Collingwood

by Daley, Paul

  By now, word was strong among the men of the 29th Battalion that they would be going to France. But for the time being they remained at Tel el Kebir, ostensibly to continue protecting the Suez Canal, but in reality doing little more than training drills in readiness for deployment to the Western Front. A highlight of sorts occurred during that hot spring with a visit to the camp by the Prince of Wales, Edward of York. If there was some interest in the prince, however, it paled in comparison to the hundreds of men who turned out to watch the dozens of boxing matches scheduled between and within the divisions and various battalions.

  On 5 April 1916, Louie Rowe, as she now was, answered the front door at her parents’ house. Tired and lonely, just weeks away from having her first child and seriously anxious about her husband, she was sickened when the knock on the door turned out to be from a uniformed Australian officer holding a telegram. She could only have thought the worst.

  Louie opened the telegram. Stamped across the top were the words:

  AUSTRALIAN IMPERIAL FORCE

  Base Records Office

  She read on.

  Dear Madam,

  I regret to advise you that No.924 L/Sgt P.E. Rowe 29th Battalion, has been reported admitted 3rd Australian General Hospital, 26/3/16, Concussion mild, and in the event of further information coming to hand, you will be promptly notified.

  Louie would have been forgiven had she crumpled the telegram in her hand, clutched it to her wildly fibrillating heart and laughed. Or cried.

  He was safe.

  And she knew precisely what the report of concussion meant. He was boxing again. Percy Rowe—or was it Paddy Rowan?—the pugilist was at it again, with a vengeance.

  After the war, Lieutenant Alexander Ellis, a winner of the Military Cross, wrote a history of the Australian 5th Division. He vividly recalled the boxing matches at Tel el Kebir, and wrote about an especially impressive bout—an inter-battalion title fight, as it were—involving a ‘Sergeant Paddy Rowan’ and Corporal Arthur Cavanagh, both of the 29th Battalion: ‘It went the full twenty [rounds] and both contestants made the fight memorable, equally by their pluck and by their chivalry … the memory of [the] fight will endure as long as the lives of those who witnessed it.’

  Percy—or rather, Paddy—won the fight on points. Along the road to his title, Percy had had to meet a range of talented amateurs and semiprofessionals in the ring. And while he was clearly badly battered in the gruelling twenty-round decider with Cavanagh that ended in his admission to hospital with concussion, others had also suffered badly from his gloves. Among them was Private Percy Herron who, besides being a boxer, was a talented member of the Fitzroy Football Club. He had played forty-six games between 1911 and 1915, and had often come up against Percy Rowe on the field. Of his boxing match in Egypt against Paddy Rowan in 1916, he would write home: ‘At the present time I am feeling a bit sore about the “I suppose” [nose]. I was boxing with Paddy Rowan for the championship of the battalion.’

  Percy Rowe, enigmatic, combative and clearly courageous, was popular among the men of the 29th Battalion and its commanding officers. It is illustrative of the force of his personality and charm, perhaps, that despite the rigours of military protocol he was able to sustain the twin identities that, by 1916, he had been switching between for six or seven years. He was Percy Rowe. And he was Paddy Rowan.

  He recovered from his bouts of concussion—he was twice hospitalised in Egypt after fights—in time to board the troop ship Tunisian at Alexandria for the voyage to Marseilles on 15 June. When the battalion arrived in France on 23 June, it was to a hero’s welcome. The soldiers were perceived by the French as saviours who would fend off the German push. According to Black and Gold: ‘Most members of the battalion had not travelled to Europe before, and the journey revealed the rich agricultural pastures of France, and also exposed the unit to the genuine hospitality of the local citizens.’

  It was at about this time that Percy would have received the letter he had been waiting on from Australia. He had a son.

  Percy Rowe Junior was born on 1 May 1916. He was a big, healthy boy, born with a great crop of hair and a distinguishing birthmark on his forehead. As a child he would have beautiful tresses of blond curls. As a man he would be dark and handsome and he would play for Collingwood—just like his father, Percy Rowe or Paddy Rowan, whom he would never meet but would spend a lifetime in search of.

  14

  An Absence of Glory

  Percy’s battalion was not, as its members might have anticipated, headed for the Somme, where a great battle for pre-eminence between the British and the Germans had been underway since the beginning of July 1916. Instead, over the fortnight following the arrival of the 29th in France, it steadily made its way towards the northern stretch of the Western Front in French and Belgian Flanders. After initially travelling by train from Marseilles to Morbecque, the men walked the last thirty or so miles to the front at Bois Grenier, loaded down with 75-pound packs of supplies, ammunition, blankets and ground sheets, as well as rifles and bayonets, and wearing hot and heavy metal helmets.

  After the months spent in the blinding heat of Egypt’s deserts and the uneventful voyage to Marseilles, the men found the softer light and the summertime beauty of the Belgian and French countrysides to be irresistible. ‘The crops were just ripening, the trees were green and the lovely long grass beautiful. You cannot imagine how absolutely lovely the country appears after nothing but sand,’ observed the battalion’s Lieutenant Ken Mortimer. But the serene bucolic atmosphere, the larksong of the countryside, was at odds with the unnerving booms of German artillery that got louder as the front line drew closer.

  At about midnight on 10 July, the men of the 29th, excited and full of anticipation after finally reaching the war, moved into a 1000-yard stretch of front-line trench. Lieutenant Alexander Ellis evocatively described the scene that Percy would have witnessed as he and his fellow novices entered it:

  From the line of lights [flares] a sound of rifle firing is heard and a spent bullet passes overhead with a pleasant, gentle sigh. Suddenly our feet strike a wooden flooring of some kind and we are swallowed up in darkness. We become aware, too, of a novel smell, a strong yet indefinable aroma which we find out later to be characteristic, more or less, of all trenches in all parts of the Western Front. It is a mixture of damp earth, high explosive, and perhaps of other things.

  The sounds of desultory rifle and machinegun fire are now loud and penetrating, and a burst of machinegun bullets sputters unpleasantly near us … This is the long-awaited moment. Everybody is anxious to get on the fire-step and have his first peep over No Man’s Land. A succession of enemy machinegun bullets raps rhythmically along the top of our parapet.

  Four nights later, one man having been killed and another thirteen wounded, the men withdrew from what the more seasoned units called the ‘Nursery Trench’—a place where the new troops were initiated because, while constantly strafed with machine-gun fire, it was rarely subject to direct enemy attack. The soldiers went to their billets in the nearby village of Fleurbaix. Then they moved again, this time heading towards Lavantie, close to the small, German-held village of Fromelles.

  The iconic sculpture Cobbers by Australian artist Peter Corlett at Fromelles depicts the diggers who risked their lives to rescue wounded mates from No Man’s Land in 1916. Mike Bowers

  As the men bathed, ate hot meals and slept, they would have heard rumours that they were about to be involved in a major frontal attack on the German front line. But they could not possibly have foreseen that so many of them would die so needlessly on a day that remains the very worst, the most tragic in Australian military history.

  The attack on Fromelles was essentially a diversionary tactic to stop the Germans from sending reinforcements south in order to help counter the great British offensive on the Somme that had begun on 1 July. The Australian 5th Division, which included the 8th Bri
gade and its 29th Battalion, was at the time attached to Britain’s XI Corps, under the command of General Sir Richard Haking. Intent on minimising casualties while creating the intended diversion, Haking proposed an assault on a distant German position: Aubers Ridge. But the British high command wanted a major artillery bombardment followed by a direct attack on the German front line and its concrete stronghold, known as ‘Sugarloaf’, and then on the secondary German defences north of Fromelles.

  The attack had originally been planned for 16 July, but heavy rain saw it postponed for three days. While this gave the tired Australians time to rest, it also gave the Germans plenty of opportunity to prepare for what was clearly going to be a frontal assault on their position. When the Allied troop movements coincided with a massive barrage of British artillery throughout the relatively clear day of 19 July, the Germans knew the attack was at hand. They inflicted heavy early casualties on the Australians, who were attacking the Delangre Farm area roughly to the south of the German defences. It was slow going over the swampy farmland, which held the decaying bodies of dozens of British troops who had fallen while attacking Fromelles the previous year. But while the British units attacking the German line further to the north failed, the Australians managed to capture some of the trenches around the farm. Percy Rowe’s C Company spent a long night dodging bullets and shrapnel while carrying machine-gun ammunition and grenades to the precarious front line.

  The Germans then counterattacked, forcing those who had been assigned to resupply their front-line comrades to join in what was, by all accounts, a desperate hand-to-hand fight. This prosaic description appears in Black and Gold:

  Sometime after 2am on 20th July, the situation deteriorated still further. The remnants of the 32nd Battalion and part of the 29th Battalion were holding the line in front of the farm, when the trenches were attacked by some Germans who had worked their way along the water-filled ditches, while others attacked from the west.

  The bulk of the Australians withdrew while the men of D and C companies remained at the front line to put down covering fire. Percy was wounded at Fromelles, though how seriously it is impossible to tell. His military record indicates only that he was one of about 3100 Australians who were hit by German machine-gunners firing from the heights of Sugarloaf, or by artillery shrapnel, while they were bogged down in the swampy no-man’s-land—in places almost a third of a mile wide—that separated the Allied and enemy trenches.

  The operation was, in the words of the esteemed Brigadier General Pompey Elliott, commander of the Australian 15th Brigade, ‘a tactical abortion’. Lieutenant Ellis observed of the disaster at Fromelles that his 8th Brigade ‘had been set a task which, as it turned out, was beyond the power of man to accomplish, and like the 15th Brigade, it achieved in its failure a renown that will never die, a glory that cannot pass away. It tried and it died.’

  Glory? Perhaps not for the 1900 Australians who died at Fromelles, blown apart by shrapnel as they were coaxed by their commanding officers to go over the tops of their trenches and trudge towards the Germans across the swamp, or who drowned in the mud after the enemy’s machine-guns mowed them down like rows of corn at harvest.

  Private Jim Cleworth of the 29th Battalion said, ‘The novelty of being a soldier wore off in about five seconds; from that point on it was a question of survival. Fromelles was confusion at best. It was like a bloody butcher’s shop, it was terrible.’

  One cold winter morning in Fromelles, while I sit in a little café festooned with boxing kangaroos and Australian flags, having just walked the sodden fields where the horror unfolded, I find myself desperately reaching for some perspective on what happened. One thousand nine hundred Australians dead in a single night, I think. At Gallipoli, 8141 dead over eight months. How do you make sense of this?

  You don’t. Because you can’t.

  The Germans buried the men who fell behind their lines in mass graves, such as the one uncovered at the bottom of the track around the corner from the café. I walk down the track, the earth squelching under my boots, to a piece of recently ploughed earth the size of a couple of tennis courts, which forms a dark shadow in a patch of fine grass. As the wind whispers through the moist, dark trees of the surrounding woods, I stand right where some 250 bodies, most of them Australians, have recently been dug from the mud and reinterred at the new Fromelles Commonwealth War Cemetery—the first such place to be dedicated in half a century. While many of the men have been identified as Australian through buttons or badges, or their distinctive and hard-wearing webbing, some of which came from the factories of Collingwood, the names of more than half have not yet been discovered.

  The cemetery is full of men who served beside Percy Rowe in the 29th Battalion, like 41-year-old Private Bill Farlow, whose gravestone bears the haunting words of the British soldier-poet Wilfred Owen: ‘Red Lips Are Not So Red As Stained Stones Kissed by the English Dead’. And Private EF Wilkin, whose headstone simply reads: ‘Always Remembered’.

  That many nameless men here have been identified as Australian and reinterred, as such, is a positive gesture. But nationality is just a fragment of their story; almost a century after they died, war still keeps their identities.

  I take the short trip over to the Commonwealth cemetery at VC Corner, so named not because of any individual act of valour but because it seems to evoke the courage of all who fought here. The stark cemetery stands in the middle of the wartime no-man’s-land where so many Australians died. It’s an unusual and very confronting burial ground because there are no individual headstones. It does, however, have two huge stone crosses that have been set square with the earth. Beneath the crosses are the bodies of about 400 Australians that were retrieved but could not be identified. Close by is a wall where 1299 Australian names have been carved into the masonry. It lists the names of those who died or otherwise went missing at Fromelles in that 24-hour period in July 1916, but whose bodies have never been found or, if they have, never been identified.

  An honour board at VC Corner at Fromelles records the names of members of the 29th Battalion who went missing in the battle. Some were recovered in a mass grave behind the old German frontline. Mike Bowers

  On the side of the road stands another monument, an evocative bronze statue fashioned by the Melbourne sculptor Peter Corlett. Cobbers evokes the Battle of Fromelles by depicting an act that has become a metaphor for Australian courage under fire—a digger with a wounded mate over his shoulder, straining away from the front line. The sculpture transports me to another place. This happened here. Men of the decimated Australian battalions spent days looking for, rescuing and all too often burying their fallen mates. An informal truce had been struck with the Germans; they went and got their wounded and the Australians retrieved theirs, consistent with Corlett’s depiction.

  I reflect upon the essence of the Fromelles tragedy and, for that matter, of the whole Western Front. The stealing of identity, the enforced anonymity of death, is war’s greatest sadness.

  Although he was among the many wounded, Percy Rowe was one of the more fortunate at Fromelles, which served as a baptism of fire for the newly raised Australian battalions. Sometime in the days after the big battle, before the 29th Battalion left the Allied front-line trenches on 30 July, Percy was promoted to temporary sergeant. This was more than likely a reflection of the enormous casualties that had occurred among the officers. Then, in August 1916, as the early chill of autumn gave promise of the brutal and bitter winter to follow, Percy’s promotion was made permanent.

  As 2nd Lieutenant Malcolm Stirling of the 29th wrote: ‘Promotion is partly the result of ability and application, and partly good luck, being on the spot when others go under and not going under yourself. Majors and captains are springing up like mushrooms.’

  How frequently the survivors of events such as the Battle of Fromelles spoke of their luck on the battlefield. But in civilian life, Percy Rowe had made his own opportuni
ties. Given its random and somewhat superstitious nature, ‘luck’ was not a virtue he’d have been likely to invest too much faith in.

  The conspiracy of chance and coincidence might have been another matter. As a champion Collingwood follower and as a boxer, Percy would have understood better than most the perfection that could be found in the alignment of motion and time—and, conversely, the disaster that could befall you when such synchronicity better suited your opponent.

  15

  A Death in the Woods

  On 24 November 1915, two weeks after Percy had been deployed, Doc shipped out with his unit, the 5th Field Company Engineers, aboard the troop ship Ceramic. Given his lifelong friendship with Louie, it is likely that Doc spent some time with her before he left. They might have reflected on the way things had turned out between them. And from what we know of Doc, it would have been in his nature to offer to pass on a message from Louie to her husband, in the event that the old mates happened upon each other in the Middle East or crossed paths elsewhere.

  It was an uneventful three-week voyage to Egypt, where Doc’s unit disembarked in Port Said. For the next two months, the men camped and worked around the British defences on the Suez Canal, including at Kantara where the Light Horse regiments were training to do battle with the Turks in the Sinai and eventually the Negev. Throughout January and February 1916 Doc worked in Moascar, Alexandria and Serapeum. It is possible that sections of his unit and men from Percy’s 29th Battalion would have met at some point during those eight weeks, particularly as the various Australian specialist groups were working in a reasonably concentrated area around the canal. Even if they had not, Doc still would’ve had every opportunity to seek Percy out and perhaps arrange for them to spend weekend leave together in the exotic playground of Cairo.