At home, or as you tour the twelve locations of the Australian Remembrance Trail in France and Belgium, listen to a four-minute audio-cast featuring the extraordinary stories of Australian soldiers 'on this spot'. Listen to the audio-cast from your device
Audio transcript
This is the Anglo-French Cemetery beside the British Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, at Thiepval in France. Here lie 600 soldiers—300 from France and 300 from the British Empire—brought here in the months prior to the dedication of the great memorial by Edward, Prince of Wales, and President Albert Lebrun of France on 1 August 1932. Only 108 of them are identified. The purpose of this unique cemetery, in words inscribed on the side of the Cross of Sacrifice, is to remember those two and a half million French and British soldiers who died, fighting for a common cause, in World War I.
On 1 July 1916 the cemetery was a battlefield. At 7.30 am soldiers of the 16th Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers left their trenches out in the fields directly beyond the Cross and, moving across no-man's-land, attacked the German front-line trenches which ran through the cemetery. The battalion war diary described what happened in a few, simple words: 'The enemy stood upon their parapet and waved to our men to come on and picked them off with rifle fire. The enemy's fire was so intense that the advance was checked and the waves, or what was left of them, were forced to lie down'. So great was the loss that the battalion commander ordered the remnants of the last wave, as they left their trench, to stop where they were.
Along a 20 kilometre front that day the British Army sustained 60 000 casualties, some 20 000 of whom died in battle or of wounds. Throughout the period of the Somme battle—1 July to 19 November 1916—the British Empire armies suffered more than 400 000 casualties. On the panels of the memorial are the names of 72,203 British soldiers described on the large inscription across the top of the edifice as 'The Missing of the Somme'. What happened on the Somme in 1916 looms large in the memory of the 'Great War', the 'war to end all wars'.
Buried on the British side of the cemetery are men who served in famous British regiments. One grave holds an unknown 'Soldier of the Great War' of the Northumberland Fusiliers, one of the British Army's oldest regiments, with the regiment's badge showing St George slaying the dragon, cut into the stone. Sergeant Major William James Nelson, born in Petersburg (now Peterborough), South Australia, fought with the 23rd Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers and died on 1 July 1916, a day on which 85 per cent of his unit—700 men—were killed or wounded. On 10 August, his brother, Private John Nelson, 16th Australian Infantry Battalion, died within sight of Thiepval, attacking Mouquet Farm. Neither of the brothers' bodies were recovered: William's name is remembered here on the Thiepval Memorial and John's is listed with the missing of the 16th Battalion in France on the walls of the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux.
Among the 300 soldiers buried on this side of the cemetery are ten Australian soldiers, four identified and six unidentified. On each of their headstones is that well-known emblem of the Australian Imperial Force, the rising sun badge. Their presence is a reminder that on the Western Front Australians served not only as members of the AIF but as proud citizens of that vanished realm known as the British Empire.