Collingwood

by Daley, Paul

  They agreed that they would take leave in January—God will-ing that they should live that long—and go to London and see some sights. But that hadn’t really cheered Percy up.

  ‘They reckon it’ll be over soon. Another big move against the German front next spring. One last big push, they reckon. Then we’ll be home for the grand final,’ Doc had said. But even shifting the conversation to footy hadn’t worked. Percy wasn’t much interested, though it had led him to say that the post had just brought another letter from Louie. She’d reckoned she was coping fine with little Perc, who was wriggling around and holding his head up and trying to crawl. Louie had also said that she’d seen Dicky Lee up in Smith Street, his knee still crook, and that he had asked if she’d heard from either Percy or Doc.

  Percy took an envelope out of the pocket of his damp greatcoat, extracted a neatly folded letter, and began to read:

  Percy Junior is crawling and the other day nearly went clean off the front verandah. We sit out there at night, as it is shaping as an especially hot summer and there is much talk etc about bushfires already. Christmas, they say, will be scorching. We have to sit out the front every night so we get the breeze. Dad takes little Perc over to Gahan’s Reserve in the pram most evenings after dinner. We find that he sleeps better that way. It must be quite the grandparent thing to do, as all number of ‘seniors’ are often over there pushing prams!

  I expect it is quite cold over there, as the papers here say it is the nastiest European winter for many years.

  So you must stay warm, my darling, and take care of yourself for us.

  Have you seen Doc? I’m sure he knows but please tell him that his father was very poorly, but has come good and is now doing well—or so his brother Donald says.

  Please send him my love and my very best.

  For now, My Darling Percy, goodbye.

  All of our love.

  From your loving wife Louie and your little boy Percy.

  Percy folded the letter, returned it to the envelope and shoved it back inside his coat.

  Doc knew the old man had been crook. Donny and the girls were always writing with news from home. But he had really taken in only one thing that Louie had said: ‘send him my love and my very best’.

  Percy broke into his thoughts: ‘Doc, I’m not sure what business I’ve got being here anymore. I’ve got a wife back home stuck with her parents and a little boy, nearly one year old, who I’ve never met—doesn’t know what his old man looks like.’

  ‘They’ll be right, Perc. The Newbys are as good as gold—known ’em all me life. You’ll be home soon enough. You wait and see. Another six months, it’ll all be over. As soon as spring comes, the Germans’ll fold.’

  ‘What if I don’t make it, Doc? What happens next? Plenty I know’ve been killed. I told you about Fromelles. Could’ve easily been me. We go charging at the bloody Hindenburg Line, it won’t be any easier. Just have a good look around here. They could stay in their trenches and us in ours, just shooting and shelling each other, taking a few yards here and losing it back there, for years and years. Sometimes I wonder what it’s all bloody for.’

  Before, when everyone else thought things were in terrible shape—the weather, the work down at the yard, the match—Percy would be on top of the bloody world, talking things up. It was what had made him captain material. But now he seemed like someone else: worn out, drawn, anxious, full of troubles.

  ‘You’ll be right, Perc. We’ve come through worse, mate.’

  This giant crucifix, standing in the muddy fields between Trone’s Wood and the village of Hardecourt aux Boix, is an enduringly haunting feature of the Somme. Mike Bowers

  As they stood to shake hands, a runner came over. He saluted and handed Percy a note. Doc had seen the kid before—maybe nineteen or twenty, fast as a bloody whippet, flaming red hair. Runners usually only lasted a couple of weeks out here, but this kid had been around for a while.

  Percy unfolded the note. ‘Orders to report,’ he said. ‘They’re sending us back out.’

  ‘No rest for the bloody wicked,’ Doc said.

  ‘Wicked alright,’ Percy said. He winked at Doc.

  For a few seconds they just stood and smiled at one another. Doc broke the silence.

  ‘Perc, you right, mate?’

  ‘Course I’m right. You know me.’ Percy shaped up just as he always did whenever he was asked that question.

  ‘Keep your head down, mate. I’ll see you soon. London for the new year,’ Doc said.

  Percy turned and began to walk away, then stopped and looked back at his mate.

  ‘Doc.’

  ‘Yeah mate, what?’

  ‘If anything happens …’

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen,’ Doc snapped, trying to cut the conversation short. He knew what Percy was going to say next.

  But Percy was insistent. ‘Doc, mate, if anything happens, look after Louie and little Perc for me, would you?’

  ‘Of course, mate. Of course. But nuthin’s gonna happen, okay?’

  ‘Doc, promise.’

  ‘Yeah mate, I promise.’

  Somehow Doc managed to keep walking, slowly pulling his feet out of the mud and advancing a few inches at a time. He and his men reached the cave-in and they all began to dig steadily, throwing the drier mud down so that they could stand on it. The trench had collapsed at its intersection with another, narrower, zigzagging dugout that the soldiers used to walk in relative safety from the rear trenches to those closer to the front. Nearby, a couple of battalions were lounging about, the men shivering in their greatcoats, trying to start fires or get some shut-eye in precarious little cul-de-sacs that they’d dug into the semifrozen walls with their trench shovels.

  After helping to clear the way, Doc stopped again. He lit another smoke and leaned on his shovel while his boys kept working, reinforcing the intersection with wooden planks and perpendicular beams. The day seemed suddenly different, like it had back home on the king’s birthday or on the Saturday arvos when he was a kid when the Magpies had played away. On those days, the shrill steam whistles that delineated the working day in the boot factories, the tanneries and the breweries were silent, and there were fewer voices on the streets. The only sound that carried through the suburb was that of the trams squealing their metal-on-metal cry as they lumbered in and out of the sheds down by the Yarra.

  The Somme was like that now, holiday-quiet and calm. The guns had fully stopped for the first time in months.

  And then, as the men dug and hammered away, it began to snow—softly at first, so that it formed just a misty patina on their clothes, and then more heavily, in great franc-sized flakes. Behind the lines, where the men and the lorries and the horses continuously churned up the ground, the snow formed translucent icy skins on puddles and made the duckboards treacherously slippery. But out in no-man’s-land, it lay in a thick, luxuriant blanket, as smooth as vanilla ice-cream, shrouding the mud and the broken machines of war and the sea of rotting bodies.

  Most of the men dreaded the snow. But for Doc it came as welcome relief from the monotony of the mud. It hid all of that ugliness and made everything clean.

  He’d only seen it once before, on one freezing day when snow had dumped itself on the outskirts of Melbourne and lain thick on the ground up at Ballarat and in the Dandenongs. It was the coldest day he’d ever played footy. Not long before the match there had been a dusting of snow over central Melbourne and, for an hour or so, the streets and houses and chimney stacks were transformed into beautifully crisp, clean lines, as if they had suddenly been traced in black on a vast white canvas. But before long the snow had melted into muddy slush that made Collingwood look even drearier than it had before; that place could never truly be beautiful. The next day, he and Fred Newby and the girls had taken the train up to Ballarat, where they had stopped for lunch at a teahouse and made a snowman
down by the lake.

  Going against his cautious nature and his experience as a soldier, Doc decided that he would risk a look out into no-man’s-land at the snow. He shuffled up to the edge of the trench and clambered onto the newly excavated firing step. He raised his eyes above the dirt and stared across the blinding white landscape towards the front line—and saw a man walking towards him, trudging impassively through the snow, weighted down by his wet coat and his rifle.

  Doc raised his rifle and trained the sights on the man’s chest. He was one of theirs. And he’d clearly seen too much random and downright unlucky death behind the lines. Men like this were blasé about their chances of survival. They became fatalistic, guided by the philosophy that when your time was up, it was up, and there was nothing you could do to change that. They started doing mad things like this, walking across no-man’s-land like they were on a Sunday stroll, challenging the enemy to shoot them or toss a grenade their way. And sometimes that was what happened. The Germans had blokes like this, too.

  On the other hand, men like this were pretty handy to have around. They were always the first to wander out amid the exploding shells and the bullets to retrieve the injured, while everyone else had their faces planted in the mud.

  The man made an easy target in the snow. A hundred German eyes would be watching him as he walked. He wore no hat, no cap or metal helmet, leaving exposed a wild crop of bright-red hair that must surely have looked to the snipers as the wounded rabbit looks to the fox.

  Doc suddenly recognised him. He was the runner from Percy’s company.

  Doc lowered his rifle and began fidgeting with another fag. He knew what this was about. Perhaps an enemy bullet would strike the man before he delivered the news.

  The red-haired man reached the edge of the trench directly in front of Doc, who looked up and said, ‘Get in you stupid bastard, ’fore you get shot.’

  The man looked at him quizzically, unable to fathom the urgency of the request.

  ‘Sir, looking for Lance Corporal Seddon.’

  ‘Found him, son.’

  ‘Sir, it’s …’

  ‘I know,’ Doc interrupted.

  ‘Sir, your friend, the sergeant, Paddy Rowan. I’m sorry, but … it was a shell.’

  Doc turned his back to the kid. ‘Thanks son—I know. Thanks. And it was Rowe—Sergeant Percy Rowe. Not Paddy Rowan. Tell his boys, okay?’

  ‘Sir.’

  The runner turned and walked back in the direction of the German guns.

  Doc could think of only one thing—his feet. Some men could live without their feet, but he couldn’t. And he had to live.

  He trudged back towards his camp through the supply trenches, supporting himself with the shovel. As the German guns started up again, he wondered whether they had lowered Percy into the frozen earth yet.

  Then he promised himself two things. He would always protect the boy. And when he got home, he would never be cold again.

  18

  A Talisman or Two

  For the rest of his life, Doc would tell the story of how a red-haired messenger had delivered the news of Percy’s death. That he would spend a lifetime talking about his strange sense that his best friend had died indicated that, regardless of what might have passed between him and Percy because of Louie, he was very deeply moved by his mate’s death.

  Given his discreet, retiring nature, it seems unlikely that Doc would have shared such an intensely emotional and traumatic moment with strangers, or even with other players at the Collingwood Football Club. But he would have told Louie. And he almost certainly would have shared the story with Hughie Thomas, an old mate who would eventually coach the Collingwood seconds, including the 1936 Premiership team of which Louie and Percy Rowe’s son, young Perc, was a member.

  Hughie would partly fill the void that Percy’s death had created in Doc’s life, becoming ‘Uncle Hughie’ to Doc’s two children, as well as to young Perc. Hughie and Doc were fiercely loyal to one another, so much so that Seddon would, as a result, fall out spectacularly with the club that he loved and had previously lived to serve. But that was well into the future.

  The story of the red-haired messenger sits somewhat incongruously with what we know about Doc’s personality and his temperament. He was, after all, a tough and practical man who was not known to be given to superstition. But the Collingwood Football Club has embraced the story as part of the Doc and Percy legend to the point that now, almost a century later, it is nearly impossible to separate the myth from the reality.

  The story also lives on in the Rowe and Seddon families, but its veracity nonetheless remains unclear. Dorothy Seddon says, ‘One of the stories was that this fellow came across to tell Malcolm Seddon that Paddy Rowan had been killed, but there was always a question mark against it. I don’t know whether it was really true or not. Doc was supposedly in one trench and Percy Rowe was way over there somewhere else and the fighting had stopped and this fellow came out of the mist, a red-headed fellow … across the snow, and Malcolm Seddon saw him and he just thought, “He’s coming with bad news about Percy Rowe.” And it was bad news. He [Percy] was wounded and he died. But there was always a question mark, you know, about whether it was just that Pop, you know, had just thought it had happened, or whether it actually happened. I don’t know.’

  On 23 December 1916, the St Arnaud Mercury ran a death notice for Percy Rowe, the ‘beloved father of little Percy’ and husband of Louie. An obituary in the same paper read:

  Another native of this district, Sgt Percy Edward Rowe has made the great sacrifice for the Empire. Deceased, who was 27 years of age, was the eldest son of Mr and Mrs John Rowe, Dundas Street St Arnaud, who received intimation on Tuesday, that their son had died on the 5th December from wounds received while fighting in France. Born at Kooreh and subsequently coming to St Arnaud deceased grew to manhood here. About seven years ago he went to Melbourne under engagement to British Imperial Oil Company. He was one of the smartest footballers in Victoria and was vice captain 1912 and 1913, Captain 1914, Collingwood … He leaves a widow and a child. Deep sympathy is expressed for the relations. The flag was flown at half mast at the Town Hall on Wednesday.

  In death, Percy’s identity was afforded considerably more certainty than it had been in life, although despite the St Arnaud Mercury’s claims, Collingwood has no record of him being formally named either the team’s captain or its vice-captain. There can be little doubt, however, that that would have been an honour bestowed upon him had he returned from the war to resume his football career.

  In February 1917, Louie was granted a war widow’s pension of £2 per fortnight. It was a small amount to compensate for the loss of a husband and a paltry sum of money on which to raise a child, especially given Percy’s foregone earnings as a footballer, a knockabout boxer and an oil company employee. John Wren may have helped Louie out. Rumours abounded around the Magpies at the time that Wren discreetly helped the families of those connected to the club and who had died in the war, as well as those from the suburb more broadly—just as it was said that he had given some men, especially footballers, financial inducements to join up, so strongly did he believe in Australia’s participation in the war. But what is certain is that the Collingwood Football Club gave Louie £20 when it learnt about Percy’s death from the C Company bugler, Alf Cohen.

  Despite having lost her husband, Louie was luckier than many war widows—including, probably, most of the several hundred widows who lived in Collingwood—because she could rely on her comparatively well-heeled parents and her sister May for financial and emotional support. Still, it would not have been easy for her. Raising a child as a single mother carried a stigma, regardless of what had happened to the father. She also would have held deep fears about her long-term capacity to provide for the boy. Aged barely twenty-eight, this socially aspiring, popular and attractive woman must have contemplated a life spent single in her
parents’ home, with the household’s emotional focus on her son, as an onerous and unremittingly lonely prospect.

  Meanwhile, the war went on. And so did Doc. He travelled around France and Belgium fortifying trenches, building roads and dodging enemy shrapnel, gunfire and, by early 1917, the poisonous gas that the Germans were increasingly using on the front line.

  During the last two years of World War I, Doc was frequently in the region of Heilly, where Percy was buried. Did he take the time to visit his old mate, to kneel by the cross that marked his resting place and say farewell, especially before he headed back to Australia? Any best mate would. But it would be almost ninety years before anyone related to Percy Rowe visited his grave. In 2004, Claire, a great-granddaughter from Australia, stopped by to put some flowers on his grave.

  Neither Louie nor young Perc would ever visit. Doc never returned.

  In March 1917 the Allied troops occupied Baupaume, close to the German Hindenburg Line. On the twenty-first of that month, Australian gunners shot down a German plane over the no-man’s-land outside Baupaume. The pilot crashed the aircraft between the British and German lines and tried to run for his own trenches after crawling out of the burning wreckage. But the Australians shot and captured him. The pilot turned out to be Prince Frederick Charles of Prussia, who died a few days later in an Australian field hospital.

  Doc must have been in Baupaume at about this time because he managed to salvage a piece of the downed aircraft. He also pocketed the driving band of an unexploded 15-inch German shell, of the type that littered the battlefield. When he got back to camp, he gave the scrap metal pieces to one of his unit’s farriers and asked him to fashion two horseshoes.

  Doc had hardened physically during the war. When he and Percy had separately made their way to Egypt in late 1915, there had still been a youthful brashness about them. But the harsh conditions had aged Doc. He was now more angular and, by the time of his twenty-ninth birthday in May, his face had lost any remnant of boyishness or softness.