, soldiers, soldiers’ families, public, and politicians were unconsciously party to allowed him to be referred to evermore in glowing terms as a ‘splendid specimen of Australia’s young manhood’, those who ‘with their fine physiques fought for the Empire’.

What was the purpose of this social covenant? Perhaps it rewarded the labourers, farmhands, and clerks who had enlisted and risked their lives for their country with a mythological status that they could never have hoped to achieve in civilian life. Perhaps it softened the blow felt by families, particularly mothers, of the dead. Even though their sons had been blown to bits, mothers could be comforted by the anaesthetising words that their sons had given up their lives gallantly and that their deeds would live forever — their sons were immortalised as Anzac legends. Perhaps this was what Henry Lawson meant when he said that their deeds would be remembered for the next thousand years.

And who would begrudge the Lees the comfort of the legend? Herman and Mary Lee did not have a lot to celebrate. According to the Herald article, they were poor and had struggled against bushfire and drought to maintain their large family. The strain of farming a barren selection had broken Herman’s health. They had lost their house and all their possessions to fire. They had lost their eldest son, Jack, to pneumonia on the Western Front. At least they could be proud, even if it was just for a moment, that their son Ernie had served the Empire as a hallowed Anzac. These honours were beyond their grasp in normal life.

Is anything gained by stripping Ernie of the Anzac cloak? Is there any justification in revealing the unflattering truth about him? Charles Bean said a historian’s obligation was to write the truest history possible. Perhaps the wound of brutal disclosure is the price paid for writing the truth.

It was left to Bean to record that fragile, fleeting, and sometimes ungraspable thing called history. He selected the old station homestead of Tuggeranong as his headquarters from which to draft it, as it was free from distractions and located in the bush he loved so much.

Denis Winter’s book, Making the Legend, which details the research and drafting of the Official History, records that Bean began setting down the history of Pozières and the Great War on Armistice Day, 1919, working from 9.00 a.m. to 11.00 p.m. seven days a week and hardly ever taking a break. And every day that passed, he knew that ‘history’ was slowly slipping away from him, like grains of sand through outstretched fingers. ‘There is only a limited time during which events can be fixed. Men’s memories fade. The chief actors die,’ explained Bean. Effie Bean quietly watched as her husband spent the 1920s and 1930s absorbed in his memories and documents of the war. 42

For Bean, there was not one absolute truth that could be wrestled from the piles of manuscripts and records he sifted through. Besides the baldest of facts — the day, the place, the recorded word — everything else seemed open to interpretation. There was even randomness in the way he came across evidence. One day, by chance, he spoke to an electrician, Apcar de Vine, rewiring his office at Victoria Barracks and found out that he had kept a detailed diary during the war; Apcar de Vine’s writings were to feature heavily in Bean’s Pozières account. Bean also drew from the unit diaries — a massive resource of over 20 million sheets — that John Treloar had carefully catalogued. By including the rich information gained from these sources, Bean turned a roughly three-year undertaking into a mission lasting almost a quarter of a century. In 1926, he wrote a letter to his friend, Major Phillips of the Australian war graves section in London, about their arduous undertaking: ‘You and I are some of the few Australians still at work on the war. I expect to reach a declaration of peace somewhere about 1935!’43

Occasionally, Bean was asked to explain why the publication of the Official History was delayed. ‘No one feels more keenly than I the fact that the official history is taking much longer to produce than was originally estimated,’ wrote Bean in response to such a request from prime minister Stanley Bruce in 1927. Bean explained that if Australians only wanted a simple narrative of events, it could be produced in six months. But if the people wanted to know the answers to the questions that had puzzled them, it would take longer. For example: What was the real reason for the terrible struggle at Pozières? What happened on the German side of the line? ‘If this knowledge is required there is no short cut,’ explained an unrepentant Bean. ‘It is being obtained by patient labour.’44

By chance, Bean also stumbled across Alec Raws’s vivid letters describing the horrors of Pozières. Should they be included in the Official History — was Alec Raws’s dark view, when coming out the trenches, of being ‘lousy, stinking, unshaven and sleepless’ the dominant emotion experienced by others at Pozières? Bean sought advice from his close friend White, who had read nearly every draft of his history. He responded: ‘I saw many of the men as they came out but I am not prepared to agree that all were in the condition you describe so vividly.’45 Bean drafted another one of the 10,000 letters he wrote to validate facts, sending it to Raws’s company commander, Captain Lionel Short, asking his opinion. Of Raws’s quote, Short wrote:

He says with such pathos, ‘We were lousy, stinking, unshaven, sleepless.’ Now, I remember halting at a cooker as we came out of the line and enjoying some hot tea. I suppose I was lousy, stinking, unshaven and sleepless but I didn’t feel those things as a tragedy; rather with exhilaration that one had been through such an experience. Does it all merely lie in the point of view?46

And maybe that was the only absolute truth: that it all lay in one’s own point of view. Perhaps there was no uniform set of facts; maybe it was impossible to distil the diverse experiences of tens of thousands of men into one definitive document.

When Bean published his final volume in 1942, he had produced one of the most comprehensive histories ever written. He detailed 6550 soldiers in it.47 Despite White’s misgivings, he quoted extensively from Raws’s letters, although omitting his most vehement comments.

Bean’s Official History was largely a concise tome of facts, figures, names, and places. It was, without doubt, true to its title of ‘official’. Bean’s real literary masterpiece was his diary: fresh and full of unguarded opinions and observations. After the war, Bean, perhaps uncomfortable with his candour, affixed to the inside cover of each volume a typed note with official red lettering that cautioned future readers that his notes were often jotted in the midst of battle, when he was very tired or almost asleep, and typically captured what was utmost on his mind. Despite Bean’s half-apology, it is these factors that make his diary a timeless piece of war writing.

White did not live to see the final volumes of the Official History published. His tenure as chief of the general staff was cut short in 1940 when the plane he was travelling in, along with three federal ministers, crashed near the Canberra aerodrome, killing all on board. Bean was devastated. ‘For me a light went out that was never relit,’ he wrote.48

In his Official History, Bean successfully provided a memorial to those men who fought in the Great War, but had he been ‘true’ to himself? Much of the horror of war and his unfiltered opinions about it never made it into the Official History. Perhaps this troubled him, for later in life, he began what he called his ‘unofficial history’. Having fulfilled his official obligations, he set about testing what he had believed to be the truth. But he was 78 years old and his hand was weak and shaky; it soon became apparent that the book that he felt compelled to write was beyond his mortal grasp. He never got beyond his rough draft of the Gallipoli campaign.49

In 1952, Bean made possibly his last visit to Pozières. Although grass, stubble, beet trees, and hedges had replaced mud, craters, and lines of ragged stumps, he wrote, ‘For me it was as though I had left it yesterday.’50

In 1964, he was admitted to the Concord Repatriation Hospital in Sydney, and he spent his last years among comrades from Gallipoli and the Somme. He died in August 1968. There was probably never an Australian who held higher hopes and aspirations for his country than Charles Bean.

Bean predicted that Pozières would become a place of ‘eternal pilgrimage’ for future generations of Australians.51 Despite his prediction, Pozières has gradually faded from our memories. Besides battalion reunions and a few church services, the tenth anniversary of Pozières passed without notice. Newspapers seemed more concerned about the pending Ashes Test and whether Clarrie Grimmett or Arthur Mailey would be selected. On the 50th anniversary, only one reference to Pozières appeared in newspapers. In 2004, it finally passed from the edges of our memory into history when Marcel Caux, the last surviving Australian Pozières veteran, passed away, aged 105.52

Despite fading memories, the fields of Pozières still disengorge reminders of the past. In 1998, a farmer’s plough caught on something. Upon investigating, the farmer found human remains. A special team that excavated the site found a skeleton, part of a uniform, a weapon, some ammunition, and, most importantly, a badly corroded identity disc. It was Australian Russell Bosisto of the 27th Battalion, who had disappeared on 4 August 1916.

Eighty-two years on, with hundreds crowded into the Courcelette Military Cemetery, including four Great War veterans, and with a pipe band playing in the background, Bosisto was finally laid to rest. With the burial came some irony — even though Bosisto’s remains have been identified, he lies with 1177 other men who remain unknown. Many are Australians.

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in the Somme battle and Pozières. Australians are increasingly curious about their past. Battalions of Australians visit the Somme each year. These individuals come as tourists, walking the battlefields and exploring the cemeteries, rather than as soldiers.

The visitors find that while many things have changed on the Somme, some have remained the same. The faint whiff of manure still hangs in the air, but now massive caterpillar tractors, rather than peasant’s carts and marching troops, tread it into the roads. Albert’s war economy continues to flourish. Ninety-five years ago, peasants sold fruit and eggs to troops at exorbitant prices. Now they sell tickets to the war museum, beneath the rebuilt basilica, or brass shell casings with intricate carvings to those visiting the battlefields. The farms of Pozières have retained their traditional quadrangle shape, but are now constructed of brick, rather than yellow clay slapped over wooden frames. The church and cemetery were reconstructed. The windmill was not.

After the war, the surrounding fields were thought to be so contaminated that nothing would ever grow there again. Slowly, the peasants cleared them. Within a few years, they had cleansed the fields and hidden Pozières’s scars beneath ‘crops of grain and nodding poppies’.53

Visitors now lose themselves in these fields. Out among the vegetable fields or up dirt tracks, they try to figure out from their bundles of maps where the German or British front lines once were. Occasionally, they stumble upon a spent cartridge or a lump of jagged iron. The French farmers leave them be as long as they don’t disturb the crops. The relationship is, at times, symbiotic. Visitors will follow the path of the farmer’s ploughs in the hope of unearthing some relic from the past; the farmers are happy to have their fields cleared before sowing.

Monsieur Vandendriessche, Mouquet Farm’s tenant, returned to his ruined farm after the war. He rebuilt the homestead and cleansed the fields of its iron harvest. The farm remains in the family, and his grandson Jose now runs it. Occasionally, Jose notices a solitary figure standing quietly on the edge of his farm. It is often an Australian whose grandfather or great-uncle was killed in his fields. ‘It’s normal, it’s memory,’ he explained.54 Vandendriessche takes the time to describe what happened all those years ago, showing them the pile of shells, grenades, and rifles that he finds in the fields.

Grandchildren and great-grandnephews and -nieces of soldiers killed on the Somme research the location of their graves and pay their respects. There are 242 military cemeteries, or, as Kipling called them, ‘Silent Cities’, dotted around the Somme region.55 Some are in the middle of ripening vegetable fields; some are located down back lanes; some are in the folds of valleys or on the brow of hills; some are in small woods shaded by trees; and others, adjacent to motorways. Where the fighting was most intense, around Thiepval, Pozières, and Beaumont-Hamel, the cemeteries are more concentrated and contain thousands of graves. Those dirt mounds with temporary white crosses that John Treloar had seen scattered among the fields on his evening walks were transformed into beautiful and immaculately maintained cemeteries. Uniform rows of Portland limestone headstones replaced the temporary wooden crosses. Lush green lawns replaced the stooked hay and poppy fields. Brick and sandstone walls, bordered by beautiful rose gardens, replaced the temporary picket fences. Today, it is difficult to reconcile the fact that such a terrible war spawned these cemeteries, so serene and peaceful, dotted in the middle of fields of maize. Although separated by generations, visitors still feel a personal connection with a long-lost relative. Their handwritten notes are scribbled in the green visitors’ books located at each cemetery. ‘At last to see where my grandfather lies; thank you for caring for this special place,’ reads one.

Another simply says, ‘Please never again.’

The gnarly concrete footings of the old Pozières windmill still remain, and standing on its stumps allows visitors an eerie appreciation of the magnificent views that the Germans had from the OG lines. Some visitors leave laminated postcards at the base of the windmill. One, a faded and grainy picture of Private William Tynan, commemorates his death, not far from there, on 4 August 1916. His mate remembered him being carted away on a stretcher. ‘I’ve got a “blighty”’, he said. He was never seen again.56

At the Pozières roadside café, Le Tommy, you can pay a few euros to visit its backyard museum. It’s a mishmash of old weapons, piles of mud-crusted shells, rolls of rusted barbed wire, and store mannequins dressed in weathered uniforms. Otherwise, you can enjoy the eclectic mix of war artefacts adorning its walls, separated by the occasional fly strip.

Outside the café, on the narrow pavement adjacent to the rebuilt Bapaume road, are a few plastic tables and chairs. B-double trucks occasionally thunder by, swirling loose papers and napkins up in their wake. They roar through Pozières, into the distance, grinding through the gears, passing by the old windmill footings, over the Pozières ridge, and out of sight.

Bécourt Château, which served as a dressing station, was rebuilt and converted, fittingly, into a community centre. Instead of its halls being crowded with broken soldiers, they are now filled with laughing children.

Behind the old front line at Contay, you can still get a beer at the estaminet, near the old church, where Australian staff officers were billeted. Rickety wooden floors, a rotund madame pouring beers, and a farm dog resting at the feet of a few local drinkers gives a feeling of yesteryear. The majestic Contay Château remains unchanged, although John Treloar’s tent offices are long gone.

The most striking thing about the battlefields is their eerie stillness. It’s as if the Great War has drained them of noise forever. Only the corn rippling in the breeze breaks the silence; only the occasional hare or startled deer disturbs the stillness. Standing in the open fields, you cannot help but wonder whether it was all worth it. What would Alec Raws, Leo Butler, or George Drosen think? What about their mothers?

Veteran John Edey reflected on the Pozières legacy whenever he examined old photos of past comrades. While studying the character of their faces, he considered the children. They were different from their parents. ‘Whereas their forebears believed that Australia was a country worth dying for, these youngsters will prove that Australia is a country worth working for, and living for,’ he said.57

And maybe that’s the legacy of Pozières. It’s one of which Alec Raws would have been proud.