In this episode, we follow the Australians – the ANZACs – and men from the West Riding of Yorkshire who fought around the sleepy village of Bullecourt near Arras, in Northern France. Here more than 10,000 ANZACs became casualties in the bloody battles for the Hindenburg Line.
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the fields and Lanes around the Sleepy Village of buor in northern France became Australia’s cauldron in the battles of Aras here in April and May of 1917 we follow not just the Anzac here but men from the West riding of Yorkshire and examine the story of the bravest man in the aif we’re on the battlefield southeast of Aras this week near to the Village of buor and we’re back in ground connected to that film 1917 but this week’s podcast is not about that film and we will touch on the history of the Hindenburg line but much of this week’s content is about the men of the Australian Imperial Force the aif or often called the Anzac the Anzac have occupied a big chunk of my interest in the Great War over many many years one summer almost 30 years ago I sat in the garden and read most of CW Bean’s official histories of the Australians on the Western Front now I guess there are not many official histories which you could say you’ve read from cover to cover but beans engaging narrative and the way that he personalizes the stories with the names and details of individual men is what really brings that whole history of the Australian divisions and the units that fought in the aif to life and I found myself on my travels Across the Western Front dipping and diving into locations well off the Beaten Track in those days from from L to buor which we’ll look at this week but on The High Ground of the Hindenburg line in the final battles of the war around the tracks of Muk farm and up in Flanders around polygon wood and along the mine Ridge and then in those early years of when I lived on the som corselet the mayor of my Village was Michelle gon whose grandfather had once owned Muk Farm in fact the family still did own it it was still rented out to the same family that had had it nearly a century before the V Anders and in honor of his grandfather and the connection of that farm to the Australians every year Mich G the mayor would host a visit from the Australian war memorial a group Battlefield tour that would come and visit the village and he’d lay on a v on Earth for them and M asked if I would act as his translator and lay on a little exhibition of Great War artifacts for the group to see the first time they came they had a guide who would always be their guide Peter beress who was a senior curator of the museum with a lifelong interest in Australian military history and the author himself of several books Peter then used to come and stay with us at corselet in the week before the tour began and we off to obscure Australian battlefields and look for some forgotten locations that he’d found in war Diaries or photographs or Memoirs one time he came with some friends and they had some amazing panoramic photographs that have been taken by an Australian photographer on the battlefields just after the war and his friend turned up with a a nappy bucket with these things rolled up inside and off we went uh to with some trench maps to go and find the locations where they had been photographed and he’d brought with him a special camera to take some then and now images which led to an exhibition at the Australian war memorial at that time but living on the P this this moment in time in the ’90s was when there was a an explosion of interests in Australia’s part in the Great War Beyond galipoli galipoli had defined his experience in the war but then Australians suddenly realized that 45,000 Australians had died on the Western Front this was the bulk of their wartime service and they began to come back to the Western Front or perhaps visit the Western Front for the first time to see where a relative had fought to visit a grave and there were very few organized tours for them outside those done by the Australian war memorial and often they would just arrive in drips and drabs and and you’d bump into them one summer we encounted a young Australian lad at Alba station looking at the map of the cira souvenir which which is the Tourist route that takes you around the S battlefields and he had a slouch hat on and there could only be one nationality there with with that so I tapped him on the shoulder and said good day mate and uh he came and stayed with us for a few days young Ian he’d been following his grandfather from galipoli and then out to the Western France and he showed me some of the diaries that he’d written during the course of his journey this is many respects the still the pre-digital age he wasn’t writing this on an iPad or taking digital notes he was writing it just like his grandfather had probably done in a in a paper diary and reading some of his impressions of watching the sun rise over the aian sea off of Anzac or what it was like to travel along the railways into France it was probably just like reading the thoughts of the men of the Australian Imperial Force who’d come that way during the Great War and I found myself as well in the ’90s and into the the early 2000s being involved with the Australian government’s attempt to look to build a visitor center and open new Memorial sites one at laml for example I assisted Brigadier O’Brien with that and had some fascinating times with him a Vietnam veteran on the battlefields comparing how Ford observation officers in the Great War did their task compared to him in the jungles of Vietnam so this this interest in the Australian aans and and watching Australian Battlefield tourism develop over that period what was in some respects an obscure interest turned into something that became mainstream and and more importantly what it also meant is that the men of the aif the Anzac were not forgotten and two decades later although covid has obviously got in the way in more recent times that level of Australian visitors to the Western Front continues they come just like the men who came before them from the other side of the world not to fight now but to remember and to visit the graves of those men who laid down their lives for Australia for a new nation a new Dominion nation that was rising and finding its way in the world now that’s not to say there’s not been a bit of what has recently been called an Zachary on the battlefields of the Great War uh with all these Australian Memorial sites there is perhaps this feeling that somehow their story dominates and I’ve had a few friendly conversations with Australians about the role of their men and how that fits into the wider picture of the British expeditionary force of which they were a part and we know now that not all Australians were 6- foot bronzed Bushmen the majority of Australians lived in towns and cities at the time of the Great War for example not in the bush but the aif was an all volunteer army from beginning to end there was never any conscription it fought in some of the toughest battles of the Great War and its men being part of a nation that was Finding its way in the world perhaps felt differently about themselves and the characters that you see emerge from its story are really quite incredible so all of that brings us to these battlefields near buor a battlefield that cost Australian Imperial Force deer in 1917 and we’re now going to take a walk across that Battlefield not looking just at the Anzac but looking at the story of the men who fought here around bulur in 1917 we’re starting the walk close to the Village of quazi a village captured in the advance to the Hindenburg line in 1917 before the Battle of Aras began the Germans having completed the construction of the Hindenberg line during that winter of 19617 realizing that they could not hold the Som front indefinitely withdrew to it and the British army effectively followed up behind and British units captured this Village in early April and it became essentially the position from which we established our Outpost line lightly dug shallow trenches initially similar to the ones that we see in the film 197 I promise I won’t keep going on about that but those trenches give us an idea of what the positions here at that time looked like with these positions established that gave us a fold to fight the next battle and that battle in this area would be the Battle of Aras in April and May of 1917 but we’re not starting in the village of Quasi we’re on the outskirts of it down a rural track leading up to quite a steep embankment which was the Old Railway line that ran from Aras through these Villages across towards combre a railway line that was decommissioned many decades ago and and is now a cycle and foot path but we’re not on that we’re on a minor road that runs parallel to it and leads up to a small Battlefield Cemetery quasi Railway Cemetery it’s quite a remote Cemetery this one way off the Beaten Track and I suspect doesn’t get a large number of visitors and it’s so named of course because it’s set right at the foot of the embankment where the railway line once ran it’s one of a number of semi cies connected to Railways which we’re going to look at in a future podcast the connection between the location of cemeteries and the naming of cemeteries and that link to the vital Logistics mechanism that that was the railways but this ground captured in early April of 1917 the cemetery was started by the 21st Battalion of the Manchester regiment which was originally a Manchester poers Battalion it had seen action extensively on the S in 19 196 and many of its original Powers have been killed or wounded some by this stage of the conflict had returned to the Battalion but increasingly their ranks were now being filled not by volunteers who joined up late but by this stage of course conscripts conscription had come in in May of 1916 nearly a year before and now many battalions on the Western Front like the 21st manchesters originally volunteers Pals the bulk of their ranks were now made up by consp to replace those losses they buried some of their dead in the cemetery and then the cemetery was used by Frontline battalions and units in this area from April 1917 during the battles here in in the Battle of Aras right through to January of 1918 on the 21st of March 1918 the Germans broke through in this particular area Ern Junger the famous German Soldier author of The Great War with his two fantastic memoirs of that conflict storm of Steel and cops 125 he took part in the fighting in this area and describes it in storm of Steel but the Germans buried some of their dead from this action in existing Cemetery so the several British cemeteries that existed at that time in this Village and in the neighboring Villages were all used to bury their dead and in some cases those soldiers were subsequently removed for burial into German cemeteries postwar in other places like like here their graves remain so it’s only a small cemetery and and we’ve got 181 British burials at quasi Railway cemetry 26 German there are 27 unnamed soldiers and one special Memorial the unnamed are quite likely men from that March 1918 period possibly buried by the Germans the Germans just like us when we captured a position would bury the enemy dead both did this for practical reasons aside from anything else but uh so these men are probably from that period of the of the war and the special Memorial May well be a grave that was destroyed in shellfire during that March 1918 German offensive that swept through here the ground was retaken subsequently in August of 1918 but there were no burials from that period in this Cemetery other cemeteries in the in the area were used at that time when we look at the plot of British Graves that are in here they reflect very well the types of units that passed through this area during the fighting against the Hindenberg line particularly in 197 and when we read the cemetery when we look at the cap badges and look at the orders of battles of the divisions of the British army we can see a connection between the different units that pass through here the seventh Division and those men from the Manchester powers for example men from the 62 West riding division Yorkshire territorials and later on uh men from the 6 th Irish division they took over this sector after the battle of Aras was over they’d come down from the fighting along the mine Ridge and along the steenbeck river in in August of 1917 when men from the Irish division had taken very heavy casualties in in those operations and they came down to what was a quiet sector but found themselves in November of that year being involved in a diversionary attack for the Battle of combre which took place over to the right flank off in the distance towards combre Beyond bulur but the 16th Iris division took part in a small scale assault against the German positions here to draw German attention away from that area of the battlefield the Infantry went into action against the German positions with a large number of men from the Royal engineer units of the division including men from the 156 field company and I mention this because one of the men who was killed in that assault and is buried here is sapper James quantril he’s my great uncle one of several great uncles who fell in the war that connect me to different parts of the old front line he was a South London boy and and his brother and his dad were in the Army his father was a regular soldier in the Royal engineers and he was at the front his brother was a reservist in the raw fusers and he came out in 1915 and served in the fighting around EP and then on the PM and at Aras 1917 and I like to think that the brothers may have met up at that particular Point as they were very very close together indeed in 1917 but also I know that Jimmy quantril spent a big chunk of his War up in Flanders and being an engineer not always in the front line operating the area behind the lines around e back towards poppinger and when you go into tobert house at poppinger you go in through the original front door and into the main Corridor there there are some frames on the left hand wall that conin some of the friends notice board announcements that were pinned up on the walls of torbet house at that time and what would happen is that when men were in the area for a given amount of time they would put their details up on the wall there to announce that they were there and any friends or family that saw that could seek them out and although Jimmy quil’s name is is not up there it’s it’s an incomplete collection of these notices there are quite a few men from his unit from 156 field company and often one wonder whether he was in there with them and every time I’ve been to toet house I’ve thought of him and wondered did he climb the stairs too just like I’ve done many times to the hop LOF Chapel so here’s one of my own personal beacons to the Great War buried in this cemetery and I feel lucky that I’m the custodian of his medals his Great War medals my Aunt Ivy gave them to me many many years ago because there was no one within her family who was really that interested in the story of the quantril quantril was her maiden name and she wanted to make sure that he was not forgotten and I’ve walked the track from quasi up to this isolated cemetery on many occasion to come and see him and here he is buried amongst men of his units men of his Division and the British and Australian soldiers buried side by side close to the graves of their foe the Germans in this perfect English Garden of Remembrance here out in the fields along the lanes somehow cut off from the modern world but which transports us back to the generation of the Great War and once more a cemetery like this is the seure of the memory of the men who came this way over a century ago so we bid farewell to the lads here and towards the back of the cemetery underneath the raway embankment there is a tunnel and it’s been a while since I’ve been through there but you could actually access the the other side of the embankment by going through this tunnel I would guess that it is probably a postwar reconstruction of a tunnel that was there at the time and looking at some of the trench Maps it seems that we probably Ed tunneling companies to put additional tunnels through there to facilitate movement from the safety of the cover of this embankment through it and to towards the Frontline positions that were indeed Beyond so we’ll take that tunnel that’ll take us out onto the Quasi acou Road and we’ll turn left there walk up the hill slightly and a track will go off to the right s post for bore and we’ll follow that track as it rises up onto High Ground again and here we’ll stop as we’ve reached the battlefield of the Hindenburg line we’re standing now in the Open Fields between the Villages of Quasi and buor and what was essentially the Left Flank the left hand portion of the battlefield at buor in 197 and in the two major attacks here during that battle in April and May the 62nd West riding division were prominent in the fighting in this area of the battlefield they were a Yorkshire territorial division 20,000 men with 12 infantry battalions a Pioneer Battalion and all the usual supports from Engineers to artillery to Army service cor and Royal Army Medical Corp to Veterinary Corp they had been formed in 1914 because the local territorial battalions of the West riding of Yorkshire were already full with either their pre-war members or the men who’ flocked to join at the beginning of the conflict so what were called second line territorial battalions were then formed so in barnesley where I live there was the first fifth Battalion of the yoran Lancaster regiment that recruited in barnesley through elica where I am across towards Rotherham in 1914 their ranks were full they went off to fight with the 49th West riding division so they formed a second line territorial Battalion the second fifth yoran lanks that were recruited in exactly the same area so in many respects they were a duplicate Battalion of of the original one recruiting men from barnesley across towards Rotherham and on the fringes of of Sheffield and that Battalion fought alongside its sister Battalion the second fourth yoran lengths the halam sheir Battalion and were part of this wider West riding division that included men not just from the oran lanks but men from the West riding regiment the Duke of wellingtons for example but also the West Yorkshire regiment and the King own Yorkshire line infantry so it was very much a Yorkshire division now we come across these Lads before because later on in 1917 they fought at havin and we visited their divisional Memorial in the walk that we did from havin cor and the ground around fles gear so you can go back through the podcast to find that episode in the list the Battle of Aras began on the 9th of April 19177 but the assault in this area didn’t take place until the 10th on the 10th of April four battalions of the West York regiment attacked the ground close to where we’re standing now from Outpost trenches so from lightly constructed shallow trenches that formed an outpost line rather than a proper defensive line because they didn’t need to defend it they were about to attack and move the Germans back and they moved into the assault on the Hindenburg line these deep trenches with thick belts of wire machine gun positions often machine gun bunkers concreted infantry shelters and tunnels this position that the Germans felt was almost impregnable and indeed on the 10th of April it proved to be so because despite a bombardment that on the S the previous year would have been more than sufficient to dislodge the Germans here this wasn’t the case and the thick belts of wire remained uncut and the West Yorkshire Lads got moaned down by German machine gun fire and shell fire and had to pull back with heavy losses no unit that day under these circumstances was going to breach these positions the second and much bigger attack took place across this ground on the 3rd of May 1917 one of the the deadliest days of the battle of Aras when the assaulting battalions went into action supported with tanks for the men of the West riding division this was their first experience of the use of Tanks alongside them in the Great War not very successful at all and it wasn’t just the Australians with with which we’ll discuss later on with with their poor experience with tanks that gave soldiers little confidence in the ability and indeed in the use of Tanks what was their purpose apart from being shell magnets it happened here as well and it wasn’t really until that final year of the war when the use of Tanks was properly perfected that the Infantry could see what an advantage it was to have tanks on your side in operations like this in this attack the bombardment did much more damage to the German positions and more importantly the wire so a lot of battalions got through and into the German trenches some on the right got into the village of buor itself some even got Beyond bore but those men were so few in number that they were isolated by the Germans and surrounded and either killed or taken prisoner the losses here in that attack on the 3D of May 1917 to the men of the West riding division were very heavy indeed there was over 3,000 casualties and when we look at it the effects of those losses on what was entally a locally raised unit so this wasn’t a pal’s Battalion it was a territorial Battalion but it was recruited in the same way so places like barnesley where I live now they were affected here in April 1917 nearly a year after the first day of the song when the death of so many barnesley Powers at SAR had devastated the town barnesley and its outlying Villages were affected once more were the losses here at buor in the second fifth Battalion they had well over 100 soldiers killed in action with a quite a high proportion of those from the barnesy area and when I look at the barnesy war memorials and The outlying Villages including my own I see men killed in this attack Lance corporal Charlie Kirby for example who lived in Foundry Lane in elica down in the main village he was one of those who was killed so this loss of men and how it impacted the community didn’t just end with the S we saw many occasions again throughout the war particularly 19177 in actions like this at buor and the involvement of men from Lancer for example at passendale which we discussed in the previous podcast in the assault there as late as October 1917 so The Echoes of the effect of raising a localized Battalion went on Way Beyond the fields of in one of the West riding division’s machine gun companies here at buor at that time was leftenant Henry William Williamson Henry Williamson author who went on to write the bestselling tar of the otter but l in his life wrote a Chronicle of ancient sunlights which is a 15 novel sequence following one London family from the Victorian period to the time just after the second world war when the main character Philip Madison sits down to write this epic account of Britain in the early part of the 20th century Williamson based much of these 15 novels on his own life and his own experiences and the volume that covers the ground here at buor is love and the Loveless and I’ll put a link to this on the old Frontline website oldf front line. I bought a copy of this book many many years ago in a car boot sale and it was a copy owned by a veteran of the Great War in which he’d sent it to another veteran and he’d said in in the introduction he’d written on the on the fly leaf of the book that this was one of his favorite books of the war and that the author couldn’t possibly have been in all these places which was indeed true but that it gave such incredible descriptions of the fighting Williamson was here as a transport officer he had his donkeys his mules and he brought them up to the area here around bulle to bring up the ammunition and supplies to the machine gun companies who were supporting the Infantry in the assault here this ground was Williamson’s last battle on the Western Front he got dentry in the summer of 1917 and went home and never served overseas again but he spent the rest of his life in the shadow of the Great War and in the shadow of the comrade that he left behind here on the battlefields of the West front and his work for me remains some of the finest writing about the Great War ever put in print so with thoughts of Williamson and his donks bringing up the supplies and the ammunition under shell fire will follow this track down and into the village of buor it comes down into one of the main streets and there’s a museum up on the left hand side and that will be a next stop today this is the Museum of Jean and Denise lat Jean lat was the former mayor of buor he was a local farmer here and Denise was his wife and for many many decades they did so much for the thousands of Australian visitors who came through here young Aussie Backpackers would turn up in buor expecting there to be a hotel where they could stay but of course it was a tiny village and there was only a bar so Jean and his wife would often put up these young Australians and look after them and feed them and take them to places it was a wonderful thing that they did over so many years and it was great for me to see in the 1990s them being recognized for the work that they had done the kindness that they’d shown by Australia with the award of the Australian order of Merit I first met Jean way back in the early 1990s when on one of these trips following where the Australians had force on the battlefields I read in John laughin’s excellent single volume guide book to the Australians that there was a little private Museum in the town hall at buor so we came here and and like on many trips to the battlefields often there were these strange coincidences in which she were just in the right place at the right time and I came here and the marry the town hall was open and in there was a tall figure the mayor M Jean L and he very much welcomed Us in he showed us his exhibition of artifacts that have been found on the battlefields and personal things that have been brought over by families in Australia who left them behind photographs and other artifacts and he said uh I’m actually closing this soon because I’m going to build an extension in in my own Farm I’m about to retire from farming and I’m going to use the farm buildings for the museum and not long afterwards he did indeed open this fantastic Museum private Museum of the first world war in his own house in one area of his Barnes that he converted for the best stuff and then in one of his bigger barns he had the larger objects which included quite a few chunks of Tanks some of these tanks that have been used at buor in 1917 that have been found by local farmers or had been Unearthed when they’ve been doing work in some of the fields so this was one of many such private collections that existed on the battlefields at this time and you could go from area to area and come across these local collectors that would have these amazing time captures of the Great War where the artifacts that they had found from their locality really did tell the story of what had happened there during the first world war and when I lived on the salmon we used to have Australian visitors and come across to see the battlefields at buor with them always call in to sejour and for a while we used to do small group tours with Ledger holies uh in a smaller coach and we used to call in here quite regularly to see his Museum and people were just amazed at the sort of artifacts and and objects that he that he had in here and he spoke pige English and he would always try and Converse with him but he he was such a kind man him and his wife always would welcome you with a cup of coffee and a bit of cake and a chat and it was just a great experience to come here and so sadly as As Time Marches On and people like this Fade Away what happens to museums like this and thankfully here John thought ahead and the collection was donated in perpetuity and is now run by the local C of this area of the the pad Cala and they turned it into a a formalized museum in in part of the barns of his Old Farm the house has been sold and someone else lives there now but the barns are here with a new Museum and there’s video of Jean and Denise and film showing the collection laid out as it once was and I think what they’ve done here is is a very sympathetic way homage to to Jean and his ideals not every object that he had in his personal collection is now on display here but it does help tell a story and is a museum really worth coming to and I can’t recommend it enough and it’s good to see really that someone like him can live on in this way in the previous podcast we spoke about how Jackie platu of the last post Association sadly died and these men and women who form part of the character of the battlefields as they have been over the last decades part of what many of us describe as the old God when they begin to fade away we can lose so much but here at buor it hasn’t been lost Jean and Denise live on and the stories of that the men that they tried to perpetuate the memory of they’re here too and it’s very strong on that it’s very strong on individual stories of ordinary men and not just Anzac not just Australians because this was a battlefield that involveed men from many different units and that was reflected in the things that Jean found in the fields around bulur I put some pictures of the old Museum up on the podcast website so you can see see what it once looked like but looking at those and going there today you’ll not be disappointed and I hope that the next time you’re at our ass you will have a chance to visit this excellent small Museum so from here we’ll continue along the roads up to the next Crossroads we’ll turn left there and we’ll walk up to the church the village of buor was completely destroyed by the end of the Great War in the first two years of it was pretty much untouched because this was a village way behind the German lines when the front lines were in the Som region and units that were fighting there would often come back to Villages like buor and be bitted here in the same way that we utilize Villages behind the British front line Beyond ALB towards Amir for exactly the same purposes so the presence of the German Army here was a visible presence to the locals but then at the end of 1916 is that cold of the war approached the Germans arrived to construct the Hindenberg line to build this system of defenses to withdraw into once it was complete and they brought with them not only their own pioneers and Engineers to to do this they brought a large number of Russian prisoners of War to do a lot of the donkey work but they also conscripted local villagers to come out and do some of the work as well and eventually once this work was near in completion places like buor being now close to the front line area were evacuated and the people thrown out of their houses and sent off to become displaced persons um most of them going off towards Villages or locations up towards leil or over towards combre some up into the occupied parts of Belgium many of them never to return When The War ended and people came back to the dust of this Village destroyed after two years of almost constant bombardments in that second part of the war very many families just never bothered to come back it’s a similar tow right across this area of Northern and Eastern France so everything we see here including the church we’re standing in front of now is completely rebuilt nothing predates the first world war but in front of the church there are a number of memorials including quite a large one the original bulur Memorial which is often referred to as the slouch hat Memorial it’s a brick and stone structure with Portland Stone common weal Warg graes commission style engraved panels on it and then a bronze slouch hats the hat worn by Australian soldiers topping the the memorial on on the upper level of it and it commemorates not just the Australians the Australians participated in a major Wes were discover in the fighting here in 1917 but the memorial came about in the 1980s with the corporation of the village of bulur Jean lat and also a gentleman in Aras called Andre quo who again had one of these amazing private museums had written a number of books on both the first and the second world war in French and in that period of the 80s tried to sort of Kickstart some of the remembrance of what had taken place here by putting out memorials on different parts of the battlefield and this was one of them so it commemorates the Australians but it’s also got the divisional emblems the divisional signs of the British divisions like the seventh division the West riding Division and the 58th London all of whom fought on this part of the battlefield John Laughin who wrote an incredible number of books on military history in what I think was one of his best books which is the single volume guide book that I mentioned the Australian battlefields and we’ll put a link to that on the podcast website he says in that that this bronze slou chat was an original slou chat that was bronze now I don’t quite know how you do that you bronze piece of felt material maybe somebody in response to this podcast can tell me but I suspect it’s just a copy of an original slouch hat and for many years this was the only Memorial on this battlefield but others in various shapes and forms were added and we’ll come to the main Australian one further into this walk but then sometime in the late ‘ 80s early 90s they found a big section of tank track out in the fields and they brought it here to place near to the slouch hat Memorial which was a sort of impromptu Memorial to the role of the tanks and then eventually that was formalized into a proper little Memorial that commemorates the men of the tanks who were here in 1917 so you’ll see that when you come here today so this little square in front of the Town Hall which once hous the original Jean L Museum it’s directly opposite the church there’s a little cafe on the corner which is occasionally open these places in rural France now that have cafes are getting rarer and rarer sadly and from here we’ll continue up through the village out onto the battlefields we’ll get to a fork in the road and we’ll take the right hand Fork that goes towards the village of ranor and we’ll walk down into a sunken part of it where we’ll come to the memorial Park this Memorial Park was one of a number of sites that was established by the Australian government in the 1990s that began to help drive that return of Australians to the battlefields they’d never come in any great numbers in even in the inter War period there was no big Australian pilgrimage to the Western Front in the same way that Canada came to vime in 1936 but Australian visitors had come to visit sites and pay their respects to the Fallen but in the ’90s it began to change and the Australian government spent a lot of Australian dollars on creating sites like this on different parts of the Western Front and this statue that’s here this bronze statue of an Australian Soldier the Digger Memorial was designed by Peter KET and it was unveiled on Anzac Day 1992 the 25th of April it depicts Peter ket’s own father who was a a veteran of the Great War it’s based on wartime photographs of him and it commemorates the more than 10,000 Australian soldiers who became casualties at bore in 1917 it gives us a good impression of of what an Australian soldier at that time of the war looked like What He Wore he’s got his slouch hat on and and when you look at the photographs of Australian soldiers they did March to and from the battlefields often still wearing their slouch hats when you read the accounts of some of the Australian soldiers some wore them in the front line but of course one of the reasons you wore a shrapnel helmet a steel helmet was to protect your head from Shell burst above the trenches so any right-minded Soldier would always have his steel helmet on when they were available and of course by the time the Australians came to the Western Front they were pretty much dier for any soldier in the for W zone of the battlefield but the Aussies like their individuality and the slouch out was their symbol so it’s quite appropriate I suppose that this this bronze Digger has got his slouch hat on but his helmet’s on there as well and he’s wearing his Battle Gear his 1908 patent webbing a lot of Australians when they came to the Western Front in 1916 there had been a short fall in production of webbing for Australian soldiers so they were wearing a leather copy of the 08 patent webbing equipment that was made it was set out of kangaroo hide whether that was entirely true or not I don’t really know but uh certainly its survivability in the ground is pretty good Jean lat found examples of of that leather equipment here at buor and Dominic zanadi at poser on the Som has found a whole load of it at different times over the years in the fields around poser where the Australians were fighting in 1916 and it comes out of the ground looking pretty much almost new and I found bits of it myself walking the fields there along the elbow and around Muk Farm you can’t help but come across this stuff so he’s wearing his his combat equipment he’s carrying his Lee Enfield rifle to all Australian soldiers had just like British Tommy and he’s got his gas mask on his chest his small box respirator that was used in the latter period of the war and the standard issue to troops by the time they got to battlefields like buor in 1917 so when you come here with groups you can tell the wider story of the Australians in in the fighting here during the Battle of buor but it also gives you a good opportunity to talk about what sold war on the front in the front line in 1917 also here by the entrance to the site is is what’s called a a Bastian plaque and these were designed by an Australian dentist Dr Ross Bastian and they were put up on the battlefields I think from the late 80s into the early ’90s on different sites where the Australians had fought it was an unofficial projects and many people thought that they’d been placed there by the Australian war memorial and in one or two of them there’s some SL slight inaccuracies about some of the history and the Australian wow used to get complaints about these things but of course it wasn’t their work but what Dr Bastion did really was again it helped Kickstart this interest and this identification of the importance of Australian battlefields on the Western Front so it’s all part of that process that led to the Resurgence of Australian interest in coming to visit places like this but at the back of the memorial site in November 1994 one of the local farmers was going about his usual business doing some plowing and he Unearthed the body of an Australian Soldier it was obviously skeletal remains but with him was his equipment and his rifle and his helmet and more importantly his aluminium identity disc is dog tag the Australians had quite a thick aluminium one that many soldiers wore they had the the red and green fiber ones as well but a lot of Australians had these aluminium ones and of course they survive in the ground and this one was in very good condition and from that you could read his details the tag identified him as sergeant Jack White of the 22nd Battalion Australian Imperial forces who had died on this spot on the 3rd of May 1917 in the Second Battle of bulur he was a blacksmith from a town in Victoria in Australia who had joined up at the beginning of the war and had seen extensive service on the Western Front as the body was carefully removed from the ground for handing over to the Commonwealth wargraves commission a small leather wallet was found in what was probably the position of his tunic pocket and when it was opened up inside was still visible a faded image a very very faded image of a soldier with his wife two young children in the front and a young baby and as that wallet was gently and carefully removed from the soil of the battlefields of bulur and that photograph was suddenly visible again incredibly that young baby Mill was still alive now an old lady living in Australia finally her father had been found the Australian government contacted Mill and they came out the whole family came out it had been a tradition within the family to name the oldest son jack in memory of Sergeant Jack White who’ been killed here in 1917 and the eldest Surviving Jack White came for the eventual reburial of Sergeant white in Quon Road Cemetery a big military cemetery not far away from the battlefields of buor that took place on a misty day in October 1995 finally a daughter had some closure she’d found her father and his loss and her grief somehow spoke for The Wider loss of Australians here on this deadly battlefield of 1917 some of the artifacts that were found with Jack White were given to Jean lat for his Museum and they are still on display in the museum in the village today so in many any ways quite rightly a part of Jack White remains forever here at bulur while the discovery of soldiers from the Great War has become quite commonplace over recent decades the finding of Jack whites in this field at buor in 1994 was the first time since 1978 that an Australian Soldier had been found on the Western Front and identified and it shows how much that whole process of the recovery and identification of the dead has moved on on since then from the Digger Memorial will return to the sunken Lane and will turn right and continue downwards and a little bit further along where it becomes sunken even more on the left hand side on the bank is a memorial an older Memorial than the Digger statue this is a gry stone structure with a cross on the top that was placed here in the 1980s as in effect another early bull cor Memorial but this one prompted by British military historian Tony spagnoli who WR wrot quite a number of books on the Great War and had a special interest in Australia’s role in it and also by his friend John Laughin uh the Australian military historian that we spoke about a few times and the memorial was here to commemorate the missing of buor the vast majority of men who had been killed in the fields around buor whether that was the West riding division men killed on the Left Flank their names were on the Aras Memorial to the missing the vast majority of the soldiers who died there do not have a known grave and the same was true here in the battlefields around buor where the men of the Australian divisions had fought so old spag and laughing they came up with the idea of this Memorial and John lay of course in bulur was heavily involved in it and this was put up here to commemorate those missing soldiers over 2,400 Australian soldiers were missing at Bull cor and what began to happen as Australian families began to visit these battlefields they wanted to leave some something behind with a missing Soldier there was a name to see on the Villa bretano Memorial but there was no grave so people began to fix plaques to the side of this Memorial structure and you’ll see those there today and I think in that early time frame when the first Australian visitors began to come to places like this before the Digger Memorial and before the creation of Memorial Parks this was an important Focus for their remembrance whether it was for a missing Soldier or not this was where they came to to pause and think looking out across these Open Wide Open Fields there are no military cemeteries here no obvious place for a pilgrim to visit but this was a somewhere where you could stand and you could think of that face that had come from the other side of the world to fight here in 1917 so just like the Museum of Jean lat the memorial here lives on as a legacy to stany spagnoli and John Laughin and although lain’s views on generalship in the first world war and the conduct of the conflict are very much out of Vogue now I have a bit of a soft spot for him really in that he continued to try and popularize interests in military history and in particular the Australians in the Great War at a time when few other people were doing that so from here we’ll continue along the road to a point in which we’ll meet a number of tracks coming in from different directions and that’ll be our next stop where we’re standing now is a position known on the battlefield is six Crossroads and the track going off ahead of us down towards the right hand side of the village of buor is what was called Central Road six Crossroads isn’t quite six Crossroads anymore but it’s still identifiable as that Junction on on the battlefields and where we are is right in the heart of the Hindenburg line defenses here the two main sections of the Hindenberg line that ran through here were called by the Australians og1 and og2 they were old German lines one and old German lines 2 which were the names given to the German positions around the poier windmill on the Som in 1916 and they just replicated those names for the German positions here where we’re standing on this point on the battlefield we are not just in the heart of the Hindenberg line defenses in many ways we’re in the heart of The Cauldron that was the battlefield field of buor in 1917 this was the great killing ground of April and May of that year the first Australian assault on these positions was on the 10th of April and the second one went in on the 11th in what was the first battle of bulur this was a very very cold period of the war the weather itself was challenging let alone the enemy and the Australian soldiers went into action that day in the snow and for the first time in Australian military history these Australian battalions were going into actions supported by tanks three of the key battalions involved in that assault on the 11th of April were the 14th the 16th and the 48th battalions the 14th was jacka’s mob that was the Battalion in which Albert Jacka VC was serving he was the first Australian to be awarded the Victoria Cross at galipoli in 1915 and he’d gained this incredible reputation as a fighting soldier at posers in 1916 he fought in an action in which many felt that he should have been awarded a bar to Victoria Cross but that never happened and his Battalion the 14th was forever associated with him and became known as jacka’s mob which for them was a huge source of Pride leftenant rule who wrote one of the histories of the 14th Battalion records in that that they would March along the lanes to or from the battlefield and another Battalion would go by and see the color flash on their tunics indicating they were 14th Battalion men and would whisper under their breaths there goes Jack’s mob and it he says that it sent shivers almost down their spine to be associated with this soldier with a soldier like Jacka the 48th Battalion was commanded by leftenant Colonel Ray lean and this was a battalion in which a number of members of the lean family served its nickname amongst the diggers was the Jon of Arc Battalion why the Joon of Arc well the Joon of Arc was the maid of orans and the 48th battalion because of all these members of the lean family in it was made of all leans so it’s one of these great Aussie jokes sadly in the fighting here at buor this would cost the lean family deer major Ben lean would be killed in action and Captain alen lean would die of wounds as a prison of war in German hands his body never being recovered and then close by the 16th Battalion Australian Imperial force was led into action by Major Percy black DSO DCM Bean described him in those official histories that I mentioned as the bravest man in the aif he was a 39-year-old soldier and gold miner who’ been awarded the distinguished condu medal as an ordinary soldier at the Battle of galy Ridge at galipoli in 1915 commissioned from the ranks he became an officer and was awarded the distinguished service order for the fighting around Muk Farm on the Som in 1916 leading his men in into action at buor he could see that the tanks had failed so he reply said come on boys bugger the tanks and under a hurricane fusel of machine gun fire he led his men Through the Wire having captured their first objective in the Advance on the second major Percy black was always at the Forefront of the advance but was shot in the head and killed instantly his body could not be recovered the fighting continued and when the ground finally was captured his great friend Harry Murray VC went out to search for the body of major Percy black but it could not be found his name like so many who died at buor serving with the Australian Imperial force is engraved on the panels of the Villa bretano Memorial on the P that commemorates the missing soldiers of the Australian forces who died in France from 1916 until the end of the war there’s a magnificent painting of black leading his men into action at buor which used to be on display a copy of it used to be on display in the Marie the Town Hall in buor itself I think it might still be there if not it’s in the museum the je Museum but this exceptional bravery that men like Percy black exhibited on these battlefields that you read about time and time again in the stories of Australian soldiers in the Great War men like him gold miners come soldiers risen from the rank decorated for their bravery it’s all part of that that Spirit of Australia that Aussie spirit that you see running through the history and the stories of Australian soldiers on battlefields like these with the failure of the first battle of bulur the second one took place on the 3rd of May 1917 when at 3:45 in the morning Australian soldiers attacked in this area and over to the left where we began the men of the West riding division made their attack there the barrage was much better in this attack just like on the west riding division front and the wire was cut but heavy machine gun fire caused a lot of casualties to the Australian battalions that advanced here and at one point a false order to retire resonated through the ranks of the shattered units that had made their attack here and Men began to pull back and the whole attack just fell apart one of the lessons of the Australian engagement that from early 1916 was to never reinforce failure don’t keep sending men forward when it’s clear that the attack has ended has finished and it would only result in costly pointless casualties and Brigadier General gellibrand who was observing the attack from the nearby Railway embankment stopped further units from going forward and save many lives no doubt that day but despite that this and the whole battlefields here at bore this vast open plane Beyond The Village was a massive killing ground for Australian soldiers in 1917 there were 10,000 Australian casualties here killed wounded and missing and the vast majority of the dead as we mentioned before do not have a known grave they’re commemorated on the Villa bretano Memorial their bodies perhaps still out there just like Jack White but with another year or so and so many battles here around buor this whole Battlefield was almost atomized by shellfire and perhaps any field grade were destroyed in the process but this is a battlefield like so many that still keeps giving up its Secrets the last page once more is yet to be turned if ever will be turned on this battlefield a few years ago there was an archaeological dig on this part of the bore sector where the tanks had gone in 11 tanks from D Battalion had gone in to assist the Australians one had broke down on the approach of the others that went in nine of them were knocked out and two rallied the tanks completely failed here on open ground exposed isolated they were vulnerable and those tanks and their Crews paid the price tank 799 commanded by leftenant Davies was one tank wreck that Jean lat had Unearthed in the 1990s but the archaeological dig that took place here more recently uncovered the remains of another and the Germans photographed these tanks during the war quite extensive Ely they were if you like well-known wrecks on this part of the battlefield so once more despite the books that have been written about the Australians and the Great War several books now on the fighting here at buor we know so much but yet there is still such a lot to uncover so much to understand and as we walk down Central Road out towards the railway embankment the continuation of that Old Railway line that ran from the point where we started at quasi Railway cemeter and we get to that embankment and look back across these fields around the village of buor it is a battlefield forever associated with the Australians we’ve just crossed ground as well where men from the seventh division fought once the Australians had moved out two veterans Ron short of the second queens and hu Perry Morris of The Honorable artillery company both fought here I interviewed them in the 1980s and buor was a battlefield that they were loathed to discuss except that as a killing ground it gave them an Insight in what their Fates would be at passendale just a few months later in the swamps around the rav beak River close to zonab Beek after them the London territorials of the 58th London division fought here and by the time the fighting at buor closed in 1917 with the Australians and the British losses combined over 15,000 men had fallen in these fields here it’s a tiny area really 15,000 casualties killed wounded and missing and when we stand here now it’s hard to imagine the shattered landscape that this once was in the distance the low hum of the Wind Farm above us the skylarks which favor the vast Open Fields like these dust thrown up along one of the tracks indicates a tractor returning to work in the village the beep beep of a car horn indicates the local bread delivery doing its rounds life has returned to bulur life has renewed the world moves on just as it should but for those families that come from the other side of the world each year to stand here in Wonder looking for something that they probably can’t really even quantify for them there is a connection here that no words can really do justice to here they see where Australia took some of its first steps in a wider World here amongst all this sacrifice here is where the path of a Dominion nation was made and while Australians may not visit every day especially in the last year Peter coretz bronze Digger stands forever as a silent Sentinel overlooking this part of the old front line you’ve been listening to an episode of the old front line with me military historian Paul Reed you can follow me on Twitter at somore you can follow the podcast at oldf Frontline pod check out the website at oldf frontline.com and links to books that are mentioned in the podcast and if you feel like supporting us you can go to our patreon page patreon.com oldf Frontline or support us on buy me a coffee at buy meac coffee.com oldf Frontline links to all of these are on our websites thanks for listening and we’ll see you again soon [Music]