In the Footsteps of Private Lynch

by Will Davies

  Germany was in desperate straits. Disillusioned soldiers returning from the front found their families starving, cold and poor. There was political turmoil. In Berlin, the revolutionary communist Spartacist League, led by a former Reichstag deputy named Karl Liebknecht and 'Red Rosa' Luxemburg, took to the streets and occupied a number of government buildings. Having seen the success of the communist takeover in Russia, they demanded that the fragile German government establish a socialist republic. A struggle for control began between the Left and the Right; between the pro-communists demanding a socialist republic and disaffected war veterans and Freikorps paramilitary groups, who demanded a new nationalist Germany and the elimination of communism. The uprising in Berlin was quashed and the two communist leaders, Liebknecht and Luxemburg, served prison sentences and were murdered soon after. The disquiet and turmoil had just begun in Germany and would not finish for another 25 years, with the defeat of Hitler's Third Reich, in May 1945.

  The armistice was only a temporary truce, so the conditions of a lasting peace needed to be negotiated. On 18 January 1919, the first formal session of negotiations got under way in Paris and the French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, was elected chairman. Twenty-six nations were assembled, including Australia, whose delegation was led by Prime Minister Billy Hughes. These nations had a wide variety of agendas and ideas on how to punish Germany and what the new post-war world should be like. The major players were Britain, France and America. France wanted Germany to suffer for starting the war and had a deep resentment of Germany and little sympathy for the idea of formulating a 'just peace', which America, at the other end of the spectrum, was arguing for. Even in Britain, there were calls to 'Hang the Kaiser' and 'Make Germany pay', but at the peace negotiations Britain took the middle ground between the two extremes of France and the United States. Pressure on President Georges Clemenceau and the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, was intense: they knew their political future could depend on how they responded to the public demand in their countries to bring Germany to its knees and never allow it to be strong enough to wage war again. Germany and her allies were excluded from the negotiations; Russia had already concluded a separate peace with Germany, in 1917.

  Negotiations between what became known as the 'Council of Ten', continued from mid-January until mid-March. In late April, the German delegation arrived in Paris and in early May it was presented with the peace conditions that had been argued over and finally agreed upon by the victorious nations. The German delegation was appalled and immediately issued a protest about the unfair conditions and withdrew from further negotiations. Soon after, the leader of the German delegation, Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau, resigned, refusing to sign, but the Allied response was immediate: either sign within 24 hours or military operations would be resumed against Germany.

  Hindenburg assured the newly elected German government that the army could not mount a defence against the Allies, so the Chancellor, Gustav Bauer, signed the treaty, four hours before the deadline was to expire. On 7 May 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was announced to the world.

  There was one element of the treaty that all nations agreed upon: the introduction of the League of Nations, whose aim was to maintain international peace and security and prevent future wars. The 32 founding members agreed 'to respect and preserve [the] territorial integrity and existing political independence' of all other member nations. As a signatory to the peace treaty, Australia became a member of the League, a major step for the newly federated nation. Until then, Australia had barely been consulted about the signing of international treaties, which Britain had taken charge of.

  On a summer afternoon on 28 June 1919, over 1,000 people crowded into the vast Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles and signed the treaty. The German representatives, Herman Muller and Johannes Bell, signed first. Once their signatures were on the paper, the great fountains in the palace gardens, which had been turned off since 1914, sprang back to life, to the cheers of the crowds.

  As the HMT Beltana slowly ploughed her way south, Australia was coming to grips with the peace terms and a new future. The Treaty of Versailles had granted Australia a League of Nations mandate over the German possessions in New Guinea and the Pacific. These included German New Guinea (Deutsch Neuguinea), the Bismarck Archipelago (New Britain) and the scattered islands of Marianne, Caroline, Pelew (present-day Palau) and Nauru, with the joint administrative capital in Rabaul, in present-day Papua New Guinea.

  On the domestic front, Australia was coming to grips with post-war needs such as the development of an efficient transport infrastructure across the vast continent. The linking of the major cities was noted as an urgent requirement and commercial aviation was seen as having a big future. In March 1919, while many Anzac soldiers still languished in holding camps in England, the Australian government offered a prize of £10,000 to the first Australian who succeeded in flying from the United Kingdom to Australia within a 30-day period. (In December 1919, the prize was won by Ross and Keith Smith, who made the journey in a Vickers Vimy.) Suburban railways were being constructed, with the first electric train running in Melbourne, from Flinders Street to Essendon.

  Things were looking up in rural Australia. A massive one-hundred-million-pound sale of Australian wool to Britain was negotiated by Prime Minister Billy Hughes, followed by a one-million-ton wheat deal, again to Britain, worth £12 million over three years, and these buoyed the fortunes of hard-pressed farmers and graziers. The government encouraged returned men, some of whom had taken agricultural courses in England and visited farms to learn rural skills, to take up small land grants as 'soldier settlers'. It was hoped they would become part of a resurgent farm sector, but the scheme was to prove disastrous in most cases, particularly for those with limited farming skills who had been given small, uneconomic blocks of mallee scrub with limited water supplies.

  The Australia to which Edward Lynch returned in July 1919 was very different from the country he had left nearly three years earlier. Jobs were hard to get. Many returned men, having been in the army virtually all their adult life, had no vocational training, no work experience and little to offer but their manual labour. Returned men took to the streets demanding jobs, and a number of riots and running brawls broke out as they clashed with police. In government offices, returned men demanded the jobs of those who had failed to volunteer for military service even though they were eligible. Given that one in ten employed Australians had state or federal government jobs, this was a potentially explosive situation.

  Like Nulla, Edward Lynch returned to the family home in the Sydney suburb of Coogee, where they were mourning his beloved father, who had died only eight weeks before. Lynch was discharged from the army in August 1919 and early the following year began attending Sydney Teachers College. Here he met Yvonne Peters, another student teacher, and they married in June 1922. At the time, he was on his first posting, in the one-teacher school at Chatsbury, near Goulburn in New South Wales. These were the days when isolated one-teacher schools were common and when children would walk long distances to school, ride horses or come from their farms in sulkies or carts.

  In 1923, the young couple moved to Kunama, halfway between Tumbarumba and Batlow on the northern edge of the Snowy Mountains. Two years after their marriage, Edward and Yvonne Lynch had their first child, whom they named Edward (Ned to his family). He was followed in August 1925 by Shirley, Richard (Dick) in February 1927, Gregory (Greg) in March 1931 and finally Moira in January 1938.

  From Kunama, the family moved to Goulburn and, soon after, the Yass River, where Edward Lynch taught at the local school and at nearby Elizabeth Fields, travelling between his teaching posts in a horse and sulky.

  Lynch's daughter Shirley remembers a frightening occasion when she and Ned were in the sulky with their father and he got out to close a gate. Something startled the horse and it bolted, racing off with the sulky and two small children. He took off after them and managed to stop the horse b
efore the sulky tipped over.

  Because of the travel required, Edward Lynch bought his first car, a Chevrolet, in 1929. In those days, you weren't required to have a licensed driver in the car with you when you learnt to drive. Shirley, who today lives in Coogee, remembers her father getting his driver's licence on her fourth birthday:

  The day we drove the 18 miles [29 kilometres] to Yass for Dad to apply for his licence, it was pouring with rain ... Mum, Ned, Dick and I were in the car with him. We had hand-operated windscreen wipers and it was freezing cold and as Dad wiped, the rain froze on the windscreen and every little while Dad would get out with a bundle of newspapers and wipe the ice away. When we arrived in Yass and he went to the police station, they asked him how he had come in. 'I drove in, of course,' was the answer and the reply was, 'Well, anyone who can drive through this weather doesn't require a driving test.'

  His daughter also remembers a more dramatic occasion involving the Chevrolet. In March 1931, while Yvonne was in Yass about to give birth to Greg, Edward Lynch stayed home to look after the children. Shirley takes up the story:

  Driving home in the late evening after heavy rain, we approached a creek crossing. A Merriman family lived nearby. Dad got out and walked into the water and gauged it safe to cross. He drove in only to find the culvert had been swept away and the car started to sink. He pulled out Ned and Dick and put them on the bank. By the time Dad got me out, the water was up to my chest. As the only girl, I always considered I should have been taken out first. The Merriman family took us in and dried us off by the fire and fed us. Dad and the Merriman fellows went out to rescue the car with a rope and a horse and Dad had to dive under the water several times as he secured the rope.

  It was sometime in the late 1920s that Edward Lynch first sat down to begin writing Somme Mud. His manuscript began with this simple dedication:

  This narrative is dedicated to the sons of the Diggers of the First AIF in the hope that they will strive to recapture and perpetuate the Digger spirit of the older AIF.

  The original draft of the book was written in pencil in 20 school exercise books, one chapter to a book, and it was from these tatty books that Lynch was later to type up the manuscript we have today. It was revealed by the family that these exercise books were stored in an outside shed in western New South Wales and, sadly, eaten by mice during a mice plague. Shirley was perhaps six or seven when he would sit her on a chair with her brothers and, with baby Greg on his knee, would read aloud the chapters as he finished writing them. It is not known how long he took to complete the book, but the original manuscript is 180,000 words, a sizeable novel and now a heavy tome in its fully hand-bound form. Shirley comments:

  One of my dearest recollections is sitting around the open fire whilst he read us his latest chapter. I was so proud of him and of all the wonderful things he accomplished.

  In 1930, the Lynch family moved to the small village of Jerrawa, between Yass and Goulburn. With the 1930s came the Depression, and for a young teacher on low pay with three young children life was very difficult. When Greg was born in 1931, teachers, like many in the public service, had their salaries reduced by one-third. As a lot of men did during these hard times, Edward Lynch shot rabbits, which Yvonne baked – stuffed and wrapped in bacon – to feed the family. Lynch also dressed in long-sleeved clothes and long gloves and put a net over his face to steal wild honey. Meat was sent from Gunning and collected from the station every Saturday by Ned. It was then put down one side of the well before being stored in a meat safe that hung in the shade of the verandah, ready for the evening meal. They had a cow and one of the chores for the boys was milking her twice daily; Yvonne made her own butter and clotted cream, something the children loved.

  A keen sportsman, Edward Lynch enjoyed cricket and tennis. In the summer he played A-grade cricket and the family would travel with their father to ovals around the district, cheering his team along. Crowds followed their local teams and it was a great outing for the children, contained as they were by very small rural villages. In winter, he and Yvonne played competitive tennis, again visiting other towns for matches, one time even venturing as far as Canberra to play a game. Upon arriving at a new school posting, the first thing Edward Lynch would do was organise a working bee to build a tennis court. He even chipped out a small tennis court at home for his children, whom he encouraged to play after dinner and during school holidays.

  Entertainment was very limited. The town was visited by the travelling picture show, which set up projectors and ran silent movies. Edward and Yvonne also encouraged the children to read, but due to the Depression they had few books. What the Lynch family did have was a radio – the only one in the town – and when the cricket was on the ABC, the locals would crowd into their kitchen and listen to the game. Shirley remembers:

  I used to be so excited when I heard the bat and ball connect, knowing the sound came from across the world. I have never really recovered from my disgust when, in my late teens, I discovered the sound was fabricated in the studio in Sydney.

  (It was made by the cricket commentator Alan McGilvray tapping the head of his pencil on the table to simulate the sound of the ball hitting the bat.)

  In 1937, just before Moira, the last baby, was born, the Lynch family moved to Numbaa, a small village south of the Shoalhaven River and east of Nowra, on the New South Wales south coast. Here Dick and Greg did some of their schooling and Edward Lynch taught in the single-teacher school. While in Numbaa, the Second World War began and, despite the fact that he still suffered from his war wounds, had pains in his foot and needed a metatarsal bar, Lynch joined the militia as an officer, no doubt passing on his own wartime experience to the young men who formed the unit.

  In the final chapter of Somme Mud, while they are on board the Beltana, Nulla and his mates debate why they enlisted for the First World War. For many, it was partly out of 'love of country and pride and race' and partly because they were 'too flamin' frightened to face the things they were saying about coves who didn't enlist'. Nulla recounts:

  Of course we vow we'll never enlist again, yet we know that if ever the boys are on the job again, many vows will be swept aside by the thunder of marching feet, the marching feet of old mates. Mateship transcends reason. That has been proved on the battlefield time after time. Mateship is born or renewed when the country calls and that is how it should be and how it ever must be. Mateship. [pp. 332–3]

  Lynch heard the call of his country and of mateship, re-joining the Australian army in September 1941. On his re-enlistment papers, under 'Marks' the following are listed: 'Bayonet wound throat. Gunshot wound right foot and hand'. He was promoted to captain and posted to the 14th Australian Infantry Training Battalion in 1942, so the family moved to Sydney. He became the Commanding Officer of the Jungle Training School at Lowanna, inland from Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, served for three years and two months in Australia and was discharged in October 1944. It was during this time that he typed up the manuscript of Somme Mud; double-spaced on foolscap paper, which was later photocopied and bound by his son Dick.

  In the foreword of the typewritten manuscript, Edward Lynch wrote the following:

  On many occasions we have been asked, 'How is it that you returned men never tell us what it was like at the war? What was it like?'

  ... Undoubtedly our people are justified in their demands to be told 'what it was like at war' and Somme Mud is just an attempt to answer the question from an infantryman's viewpoint.

  No two men's experiences were alike in particular, though in general we experienced much the same.

  Somme Mud is written around the war experiences of a young lad who was a wartime pal of mine ... 'Nulla' of the 45th Battalion and his section ...

  If Somme Mud should happen to convey a typical picture of an infantryman's life at the war I shall feel that I have at least done something towards telling 'what it was like at the war'.

  Even though Lynch expressly pointed to another man as the insp
iration for Nulla, his daughter Shirley says of her father:

  He was Nulla in the book and most of, if not all, the tales he told are about himself.

  Lynch's surviving family members can unfortunately shed no light on the origin of the nickname 'Nulla' or the true identities of Nulla's six mates who appear in the story.

  Though Edward Lynch tried to have the manuscript published during the 1930s, the pain of the war was then too recent for the general public and there would have been little interest from publishers. Though excerpts were published in the RSL magazine Reveille, to the end he remained disappointed about not having his book published. I understand from Lynch's family that his dying wish was for it to be published.

  After the war, Edward Lynch returned to teaching, finally retiring in the late 1960s. He lived with his wife until her death in 1978, after which he moved in with one of his daughters and her husband. Slowly his mind went as dementia took hold and he died of kidney failure on 12 September 1980. Today he lies in the Roman Catholic section in the Northern Suburbs Cemetery in Sydney.

  He is fondly remembered by his children as a kind and generous man, who was very supportive of their individual endeavours and a wonderful father. His focus was always on his family. He was a leader in his rural community and a well respected and loved teacher. Edward Lynch was a man typical of his generation and a proud Digger. And he was a great Australian.