By Tony Wright
It might have been one of the greatest Australian love stories of World War I – if only it had not been for the carnage we call the Battle of Fromelles, the first major action by Australian troops on the Western Front.
The battle – a shameful and ultimately pointless sacrifice of thousands of lives – occurred in France precisely 108 years ago this week. Ever since it has been called “Australia’s worst 24 hours in military history”.
Alice Ross-King (far left) marches with the Australian Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment.Credit: Australian War Memorial
For a young Australian war nurse, Alice Ross-King, it inflicted pain lasting vastly longer than a mere 24 hours.
Her heartbreak remains exposed for us to see and feel even today in the pages of a diary that is among the most graphic of accounts of World War I.
Ross-King, like many other Australian nurses, spent the war wading through lakes of blood and administering mercy to soldiers sent her way from the trenches, many of them suffering unspeakable agony and often insanity.
Her diaries, raw as the terrible days during which they were written, are now available at the touch of a keyboard on an Australian War Memorial website called Transcribe.
Almost 29,000 volunteers have spent – and continue to expend – vast effort transcribing the handwritten diaries and letters and other documents of tens of thousands of Australians who have gone to war: a mighty 3.7 million words so far.
Transcribe not only makes available the digitised words of all these people, without the need to interpret old script on fragile documents, but is evolving to include oral histories, placing text and the spoken word side by side.
The head of the war memorial’s research centre, Robyn Van Dyk, describes Ross-King’s collected diaries as among the most valuable in the memorial’s collection.
“You feel as if you are looking over her shoulder, experiencing the horror of what she had to deal with,” Van Dyk says. “You can see she struggled to keep up these diaries, but she wanted to keep an honest record of it all. It is also a very romantic diary, with almost a Jane Austen approach to some of it.”
Ross-King was neither wilting violet nor stranger to tragedy. Born in Ballarat in 1887, she moved with her family to Perth when she was a child. There her father Archibald and her two brothers were drowned in an accident on the Swan River.
She and her mother moved back to Melbourne, where the young Alice [though baptised Alys, she usually used Alice] studied nursing at The Alfred before becoming sister in charge of a private hospital in Collins Street.
She enlisted, aged 27, as a staff nurse in the Australian Army Nursing Service, on November 5, 1914, and was posted to the 1st Australian General Hospital at Heliopolis, Egypt.
Ross-King was confronted by the truth of war as the wounded poured in from Gallipoli from mid-1915.
Tuesday, May 4, 1915
We got through 800 dressings – attended to them properly, extracted a few bullets. Some of the injuries will mean amputation of the limbs. Most wounds fly blown. They were lying there in misery & some so weak & miserable the tears were flowing. The flies swarmed over them & the heat was suffocating & we could not get enough food for them.
By then she had met and fallen in love with a lieutenant from the Victorian countryside, Harry Moffitt.
On September 8, 1915, Ross-King was sceptical about such a match:
Mft pretends to be serious & is wanting real love - but I don’t know if I can trust him or not.
In less than a week, however, everything changed:
September 13, 1915
... a wonderful thing has happened. I am really and truly in love. I have never felt like this before for anybody. I am very, very happy because I believe [Harry] loves me just as much. He wants me to marry him after the war ...
Harry Moffitt (far left).Credit: Australian War Memorial
It becomes clear in the diaries that Moffitt’s promise of a life together held Ross-King’s hard-pressed spirits aloft clear through the last months of Gallipoli in 1915 and the first months of 1916 on the Western Front in France.
Moffitt, previously an accountant from the Gisborne-Kyneton area of central Victoria, was able to continue the relationship with Ross-King during his convalescence in Egypt (from an illness contracted in Gallipoli), and later during his period as adjutant of the 53rd Battalion guarding the Suez Canal.
Ross-King found within Moffitt’s country-boy exterior a romantic heart. She wrote of them climbing a pyramid to have tea together on top, the sun setting when “the colouring was wonderful”.
Later, she spoke of the last blissful day she would see her “Moff” before she was sent to help establish the First Australian General Hospital at Rouen on the Seine in northern France.
“We sat on the balcony at Shepherds [Shepheards Hotel in Cairo] and talked of our future. There was a wonderful sunset, a beautiful apricot glow. H. said ‘when we are married I’ll give you a dress that colour’.”
Ross-King would never see her Moff again. He would not reach France until June 1916.
When she could get a few hours away from her patients at the hospital, Ross-King travelled to a French railway staging point, dreaming that her fiance might be aboard one of the trains.
Saturday, July 1, 1916
“All the afternoon is spent on the Railway station hoping against hope that I might see Harry come through. But no luck.”
She had little time for such excursions, however.
July 3, 1916
Still the cases are pouring in; 500 alone today. Have one man who is quite mad. He got into the 4th line of German trench & went to take some prisoners. They cried mercy and while he hesitated one threw a bomb right into his face. The fire enveloped him & he says he lay there grovelling in the earth. For two days he was not picked up.
The next day, July 4, 1916, the diary is brutally succinct:
“Burnt case very bad. Crushed pelvis worse. Amputated leg. Three trephines [a cylindrical saw for cutting out circular sections of bone]. A lot of chest cases. No word from H.”
That “no letter from H.” began wearing at Ross-King. Her confidence grew fragile.
Sunday, July 9, 1916
All day long my thoughts have been with him but I have had no letter. I cannot think that he wd so neglect writing if he really cared for me. Well, I have other offers of love & I don’t think I’ll sit & fret over any one man. Still it is a blow.
And then, relief.
July 11, 1916
Letter from Harry! It has taken 10 days to come, but it is one full of love & all my confidence is renewed.
Soldiers of the 53rd Battalion at Fromelles. Credit: Australian War Memorial
Who could be surprised that Ross-King needed a letter to sustain her, for the entry that day went on:
Convoy of very bad cases. All have been lying out for 6, 7 & 8 days since wounded. They were where the stretcher bearers could not get them, in German trenches & dugouts. One man stretched out his hand for water & the wrist was immediately cut to pieces by explosive bullet.
July held much worse for both Harry Moffitt and Alice Ross-King.
On July 19, near the village of Fromelles, Australian soldiers of the 5th Division – a mix of veterans from Gallipoli and newly trained reinforcements – were ordered to attack strongly defended German positions across open ground at 6pm. It was broad daylight, with hours of light left in the high summer of France.
Harry Moffitt was among the attackers.
The Germans barely had to elevate their machine guns.
“Hundreds were mown down in the flicker of an eyelid, like great rows of teeth knocked from a comb,” related Sergeant “Jimmy” Downing of the 57th Battalion.
By morning, there were 5533 Australian “casualties” – the too-easy word that embraces all the death and wounds and agony of a battlefield.
More than 2000 Australian lives had been lost: tossed away, really, by British military chiefs who had insisted the ill-conceived operation proceed despite being warned it could only fail. Around 470 Australians were taken prisoner.
The British themselves suffered, too: the British 61st Division, attacking alongside the Australians, had 1547 casualties, including 500 dead. Amid the debacle, the British attack was called off, but an Australian commander failed to pass on the message, leaving Australians trapped between German guns.
The commander of the 5th Division’s 15th Brigade, “Pompey” Elliott, who had opposed the operation, met his returning men with tears rolling down his face. Haunted, Elliott took his own life in 1931.
Within days, Alice Ross-King would learn that Harry Moffitt was among those killed.
Saturday, July 29, 1916
“Well, my world has ended. Harry is dead.
God, what shall I do! Nothing on earth matters to me now. The future is an absolute blank.
I have kept on duty but God only knows how I have done so.
Oh my dear, dear love what am I to do? I can’t believe he is
dead. My beautiful boy.”
Over months, Ross-King’s diaries veer between false hope (“each day I long for a letter telling me he is only wounded”) and an acceptance of the hideous truth.
August 23, 1916
“They say it was not possible to bring in the wounded at all & that they are still lying there unburied. For days one could see occasional signs of life: an arm would wave or there wd be slight movement but it was quite impossible to collect the wounded beyond a certain distance. Thank God I am almost certain that death was instantaneous.”
Evidence later collected by the Red Cross found Harry Moffitt had been killed trying to retrieve the body of Lieutenant-Colonel Ignatius Norris, who had been killed while leading a charge to the Germans’ second line.
Moffitt was cut down by machine-gun fire and fell across the colonel’s body, but his corpse could not be retrieved. He was 33. He remains missing.
Ross-King continued to nurse troops until the end of the war.
She was awarded a Military Medal for “great coolness and devotion to duty” after five bombs fell on the 2nd Australian Casualty Clearing Station near the front line at Trois Arbres near Armentieres, where she was tending the wounded in July 1917.
Major Alice Appleford.Credit: Australian War Memorial
Sailing home to Australia in 1919, she met a doctor, Sydney Theodore Appleford.
They married and settled at Lang Lang, South Gippsland, and had two daughters and two sons.
During World War II, Alice Appleford was appointed Victoria’s senior controller of the Australian Army Women’s Medical Services, with responsibility for more than 2000 servicewomen.
She was awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal in 1949 by the International Red Cross, and lived until 1968.
It is not known if she ever spoke after the war about her beautiful boy, Harry Moffitt.
The Australian War Memorial’s Transcribe website can be found at transcribe.awm.gov.au