Jack and Joseph Bolton both went to war. There was not much more than a year between the two brothers, both engine cleaners from Sydney. Joseph embarked for active service overseas in March 1916. Always just a step behind, Jack followed him eight months later. From that moment on, their parents, Lydia and George, began the long ordeal of waiting.

Private Joseph Bolton fought in the Second Battle of Bullecourt, the AIF’s second attempt to break the heavily fortified Hindenburg Line. On the first day he was struck by a shell, and on the second he died. In the first three weeks of May 1917, the AIF suffered over 7000 casualties.

On the first day struck by a shell, on the second he died: Joseph Claude Bolton. This studio portrait was taken shortly before he sailed from Sydney. Joseph was 21 years of age. H06292, courtesy Australian War Memorial.

Consumed with grief and fearing for Jack’s life, Lydia and George both wrote to the authorities: ‘[Is there] any possible chance of [Jack] being transferred . . .  out of the firing zone,’ a fretful father pleaded, ‘he has been twice wounded and the loss of his younger brother at Bullecourt makes me anxious.’ Lydia’s letter appealed, ‘I only hope my other son will be spared to me.’1

He was, but more by luck than intervention from the authorities. Jack was discharged medically unfit at the end of the war. By that time the scars of battle covered most of his body.

The scars of battle: The Young Australia League boys investigate a crater near Fleurs, not too far from Baupame where Private Joseph Bolton was killed. One of the Young Australia League boys, Thomas Donnan, noted on the back of this photograph that 850 Germans were killed here. Thomas Donnan Papers courtesy Rare Book Collection, Monash University.

The family faced the maiming of one son and the loss of another. ‘Just away, not forgotten,’2 Joseph’s memorial notice reads. Joseph’s body was far away, buried in a grave on the other side of the ocean. A sense of distance made the grieving almost unbearable.

Back in Sydney, Lydia laboured to build some connection to her dead son. She gathered together what mementos she could. At her request, the authorities sent the standard parcels – a photograph of the grave, the King’s commemorative scroll, a few of her son’s belongings bundled up in plain, brown paper. In 1922, Lydia received a copy of Where the Australians Rest, a sketchbook of cemeteries distributed to mourning families. C.E.W. Bean, who edited the booklet, hoped Australians would ‘read the book, and gather from it at any rate the sort of surrounding in which their boys lie’.3 Lydia and George imagined the journey to their son’s grave. A hasty sketch in Indian ink was all they had to go on.

In 1924, Lydia saw a newspaper article about the Young Australia League Tour to Europe. Founded in 1905, the League’s philosophy was ‘education by travel’. Its purpose was to send young men overseas, introduce them to the world and widen their horizons. They were convinced that taking such a journey ‘adds to the storehouse of individual knowledge, broadens the outlook and brings first-hand information in a way never reached by book study’.

The 1924 European Tour included excursions to France and Belgium, and some forty Australian boys made up the contingent. It was one of the earliest youth pilgrimages, organised well before British schoolchildren travelled to Menin Gate or the battlefield excursions run by the Ypres League in the 1930s. The tour cost around £250, more than twice the yearly earnings of a skilled, white, male worker. In the interwar years, pilgrimage was a privilege enjoyed by very few Australians.

Lydia Bolton would never be able to afford to visit her son’s grave. But perhaps others could make the journey for her, embarking on a pilgrimage by proxy. Lydia wrote to the League in July 1924. She sent the location of her son’s grave and begged the boys to visit it.

When the Young Australia League arrived in France, they were warmly welcomed. At French Army Headquarters, Marshall Foch marched along their ranks, inspected their uniforms and applauded their discipline. They ‘represented a great nation’s sons’, he told them, mindful of the number of Australian dead buried in his soil. The League were the ‘sons and brothers of those who fought with France’: ‘You boys are met here with great and deep sympathy. France will never forget the Anzacs.’4

At Amiens, the boys were met by Major Phillips, Superintendent of the Somme War Graves. His familiar Australian accent was something of a relief to them. Together they travelled across a landscape marked with the scars of battle:

They penetrated into uncleared areas hitherto not visited by tourists, where they found live shells and wrecked aeroplanes and guns. The lads inspected trenches and ‘pill boxes’ and the German division headquarters dug-out, all as in wartime . . .  [At Albert] the boys climbed to the top of the ruined cathedral. At Delville Wood rain fell unceasingly, and the lads saw the typical muddy conditions in which the soldiers lived during the wet season in war time.5

Many of the vast cemeteries and great memorials were still being completed, and the landscape was littered with the debris of war. Death and destruction lay all around them. The boys found bodies that could never be buried, ‘all churned up in the mud’ of the Somme. ‘[W]e saw several skulls,’ one boy scribbled in his diary, ‘[and the] bones of a man’s foot [encased] in [a] boot.’6 Once thriving townships were now nothing more than ruins.

Cemeteries still being completed: The Young Australia League boys inspect the graves in Adelaide Cemetery. These temporary crosses were not replaced with permanent headstones until the mid-1920s. Thomas Donnan Papers, courtesy Rare Book Collection, Monash University.

North of Amiens, the League began their pilgrimage by proxy. They made their way to Vaulx Australian Field Ambulance Cemetery, a tiny graveyard on the edge of the Somme. It wasn’t difficult to find Private Bolton’s grave buried alongside thirty other Australians. On a dull spring day, they carried out a makeshift service and laid a wreath for a family half a world away. The boys took photographs of the grave, careful to include French caretakers tending the cemetery. Before they left, they picked a posy of forget-me-nots to carry all the way home to Australia. Most of the boys who made that journey were not much younger than Joseph Bolton. But for the grace of God, his grave could have held any one of them. We know from the correspondence that Lydia gained much comfort from that pilgrimage to that corner of a foreign field forever her own.7 Joseph’s grave reads ‘Peace, Perfect Peace’.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on the service dossiers of Joseph and Jack Bolton NAA: B2455 BOLTON J C and NAA: B2455 BOLTON J G; Joseph’s Red Cross Wounded and Missing file AWM 1DRL/0428; Thomas Donnan’s diary, 1924 Young Australia League Tour, Rare Book Collection, Monash University; Young Australia League Papers, 7292A, State Library of Western Australia; and contemporary newspaper reports.

1 Letter from Mrs Lydia Bolton, 12 June, 1918 and letter from Mr George Bolton, 14 October, 1918 in NAA: B2455 BOLTON J G.

2 Sydney Morning Herald, 4 May 1921.

3 Letter from Mrs Lydia Bolton, NAA: B2455 BOLTON J C; Charles Bean to T. Trumble, Secretary, Department of Defence, 18 February 1920, NAA: MP 367, AB446/10/1331; C.E.W. Bean, Where the Australians Rest (Melbourne: Government Printing Office, 1922).

4 Daily News, 17 May 1924.

5 Register, 22 May 1924, p.10.

6 Thomas Donnan Diary 20 May 1924, Rare Book Collection, Monash University.

7 Melbourne Herald, 22 May 1924.