Fromelles

We’ve lain lost for near a century. No-one knew where we were here

in a stranger’s land away from those whose memories held us dear.

We were diggers out for adventure, some too young to understand.

We fought for King and country out here in Fromelles, France.

It was supposed to be a diversion for the main action at the Somme.

The ‘Sugarloaf’ the target, but orders went all wrong.

The Germans on the hilltop could see for miles around.

And General Haking pushed us on when we no longer needed the ground.

On that fateful day in nineteen sixteen we were ordered the guns to charge

on the nineteenth day of July we faced machine gun barrage.

In “the worst twenty-four hours of Australia’s history,” the Fifth Division went over the top.

Some made it to the trenches, but full of rain they caused us to stop.

 “The air was thick with bullets in a criss-crossed lattice of death,”

was how Jimmy Downing described it – one of the few who survived the test.

Brigades Eight and Fourteen were there, and the Fifteenth led by ‘Pompey’ Elliott

who had predicted a ‘bloody holocaust’ and attempted to prevent it.

The Fifteenth Brigade was sorely let down, outflanked in no man’s land

when the British Sixty-first forgot to tell them of a change in plan.

Half of the Fifty-eighth Battalion was isolated and dismayed.

Left open to German bunkers they were caught in the enfilade.

Five thousand five hundred and seventy-three hurt in that bloodbath lay.

One thousand nine hundred and seventeen dead under Major General M’Cay.

Tears streaming down his face Pompey watched while his men died.

The ground resembled ‘a thousand butcher shops.’ Years later he committed suicide.

A truce to collect the wounded and dead poorly handled and misunderstood

left the casualties  dying on the battlefield crying out for Mother and God.

No comrades left to bury us, we were intertwined in mass graves

by the enemy who cut us down here on that fateful day.

No poppies grew above us, no cross showed where we lay.

Two hundred and fifty souls from the Battle of Fleurbaix.

Found in the year two thousand and eight, only seventy-five identified,

some by a science we never knew - DNA by descendants supplied.

A few of us were recognised by items with us unearthed,

a curled up hair in a locket, a ticket home to Perth.

We’re been re-buried in single plots at a place made especially for

the fallen who did not go home, with headstones for us all.

And those who can’t be named will lay at Pheasant Wood

below a stone simply engraved “Known unto God.”

I’ve waited for nearly a hundred years bushwhacked in foreign loam.

But now I’m free at last, and now I’m going Home.