by Gill Paul
Percy’s diary indicates he was well aware of his ability to attract the opposite sex. After kissing a girl in Birmingham, he quipped, “Well, it’s good to have friends in a strange country.”
… she was “a dear little girl, with auburn hair and grey eyes full of mirth …”
In October 1917 Percy was sent back out to the front line, and had a narrow escape when his trench was gassed and the tapes of his respirator became twisted. He got a lungful of poison gas before managing to get his mask on and was shocked to see that a shell had landed just two feet from his head. Letters from Dorothy provided consolation in the midst of hardship. She sent him a New Testament and a pocket wallet containing her photograph, as well as the reassurance that she had written to George Pike to tell him she could no longer be his girl, news it seems that left him deeply upset.
At the end of November, Percy was back in England on leave and spending a musical evening with Dorothy, her mother, and some friends, when her father came home unexpectedly. He was furious to discover that Percy had continued to see his daughter after he had forbidden it and was abrupt with them both. The next day Percy wrote to him, formally asking permission to get engaged to Dorothy. In a man-to-man conversation, Mr Jewell explained that he didn’t have a high opinion of Australians in general, that he and his wife knew nothing about Percy or his family but had to take them “on trust,” and that he certainly wouldn’t consent to Dorothy marrying and going off to live in Australia after the war. She was needed at home to help look after her younger brother and sister, Wilf and Betty. Dorothy was distressed by his views, but declared to Percy she would marry him regardless. They settled on the date of June 1919, eighteen months later, by which time she hoped to have won her father over to the idea.
Dorothy and Percy: When they met, she was suspicious that he might be married so he showed her his paybook in which it said, “Next of kin: Mother.”
Percy went back to the Front, but there was a slight hiccup in the courtship at this point when Dorothy found out that he had been seen with another girl while at officer training school in Cambridge. Percy hurriedly wrote to Dorothy with an innocent explanation and she claimed she forgave him, but in a letter soon afterward she described going out dancing—an obvious ploy to make him jealous which seems to have worked well. Meanwhile, Dorothy’s mother suggested a solution to the problem of her father’s objection to their engagement—get married but agree to live in England after the war. Percy explained to Dorothy he couldn’t do this as he had already promised his mother faithfully that he would come home.
Australian troops in the attack on Mont Saint-Quentin at which Percy earned a Military Cross for helping to rescue the wounded.
Before long he was sent back into the heat of battle. In August 1918, his men were commanded to take over some German trenches during the Battle of Dompierre and they captured several prisoners. Percy asked his comrade not to shoot a wounded “Hun” who “tried to hold up his hands, the look on his face a piteous plea for mercy” but the man fired all the same. At the end of the month, they crossed the Somme to Mont Saint-Quentin, where he helped dozens of men wounded after shelling there. “Dead, wounded, and dying, all lay twisted and huddled together in grotesque little heaps, a mass of mangled flesh,” he wrote in his diary. The next day he got some shrapnel embedded in his cheek, but a minor scratch did not warrant leaving the battlefield. This was the scene of what British commander General Sir Henry Rawlinson described as “the greatest military achievement of the war,” when the Australian 21st, 23rd and 24th Battalions stormed the village of Mont Saint-Quentin and captured the hill site, with Percy among them. The Germans were pushed back to the Hindenburg Line, their position of the previous spring, and 2,600 German prisoners were taken. When the five days of solid fighting were over, Percy collapsed from exhaustion and was taken to a casualty clearing station to recover. At the end of October he heard that he was to be awarded a Military Cross for his actions at Mont Saint-Quentin.
German prisoners of war captured by the Australians on August 8, 1918, after the Battle of Dompierre.
Shortly afterward, on November 11, 1918, Armistice was declared. Percy and two of his brothers had survived the war, but he was determined not to return to Australia without Dorothy by his side, so there was one last battle he had to fight.
SPANISH INFLUENZA
Percy had a narrow escape from the deadly flu pandemic that swept the globe between 1918 and 1920 after he was billeted in February 1919 with a Belgian man who fell ill and died of influenza in the next room. Unlike normal winter flu, this virus seemed to attack and kill the fit and healthy rather than the weak, as it caused a fatal overreaction of the immune system in which the body started attacking its own cells. It spread quickly through troops in confined areas, such as in the trenches, in military camps, or on board ships, with roughly 50 percent of those who came into contact with the virus catching it. It also crossed continents with the movements of armies. The governments of countries at war tried to keep the facts from the media to avoid creating panic, but it was widely reported in Spain, which was not at war, giving the false impression that the epidemic was most serious there (thus the name “Spanish influenza”). In fact, 500 million people were infected worldwide, and it’s estimated that the flu killed between 50 and 100 million of them—3 to 5 percent of the world’s then population. This was far more than the estimated 10 million soldiers and 7 million civilians who died due to the war.
The Cost of a Marriage
Mr. and Mrs. Jewell did all they could to prevent Dorothy and Percy from marrying. Mrs. Jewell argued that Dorothy’s health was too precarious for marriage since she suffered from rheumatism. Mr. Jewell asked why they couldn’t wait for a couple of years and declared that once she got to Australia, Dorothy would be so homesick she would turn around and come home again. Undeterred, Percy and Dorothy decided that if they did not have her parents’ permission, they would travel to Scotland, where the age of consent was lower, and marry there instead. Right up until the last moment, they hoped her parents would relent and let the marriage take place in her hometown, but it wasn’t to be.
On May 23, 1919, they traveled to Glasgow, where Dorothy stayed with a minister for the requisite fifteen days of residency that made them eligible for a marriage license, and on June 7 they got married in a brief, solemn ceremony. They honeymooned at Balloch on the banks of Loch Lomond and had a wonderful time rowing on the loch and going for walks along the shore.
Stretcher-bearers wear masks to avoid catching the highly contagious influenza virus in October, 1918.
Percy and Dorothy made one last visit to her parents, this time as a married couple, but the meeting was strained. On August 23, when they set sail for Australia, neither Mr. nor Mrs. Jewell came to see them off.
They had struggled long and hard to be together …
Bad news awaited Percy on arrival in Australia six weeks later: his father had been fatally injured when he was run over by an ambulance after stepping off a trolley. Percy and Dorothy traveled to Sydney to live with his grieving mother but, as her parents had predicted, she was fiercely homesick, especially after she gave birth to a stillborn child in 1920. Percy suffered from chronic bronchitis caused by his war experiences and he tried farming for a couple of years, as he felt the outdoor life helped his chest. The couple had a daughter, Betty, in 1923 and Dorothy gradually began to enjoy her Australian lifestyle, caring for her daughter, cooking for her family and friends, playing the piano, and singing. Dorothy took Betty back to England for a visit when she was three years old, hoping for a family reconciliation, but found that, although pleased to see her, her father had still not forgiven her for emigrating. Meanwhile, Percy still wanted to become a writer, so he worked hard to get himself a place at a university, the first member of his family to achieve such a thing. He became a teacher at a private coaching college and wrote some well-regarded study guides, as well as poems, stories, and a one-act play that was presented on the ra
dio in 1934.
In 1939, after Dorothy’s mother died, her father was lonely and he accepted Percy’s offer to pay for him and Dorothy’s younger brother and sister, Wilf and Betty, to come to live in Australia. The years had mellowed him and he missed his daughter, so was glad to be near her once more. Percy and Dorothy twice traveled back to Europe themselves: in 1954 and 1961–2. Percy visited the war memorial at Villers-Brettoneux, where Bert’s name was engraved on a wall, as well as revisiting the scenes of the battles he had taken part in.
The couple bought a holiday cottage at Paradise Beach in Pittwater, New South Wales, where they entertained regularly, but Dorothy hung onto some English customs, always cooking a full Christmas dinner on December 25, despite the blazing heat outside. They had struggled long and hard to be together but, although she outlived Percy by eighteen years, Dorothy never for one moment regretted the decision she had made when she decided to place her future in his hands and make a life with him in Australia.
Joseph & Mary
HEAPES
Married: August 5, 1919
A brass box given to 427,000 British forces as a Christmas present in 1914. It was the idea of Princess Mary and contained her photograph along with tobacco, writing materials, or candy.
Joseph’s service medals.
Joseph Heapes
IRISH
Born: September 20, 1887
Rank & regiment: Lance Corporal, 2nd Battalion Royal Irish Regiment
Mary Fearon
IRISH
Born: August 16, 1885
Officers of Joseph’s regiment, the Royal Irish Rifles, stationed at Belfast, 1914.
A letter of reference from Joseph’s commanding officer in India: “I can recommend him to anyone requiring a reliable man.”
Mary started writing to Joseph during his years in a German prisoner-of-war camp to help raise his spirits, but when she fell in love with him, she faced hostility from her friends
As a boy, Joseph lived with his parents and his seven brothers and sisters in the gate lodge of an estate owned by Captain Robert Henry Fowler in Rahinstown, County Meath, Ireland. Young Joseph was so impressed by Captain Fowler, a distinguished career officer in the British army and a renowned cricket player, that he determined to join the army himself one day. There was little other employment in the area, so in August 1900, at the age of thirteen or fourteen, he ran away from home and made his way to Belfast, where he tried to enlist. The enlisting officer took one look at him, asked a few shrewd questions about his age, and got a policeman to escort him home to his mother. In fact, it wasn’t until several years later, when Joseph was eighteen, that he finally managed to enlist in the Royal Irish Rifles.
He had hoped for excitement and adventure, and that’s certainly what he got over the next few years. First he was in stationed in Delhi, then in 1909 the company moved to Maymo, Upper Burma, where he served with the mounted infantry; in 1911 he was in Mandalay then in 1912 back in India, where he served as an orderly corporal in the hospital in Kamptee. He became a reservist in 1913, having completed the time he signed up for, and received glowing references from his superior officers: “I can recommend him to anyone requiring a reliable man,” wrote one. “He is a man of exemplary character,” wrote another, calling him “steady and hardworking.” He took a job as a groom for the Benison family at their estate in Slieve Russell, Ballyconnell, where his responsibilities included looking after the ponies and the cars owned by his employer, Joseph Benison.
Joseph was working as a groom when war broke out; this experience would have been useful as horses were vital for transporting guns and equipment behind the lines.
THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE
In the first months of the war, before the gas attacks and slaughter of the Somme, relations between individual Germans and their British counterparts were not as hostile as they would later become. On Christmas Eve 1914, German troops along the northern sector of the Western Front decorated their trenches with candles and Christmas trees, and began singing carols. The British responded by singing their own carols and shouting greetings, and through messengers an unofficial truce was agreed for Christmas Day. Soldiers walked out into no-man’s-land and exchanged gifts of tobacco and food with their opposite numbers, some offering small souvenirs such as uniform buttons. It was also an opportunity to collect and bury the dead lying there. In several places, impromptu football matches took place between British and German soldiers. It is estimated that as many as 100,000 French, German, and British soldiers, including Joseph’s comrades in the Irish Rifles, took part in this unofficial Christmas Day truce, although this unofficial peace-making was roundly condemned by their superior officers.
However, his days as a groom were not to last. On August 5, 1914, the day after the declaration of war, Joseph was recalled to the army. The 1st Battalion was on service in Aden in the Middle East, so Joseph was attached to the 2nd Battalion and by August 14 was already in Rouen. The British Expeditionary Force of regular soldiers came to around 80,000 men, and the plan was to deploy them on the left flank of the French army around the small town of Maubeuge. The German 1st and 2nd Armies were advancing quickly through Belgium, and it was decided that the BEF would make a stand at the Mons-Condé Canal. At dawn on August 23, the Germans charged on British lines and were astonished by a rapid hail of rifle fire that cut them down in the thousands. They hadn’t expected the British to get forces out there so quickly, and the men who took aim that day were all professional, well-trained soldiers. However, by the end of the 23rd the sheer weight of German numbers forced the British to retreat, especially after reports reached them that the French 5th Army was pulling back and they risked being encircled. On the 26th, part of the retreating force made a stand at Le Câtelet and the 2nd Irish Rifles engaged the enemy near Caudry, losing around 60 men, with 34 wounded. But although casualties were higher for the British than for the Germans, the Battle of Le Câtelet was critical in holding back the German advance long enough to give British forces time to regroup.
Men who had been shooting each other the day before exchanged gifts on December 25, 1914, as British and German soldiers mingled on the Western Front.
Joseph was surrounded and taken prisoner. His war was over.
The retreat continued for over 100 miles south to Aisne, where the BEF halted. The men were exhausted and suffering from severe blisters, and there were intermittent exchanges of fire with the pursuing enemy. On September 15, the 2nd Irish came upon strong German lines right ahead of them and could go no further. There were a number of skirmishes and in a German attack on their line on September 20, Joseph was surrounded and taken prisoner. His war was over.
A clearly shocked private in the Irish Rifles shortly after being taken prisoner by the Germans.
The German guards treated him well, but Joseph was devastated. All he wanted was to get back to his company, but there was no chance of that as he was loaded onto a train and transported back far behind the front lines. It must have been terrifying, as he spoke no German and had no idea what would happen to him. He was taken to one camp, then another, and in early December 1914 he arrived at a place called Limburg where there were many other Irish prisoners-of-war. He was met by a Catholic priest, who reassured him that he was safe and would be well treated. The rooms in which they slept were well ventilated, there were plenty of blankets against the cold, and at first the food wasn’t at all bad.
Limburg seemed to Joseph to have a high percentage of Irish prisoners, and on December 17 he realized why when an ex-British diplomat named Roger Casement stood up in front of the men and made a speech trying to recruit them into an Irish Brigade he was forming. His goal was to rise up against the British back in Dublin and fight for home rule for Ireland. Casement said he had secured a guarantee from the Kaiser that Ireland would not be invaded by Germany, and he told the men that if they joined him they would be freed immediately.
According to Private William Dooley of the 2nd Royal Irish, “The men
were very restless during the speech but they restrained themselves to the end. Then, as Casement passed by, they let themselves go, hushing, hissing, and calling him all sorts of names.” Of around 1,800 Irishmen in Limburg, Casement only raised 56 volunteers for his brigade, and these were immediately whisked away to a fancy hotel in the town.
The Irish commanding officers at Limburg sent a message to the camp commandant saying that they didn’t want any special treatment because, “in addition to being Irish Catholics, we have the honor to be British soldiers.” After this, conditions deteriorated and the food rations were reduced. When Casement visited the camp again in January 1915, he was not well received, with men cat-calling, “How much are the Germans paying you?”
Roger Casement, convicted of treason for negotiating with the Germans and hanged at London’s Pentonville Prison on August 3, 1916.
Some of the fifty-six members of Casement’s Irish Brigade, recruited as prisoners of war. They spent most of the rest of the war in German camps, then disbanded and either stayed in Germany, slipped back into Ireland, or sailed to America in 1919.
Joseph wasn’t remotely tempted to join the Irish Brigade. As far as he was concerned the Germans were the enemy who had already killed comrades of his, and he would rather sit out the war in a POW camp than betray the men he had fought along-side in the trenches. He hoped the fighting would soon be over so that he could get back home and carry on with his life.
