Greater love ...

 

 

On Monday the 25th of April, remember with sadness the many men and women who served their country in the great war, particularly the 63,000 of Australia's finest young men and women who went to an early grave.

 

Remember the families left to grieve. All they were left with were memories of their children's childhood and youth, a few photos - and a memorial in the main street.

 

Australia's best deserved to grow old and die at home, and not in Turkey, Syria or France.

 

 

Hold the torch high.

 

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

 

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

 

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

 

John McCrae (1915)

 

On January 28, 1918, while still commanding No. 3 Canadian General Hospital (McGill) at Boulogne, McCrae died of pneumonia with "extensive pneumococcus meningitis". He was buried the following day in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission section of Wimereux Cemetery, just a couple of kilometres up the coast from Boulogne, with full military honours. His flag-draped coffin was borne on a gun carriage and the mourners – who included Sir Arthur Currie and many of McCrae's friends and staff – were preceded by McCrae's charger, "Bonfire", with McCrae's boots reversed in the stirrups. Bonfire was with McCrae from Valcartier, Quebec until his death and was much loved.

 

 

 

In memory of Robert Peter HENLEY (1884 - 1937) – the grandfather I never knew, who died before his time.

 

Military Service: Regular Army 1908-16; Staff Sgt.  3rd Casualty Clearing Station, Australian Army 1916-19.

 

'Trains ran into the little siding loaded with wounded from the Somme battlefields.  The weather was terrible and the mud near the line so bad that many came in for treatment literally covered from head to foot . . . Sometimes 3 and 4 trains per day with loads of 200-400 cases.

 

. . . In December the sick began to come in numbers - trench foot, rheumatism, pneumonia.' 

 

At 10.30 pm the Gothas were over and bombed a lot of men; many were killed.  At 11.30 pm the wounded began to arrive.  The three C.C.S.s took it in turn to admit batches of 50 each. 

 

 I was in charge of the Resuscitation ward, with two splendid orderlies.  Torrents of rain were falling, and poor fellows were carried in, saturated and covered in mud, stone cold and pulseless.  Three primus stoves provided our hot water supply.  Many of our patients died as we lifted them from the stretchers.  By midnight, the ward was full of groaning wrecks.  I was appalled by the immensity of the task before us.  At the faintest sign of a pulse beat, we were injecting salines and working like mad to get the patient to the operating table.

 

Friday, 17 August.  The hospital was fuller than ever of dying men.  All day and night they poured in.  Troops came up in their thousands, past the hospital, singing with brave gaiety as they marched to death, disappearing amid the never-ending thunder and lightning of the guns.  As fast as they went up, they - or what was left of them - would be brought back in all sorts of frightful conditions.  We worked night after night, in the din of raging battles; dressed and bandaged the wounded; comforted them; praised their courage, their grit and strength of will.  The atmosphere reeked with the mingled odours of blood and humanity, antiseptic and gas.

 

No. 3 A.C.C.S. was included in the first echelon of a northern group (behind II Corps) with Nos. 2 Canadian and 10 British – a distinguished company – and during the next two months, with wounded and the first wave of influenza, had a very strenuous time.  It was made a special centre for the severer type of influenza, which began to occur in June, just before the first wave subsided.  Of a total of 1,893 admissions in August, 1,177 were for sickness, and it was observed that, while the number of patients diagnosed - influenza - decreased, the duration of  the disability and death rate from bronchopneumonia was on the increase.

 

Poperinghe 4 October 1917.  Patients began to arrive at 11 am, and in the first twenty-four hours about three thousand patients passed through our C.C.S.

 

The work in the Resuscitation ward was indescribable.  The butchery of these precious lives - men of such splendid physique!  To watch them dying in such numbers was ghastly.  Their frightful condition was appalling: clothes saturated; faces caked with mud; the conscious ones smiling grimly, glad to be wounded and out of it.

 

Mary Tilton: The Grey Battalion - (State Library of Victoria catalogue no. 940.4)

 

With thanks to my brother Ted for tracking down this information.

 

 

Lest we forget.

 

 

John Miller