3 a.m. start, with an orange half-moon in the east. Took the wrong turnoff from the tollway, and got trapped in Amiens. By trial and error we discovered the right road and joined the line of traffic to Villers-Bretonneux. Our unscheduled excursion cost us about forty minutes, so by the time we parked the car and walked fifteen minutes back to the Australian memorial the service had started. A couple of thousand people sitting quietly in the dark, without enough light to read the programs. The sky was cloudless. It was jumper and coat and scarf weather, but not freezing. By the time the sun had come up so had the breeze, the gloves came out, and people started shivering. With the light we could see people of all ages around us, and hear Australian, English and French accents. Young French couples sat in front of and behind us. That impressed me – it wasn’t just the usual suspects.
Kevin Rudd gave a good speech, full of the motherhood statements that need to be said on occasions like this. Apparently Barry O’Farrell didn’t like it, but I can’t say I saw him haul his backside out of bed at 3 a.m. to be there.
A bugler in khaki played the Last Post from the top of the tower. The Last Post marks the end of the day; at memorial services it symbolises that the dead are no longer on duty and can stand down. As he blew Reveille the flags, Australian and French, were raised from half mast. It was the most moving part of the service.
The Ode of Remembrance was recited in English and French, and we responded to both to show off our language skills, and even had a stab at La Marseillaise. (That’s a bloodthirsty bit of poetry, isn’t it?). A cup of coffee and some croissants laid on by the community of Villers-Bretonneux, and a walk around the memorial to see a misty sunrise out of a Friedrich painting.
When we arrived back at our car we realised that we had parked in Villers-Bretonneux itself, so we walked into town to watch the wreath-laying ceremony at the French Memorial. As we went we ‘bonjoured’ the locals out of habit; you can tell we’ve been in France for a while. At the memorial we had a good position on the edge of a garden, but a group of older package-tour Australians on a pushed past and stood in the shrubbery. I made semi-loud comments about the rudeness of pushy people who trample the gardens of the country in which they are guests. They spoke loudly about the tragedy of leaving their carry-on baggage in the hotel rooms at their last stop, expecting the local slaves to pick it up and put it on the bus for them. Sadly, these days you can’t get good slaves. They blamed everyone but themselves. I didn’t tell them that the garden they were trampling had been recently manured, it would only inflict more distress. A close encounter with KRudd at the end of the ceremony helped them overcome their tragedy.
A beautiful drive through Corbie and up to Pozieres, where in six weeks Australia had more casualties than at Gallipoli. One of those casualties was Charlie Andrews, a railway officer from Lakemba in Sydney aged 22. After joining the 1st Battalion he found a niche as the quartermaster and was very popular. On 19 August 1916 his company was advancing on the heavily-entrenched German position at Mouquet Farm, north-west of Pozieres, when a shell killed Charlie and three other soldiers. The Red Cross located soldiers who had been there and collected their reports for the comfort of the family; however they edited one, to leave out the fact that Charlie was ‘knocked to pieces by a shell’. Mouquet is still a working farm, owned by the same family. Today its fields are covered in canola instead of trenches.
At the farm Megan gathered some small white flowers to take with us to Serre. Charlie’s body was buried near the trench the night he was killed. After the war the Commonwealth Graves Commission asked his family to supply an inscription for a headstone in the proposed war cemetery. They did so, but heard no further word. For several years his father Alfred repeatedly wrote to ask if they had found Charlie’s grave. In 1928 Charlie’s body was located at Pozieres and identified by his identity disc and a ring, which were returned to his father. He was reinterred in Serre Road Cemetery No 2, about 11 kilometres north-west of Mouquet Farm.
I had heard that the Commonwealth War Graves Commission takes very good care of the cemeteries, but I was impressed with how neat they were. It took us a while to find Charlie’s grave, thanks to the idiosyncratic numbering system; but when we did, Megan placed the flowers at the foot of her great-uncle’s headstone. The inscription is there (‘Safe in his Father’s arms’), and I wished we could have told Alfred how good it looked, and how the gravesite looks northeast across the fields.
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