AFTERMATH OF WAR

WHEN THE ARMISTICE was finally signed to end the Great War between the Allied Powers and Germany, its timing was set deliberately to come into force at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. But after the roar of guns had died away, the bitterly contested swathe of ground that had been the Western Front remained a monstrous and persistent wound stretching across northern France and Belgium.

In time, the rubble of once postcard-perfect towns and villages would be cleared away, buildings restored or replaced, and cratered fields ploughed back into usefulness. The scarred landscape would begin to heal as survivors struggled for normality and order.

Yet at war’s end, tens of thousands of bodies remained entrapped in the mud. While battles raged, some had been hastily consigned to mass graves. Many more were lost, beyond knowing and with no recorded resting place, while the dubious fortunate at least lay beneath makeshift crosses noting only the barest details of their identity.

The task of locating and exhuming the dead, and then reinterring them in formally designated and consecrated cemeteries, was as daunting as it was distressing. About 295,000 Australians had fought on the Western Front with 46,000 dead among nearly 180,000 casualties from the fighting in France and Belgium. Of those, about 18,000 had no known grave at the war’s end.

THE IMPERIAL WAR GRAVES COMMISSION began its work in 1917, attending to the remains of soldiers of the British Empire. An Australian War Graves Detachment worked under the Commission’s direction, and, at its greatest strength, 1100 men were deployed on and around the former battlefields.

A Sergeant Sydney Wigzell, described in the press as “a. “You know that our boys are all ‘diggers’,” he began in grimly laconic jest. “Well there are 1000 of us who are us who are really ‘dinkum diggers’. It is certainly a gruesome and very sorrowful task, but…who more fitting to perform it, than their mates who were beside them when they fell.”