by Daley, Paul
Doc went to war aboard the SS Ceramic. Seddon family collection
On 6 March, not long before the men of the 5th Field Company Engineers were due to sail for Marseilles, from where they would quickly travel to the front line in Flanders, Doc transferred to the 12th Field Company Engineers. This would delay his deployment to the Allied front line in the European theatre of the war for three months. Fortuitously or by design, it would also mean he would be camped at the giant tent city at Tel el Kebir—the place where his old mate Percy Rowe was staying and once again boxing as Paddy Rowan.
If Doc had felt the need for some distance from Percy after the tumultuous and emotional events that surrounded the 1915 Grand Final, not least Louie’s pregnancy and her sudden marriage to his best mate, then he had gained it by transferring out of the 29th Battalion. Surely he would now have been keen to witness his mate’s efforts in the battalion title fight, and there may even have been an opportunity for the mates to celebrate the birth of Rowe Junior after Percy recovered from his concussion.
Doc arrived in Marseilles about a fortnight ahead of Percy, on 10 June, and went directly to Bailleul, the main British base on the front line in Flanders. From there he went to nearby La Clyte, where he helped to build observation posts for British artillery. Then, towards the end of July, at about the same time that Percy was engaged in the Battle of Fromelles, Doc found himself billeted in Albert, a town that, before the war, had been regarded as one of the most beautiful on the Somme River. Now, however, the town was under constant German artillery fire.
Many buildings had fallen in Albert, but the grand basilica at the centre of the town was still standing—though only just. A breathtaking golden statue of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus in her outstretched arms leaned precariously out from its roof. To the British, she was ‘the leaning virgin’ or ‘the golden virgin’. The less reverent antipodeans, however, thought she looked like a woman who was about to dive into a swimming pool. So she naturally became ‘Fanny Durack’, in honour of the Australian swimmer who had won a gold medal, against the odds, at the 1912 Olympic Games. At one point French engineers straightened Fanny, but their work was substandard and she soon began to lean over again. According to local superstition, when Fanny finally fell down, the war would end. The prediction was almost spot on—Fanny plummeted to the ground in 1918, courtesy of a direct hit by British artillery, at a time when the Germans had briefly gained control of Albert.
Doc spent much of August in Flanders before returning to the Somme to join the fight for Mouquet Farm outside Pozières, a battle that proved no less catastrophic for the Australian forces than the tragedy of Fromelles.
I am standing beside a 1-metre-deep, newly excavated drainage ditch outside Mouquet Farm. While the mud sucks at my boots and a bitter wind blows, Dominique Zanardi passes me some bones that I, in turn, place in a hessian sack. Zanardi then uncovers the soldier’s boots, still holding the bones of his feet, and places them beside the ditch.
While carrying out public works excavations here, a bulldozer has uncovered a body. It is at once extraordinarily unnerving, very moving and a great privilege to help retrieve the bones of the long-dead soldier who has lain beneath the surface of the Somme for the best part of a century.
Our soldier is an Australian, possibly an officer. But as far as his name goes, like the many thousands of others who lost their lives in the terrible fighting on the Somme during World War I, the battlefield has claimed his identity. Then again, perhaps one day soon our soldier will have his name returned and his relatives will be able to formally pay their respects; no longer will they have to wonder what happened to him. In the meantime, he will at least be buried in a Commonwealth war cemetery as an Australian.
I had recently completed a week-long journey during which I had traced, as accurately as was possible given the lapse of a century, some of the places where both Doc and Percy had fought and stayed. One of my stops had been Mouquet Farm. Dominique, a French World War I battlefield guide and historian, had taken me out to the diggings there in the dead of a freezing, wet, mid-winter’s night. We had found all manner of weapons in what is known around those parts as an ‘iron harvest’—unexploded German and British shells; mortar heads; hundreds and hundreds of rounds of live machine-gun and .303 casings; the remains of rifles, gas masks, grenades and their launchers. As I’d struggled for a few hours through the mud and the slush, I imagined what it might have been like out there during that horrific European winter of 1916.
After visiting Mouquet Farm, I had continued on to Belgium and was readying myself to return to London, and then Australia, when I received Dominique’s phone call. The following morning I had returned to the Somme where, under leaden skies and in view of the farm that had once been a British military objective, I helped Dominique recover a body from the mud.
Now, I carry more of the man’s bones to the side of the trench and place them in a bag, along with what remains of his clothing, his intact leather webbing and the leather soles of his boots. Whoever he was, our soldier had been ready for action. He carried a Webley service revolver, a Lee-Enfield rifle, 150 rounds of ammunition, eight Mills bombs (British hand grenades) and a bayonet. The man was kitted-out for battle in much the same way that Doc would have been when he arrived at the front line here, and just as Percy would have been equipped at Fromelles.
I carry the man’s bones to the side of the trench. Mike Bowers
During six weeks of intense fighting around Pozières and Mouquet Farm, when the air was thick with snipers’ lead and artillery shells fired by the British and the Germans, there were 23 000 Australian casualties. This figure includes the 6800 men who were killed outright by the intensive shelling or the machine-gun fire, or who sank into the stinking black bog of shell holes, body parts and mud, or who later died of wounds in one of the casualty clearing stations, the military medical centres that carried out the gruesome business of sorting the savable men from the lost.
Like anyone who had gone to the front line there, Doc had been lucky to escape unharmed. His unit diary for 2 September, one of the most heated days of fighting around the farm, read: ‘Surveyed the trenches between Pozières and Mouquet Farm … Harking wounded and evacuated to clearing hospital. Sgt Pentland shell shock, but remained on duty.’
As the chilly western European autumn of October 1916 hinted that the coldest and wettest winter for nearly twenty years was about to envelop the Somme and Flanders, Australians voted against conscription in the first of two plebiscites. Doubtless the news of the tragedies at Fromelles and Mouquet Farm helped influence the voters’ decision, coinciding as they did with the increasingly forceful arguments of men like Daniel Mannix that Australia had already done enough in the war.
Percy’s battalion had by now moved into the Somme area of the Western Front, where it would stay for the rest of the year, the men moving between their camps and billets behind the lines, and the front-line trenches around Flers and Longueval. The front-line work was dangerous and desperately uncomfortable, due to the poor state of the trenches, the foul weather and the incessant shelling from the German artillery on the rise behind Longueval. While there is a pervasive idea that the fighting on the Somme was dominated by bayonet charges, in fact, about 70 per cent of casualties were the result of artillery fire—most of the men who died on the Somme never saw their killers.
According to Black and Gold, when the 29th took over the front line near Flers from the British late on a very wet night at the end of October, the men, though battle-hardened and tough, were nonetheless appalled by what they found:
The move to the front line took the forward companies over five hours as they struggled knee-deep in mud along Fish Alley, the main communication trench. The trenches were in poor condition and from comments made by the departing English troops it was clear that the British were glad to leave Flers. When dawn broke … the Victorians could see why the British troops w
ere eager to depart, for in front of them lay the bodies of hundreds of German and British dead.
Percy spent the next month rotating in and out of the front line. The men would rest and clean themselves up in camps and billets in the villages. Vats that had been used to brew beer and ferment other liquor in peacetime were transformed into giant communal baths. The men would hand over their uniforms for delousing but as soon as they put them back on, the resilient lice eggs, warmed by the men’s bodies, would begin to hatch again. The men could also get hot meals, and they could have a drink in the estaminets or bars that were still functioning. And, if they desired, they could find comfort with the prostitutes who had made their way to the front from regional towns and from Paris.
Joshua Levin’s book about the Somme, Forgotten Voices, quotes a British soldier’s description of the women who worked on the front-line brothels:
We were drinking vin blanc in the estaminet, and it was absolutely crowded. There were five women in there, and it was five francs to go up the stairs and into the bedroom with them. One night, the padre walked in. The stairs leading up to the bedroom were full; there was a man on every step, waiting his turn to go in with a woman. I was sat at a table with my friend Tom, when the padre came in. He dressed us all down. ‘Have none of you any mothers? Have none of you any sisters?’ I didn’t fancy the prostitutes at all. They were so common. Tom said, ‘Are you going up there?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘not with them things!’ They were all sorts of ages. Fellows could probably tell you what it was like going in; the first thing she does is grab your five franc note. Put it there! And then she unfastens your flies, and has a feel, and squeezes it, to feel if anything’s wrong with you. And when she’s finished, she has the kettle boiling with some herbs in it, to give you a bit of a swill. For safety’s sake. There was an old Frenchman upstairs, bossing the place, and he was shoving the men into the rooms, when they were empty, and shoving the men away, who’d been in. I didn’t go for it—not with that lot. But most of the troops did.
Throughout much of November, Percy and Doc were, as chance would have it, in the same part of the Somme. They could have met if they had chosen to, and there is a strong likelihood that they would have stumbled across each other anyway. Given the depth of Doc’s distress when he later learned of Percy’s death, if there had indeed been distance in their relationship in late 1915, any rift had healed by the time they were both on the Somme.
The 29th Battalion had sixteen of its men killed and another sixty-two wounded that November. But a more telling figure was that 211 men from the 900-strong unit wound up in hospital with a range of ailments due to the appalling conditions, one of which is mentioned in Black and Gold:
Quite a few men had toes and even feet amputated due to the dreaded ‘trench foot’. Initially the men had been issued with whale oil with which to massage their feet, but this soon proved to be an inadequate treatment. The only preventative measure that satisfactorily reduced the incidence of ‘trench foot’ was the issue of gumboots to the troops.
The Somme, near Longueval, is a malevolent, muddy and evocative place in winter. Mike Bowers
Trench foot was a severe infection of the feet caused by sustained exposure to the sodden trenches. The cold and the wetness would inhibit blood circulation and cause the soldiers’ feet to go numb. The skin would effectively rot; in the worst cases, gangrene would set in. Unfortunately, the distribution of gumboots brought its own problems. The men found that the boots quickly became mired in the thick, sticky mud, resulting in dangerous immobility. The only measure that could effectively combat trench foot was dry socks and shoes. In the absence of these essentials, a great many troops had their feet amputated.
In his acclaimed book To the Last Ridge, Sergeant Walter Downing of the 57th Battalion wrote about the difficulty of moving around behind the lines as the winter of 1916 closed in:
We entered a waterlogged sap where one or two duckboards were uselessly floating. Then there were no more duckboards but mire, to the thighs at best, to the middle at worst. There men were caught as in a vice. There were wires in which one’s equipment caught fast. They wound about the sights of one’s rifle, pulling its strap from one’s shoulder, so that it fell in the ooze which covered the gripping clay, as one battled with one’s legs.
There were occasional bodies underneath, possibly of some lonely nightfarer who had been wounded and had struggled till he sank or, unconscious, was suffocated without a struggle, the manner of his end a secret of the bog. The effort of lifting one’s rear leg clear then pushing it forward, drove the other into deeper more tenacious clay … All the time shells and rain fell from the leaden pitiless skies. There was no avoiding the one or the other … What few dugouts there were were full of water. We were buried to the waist in clay and slush, which increased as the drizzle came steadily down. The dead lay everywhere. The deeper one dug, the more bodies one exhumed. Hands and faces protruding from the slimy toppling walls of trenches.
Today, Trone’s Wood is just as it was before World War I, a thick copse of beech, ash and maple trees. The ground is soft and wet underfoot and it exudes a thick, unpleasant odour—a hybrid of humus and some chemical, sulphur perhaps, that pervades the nostrils of those who walk through it. In the July 1916 British offensive that eventually led to the capture of Longueval, thousands of men died in and around Trone’s Wood, Bernafay Wood and Delville Wood—‘Devil’s Wood’ to the troops. Many of these men were buried nearby in a series of Commonwealth war cemeteries, including Tom Wright, who played two seasons for Collingwood in 1906 and 1907. But more still lie where they fell.
The woods around Longueval are the source of some superstition due to the vast numbers of unfound dead who lie there. All about are collapsed dugouts, old trench systems and shell craters. A small wooden cross, falling over in the mud, marks the spot where the body of H Dickens of Kent, England was recently found. Few walk through these woods anymore, excepting the occasional hunter in pursuit of deer. Some dogs, perhaps instinctively attuned to the wood’s enduring sense of menace, refuse to enter, and local walkers who know the history of the place will more often than not divert around the edge of the trees rather than go through them.
With its thick canopy of twisted black branches, Trone’s Wood is an especially dark and foreboding place in winter. The ivy fluttering against the tree trunks in the crisp breeze creates a symphony, at once hypnotic and deeply unsettling, of water running through thousands of pebbles. The elemental ambience of the forest, as much as its dark history, renders it a disturbing place to visit.
Trone’s Wood, just a stone’s throw from the village of Hardecourt aux Boix, which in 1916 was flattened by shellfire, is where Percy Rowe spent the last few days of his life. By chance, Doc was camped at Bernafay Wood, perhaps half a mile away across a flat, wide piece of marshy farmland where potatoes are grown today—he was there between stints righting cave-ins in the front-line trenches around Flers and Longueval, and helping to make the roads passable.
Perhaps they had already caught up at one of the local estaminets, as so many mates who were assigned to different units had. Regardless, it was probably around now, when both men had cheated death often enough to realise that it could come at any moment, that Percy made the request to his mate that stands at the centre of their legendary friendship. Or so the story goes.
‘Doc, mate, if anything happens, look after Louie and little Perc for me, would you?’
‘Of course, mate. Of course …’
Snowdrifts have rendered unpassable the road past the Bull’s Road Cemetery. If I want to see where Percy Rowe was crouching when he was fatally wounded on the evening of 4 December 1916, then it is going to require a long trudge through the stinging rain and the biting wind.
Close to the old trench line where Percy Rowe was fatally hit. Mike Bowers
There is so much water around that the cuttings and embankments along the side of the ro
ad are crumbling and falling into piles amid the snow and ice. Old man willow trees, their gnarled roots clinging like cephalopod arms to the loose mud, watch over me as I walk along this lonely road. A close look reveals that its surface is littered with pieces of jagged, rusty metal—shrapnel from the artillery rounds that the earth continues to bleed around here whenever it rains, long, long after the last shots of the war were fired. The iron harvest is all about me; 18-pound shells from the big British guns, now exposed after having lain unexploded where the mud swallowed them nearly a century ago, seem to have just dropped onto the road.
This landscape, with its treeless, roughly hewn potato fields that are the colour of Belgian chocolate, continues to tell its stories and to give up its pain. Farmers are forever unearthing the dead. It is reliably said that many just plough them back into these fields of the lost and the nameless, rather than call the gendarmerie who will create paperwork and then shut the farm down so that the experts can carry out a proper exhumation.
I walk and walk, past snowdrifts that cling to the cuttings like long white waves. And then I turn onto a barely discernible track that runs to the east of Gueudecourt through clods of mud, roughly tracing the old Zenith Trench line.
Live 18-pound shells from the big British guns drop out of the easements beside the roads when the Somme is wet. Mike Bowers
The 29th Battalion went into these trenches on 3 December for what were to be two routine days of patrolling. The German gunners over on the ridge behind Gueudecourt knew the precise bearings of the channels because, not too long beforehand, they had been theirs. The shells came in all night, every few seconds, lighting up the sky as they whistled down onto their targets.
So unremarkable was the incident that claimed Percy’s life, it does not even rate a mention in his unit’s diary. The day in question was described simply as ‘disposition unchanged’. At the time, Doc was working around the area of Switch Trench, also previously a German-held position, and which ran roughly between Flers and Longueval. By chance, the mates were only a kilometre or so apart as the crow flies when Percy was hit.
