by Daley, Paul
Alf Cohen, a bugler attached to C Company of the 29th Battalion and who apparently witnessed Percy’s injury, wrote to the Collingwood Football Club a week later. It is instructive that he referred to Percy as ‘Pat’:
Dear Sir,
I am enclosing Details of how Pat Rowe, Rowan, Collingwood’s crack follower got fatally wounded. I was with Pat + some more chaps in a bombing post, in one of the hottest corner’s of the ‘Somme’ firing line, it rains shells + bullets here, we had some very miraculous escape’s but fortunately no one was seriously hit till about half-hour before we got relieved when Pat got hit. It was about six pm on the evening of Monday, Dec 4th, Pat was stooping down doing up his equipment getting ready to leave the line, when a shrapnel shell burst on the parapet about three feet above our heads, Pat gripped his side + fell, turning to us he exclaimed I’m gone, goodbye lads, shake hands, he held out his hand, I gripped it, he then turned over + rolled in pain, I immediately sent for stretcher bearer’s + with the aid of another lad, undid Pat’s clothes + dressed his wound, which was a jagged one, about three inches long, in the small of the back near the left kidney. He complained of a dull pain in the stomach and said he felt himself running in the stomach, I expect he had internal hemmorage. The stretcher bearers took him to the dressing station, but I believe the Doctor held out no hope from the first look. Pat died the same night and is buried near ‘Trone’s Wood’ in a soldier’s battlefield cemetery. Pat was our Platoon Sergeant, + the Boy’s of [11] platoon felt his death very keenly, as he was an honest straight forward sort of good soldier, and had the fullest confidence of his men. He was calm and collected right through, and seemed to know as soon as he was hit that he was fatally wounded. I am writing you these details as I reckon it’s my duty to do so for … Pat’s relative’s and friends.
It was just before Christmas and Percy Junior had started crawling.
This time, when the officer knocked on the door of her parents’ home in Park Street, the news for Louie was the worst possible. Percy Rowe, she was told, was missing in action—believed dead.
She heard nothing definitive for another month. She lived in hope, even though it had been reported that Percy had died in France. And then, on 19 February 1917, the letter came. It was in a plain envelope and it was addressed to her.
Dear Madam,
Herewith please receive certificate of report of death of the late No.924, Sgt PE Rowe 29th Battalion.
She opened the certificate. It was dated 22 January.
THIS IS TO CERTIFY that, according to the records, No.924, Sergeant Percy Edward Rowe, 29th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force, is reported by cable message died at 38th Casualty Clearing Station on 5th December, 1916 of ‘Gun Shot Wound Abdomen’. This report has not yet been confirmed by mail.
On 17 July, Louie received a small package in the post. It contained Percy’s meagre belongings, including six coins, a couple of notebooks and some photographs. The pictures included the only one that survives of him and Louie, which was taken just after their wedding, and the one of he and Doc dressed in their best suits, taken before they joined up.
The package also contained her dead husband’s identity disc.
Zenith Trench, where Percy was hit, ran approximately through the foreground of this field in 1916. Mike Bowers
16
Two Men, One Grave
The bugler Alf Cohen’s decision to write to Percy’s football club rather than to his family was understandable. As a Carlton resident—and, in all likelihood, a Carlton supporter—before the war, Cohen would have been aware of his sergeant’s prowess on the field and his popularity in Melbourne’s football community. That he referred to him as ‘Pat Rowe’ also indicates that Percy’s notoriety as a pseudonymous footy player and boxer followed him well beyond the Victorian ovals and the canvas-floored rings of Melbourne and Tel el Kebir, and onto the battlefield.
Cohen’s letter also shows that he and the others in his platoon were very fond of Percy. There can be little doubt that he was well regarded as a leader of men in war, just as he served as an inspiration to his teammates—and a legion of Magpies fans—at Victoria Park. Cohen understood that many people would be moved by Percy Rowe’s death and clearly he had decided that the best way to assuage their distress was to provide the Magpies with the details of what had happened, as he saw it, so that the club might pass them on.
Cohen paints a picture of a dying man who was relaxed and resigned to his fate. Letters with this tone, written by fellow unit members or commanding officers to the families of the dead, were very common. They invariably described the death of the soldier concerned as peaceful and quick, in order to shield the man’s family and friends from the inordinate distress that would inevitably greet the truth—that death on the battlefield was often a lonely, tortuously long and extremely painful process. After all, having been so badly wounded, would Percy really have said, ‘I’m gone, goodbye lads, shake hands’? It seems unlikely.
The bugler’s letter also explicitly states that shrapnel from an exploding artillery shell was the cause of Percy’s injury. Given the intense shelling around those trenches towards the end of 1916, that is highly plausible. But it does not accord with the official explanation of Percy’s injury and his subsequent death.
The letter informing Louie of Percy’s death makes it plain that he died from a gunshot wound, not shrapnel. This is corroborated in Percy’s official file, which states that he died of a ‘G.S.W. abdomen’. The implications of a gunshot wound in the lower back are obvious—the bullet probably came from behind Percy, suggesting that, perhaps, he was accidentally shot by one of his own men. In battle, such accidents were common. But there is nothing in the 29th Battalion’s war diary to suggest that the Zenith Trench was under assault from enemy infantry on the night of 4 December, the only rationale for the discharging of weapons. It should, however, be remembered that snipers, both Allied and German, were everywhere along the lines. Percy could well have been the victim of such a sharpshooter.
Cohen went on to write that ‘Pat died the same night and is buried near “Trone’s Wood” in a soldier’s battlefield cemetery’. But, as attested to by the letter sent to Louie, Percy Rowe actually died the next day at a casualty clearing station near Heilly, a large village near the town of Corbie, situated well behind the British front line as it stood in December 1916. He was immediately buried at Heilly’s cemetery. Cohen either did not know this or he was simply trying to convey that Percy had died quickly, which was more than likely not the case.
After Percy had been wounded, his unit’s medical officer would have briefly assessed him before arranging for him to be carried to a front-line dressing station. There, Percy’s condition would have been classed as critical, possibly hopeless, by a battlefield doctor, the person whose responsibility it was to decide which soldiers should have drugs and surgery invested in them, and which ones could not be saved—such was his expertise and experience, a front-line doctor would not have mistaken a shrapnel wound for a gunshot injury. Percy would then have been given a shot of morphine, if it was available, to ease his distress and pain. His wound would have been compressed with cloth and a label specifying his injury would have been attached to an arm or leg. Percy would then have been transported, probably by train, to the small railway station at Heilly.
We will never know what really happened. But the discrepancies in the accounts of Percy’s death are certainly oddities, curiosities that are in keeping, perhaps, with other aspects of Percy’s life.
I drive into Heilly from Corbie through a lush valley. It feels odd to be moving through such steep, accentuated hills on the Somme, so much of which is marked by gentle contours. It is a beautiful part of the region, one that is, judging against its surroundings, seemingly prosperous. Perfectly kept, white two-storey cottages, their window sills and doors painted in vivid blues, greens and yellows, abut the road and eventually give way to s
ome of the more stately chateaux of the region. I make a turn, cross the Somme River and pass Heilly’s lonely little railway station.
The town’s graveyard, unlike so many of the Commonwealth cemeteries on the Somme, is not well visited. It is not on the routes taken by most of the tourists who flock to the Somme in the warmer months to trace the seminal battles that took place there. And that is because most of the 401 Australian, fourteen Canadian and 2328 British troops who are buried there died at the Heilly Clearing Station, not near the static front lines or the battlefields where they received their wounds.
Thousands of men were admitted to the Heilly Clearing Station during the first days of the Battle of the Somme, which began in July 1916, and thousands more arrived in the course of subsequent battles, such as the one at Mouquet Farm. The death toll at Heilly, which was known by some of its doctors and nurses as ‘the butcher shop’, was so great that, in order to save both time and space, soldiers were buried two and sometimes three to a grave. Because some of the headstones marked up to three casualties, the regimental badges of some of the dead were carved on a cloister wall on the cemetery’s northern border.
Today, the cemetery stands amid green crop fields, which are a balm to eyes that have become accustomed to the monotone shades of battleship skies and Somme mud, and is bordered by a low, militarily precise hedge. It sits below Bouzencourt Ridge, a long, caterpillar-like rise that stretches towards Corbie. One point on this ridge, which is known as ‘the brickworks’, won notoriety as the place where Manfred von Richthofen, the ‘Red Baron’, crashed after Australian gunners shot him down in April 1918.
The visitors’ book in the portico shows that only seven people have come through here in the past six or so weeks. I sign it, writing, ‘Visiting Percy Edward Rowe. A great Collingwood player remembered’. And then I walk over to his grave, through sleety rain that is coming in sideways. I squat before the plot and I wonder if Percy knew the man he was buried with, 23-year-old Private PT Plunkett, also of the 29th Battalion, who died on the same day.
My family and I had buried my elderly mother just a few months previously in a plot at Melbourne General Cemetery, one that she shares with her own mother, who had died almost five decades earlier. My sister, Cathie, and I had consoled ourselves at the time with the thought that she would have liked the idea of being buried with Nanna.
The author at Percy Rowe’s grave on the Somme. Mike Bowers
But it strikes me now that such intimacy in death has been forced upon Rowe and Plunkett and all of the other poor souls in this cemetery, who came here to fight because they were told to or because they thought it was the right thing to do, but who never understood the real risk they had taken until it was too late.
I say a silent prayer of sorts in my not-too-sure, lapsed-Catholic way. This is a long way from Victoria Park, I think—a bloody long way.
Plunkett’s next of kin has had an inscription carved into the headstone. It reads, ‘He fought & died for us’. But when the authorities wrote to Louie in 1926 to inform her of the precise plot at Heilly where her husband lay, she apparently chose not to mark Percy’s memory with an epitaph. However, while she had embarked on another life by that stage, there was little chance that she would forget him. By then, her beautiful, strong and spirited boy was ten years old and, like his father, an excellent footballer. The past would always be with her.
All of this adds to the mystery of a man who so readily refashioned his identity throughout his short, spectacular life that those around him called him by two names—Percy Rowe and Paddy Rowan, or a combination of both. Neither his wife nor his best mate knew exactly where one man segued into the other, or how Paddy/Percy saw the difference. It is why, standing on the frozen ground before his grave in France, I think aloud: ‘Who are you, mate?’
17
Send Him My Love
He stopped and leaned forward, supporting himself on the greasy handle of the shovel, fighting to catch breath. He tried wiping the sweat from his eyes and freezing brow. But his khaki woollen glove, crusty with frost, only deposited tiny needles of ice into his already stinging eyes and scoured the tender skin about his face.
He looked down to where his feet should have been but they were hidden from his eyes by the mud that came up to his knees—mud that sucked down on his feet so hard that every step sapped him of energy. He knew of men who’d just disappeared completely when they stopped like this, totally spent, to rest. All the soldiers knew that in some places there was no bottom, that you could just sink down and down and down through the raven earth, and that you’d stay there until a flood or a farmer’s plough dragged your bones and the soles of your boots to the surface in fifty or 100 years’ time.
Mud. Mud full of unexploded bombs and sharp ends of wire that cut through your khakis. Mud full of blood and shit and bits of people, with contented rats the size of kittens brazenly shimmying across its slick, oily skin. Filthy fucking mud everywhere.
Doc knew that his feet were down there. But he hadn’t felt them properly for days. You could lose your feet when you stopped feeling them like this. The surgeons would just cut them off to save you. He’d decided a while ago that he’d prefer to die rather than lose his feet. He was nothing without them. And so, with every step, he’d tried to move his toes to circulate the blood a little. Whenever he could, he’d dried and warmed them, squeezed and massaged them. Then he’d bite back tears while blood seeped into the frozen flesh and hot currents of pain shot up his calves and flared in his swollen knees.
But now, he could feel absolutely nothing below his knees; he couldn’t even wriggle his toes. He had no idea how it was that he was still standing. Except that the body, he knew, could go on and on despite the most horrible injuries. He had seen blokes with their limbs or their eyes or half of their skulls missing, even with their innards exposed, marching or sitting in the dugouts, drinking tea and chatting.
Still, he’d be fucked if he’d let a doctor cut his feet off just because he couldn’t feel them anymore. ‘Kill me first,’ he thought.
Part of the secondary trench in which he was stuck had collapsed just up ahead. They called it the Switch Trench and it had taken a direct hit from a shell the day before. It was a fair way from the front line and a long way from the German guns, but every night the enemy would target it, knowing they’d probably kill a few, maim a few and terrify hundreds. He and his men hadn’t actually seen a German for weeks. But the shells had continued to rain down, sometimes dozens in a minute, pulverising the poor bastards who sat here night after night, clutching their useless Lee-Enfields while searing shrapnel flew all around them. That was the routine now: the infantry would get shelled to pieces and he and the boys would go in and clean out the trenches, fix the cave-ins, reinforce the walls and rig up new firing steps.
Doc shook loose a smoke and fumbled it into his mouth with frozen-sausage fingers. The boy behind him struck a match and Doc lit up, sucked deeply. None of the men following him cared that he had just stopped without explanation. Nobody was in a hurry to finish this job because when you finished doing something, it just meant that you had to do something else, and the next job might leave you even more exposed. It might take you out into no-man’s-land to lay more wire or, just as bad, to fix the duckboards in one of the valleys where the snipers could get you.
He’d lost three men and a couple of horses in the camp yesterday afternoon after direct hits from the big Hun guns on the other side of Gueudecourt. The boys and the animals had been there one minute. The next minute, Hicks was gone, blown off the earth, leaving nothing but a few bits of leather and shards of bone, while Smithwick and the horses had become piles of steaming, indistinguishable muck. That’s how it happened. Everyone would prefer to go while charging the lines, screaming as they ran into the guns with a rifle and bayonet and perhaps an outside chance that they could enter the enemy trench and stick it to a German before dying.
&nbs
p; That’s why nobody cared that Doc had just stopped. If the moment was safe then you did everything that you possibly could to stay in it.
Doc wondered about Perc when the guns were going nonstop like that. When they’d caught up a few days earlier at Trone’s Wood, Percy had just come off three days and nights on the line. They’d shared a brew and sat around the farrier’s fire. Doc knew all the unit farriers. One or two had worked in the transportation business back in Melbourne, delivering boots or kegs to the pubs with their drays.
Percy was exhausted and subdued. Doc thought it odd because it wasn’t like him, the world’s bloody greatest optimist, to be so flat. Percy could always find the bright side, and the funny side, of any situation. He talked about the long nights out on the front line with his platoon and how some of the younger ones, the inexperienced reinforcements, just froze up and whimpered for their mothers when the guns began. They couldn’t handle the thought that what happened next was completely random and that there was nothing, really, that they could do, save from curling up in the dugouts.
Doc writes home from the frontline in France. Seddon family collection
‘Doc,’ he said, ‘they beg me, “Don’t make me go out there—we don’t have to go over the top, do we?” “No-one’s bloody going over the top,” I tell ’em. But I tell you, it’s just cruel having them out there night after night, just so the Germans can have some target practice.’