The Battle of Fromelles

Shortly after taking the tunnel from England to France, we made a trip to a tiny village in the North East of France called Fromelles. It was in the complete opposite way we were going for our tour, but both Tara and I thought it was important to make the detour.

Our immediate reason for going there was to visit Tara’s family. Not living relatives, but dead ones. Lost soldiers of World War I. Before I go right into the events of the visit, I think it’s fitting to give some brief history, since I had never even heard of Fromelles before Tara’s family connection. And to be honest I should have, all Australians should.

The Battle of Fromelles, took place in France on July 19th-20th, 1916. The action was intended partly as a diversion from the Battle of the Somme that was being fought about 80 kilometers to the south. The operation, which was carried out midway between the British-occupied village of Fleurbaix and Fromelles behind the German lines, sought to retake a salient position just north of the Fromelles.

The attack was a combined operation between British troops and the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). It would be the first occasion that the AIF saw action on the Western Front.

After only one single night and one day of fighting, 1,500 British and 5,533 Australian soldiers were killed.

The Australian War Memorial describes the battle as "the worst 24 hours in Australia's entire history."

To give you a comparison, the well-known ANZAC offensive of Gallipoli saw 8,709 killed. This was spread over 9 months however, compared with little over a day at Fromelles. Essentially, The Battle of Fromelles it was a slaughter.

Not only did the offensive fail to capture the target salient position north of the village, it also failed in diverting any attention away from the Battle of the Somme as intended.

Maybe because this offensive was such a catastrophe, history has somewhat swept it under the carpet. But if we don’t learn from and remember our mistakes, then those mistakes are bound to be repeated.

Most of the bodies of the dead from this battle have not been recovered or identified.

The bodies of Tara’s Great Uncle, Guy, and her Great Grandmother’s Fiance, Frank, are amongst those thousands that have never been found, named nor sent home to have the burial they deserve with their families.

To provide some extra background, Tara was named after her great grandmother Iris Tara Gibney. Iris Tara and her twin brother Guy were sent as orphans from England to Western Australia to their adoptive Myatt Family. They had a very tough life but they always had each other. Once older, Iris was engaged to Frank Myatt (her stepbrother). At the young age of 21, both Frank and Guy joined the armed forces.

Here is an except from Iris Tara’s memoir, handwritten on her deathbed, regarding what happened to Frank and Guy (I have edited this slightly for clarity):

“Guy, after about four tries to enlist and who was refused because he was too narrow in the chest, finally got in, in 1915. He and Frank enlisted and went to Blackboy Camp; Guy in Light Horse and Frank in the Infantry. It was a sad day for us all in November, but one could not grudge the boys, and Guy was so thrilled as all his friends had joined up too.

We waited for news and one day the Clergyman came with a wire, saying Frank had been buried by a shell. An hour after, Win Gibbs came out with a letter from Les Weston, telling her about the attack, and saying that Guy also must have staggered out into No Mans Land in desperation, as that night Les had heard someone calling for water from a shell-hole. He crawled down and found Guy and gave him a drink of water, which is no good for a stomach wound. Guy asked him to write to Win and said that if he did not recover that his last thoughts were of her, and he never spoke again. Les was picked up, but Guy was never found.”

The dreadful night of Fromelle saw Iris Tara lose her twin brother and her fiancé. Both never came home, were never properly buried and Iris never got to say a true goodbye to the two people that meant the most to her. She received the news of their deaths just one hour apart. When you hear a story like that, it becomes a personal tragedy. But just think of the other 5531 Australian’s killed that night; they all had stories like this, and that is a national tragedy. This is why we felt compelled to visit the memorial cemetery erected at Fromelles.

The following are both mine and Tara’s separate thoughts about the visit.

Tim:

Walking through the graveyard, I felt myself getting very emotional. I didn’t really know why there were tears brimming in my eyes, it wasn’t my family who had been killed here. But then I realised, the names on the stones are names of people I grew up with, people I went to school with; names like Wilson, Green, Loader, Johnston and Barrett. These were not long dead soldiers of another generation, they were my friends, my father, my brother. The names on the stones could have easily read Wilcock, Grayling, Bleazby, Muscroft, Eather, Stanley or Hawken. Had we been born in another time, we would have been called up, and gone with no real idea why, or what we were in for.

It’s a dangerous thing to glorify war. It is abhorrent, gruesome and cruel. There is nothing romantic about bleeding to death in a muddy trench, shivering in pain and parched with thirst while the soles of your mate’s boots stamp around you in terror. There is nothing glorious about watching your friends die around you, only to be buried in a mass grave, unnamed and unknown. But what these people died for was important: defending their way of life. Because of them I have the freedom to go down the beach on a sunny day and enjoy a surf, or freedom to play a game of footy, or own a dog, the freedom to vote or the freedom not to. They might not seem big things if you don’t think about them. This kind of sentiment could easily be fobbed off as patriotic nostalgia. But what happens if you lose these freedoms you take for granted? Would you fight if you genuinely thought they were at risk of being taken away?

As we turned to leave the cemetery, there was an ominous rumble of thunder that broke the eerie silence of the place. It made me imagine how terrifying the rumble of mortar shells would have been, in the same place nearly a hundred years previous. I count my blessings that we were able to walk away from the memorial over the rain sprinkled ground, instead of being forced to stay there forever, buried anonymously in blood soaked soil.

Tara:

Frommelles is a little ghost village, with no one around and only a tiny sign that you could easily miss, pointing to the ‘Mémorial Australienne’.

As soon as we pulled into the carpark the initial thing that hit me was how many lines of white gravestones filled the memorial site.

It was such a touching experience, the sadness hit as soon as I walked through the gates to face so many unnamed gave stones. Each white arc, marks someone’s son, someone’s brother, uncle or friend. They all left behind wives, fiancés, mothers and sisters.

As I walked the graveyard, I thought of my great uncle and then of my great grandmother Iris. How she lost her twin bother and fiancé all in that one dreadful night. The saddest thought struck me, that in another time or place that could have been me, I could have lost my Husband Tim and my brother Simon that night, my two best friends . . gone .  never to come back.

What did make me smile however, was that the memorial is so nicely surrounded by lush green paddocks filled with trees and loads of dairy cows. It was just like the dairy farm that my past generation of family came from, lived and worked on. It was the same type of land that my family home still stands on. As Guy and Frank lay to rest nearby, I know that they rest in peace with reminders of home and cared ones, when they are actually thousands of miles away.

We were the only visitors that day in the 2 hours we stayed there. You would think that this memorial should have lines of Australian tourists visiting each day, just as many who visit the tourist spots we have visited, like the Eiffel Tower or Buckingham Palace, or even Gallipoli for that matter. But no one came that day to say thanks but us.

So when April 25^th comes around next year, ANZAC Day, have a think about it the night before. Do you sleep in all morning after having a big night out because you don’t have to go to work? Or do you set an alarm, and give up just ONE early morning out of a year, to say thanks for the life you are so grateful for everyday?