The Spirit of the Digger

by Patrick Lindsay

  After the battle, the unrepentant General Haking had the unmitigated hide to send a message to the Australians:

  I think the attack, although it failed, has done both divisions a great deal of good.

  The cover-up of the disaster at Fromelles started immediately. The official British communiqué read:

  Yesterday evening, south of Armentières, we carried out some important raids on a front of two miles in which Australian troops took part. About 140 German prisoners were captured.

  That was it! You don’t expect to tell the enemy that you were smashed in the battle but if you lose 5533 troops in a single night, surely you’re entitled to hope for more than ‘Australian troops took part’. The cover-up was assisted by the fact that the official references continually confused even the name of the battle. The communiqué called it ‘south of Armentières’, other reports called it Fleurbaix (where the Australians were billeted nearby), or by the name of other surrounding villages, Bois-Grenier, Laventie or Petillon. In addition, the much more famous Battle of Pozières on the Somme, in which other Australians participated, began just four days after Fromelles and it helped distract attention from the disaster.

  Except for those who fought there, and the loved ones of those who never returned from it, Fromelles largely slipped into the footnotes of history. That is until 2002, when a Greek-born Australian art teacher from Melbourne, Lambis Englezos, began a remarkable quest to solve the mystery of what he believed was the missing Diggers of Fromelles.

  Lambis came to Australia from Salonika, Greece, with his parents when he was one. He had no grandparents in his new country, so he adopted some of the old characters who lived near his home around Melbourne’s Albert Park. They were World War I Diggers and they imbued Lambis with the Anzac spirit.

  He grew to become an avid amateur historian and he eventually focused on the Battle of Fromelles after reading about it and befriending some of the survivors. Lambis was struck by the number of unknown soldiers among the Australian dead from the battle. When he did the maths, the numbers didn’t add up: there were many more dead than those accounted for in the graves of soldiers ‘known unto God’. Lambis worked painstakingly through the records and initially calculated that at least 170 Diggers who died at Fromelles had simply disappeared without trace.

  Knowing most of them had died behind German lines, Lambis recalled seeing photos of a German light rail that was used to transport bodies away from the front for burial. He figured that the Germans would have buried the Australian dead as well as their own to prevent them becoming a health hazard. So he worked through the logical possible burial areas and then searched the British Imperial War Museum to see whether they held aerial photos of the battlefield around the time. Luck was with him and he found aerials of the positions before and shortly after the battle. The post-battle shots showed what seemed to be a major digging disturbance behind a wood below the town of Fromelles. The pre-battle shots showed the same area undisturbed. Closer examination of the aerial photos revealed eight large pits, each about 10 metres long and 2 metres wide. Aerial photos taken later in the war showed five of these pits had been filled in.

  Lambis’ research gathered pace and he found support from a group of like-minded enthusiasts in Australia, France and Britain. Their searches of the official records, especially the Red Cross Wounded and Missing files at the Australian War Memorial, began to throw up tantalising references to the Germans burying Australian dead after the battle, and then he found references to ‘Pheasant Wood’ as the site of the burials. The big breakthrough came when the Red Cross files revealed a post–World War I family inquiry about a missing Digger named Jack Bowden. In response, the German Red Cross had said he was likely to be among those ‘buried in one of five large British collective graves outside Fasenenwalchen (or Pheasant Wood)’. Lambis soon narrowed down Pheasant Wood to the area he had already pinpointed below Fromelles town. Subsequent research has confirmed that after the battle the Germans collected the Australian dead, took off their identification discs and buried them in the mass graves at Pheasant Wood. They noted the names from the dog tags and sent the details to the International Red Cross. Some of the discs even made their way back to the families in Australia.

  In spite of his team’s compelling research, it took Lambis and his supporters three years to persuade the Australian authorities they had a strong enough case to warrant official examination of the site. Finally, in May 2007, the Australian Army commissioned a team of experts from Glasgow University to carry out a non-invasive examination of the ground at Pheasant Wood. The search turned up two medallions that were indisputably Australian. It also led the investigators to proclaim that not only was the site a mass grave but that it was almost certainly undisturbed since the original burial.

  In May the following year, an archaeological team conducting an exploratory dig at Pheasant Wood confirmed the presence of around 200 remains. Exhumation began in May 2009 and, by September that year, 250 skeletal remains had been discovered – 203 of them confirmed as Australian, the remainder British. The missing Diggers and Tommies of Fromelles were progressively laid to rest in a new cemetery across the road from Pheasant Wood between 30 January and 19 February 2010. One set of remains was held back and was ceremonially reburied in the Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) Military Cemetery on 19 July 2010, the anniversary of the battle, with more than 5000 descendants and supporters, including Lambis Englezos, in attendance.

  Despite initial bureaucratic reluctance to do so, experts took DNA samples as the remains were uncovered for later comparison with surviving descendants. While awaiting identification, the remains were numbered and then reburied in the new cemetery under an unknown soldier’s headstone. Once DNA matching with descendants identified a set of remains, the headstone was replaced with one featuring the missing Digger’s name.

  Among the missing Diggers buried in the mass grave at Pheasant Wood were the Wilson brothers, Samuel and Eric, from Port Macquarie on the New South Wales north coast. Both served as privates in the 53rd Battalion and charged together across no-man’s land at Fromelles. Eric apparently died in no-man’s land but Sam made it through to the German lines before being killed by a grenade. When the DNA results came in, they initially identified both Sam and Eric Wilson as the same person. The experts were able to separate the brothers’ remains by the evidence of a childhood injury one of them suffered as a boy. When they checked to see where they had been randomly buried in the new cemetery, they were astonished to find them resting side by side.

  Early concerns that the DNA matching would be ineffective, because of the condition of the graves and the passing of time, proved unwarranted. At the time of writing, 96 remains have already been indentified. Each of these Diggers now has a headstone bearing his name and their loved ones have a place of pilgrimage where they can pay their respects to him, all thanks to the persistence of a passionate advocate of the spirit of the Digger.

  At Fromelles, the Diggers had been given a foretaste of the grim fighting which lay ahead of them – static set-piece battles on a scale they could never have imagined when they enthusiastically joined up in that sunny land which now seemed a world away. Worse was to come when the Anzacs’ 1st, 2nd and 4th Divisions were committed to the Battle of the Somme. This was to be the bloodiest fighting in the entire war. The Germans and the Allies were deadlocked in the trenches, with each trying to outlast the other in a merciless war of attrition. The endless tit-for-tat artillery bombardments reduced towns, countryside and soldiers to piles of pulverised waste. In addition to the high explosives that tore apart the beautiful French countryside, blasting men and buildings into atoms, both sides resorted to gas attacks as they desperately tried to gain an advantage. Each side used recent technological advances such as telephones, cars, trucks and aircraft, as well as wireless telegraphy. And they invented and adapted other weapons like tanks, flamethrowers and armoured cars specifically for the war.

  The Australian 1st Division was
ordered to attack Pozières, a vital area north of the Somme, which had held firm after four earlier British attacks. The Australians stormed towards Pozières and, fighting with great confidence and determination, drove the Germans before them. Displaying considerable flair, the men of the 1st celebrated by smoking captured German cigars and wearing their spiked helmets as they dug in to consolidate their gains. The Australians repulsed a German counterattack the next morning. The Germans, realising they had a new and worthy opponent, resolved to force the newcomers back with a methodical bombardment of the position which reduced the land to a pulverised mudpile and gradually cut the Australians to shreds. Charles Bean quotes this description by Lieutenant J.A. Raws of the 23rd Battalion:

  … we lay down terror-stricken on a bank. The shelling was awful … we eventually found our way to the right spot out in no man’s land. Our leader was shot before we arrived and the strain had sent two officers mad. I and another new officer took charge and dug the trench. We were shot at all the time … the wounded and the killed had to be thrown to one side. I refused to let any sound man help a wounded man; the sound man had to dig … we dug on and we finished amid a tornado of bursting shells.

  I was buried with dead and dying. The ground was covered with bodies in all stages of decay and mutilation and I would, after struggling from the earth, pick up a body by me to try and lift him out with me and find him a decayed corpse … I went up again the next night and stayed there.

  We were shelled to hell ceaselessly. X went mad and disappeared … there remained nothing but a charred mass of debris with bricks, stones, girders and bodies pounded to nothing … we are lousy, stinking, unshaven, sleepless … I have one puttee, a dead man’s helmet, another dead man’s protector, a dead man’s bayonet. My tunic is rotten with other men’s blood and partly spattered with a comrade’s brains …

  Sadly, Lieutenant Raws and his brother were both killed later in the battle.

  The psychological impact of the artillery pounding soon became a major weapon wielded by each side. Brave men who had survived countless bombardments were often pushed beyond their capacity to withstand the constant concussion and apprehension. Many were sent ‘over the top’ of their trenches time and again into the ‘meat grinder’, where they threw themselves against heavily protected enemy defensive positions in futile, often mindless, attempts to gain a few metres of bombed-out mud. Many soldiers survived with lifelong nightmares centred on the images of their mates being mutilated or blown to pieces before their eyes. Others spoke of having to leave their wounded friends to die in no-man’s land. When the winter rains turned the battlefields into quagmires, troops edged their way through the slush along wooden duckboards. Horses often became bogged and some men actually drowned, held down by their heavy equipment after slipping off the duckboards into holes more than 2 metres deep.

  Over the next months and years, a series of names would enter the Australian consciousness – Pozières, Mouquet Farm, Bapaume, Bullecourt, Messines, Ypres, Menin Road, Polygon Wood, Broodseinde, Poelcapelle, Passchendaele, Amiens, Hazebrouck, Mont St Quentin, Albert and Villers-Bretonneux. They came to symbolise the sacrifices of thousands of young Diggers who would find their final resting places in the tortured earth of these battlegrounds, far from their homeland.

  The Australians maintained a constant strength on the Western Front of around 120,000 troops over the three years of trench warfare there. During that time they suffered 181,000 casualties, with 46,000 deaths, 114,000 wounded, 16,000 gassed and 4000 taken prisoners of war. But the Diggers made their presence felt in ways far in excess of their numbers. Measured in terms of total deaths for each 1000 men mobilised, the Australians lost 145 – the highest rate of all the Commonwealth armies. Diggers also won a remarkable 53 Victoria Crosses on the Western Front (compared with a total of 20 throughout the entire World War II). Ironically, the Anzacs’ performances under fire meant they were often placed in the most dangerous positions, because they were so often effective in creating breakthroughs. This, of course, exposed them to even more casualties. Yet it still failed to break their fighting spirit.

  Despite the undeniable valour displayed by so many, the horrors of trench warfare took an enormous mental as well as physical toll, and a new form of battle injury began to be observed by the frazzled medical staffs – ‘battle fatigue’ or ‘shell shock’. In his fascinating book A War of Nerves, Ben Shephard writes of the experience of the Australians at the Somme:

  They were good, strong soldiers, many of them Gallipoli veterans, and they swept their way into the village of Pozières – which had eluded the British earlier in July – ‘like a pack of hungry dogs that had tasted blood’.

  But there was no comparable advance elsewhere and for the next seven weeks the Australians were ‘shelled to bits’ in the inevitable counter attack. In the end 22,826 Australians fell to win a ‘few yards of ground’. On 24 July an Anzac counted some 75 shells, 9.2s and larger, landing within five minutes in an area of some four acres.

  Just think about it. That’s a massive deadly explosion every four seconds in an area about the size of two football fields. Imagine the feelings of those soldiers as they prayed the next one wouldn’t have their name written on it. Imagine what they witnessed as those shells dealt their random destruction. How often could you take that? How many mates could you see being maimed or blown to pieces before your eyes? Charles Bean observed that the shelling at Pozières:

  … did not merely probe character and nerve; it laid them stark naked … The strain eventually became so great that what is rightly known as courage – the will to persist – would not suffice since, however keen his will, the machinery of the man’s self control might become deranged.

  The battles of Fromelles, Pozières and another at Mouquet Farm tested the Diggers to the limit. In seven weeks they lost 28,000 officers and men. As always, Charles Bean put it beautifully, calling the area ‘more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth’. But somehow the Australians were able to sustain these massive losses and bounce back. Their outstanding performances in the light of such losses gave the lie to the earlier British criticisms of a lack of discipline. In fact, the distinctly Australian system of discipline worked exceptionally well, particularly as so many officers and NCOs were among the casualties.

  Australia’s most decorated soldier, the remarkable Henry William ‘Harry’ Murray, a former miner and timber-cutter from Tasmania, was consistently outstanding during this period in France, just as he had been at Gallipoli where he won the first of his two Distinguished Service Orders. He fought at the Somme, Pozières, Mouquet Farm and Stormy Trench, where he won his VC.

  Murray was a 33-year-old when he joined up, and immediately distinguished himself in combat because of a seemingly complete lack of fear. His rise through the ranks was meteoric: from private at the start of World War I to Lieutenant Colonel by war’s end. During his service he won the Distinguished Service Order twice and a Distinguished Conduct Medal, in addition to his Victoria Cross. King George V made him a Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George and the French awarded him a Croix de Guerre. Charles Bean recorded his role during the Battle of Mouquet Farm, when the artillery bombardment grew so heavy that on 14 August Lieutenant Colonel Ross, a British officer in command of the 51st Battalion, wrote to his brigadier saying it was ‘his genuine (not depressed) opinion that it would be a mistake to press the offensive further’. But, Bean noted:

  The attack, however, was made. A quarry near the Farm was captured and a company under Captain Harry Murray seized part of the German ‘Fabeck Trench’, north-east of the Farm. Here Murray and his men were outflanked by the Germans, who had been ordered by their corps commander not to permit the British plan to develop. But this former miner, who was to become known as a most famous fighting leader, fought his way back with his men in one of the most ably conducted actions in Australian experience.

  The 4th Australian Division was recalled and
its 4th Brigade, after a series of desperate assaults, each of which won some small gains, gradually began to surround Mouquet Farm itself. But the Australians lacked the numbers to consolidate their position on Mouquet Farm and, despite fierce fighting, both above ground and in deep tunnels below the Farm, they were pushed back. Nevertheless, to the northeast of the Farm they hung on grimly to part of Fabeck Trench and other posts. Charles Bean quoted an observer who watched as the Australians emerged from their positions for a rest:

  ‘The way was absolutely open (to shellfire), and others were bending low and running hurriedly. Our men were walking as if they were in Pitt Street, erect, not hurrying, each man carrying himself as proudly and carelessly as a British officer.’

  This was how the tradition of Anzac Beach, then only 16 months old, worked at Mouquet Farm.

  At Stormy Trench, one of the many assaults during the bitter fighting of the spring offensive around Bullecourt, in February 1917, Harry Murray again showed the way as his unit was ordered to harass the enemy with constant raiding. His audacious, aggressive leadership in the field enabled the Australians to considerably extend the ground they won. The citation for Harry Murray’s VC says it all: