Beaten Down By Blood
Page 31
By the end of 1919 the violence and rioting by returned soldiers had died away. Largely because of the conciliatory work of the RSSILA, which claimed over 100,000 members by the end of 1919, a paid repatriation commission had been established, pensions increased, a war gratuity established and preference in employment secured. There was no radicalisation of ex-servicemen and the belief in democracy remained strong. However, there is a strong sense that many men were disappointed on their return to the country whose distinct characteristics they had thought of so nostalgically while in France.
As early as 7 September 1918, Charles Rosenthal had decided on a site for the 2nd Division Memorial on the Western Front.9 Obviously he believed that the achievement at Mont St Quentin had exceeded anything that had been done before and would not be equalled by any subsequent action in which his division would play a part. After the war, the mayor and council of Mont St Quentin gave the land to the Australians and the men of the 2nd Division, with the help of the Commonwealth Government, collected the money and commissioned Charles Web Gilbert to create a statue for the monument. Web Gilbert’s allegorical concept of a digger bayoneting a dying eagle, symbolising the AIF defeating the Imperial German Army, was not enthusiastically received, Charles Bean calling it ‘a cheap conception’ which did not reflect the spirit of the AIF.10 Nonetheless, the statue was cast in bronze, and its supporters saw it fitting well with the legendary status of the battle. May Butler-George created the bas-reliefs on the north and south faces of the memorial and they represented Australian artillery going into action and infantrymen bombing their way along a trench.
The memorial was unveiled by Marshal Foch on 30 August 1925, when he spoke of Mont St Quentin as one of the ‘finest feats of arms in a time rich in innumerable deeds of heroism’.11 The Germans did not see it in quite the same way. In 1940, when the armies of the Third Reich burnt and bombed Péronne, they took exception to the monument, tore down the statue and removed the bas-reliefs. The statue was hacked to pieces and left lying on the ground, to disappear without trace. However, the plaster casts of the reliefs had remained in Melbourne and were re-cast by the Australian War Memorial, to take their place in its sculpture garden, as well as being reinstated on the memorial in France. A new statue of a more reflective digger, unveiled in 1971, focused on a different perspective of the Australian experience.
In February 1919 the first of the townspeople returned to Péronne, their ‘footsteps echoing up the street’ like someone ‘walking through an empty house’. May Butler-George, who was there at the time, recalled in 1920 that the main square was ‘all shattered and there was a ghostly silence among the ruins’. Suddenly a thrush began to sing on a broken beam of an old woman’s house, a symbol of ‘the spirit of Péronne’ and the willingness to ‘be brave even among our ruins’.12 In a town where ‘chaos and ruin presents itself at every turn’, everything had to be rebuilt.13 Its battlements were scarred and its churches destroyed. Only the cobbled streets remained intact, the bricks, masonry and debris which had choked them cleared by the Australians who had made themselves at home in September 1918, giving the streets names such as ‘Dingbat Alley’, ‘Digger Road’ and ‘Roo de Kanga’, the last so named because the men ‘would have to hop along it pretty quick’ to avoid the German shells.14 Across the whole Mont St Quentin-Péronne battlefield there was an ‘eerie silence’, with the ‘fields of wooden crosses’ serving as poignant reminders of the desperate fighting for this ground. It was ‘a Somme Golgotha’, a place of the skull, a land of death.15
The original 2nd Division Memorial at Mont St Quentin. (AWM PO2205.011)
Reconstruction began in 1919, the people housed in Nissen huts while their houses were rebuilt. Gradually the public buildings were made whole again. Today, the Australian flag, among others, flies from the restored remains of the citadel, which adjoins a modern interpretative museum of the Great War — the Historial de la Grande Guerre. On one wall of the Town Hall, facing the Rue St Sauveur, is a small plaque recognising that this street was the ‘Roo de Kanga’, a main artery for the Australian advance through the town in September 1918. The evocative Church of Saint-Jean, its steeple visible for many miles, stands proudly just off the main square. Péronne is once again a beautiful town, surrounded by lakes and parklands and proud of its heritage and history. It has not forgotten the Australians who fought here at the end of August and the beginning of September 1918, although few Australians know Péronne.
This account has been as much about the ordinary men who fought at Mont St Quentin-Péronne as it has about the problems surrounding the battle and its ultimate significance. Without John McDonald, Percy Morris, Daniel Anthon, Joe Maxwell, Percy Smythe, Edgar Towner, James Marshall, Alex Buckley, Alexander O’Connor, Oscar Lawson, Norman Nicolson, Donald Coutts, Louis Noedl, Tom Slaughter, Bert Bishop, Cleve Potter, Ernie Corey and the host of others who play a part in this account, the story would be without meaning and without a human face. These were the men who crept to their jumping-off line in the darkness just before dawn on 31 August, the men who stormed the Mont and Péronne on 1 September, the men caught in the maelstrom of 2 September, the gunners and machine-gunners who tried to support them, the engineers who built those crucial bridges across the Somme and the men who attended to their wounds. A soldier, known simply as ‘M.B.’, captured their essence in a poem he wrote on the ship in which he returned to Australia in 1919:
Stand silent, as the bugle’s fading notes
Wail o’er the waters to the dying sun:
Stand to their memory whose race is run.
And think, while yet the quiet music floats,
Of the great life departed, and the mirth
Of good companions, and the splendid years,
Red wine, red blood, and noble deeds and tears.
These sink as leaves to the autumnal earth.
And when Time’s journeyings shall leave you grey
At the last end of life, again you’ll stand,
See long-remembered shattered fields of France,
Dream the dead battles of bygone day,
And friends forgotten in an alien land,
Who left Australia wonder and a radiance.16
The 2nd Division Memorial at Mont St Quentin, photo by the author, May 2010.
Most who believe in the value of the Anzac tradition — and assert that Australia’s role in international conflict is a significant part of its history — do not glorify war. Anzac Day is not a ‘celebration’ of war; it is a commemoration, a tribute to those who considered it their duty to serve and to the sacrifices they made. The men of the First AIF — the 1914–1918 men — for the most part believed in the cause for which they were fighting and regarded it as a matter of pride to do the job well. This involved killing the enemy, in sometimes very bloody encounters, but these men were not brutal killers. In fact, what is revealed about them, in accounts such as those from the Battle of Mont St Quentin-Péronne, is their humanity and their respect for human life.
Very few of them ‘enjoyed’ the war, but for most it was the most ‘intense’ experience of their lives and they remembered it in terms of the mateship and the humour as well as the dreadful conditions, the suffering and the death. Throughout their lives it would remain, as Peter Stanley writes, a part of their ‘mental landscape’.17 Paradoxically, they fought ‘the war to end all wars’ so that a lasting peace and a better society could result. These were noble aims, if in fact they proved illusory. The men of Mont St Quentin-Péronne mourned the destruction they saw around them and took careful time to make the crosses with which they marked the graves of the dead.
These were fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers and now great, great-grandfathers — real people, individuals who held the same hope for their world as we do for ours today. Lest we forget.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
UNIT WAR DIARIES – AWM 4
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AWM 28
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Folders, 3DRL 606 Items 198, 257, 266, 274, 274b, 276, 277, 280a, 280b, 281
Newspaper Articles, 3DRL 8039, Item 43
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AWM 133
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WAR SERVICE RECORDS
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FIELD WORK
Mont St Quentin-Péronne Battlefield, the Somme, France, May 2010
UNPUBLISHED PERSONAL RECORDS
Australian War Memorial (AWM)
Australian War Memorial (AWM)
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Hawkins, William Lawes, Manuscript, 1962, ‘The King’s Horses and Other Stories’, MSS 1374
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Horniman, Lance, Letters, 1DRL/0357
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Skinner, Charlie, Transcript of Interview describing actions for which Skinner was awarded the MM at Mont St Quentin, PR 84/020
Stewart, James Campbell, Papers and Diary, 3DRL/1459
Williams, Albert J
., Typescript – ‘A Soldier Looks Back’ c. 1935, MSS 1337
Mitchell Library, Sydney (ML)
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Other
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UNPUBLISHED FAMILY HISTORIES
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