Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 259
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[Page 259]
128
was very exhausting and four men were necessary to carry out a wounded man on a stretcher: artillery ammunition pack-mules often sank deep in the mud and stuck there until they perished. The few villages in the area had been razed to the ground, leaving only a few heaps of bricks at the cross roads to identify them. The Chief of the German Staff, Ludendorf, described it as the worst battle of the whole Western Front from the German point of view.
Early in October the New Zealand Division had been almost wiped out of existence in attempting to take Passchendaele. Our Third Division relieved the survivors and on the 18th October continued the attack up the slope towards the village, but suffered almost unbelievable casualties trying to get past the indestructible concrete strong-points from which the well-protected enemy poured heavy and deadly small-arms fire. Our 34th Battalion, which was one of the units leading the assault, went into the fray with about eight hundred men and twenty officers, of whom only about eighty men and three officers stumbled back in the dark and the rain, the next night, to lie down and try to rest on the shell-torn mud in rear of the new front line. One of our dead, young Lieutenant Captain Jeffreys of Maitland N.S.W. was awarded a posthumus Victoria Cross for his outstanding bravery in this action.
Our original front had been advanced several hundreds of yards, and a few of the nearest formidable concrete shelters had been taken, but at what a dreadful cost. After things quietened down, we went forward to relieve the battalion occupying the captured strong-points, and I made my Company Headquarters in the big one at Tyne Farm, now still under the stepped base of the tall Cross of Sacrifice at the British War Cemetery on the site of this battle. It is the largest cemetery in the World and has 11,512 graves, seventy per cent of them unnamed. I visited it nearly fifty one years afterwards (on 26th June 1968). The visitor's book had a column for remarks and as I pondered what to write the following thought came into my mind: