Our nation’s silent Anzac grief

ONE hundred years ago, news of the scale of deaths at Gallipoli was about to filter back to South Australia, forcing huge changes on the home front. South Australians were about to learn new ways of dealing with death.

IT was a wave of grief that South Australians did not see coming, a storm tide that would sweep away the old ways of dealing with death and leave many in a traumatised community unable to experience or even express their full emotions.

One hundred years ago, news of the scale of deaths at Gallipoli was about to filter back to South Australia, forcing huge changes on the home front. South Australians were about to learn new ways of dealing with death.

By September of 1915, the grieving women of Adelaide would create the first memorial in the world to Anzac Day.

Until Gallipoli, death had been a domestic affair and war a virtual unknown. In South Australia it had been usual for families assisted by local women to lay out the body at home, dress it and prepare it for a vigil, often overnight, before it was taken in a procession direct to the local church or cemetery for burial, most often the following day.

But as casualties began to rise, that changed. There were no bodies — they were left on the battleground. And public grieving, if deemed bad for the war effort, was not just frowned upon but potentially illegal.

In the first eight months of World War I from August 1914 there had been few deaths of Australian servicemen, and these were extensively covered in the press.

Even months after the first Australian military operation — the invasion of German New Guinea in September 1914 with the loss of five men — local newspapers would print, uncensored, entire letters home from servicemen about the battle.

The bodies of the dead, being in foreign lands, were not available for burial, so instead memorial services were held for them. But Australian families, like their soldiers overseas, were innocent of the scale of deaths that was about to descend upon them.

Much of the South Australian record of our home front in World War I can be found in the archives of the State Library of SA and the photographs, documents and multitudes of other material show a population that was fervently patriotic and upbeat about the war.

By the end of 1914, Britons were facing a much more grim reality. In Belgium and France they had suffered 100,000 casualties including 25,000 deaths in five months and were lamenting the loss of their loved ones. In most cases, their remains were never to be returned, so an increasing number of memorial services were held.

But with 25,000 dead, the British authorities feared the effects of endless memorial services in their churches and public places. Four days after the outbreak of war, they had passed a Defence of the Realms Act 1914, which would become a model for Australia.

According to State Library of SA researcher Rose Wilson, DORA, as it was known, did not specifically ban memorial services. Instead it gave authorities wide-reaching powers over civilians, including their meetings and gatherings.

“If such were deemed to prejudice the enlistment of servicemen, or the necessary activities involved in waging war, any gathering could be closed by the authorities,” she says. “Obviously this made memorial services tricky.”

In Australia, the War Precautions Act was brought in by the end of October 1914 and had similar sweeping powers. Censorship, for example, meant the frank eyewitness reports published in Adelaide newspapers of the German New Guinea campaign would never be repeated.

On April 25, 1915, the Australians landed at Gallipoli and took large casualties. No one has a final figure, but 650 to 750 were killed that day, and more than 1400 wounded. Since South Australians, Queenslanders and Western Australians led the assault, they took the heaviest casualties.

The papers reported a success, although the generals at Gallipoli on the day were describing the landing as a fiasco, and asked to immediately evacuate. They were told it wasn’t practical.

Back in Adelaide, there were no reports of a body count, the next day, or for weeks afterwards. By late May, the authorities had acknowledged 350 deaths. By December, when the Australians pulled out, there were 8700 dead, and a further 2700 New Zealanders lost.

South Australian families of the dead had to be told and the bad news often arrived in swathes. Throughout the war there would be battles when thousands of Australians died, interspersed with months of relatively light casualties.

It left the insurmountable problem of how to organise and conduct suitable services recognising the dead.

Wilson points out that one entirely practical problem was that the mobilisation of all available labour forces for the war effort made it difficult to organise a memorial service in any case.

“Nobody had time to attend services,” she says. “There were so many war dead, people could have gone to memorial services every day.”

“Secondly, workers involved in memorial and funeral facilities didn’t have the manpower to hold all these events. Clergymen visited people who had received the dreaded telegrams informing them they had lost a family member. But that was a huge commitment of time for the clergy who rarely had motor transport.”

Australians demanded that the remains of their loved ones be exhumed and returned to Australia but the military authorities refused. Influential and wealthy friends eventually prevailed with the return of one single soldier, fatally wounded at Gallipoli, Major-General Sir W.T. Bridges. His remains were discreetly returned to Canberra’s Royal Military Cemetery, and the public were permitted to visit his grave.

In Australia, as in Britain, funerals and memorial services for individual soldiers effectively ceased.

Australians were urged to be cheerful and to control their grief in public, because everyone was in mourning for a loved one. A badge was created for people to wear, in order to demonstrate that they were in mourning.

It’s hard to imagine the effect of this suppression of public mourning and its associated rituals. A decade later, in the late 1920s, the Anzac Dawn Service wanted women excluded because it “was inundated by the distracting signs of female grief.”

In 1915 in South Australia, after the losses at Gallipoli began to sink in, a group comprised mainly of women involved in the annual patriotic Wattle Day event decided to do something — and it amounted to the world’s first Anzac Day memorial.

They raised funds so that Adelaide architect Walter Torode could create a memorial — an obelisk topped with a cross — which was inscribed “Australian Soldiers” and “Dardanelles, April 25, 1915”. It was a start to the erection of cenotaphs, or empty tombs, which now populate Australia.

The governor-general, Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson, recognised the significance of the event, and journeyed to Adelaide to unveil the memorial on Wattle Day, September 7, 1915. The Anzacs were still dying in Gallipoli. It stands, still, in the parklands, often referred to as the “forgotten” Anzac Day memorial.

The State Library of SA has a huge selection of World War I resources such that it is capable of re-creating some of effects of World War I on the home front. There are large numbers of photographs, films, documents, letters, along with posters and flyers, programs and tickets. Importantly, the State Library is the only known repository outside the Red Cross headquarters in Geneva of Red Cross correspondence.

Unable to find solace through ritual, grieving families sought the help of the Red Cross to discover how, where or why their loved ones had died or gone missing.

The Red Cross, formed in South Australia at the outbreak of the war, would begin a long and detailed investigation by letter, seeking out eyewitnesses to the death. Months later, there might be a report based on what fellow soldiers or commanders had seen or heard.

The soldiers’ eyewitness accounts of deaths of their mates on the battlefield, often written to the Red Cross in their own hand, live on, a unique and remarkable testament in the State Library’s archives.

State Library director Alan Smith says that from the start, SA’s home front activities were dedicated to fundraising efforts, often exuberant affairs with lots of parades and pageants because everyone expected a short war with a happy outcome. One memorable early event was a charity concert in Adelaide presented by Nellie Melba, appointed a dame in 1918 for her work during the war.

Smith says the archives were being studied to better understand how the mood on the home front changed as news of the war became grim, casualties piled up, and maimed Diggers began to be sent home.

After Gallipoli, a steady stream of maimed soldiers began to flow back to Adelaide. They arrived at the then recently completed Keswick Barracks, which were hastily expanded to serve as a general hospital. It was there that the first attempts were made at “curative workshops” and it was home to the Artificial Limb Factory.

Keswick became the touchpoint for the home front in Adelaide, where the ghastly results of war could be witnessed first hand.

The hospital had a publication, What Every Disabled Soldier Is Told, which starts: “1. That there is no such thing as impossible in his dictionary.” The opposite page, What the Public Should Know, starts with “1. The crippled soldier needs encouragement. Sympathy does not assist him.”

After the war, rituals around death moved from hands-on in families’ front parlours to a more public and formal event, run increasingly by funeral directors.

As the centenary celebrations of World War I play out over the next few years, the State Library is leading museums and performing arts companies in producing events giving insight into the scale of changes wrought by the war.

The Search for Answers

Elisa Black

IN the archives of the State Library of South Australia, gathered in bundles and piles, lie the hopes and desperate fears of South Australian families searching for their lost men.

The only letters of their kind left in the country, the correspondence to and from the SA Red Cross Information Bureau during World War I, shows an expression of grief tempered by the era.

These aren’t the public demands for information that we (rightly) see today, nor the questioning of authority. These are families, mostly women, mindful of manners and with an inherent respect for authority, who are still desperate for news of their loved ones. Heartsick and without a body for which to grieve.

So they write.

Armed with this information, Red Cross searchers would scour the hospitals of Egypt, Britain and France, trying to send word home.

Port Pirie’s William H. Alderson was one of the first to contact the bureau after it opened in January 1916.

William’s son Lancelot was a 19-year-old sergeant in the 16th Battalion who fought at Gallipoli and went missing in the first week of the campaign.

His dad had been searching for him through letters to the military since May 1915, but had learned little of his fate.

The best the chaotic war office was able to offer him was that Lancelot had been wounded on May 7, but “ ... in the absence of further reports, it is to be assumed all wounded are progressing satisfactorily.”

So William turned to the Red Cross.

After eight months, through hard-found interviews with Lancelot’s fellow soldiers and a trail that lead them to a hospital ship, the bureau was finally able to tell William what had come of his boy ...

Witness (Corpl. Watts) says that Alderson was wounded on the right side of the waist by a bomb on the night of 2nd May at Dead Man’s Ridge and witness helped him down to the doctor. He seemed to be badly wounded and when the doctor saw him he made an exclamation as there was not much hope ...

Witness (Cpl. O’Gorman) says that Alderson had his right side blown in by a bomb on Sunday night 2nd May at Dead Man’s Ridge. The last witness saw of him he was being carried down to the ambulance. Witness enquired about him afterwards and heard that he had died ...

Witness (Corpl. Jenkins) says he saw Alderson wounded at Dead Man’s Ridge on the night of 2nd May, 1915, but thinks it was by a rifle bullet and could not say where. He was about 10 yards away from him ...

We are in receipt of two further slips from the Commissioners relating to your son which we deem will be of interest to you. They are as follows:

“Alderson’s name appeared in Battalion records at the Peninsula as severely wounded on May 2nd, 1915, died of wounds on hospital ship and buried at sea ... Ref Lieutenant Day

“Alderson was shot in the left thigh on 2nd May at Dead man’s Ridge, Anzac. I took him down to the dressing station after he was wounded. I wanted to carry him but he would not let me. Private Watts crossed our arms and took him down in that fashion. The bullet, we found, had entered his thigh and passed out through his stomach. We left him at the dressing station. He died afterwards on the hospital ship. Word came back to us to this effect. He was a pal of mine. I have seen his name and photograph in a South Australian paper as killed. He came from Port Pirie and was a little short fellow of about 19 years of age — Private F. Asner.

Lancelot Alderson, who enlisted in September 1914 but who needed his dad’s consent because he was only 18; a brown-haired lad who stood just 162cm tall and had been apprenticed as a cabinet-maker back home, was confirmed dead.

With his son’s effects finally returned to him, William Alderson writes one more time.

I am very grateful to your Society and the Commissioners for the valuable information obtained, and fully realise the difficulty there must be in finding a large number of cases of men wounded and missing.

He is now officially reported killed by the Military Office and a few of his belongings have been returned to me.

Again thanking all concerned.

Yours Faithfully

W H Alderson

Flinders University professor of history Melanie Oppenheimer has so far examined the first 250 packets of inquiries send to the Red Cross that relate to the Gallipoli campaign.

“People in 1915 were more tempered in their responses, they were more patient than we are now,’’ she says.

“However, the records, too, reveal that relatives of missing and wounded soldiers went to enormous lengths to gain any information as to what exactly happened to their loved ones. The grief is not lessened. It’s also the scale of the grief, the large numbers of families directly impacted by the war through the death of their sons, fathers and husbands. The whole society must have been grieving to some degree or another.

“It’s something I don’t think we can quite grasp today, the sheer scale of the loss and how that impacted people at home.

Originally published as Our nation’s silent Anzac grief