01 Private Harry Willis. Image © Tim Whitford
At times the only way to find peace on the site was to sit quietly at a graveside
(Harry’s great-nephew). Photo presented to the author by the family All other photos © University of Glasgow unless otherwise credited
Finding the missing of Fromelles TEN YEARS AFTER
The rediscovery of mass graves near the site of the Battle of Fromelles resulted in the recovery and identification of scores of Australian soldiers killed there in 1916. It also led to the establishment of a new Commonwealth War Graves cemetery, the first since 1982. Professor Tony Pollard led the excavation team. 2018 MARKS THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY of the discovery of intact mass graves resulting from the 1916 Battle of Fromelles – a fact that had entirely escaped me until the day after I spoke on the topic at the Archaeology of War conference at the Australian National Maritime Museum in June. Time flies by, and much water has passed under the bridge since I led a team on to that narrow strip of ground, adjacent to Pheasant Wood and overlooked by the village of Fromelles, in northern France. The Fromelles project was undoubtedly the most stressful and yet one of the most rewarding of my no-longer-short career as an archaeologist. Up until 2015, I would probably have said that it had been the most rewarding. However, that year I started work on the Waterloo Uncovered project, of which I am now the academic lead and a field director. The work of Waterloo Uncovered was the subject of a second paper I presented at the Sydney conference and, as will become apparent here, there is more of a link between the two than might initially meet the eye – but first to Fromelles. The search for unmarked mass graves containing the bodies of Australian, and possibly British, soldiers killed in the Battle of Fromelles – fought in northern France on
19–20 July 1916 – was initiated by Australian art teacher Lambis Englezos. Lambis is now well known for his commitment to recovering and commemorating the dead of Fromelles, and indeed of other First World War battles in which Australian troops fought and died. It was he who first suggested that unmarked graves, dug by German troops in the lee of Pheasant Wood, some distance behind their own front line, still contained the bodies of Australian soldiers. At first he was a voice in the wilderness – the official search for the war dead by the victorious powers ceased in 1921, so there was little interest at government level in what might well have been a wild goose chase. However, the assistance of historian Peter Barton, and support from a small group of Australians – including lawyer Chris Bryant, author Patrick Lindsay, archaeologist Richard White and television journalist Ray Martin – resulted in a case strong enough to convince the Australian government to engage a team from Glasgow University Archaeological Research Division to carry out a limited program of fieldwork in order to ‘groundtruth’ Lambis’s assertions. There was some compelling documentary evidence, in the form of wartime aerial photographs of the area taken before and after the battle – the latter showing eight pits behind Pheasant
Wood, five of which were backfilled within a week or so of the battle. Other evidence included a burial order issued to men of the 6th Bavarian Reserve Division who had fought in the battle and were now assigned the task of burying the enemy dead lying in and around their frontline trenches. So it was that in 2007, I led a small team of archaeologists in a project focused on the area that Lambis had identified as the burial site. The remit was clear: there was to be minimal intervention, in the form of ground disturbance, with the exception of the recovery of objects present in the topsoil and located through the use of metal detectors. Various types of geophysical survey were deployed in this initial phase of work, but given the heavy clay soils the findings were less than clear – it was certainly difficult to make out convincing traces of the pits in the resulting plots. Evidence came in the recovery of tell-tale artefacts, which included two medallions, at least one of which was presented to Australian recruits when they volunteered to serve at their local recruiting station.1 This one bore the place name Shire of Alberton, surrounded by a horseshoe border, with the letters AIF (Australian Imperial Force) set into the centre, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM 9