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[Page 30]
The Sun, 22nd September 1919
DESOLATION
The Silent Battlefields
Weeds and Barrenness
The Australian Cemeteries
("The Sun's" Special Representative)
The following article was written by the Special Representative of "The Sun," Mr. Keith Murdoch, after a visit to the battlefields.
LONDON, Sunday Night
Not even a soldier can imagine the profoundness of the desolation brooding over the old battlefields to-day. The old spirit, the action, the energy the lusty strength of the youthful armies no longer temper the scenes of waste and destruction. All is emptiness, weediness, barrenness. Men's strife seems to have rolled far away, and to have left here a vacuous and untenanted wilderness, already almost forgotten.
From Ypres to St. Quentin I travelled through a monotonous, weedy desolation, with the ghosts of cities and villages arising here and there like dumb sentinels of the dead.
At places this waste is 20 miles broad, and all along its fringes are far wider zones of semi-shattered places where the peasants are striving again to raise corn.
Amidst the shellholes and smashed redoubts the weeds grow in the middle zone thigh high. The rankest growths hide those old trenches and landmarks which the artillery had not already made unrecognisable amidst the tumbled earth.
Boche and Chinese Workers
The War Office has 200,9000 Germans and 85,000 Chinese under British officers clearing up the fields, collecting the rusty iron, the reddened barbed-wire, the old shells and rails. These men dynamite the German redoubts for steel girders. All our Passchendaele redoubts have gone this way, and now lie, jagged lumps of concrete, but the redoubts along the Menin road remain as memorials.
Messines is blown to fragments, in which the old villagers dig for hidden treasures, and the "chink, chink!" of the demolition parties' tools resound across the wide valleys where we fought. Two garish shanty estaminets have been erected at the Messines cross-roads.
Mushroom Estaminets
These tin and timber estaminets spring up in many parts of the Belgian battlefields. You can drink Belgian beer or bad wine at the Zonnebeke crossroads or Broodseinde on sites truly red with Australian blood. The shanty hotels crowd each other at Ypres, near the Menin Gate, through which the stream of trippers passes, but on the French fields it is different. No soul stirs amidst the rubble of proud old Bailleul. There is life in Meteren again, but the dozen pioneers' dwellings there bear such signs as "Coiffeur" and "Ironmonger", not "Beer".
The general rule along the front is where ground was not heavily shelled agriculture is beginning again. Elsewhere there is no sign, indeed, no hope of re-settlement yet, for every yard will have to be laboriously treated.
The Sadness of Passchendaele
The saddest scene of utter decay is that of the Passchendaele fields, where a few prisoner companies and a few Tommy grave-diggers are the only people visible in the wilderness.
Australian souvenirs can still be found – tattered uniforms in the Daisy and Dairy woods.
There are little crosses marking the graves. The nearest Australian grave to Paschendaele is that of Private A.E. Toll, of the 20th Battalion. I searched for signs of those brave men of the Ninth Brigade who got to the outlying houses of the village itself on that dreadful morning of October, but their fate will ever remain a mystery.
The Fifth Division's memorial on Polygon Butte has a lonely and magnificent domination over the whole of the Ypres sepulchre.
The Acres of the Dead
The other divisional memorials are less advanced. Each is awaiting material for the obelisk. Not enough Australian bodies have been recovered at Villers-Bretonneux and in the Chuignes district for the cemetery at the foot of the Corps Memorial. This cemetery, therefore, has been filled up with other dead, representing all parts of the Empire. This graveyard work will last for five years at the present rate. The percentage of bodies recovered is proving small, but some day there will be many peaceful cemeteries with lines of headstones surrounding the central tablet. "Their name liveth for evermore".
The sights most impressive to an Australian along the front are the burst, black sandbags and trenches of Fleurbaix, our first, and perhaps most disastrous fighting-ground in France, and the neglected Bullecourt field, where the great Australian Army is represented only by a few discolored crosses, and even the saps of the trenches are lost in the general obliteration, decay, and weediness.
Traffic has been resumed on the Bellenglise-St. Quentin Canal and further north one can see our Decauville railways used for civilian purposes, with grandmothers under black umbrellas sitting in the trucks which not long ago carried our helmeted soldiers.
Sun, 28th Oct. 1919
WHERE THEY LIE
The Australian Dead
Battlefields Desolate and Empty in France and Flanders
(No. 1)
("The Sun's" Special Representative)
To secure for our readers, and particularly for ex-soldiers, a series of impressions of the Australian battlefields as they are to-day, "The Sun's" Special Representative has re-visited France and Flanders, and in his first article describes in broad outline the sacred places where lie our dead.
London, August 24.
Fifty thousand Australian dead lie within the weedy, desolate zone I have just traversed. Fifty thousand as true-hearted men, as bright and eager youths as any country has left in this vast cemetery of shattered life and promise.
They lie – where do they lie? Let the truth be known. With a very large percentage one can but wave one's hand across a wilderness of broken earth, of thistles, and poppies, and rank high growth, and say, "They lie … there".
From Ypres to Amiens, from Passchendaele to St. Quentin, along the whole British front, I have found our graves, and visited too the little graveyards consecrated by padres' prayers and services. But of 50 per cent of our dead there will never again be earthly trace. That is the lowest estimate I could get from any officers of the graves registration units, or any member of the Imperial Graves Commission. The percentage, I fear, will be much higher.
They lie where they fell, or where haggard comrades, amidst the ceaseless fury of the battle, buried them in trench or shell-hole; they lie unnamed, unmarked, unknown. I do not think they would have had it otherwise. For though the Australian soldier showed a tender care for every soldier's grave within his lines, he wished for himself, if death should find him, to lie out his six feet where he fell.
Resting in Peace
Except for the Lens and Scarpe battlefields, where our men never fought, there is scarcely a square mile in the long, broad area of desolation in which the distinctive A.I.F. gravemark, with its white circle round the cross, is not to be found; sometimes in lonely isolation, sometimes in little patches marking a casualty clearing-station or an old battalion headquarters, sometimes in the profusion of a new military cemetery. Whenever it was possible, the Australian soldier marked his comrade's burial place in this way. It says much for the Australian army that higher percentage of our dead is being accounted for than that of other armies. It says in particular two things – that we did not lose ground and with it the guardianship of the dead who won it; and that we carried back many dying and dead men from the other lines.
I have walked over deserted fields, such as Bullecourt. I have picked my way across overgrown trenches and the deeply pitted fields towards Riencourt, all tangled and twisted still with wire and the broken weapons of two armies in their prime; I have found the sunken pathway, which was an avenue of the dead, with our bodies heaped up on either side. And one outstanding impression has been the fewness of our crosses. But at Villers Brettoneux, I have stood on a mound, and seen more than a thousand Australian gravemarks within easy view.
As Messines and Wytschaete they are to be found nestling beside redoubts, and scattered down the hillside towards the river, and in two pretty cemeteries behind Hill 62 from which our first lines ventured forth. In the Passchendaele area they stand up in little groups, and meet the eye singly on every acre of that dreadful field. All is waste around them, and the spirit that broods over them is still sad and heavy-eyed. Stark realities of destruction and death weigh heavily on the mind.
But there is peacefulness now, and silence. The winds whisper through the thigh-high growths. There is no longer the dirge of shells, but rather a rustling as that of the leaves at home, or a chant like the ceaseless washing of the waters on some beach they loved well in Australia. They lie in peace, in perfect quiet, and gradually beauty will be evolved out of this chaos, and their resting-place will be lovely again with the pretty things that surround such a countryside as they and their prattling children would have made and love.
Little Graveyards
It is part of our national duty to them that we should find every body that can be traced and place it in one of the many new consecrated graveyards. It is only a tiny part of the great and endless debt we owe them, but a part so intimate and reverent that we should surely carry it through with exceeding thoroughness.
This work has only begun. There are 25,000 British soldiers, divided into some fifty companies, going laboriously over the battlefields seeking and removing bodies. I say it has only begun, because, though the fields have been clear of enemy troops for nine months, great areas have still to be searched. The visitor cannot escape disappointment that more energy is not being put into the task.
But the little graveyards are taking shape. Many are already closed with their quota of 900 or 1000 dead. They are flowerless, treeless. They are mere rows of newly broken earth with little temporary wooden crosses. But some day there will be tombstones and gardens, and little central buildings, and a large common six-sided cross and altar-stone, bearing the words, "Their Name Liveth for Evermore."
Five years must pass, say the officials, before all this can be completed. Then each man who has died will have his tombstone, whether his bones lie here or not. The arms of his fighting force will be on top, a cross carved beneath; there will be his soldier's number, his full name, his rank, the dates of birth and death, the great words "Killed in Action," and room is left for his relatives to carve or stamp an epitaph or text, of not more than 63 letters, including spacings, in length.
There will be no dummy graves in these thousand cemeteries, but stones will be erected for those who died and have not been found. In the building or shelter complete records of the dead, with details of their death and names of next of kin, will be kept on parchment, so that those who come in future may know the story of brothers or sons who lie in these parts.
This part of the last duty will be executed by the Imperial Graves Commission, on which each part of the Empire has a representative. So far as possible the Australian tombstones will be provided from Australia. They may be either marble or concrete; it is believed the latter would have a better chance of standing through generations. Similar plans will be followed in Gallipoli and Palestine, with this difference, that in Gallipoli Australia has charge of the initial work of clearing up the battlefields, whereas elsewhere the British War Office is solely responsible.
Unless our authorities get to work at once there will be only one purely Australian cemetery in France. That is the "Adelaide Cemetery" on the Villers-Bretonneux-road near the old White chateau. It is planned now to make the graveyard at the base of the great Australian National Memorial on Hill 104 a mixed cemetery, because enough bodies have not been recovered in the area to have it distinctively Australian.
Those of our men who are working on memorials and cemeteries in France and Flanders are sad about this. They think we should have had our own cemeteries on such a costly battlefield as Passchendaele. There, near Polygon wood, I found British soldiers carrying Australian bodies three miles to be buried in the British cemetery at Wiltje.
The Unnamed Graves
Though in these scattered formal graveyards our tributes to the dead must necessarily be concentrated, a far wider area will for many generations of Australians possess a living interest.
In the little cemeteries, with their regular, even rows of headstones and their noble central crosses, will be the consecrated plots on which the nation can lavish its attention and express its sorrow. Mothers, maybe, will come to drop their tears; brothers will come, because perhaps he would have wished it. But in the larger spaces beyond and around there will be wider and freer habitations for the spirit of the A.I.F., which loved space and distance, and everything that was generous – nothing that was cabined and confined.
But these spaces are to-day very ugly, very depressing, very sad. So ugly and sorrowful that though I would not dare to say to any mother or brother "Do not come," I would say with full belief that it would be the dead soldier's wish, "Wait a while".
The battlefields to-day are tumbled masses of ruins, wide tracts of desolate, overturned moorlands, on which high, stinging growths have sprung in place of the crops that once were there, and the white torn roads seem to wander aimlessly through a blighted and deserted land.
No one can cross them without catching the echo, though there is no sound, of a great sadness and deep grief.
Little wooden huts are rising here and there. The country folk come slowly back. Implements are arriving, work will soon begin, and the sights of battle will some day disappear.
I do not say "Wait till then," but it will surely be many months before the deep melancholy that broods here will have gone.
Such of the cable news on this page as is so headed appeared in "The Times" and is cabled to "The Sun" by special permission. It should be understood that the opinions given are not those of "The Times" unless expressly stated to be so.