The Nameless Names: recovering the missing Anzacs

By Scott Bennett

Few Australians realise that of the 62,000 Anzac soldiers who died in the Great War, over one-third are still listed as ‘missing’. With no marked graves, the only reminders of their sacrifice are the many names inscribed on ageing war memorials around the world.

Scott Bennett deftly tells the story of such missing Anzacs through the personal experience of three sets of brothers — the Reids, Pflaums, and Allens — whose names he selected from the Memorials to the Missing. Bennett traces their paths from small, peaceful towns to three devastating battlefields of the Great War: Gallipoli, Fromelles, and Ypres. He reveals the carnage that led to their disappearance, and their family’s subsequent grief and endless search for elusive facts.

Bennett’s unflinching account addresses many painful questions. What circumstances resulted in the disappearance of so many soldiers? Why did the Australian government fail in its solemn pledge to recover the missing? Why were so many families left without answers about the fate of their loved ones — despite the dedicated efforts of Vera Deakin and her co-workers at the Australian Red Cross inquiry bureau, first in Cairo and then in London? Vera, a daughter of Australia’s second prime minister, had had a privileged upbringing, and yet devoted herself tirelessly to seeking answers for the families of the missing.

The Nameless Names lays bare the emotional toll inflicted upon families, describing those caught between clinging to hope and letting go, those who felt compelled to journey to distant battlefields for answers, and those who shunned conventional religion and resorted to spiritualism for solace.

This moving book delicately reveals the human faces and the devastating stories behind the names listed on the stone memorials.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Oct 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781925693317

Scott Bennett

SCOTT BENNETT has reviewed more than 100,000 r'sum's, conducted thousands of interviews, and hired hundreds of employees in organizations both large and small.

Book preview

THE NAMELESS NAMES

Scott Bennett was born in Bairnsdale, Victoria, in 1966. He gained an Executive Master of Business Administration degree from the Australian Graduate School of Management at the University of Sydney, and has worked for many of Australia’s most recognised retail companies as a management consultant or an executive manager. In 2003, he visited the Great War battlefields in France and Belgium to retrace the steps of his great-uncles, who had fought there. This experience led him to question the many ‘truths’ that have developed around the Anzac legend. The result was the writing of The Nameless Names and his first book, Pozières, which re-examined the battle of Pozières.

Scribe Publications

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2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

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First published by Scribe 2018

Copyright © Scott Bennett 2018

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

9781925713558 (Hardback edition)

9781925693317 (e-book)

A CiP entry for this title is available from the National Library of Australia.

scribepublications.com.au

To Pablo

Contents

Information

Introduction

1 Coolgardie

2 Gallipoli

3 ‘Gentle Sobbing in the South’

4 The Red Cross

5 Blumberg

6 Fromelles

7 Flickering Hope

8 Gin Gin

9 Messines Ridge

10 Ypres

11 Villers-Bretonneux

12 The Unmournable Dead

13 The Gallipoli Mission

14 Justice to the Missing

15 Justice Done?

16 Grasping for Answers

17 Commemoration

18 Remembering

19 Connecting with the Past

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

I’ve seen a battalion in the dust on the road, a third of them for death or worse and no special marks on them, the dust for all.

— Ernest Hemingway ¹

Information

Conversions

1 inch 2.54 centimetres

1 foot 0.3 metres

1 yard 0.91 metres

1 mile 1.6 kilometres

1 acre 0.4 hectares

Formations in the British Expeditionary Force

Body Commanded by Approximate Infantry Number

Army General 100,000 to 150,000

Corps Lieutenant-General 50,000

Division Major-General 12,000

Brigade Brigadier-General 4,000

Battalion Lieutenant-Colonel 1,000

Company Captain 250

Platoon Second-Lieutenant 60

Section Lance-Corporal 15

Introduction

The people have asked for houses and we have given them stones.

— William Richard Lethaby

Columns of soldiers tramp the mud-smeared Ypres Road. The stamp of their sodden boots upon the cobblestones sounds a drumbeat. They tramp past the gaunt ruins of the medieval Cloth Hall and through the humps of broken masonry that once formed the Menin Gate. The drumbeat fall of their boots continues uninterrupted — every hour, every day, and every night for four long years. A mile beyond the Menin Gate is Hellfire Corner, and a mile further is the abyss. In that sodden wasteland, cannons sound, machine guns stutter, parachute flares fizz, poisonous gas drifts, and disembowelled horses shriek. Five thousand men die every month; 5,000 are crippled every week. A quarter-of-a-million stout-hearted men dissolve into ghosts, shadows, and memories. There is no single yard of ground that does not cost blood and bone. This is the Ypres Salient, the ten-by-six mile shell-torn expanse of Belgium that the British and German armies bitterly contest throughout the Great War. ²

A century later, I walk the patterned cobblestones of Ypres Road. Quaint shops that display Belgian chocolates and fine pastries have replaced rubble-lined streets. The tourists who collect inside these premises to admire the ornate window displays and swap cheerful banter have replaced the columns of tramping soldiers. Yet the residue of war remains. As I walk further, the shops abruptly end and are replaced by a colossal arch that straddles the street. Its straight lines and geometrically precise angles cast a mournful shadow across the Ypres-to-Menin road. The inscription on its façade reveals itself: ‘To the armies of the British Empire who stood here from 1914 to 1918 and to those of their dead that have no known grave.’

I have reached the haunting Menin Gate Memorial.

I enter the arch’s belly to shelter from the menacing clouds that threaten rain. Tourists wearing long overcoats, with collars upturned, mill at the memorial’s base. Soon the traffic will stop, and buglers will sound the ‘Last Post’. It is a ritual that has continued uninterrupted every evening and in all weathers since 1929. ³

Standing among the sodden wreaths and faded flowers, I see the inscriptions etched on its Portland stone walls: panel after panel, floor to ceiling, with the names of 55,000 Indians, Englishmen, Australians, Irishman, Scots, and Canadians. Each name is inscribed with uniform precision: letters evenly spaced, justified to the right, in an artless Roman typeface.

I struggle to comprehend how tens of thousands of souls could be lost in the Ypres Salient, just a few miles beyond the brightly lit shops, and how their existence could be distilled down to names on endless lists. And I find it difficult to discern an individual name from those lists. Perhaps that’s the way Sir Reginald Blomfield, the architect of the Menin Gate Memorial, intended it: no individual name should be distinguished from the masses; a visitor’s gaze should never penetrate the endless lists. Yet I find myself compelled to do just that. To understand what this memorial really symbolises, I must pierce Blomfield’s dehumanising illusion, and put a story to a name to draw out warmth, love, and grief from the cold stone.

I gaze upon a single panel. Battalions dissolve into individuals: Albert, Allan, Allen, Allen J. — Josiah Allen. I reach out and sweep my hand across Josiah’s name, my fingertips catching on the edges of each letter. I punch Josiah’s name into my iPhone, and discover that he was a 27-year-old grazier from the remote town of Gin Gin in Queensland who enlisted in July 1916. I learn later that Josiah was a clean-living bloke who was a member of the local temperance movement and a devout churchgoer who attended the Gin Gin Methodist Church. Josiah was recognised throughout the district as an expert horseman capable of riding the wildest stallion bareback, and considered an expert marksman capable of shooting out a fly’s eye at 500 yards. ⁴

I ponder what Josiah may have thought in June 1917 as he marched past where I now stand. Did he realise that his battalion would be thrust into the bloody offensive at Messines Ridge? Was he comforted that his brothers, Ned and Ernest, marched alongside him? Within days, a shell burst would kill Josiah, his remains would lie buried forever somewhere on the mired battlefield, and his name would be memorialised on the Menin Gate.

Josiah suffered the ignominy of being lost in the Flanders mud, along with thousands of others. Ironically, in commemoration, he suffers the same fate — lost in a sea of tens of thousands of uniform inscriptions. ‘Memorials to the Missing are not about people,’ reflected Geoff Dyer, the author of The Missing of the Somme, ‘they are about names: the nameless names.’ ⁵ Yet, with some rudimentary research, I uncovered Josiah’s story. I have penetrated the memorial’s endless lists and grasped the impost of a single name. I understand Josiah’s 12-month journey to Messines Ridge, his aspiration to return to ‘sunny old’ Gin Gin, and his family’s grief when he was listed as missing. What other intimate stories can be drawn out from those lists?

Blomfield’s method of commemorating the British Empire’s missing — the so-called imperial framework — is replicated right across the Great War battlefields. A short distance from Ypres, among ploughed fields, is the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing: the uniform stone-and-flint panels that rim the cemetery list 35,000 missing British and New Zealand soldiers. In northern France, on the Somme, the identity of 74,000 British soldiers is etched on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing. Across almost 1,000 commonwealth cemeteries that trace the Western Front, 180,000 near-identical headstones simply read ‘A Soldier of The Great War Known Unto God.’

The story is no different for Australian soldiers. On the Somme, on a quiet hill just outside Villers-Bretonneux is the Australian National Memorial; its panels record 10,738 Australian soldiers missing in action over three years of fighting in that region. ⁶ The Menin Gate records the 6,000 Australian soldiers missing in Belgium. In Turkey, the Lone Pine Memorial records the names of 4,900 Australian and New Zealand soldiers missing in the Gallipoli campaign. ⁷

Many are aware that 62,000 Australian soldiers died in the Great War. Yet what remains largely unknown is that well over one-third of these soldiers were recorded as missing — their bodies either unrecovered or unidentified. The Great War for Civilisation brutally erased 23,000 of them: dismembered by shellfire, buried without proper identification, shovelled into unmarked graves, or left to rot in no man’s land. ⁸ They were consigned to a suspended state — no name, no body, no burial, no mourning — entombed in uncertainty.

My experience at the Menin Gate Memorial compelled me to understand and write the story of the missing; but, most importantly, it influenced how I decided to tell the story. I have consciously avoided statistics that overwhelm one’s senses but do not enlighten them. Napoleon’s quote, ‘The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of thousands is a statistic,’ became my guiding mantra. ⁹ I deliberately stripped back the military jargon in this book that can lock many readers out of these stories. (Don’t panic: I have included 850 footnotes for those so inclined.) Rather, I have focused on conveying the personal experiences of those affected — mothers, fathers, wives, sons, daughters, and lovers.

This book tells the story of the missing Australian soldiers through the personal experiences of three Australian families: the Reid family and their sons Mordaunt and Lindsay; the Pflaum family and their sons Tab, Theo, and Ray; and the Allen family and their sons Ernest, Ned, and Josiah. I start these family stories in peaceful country towns such as Coolgardie, Blumberg, and Gin Gin, and then chart their sons’ path to war. I convey the circumstances of their sons’ disappearance and then explore the family’s grief, their endless search for facts, how they commemorated their missing loved ones, and whether later generations of relatives connect with their past.

The Reid, Pflaum, and Allen brothers fought on three devastating battlefields of the Great War: Gallipoli, Fromelles, and Ypres. Their names are listed on the ageing memorials — the Lone Pine Memorial, the Australian National Memorial, and the Menin Gate Memorial — that mark the old battlefields.

Yet, after months of research, I realised there was more to the story. As compelling as I found their personal stories, three questions continually occupied my mind. I realised that to address these questions I had to add a layer that examined the wider landscape of the missing, projecting from and beyond the experiences of the Reid, Pflaum, and Allen families to tell a more complete Australian story.

The first question was: Why were so many families left without answers about their missing loved one’s fate? Poet laureate John Masefield provided some clues when he observed a battlefield plateau where thousands had died. He recorded that the incessant shelling buried and unburied them, and then buried and unburied them until ‘no bit of dust was without a man in it’. ¹⁰

A son was missing on the battlefield, but so too was information about him. The flood of enquiries from anguished relatives of the missing overwhelmed the two agencies responsible for providing answers: the Office of Base Records and the Australian Red Cross Society Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau. The letters sent out by the Base Record’s overworked clerks always read the same: ‘No details are available. They will be furnished at first opportunity.’ Despite this undertaking, families rarely received the promised details on their son’s fate.

After the war, the Australian government reassured families that ‘all pains’ would be taken to greatly reduce the missing. ¹¹ Exhumation parties were tasked with recovering, identifying, and interring bodies in central cemeteries. ¹² Yet, at the conclusion of their work, 23,000 Australian soldiers remained unidentified or unrecovered.

Second, what was the emotional toll upon relatives of the missing? Janet Fox provided a glimpse into the unique torment they suffered when she wrote that the state of suspense over her missing son ate at her very soul. ‘How helpless I am,’ she lamented. ¹³ Women such as Janet Fox were denied that very human healing process, described by psychoanalysts as the shift from the initial denial of death to a slow emotional disassociation from the lost person. Being missing was an undefined social state, which precluded access to all the rituals and practices that society had developed to deal with such sadness. ¹⁴

To soothe the anguish of families with missing loved ones, the British Empire boldly embarked on the largest architectural project in its history to commemorate the dead and missing in memorials. Yet this approach left many families bewildered — they wondered whether their loved ones or the deeds of the empire were being honoured. Families responded by finding their own way to soothe their anguish, such as building memorials in their communities, or lovingly maintaining shrines in their homes to their beloved.

And, finally, does a connection exist between current generations and the missing? Relatives of the missing, such as Lesley Bath, the great-niece of Josiah Allen, provide some insight. Lesley, who is connected to her family history, felt compelled to visit the Menin Gate Memorial in the 1990s to honour her great-uncle. She remembers that it was a ‘tough day’ when she read Josiah’s name on the panels. ¹⁵

Yet beyond family connections such as Lesley’s, the missing and their stories are seemingly forgotten. I discovered this when I randomly surveyed 20 Australians unconnected to the missing, asking them if they knew of the Menin Gate Memorial. None did. Yet, after having it explained to them, most felt aghast that its story was unknown to them. By contrast, many of those surveyed condensed the Great War down to stories of heroic Anzacs. It’s a lopsided picture that is evident on bookstore and library shelves that swell with stories of Victoria Cross recipients. ¹⁶ As I highlight in this book, the Great War’s more prevalent experience was that of the one in 14 families whose son went missing, rather than the one in 5,000 families whose son was awarded a Victoria Cross. ¹⁷

And despite the incalculable investment in tons of Portland stone, miles of uniform headstones, and endless acres of commemorative monuments that should balance out these two contrary perspectives, ordinary soldiers such as Josiah Allen remain missing from our minds. This book’s purpose is to address this by revealing the human faces hidden behind the cold stone.

CHAPTER ONE

Coolgardie

At last he has reached the Eldorado of his dreams, the land of golden promise, the region of sudden fortunes.

— A prospector discovers Coolgardie in 1894 ¹

Lieutenant Mordaunt Reid’s story flickers through all significant historical accounts of the Gallipoli landing on 25 April 1915. Official historian Charles Bean paid him the ultimate accolade, stating that he displayed all the attributes of a ‘born leader’ that morning. ² Yet Mordaunt’s story peters out, with the circumstances of his disappearance later that day consigned to footnotes. Intrigued, I searched old newspapers, soldiers’ dairies, and battalion histories, and tracked down aged relatives to uncover a poignant story that sweeps well beyond Mordaunt’s disappearance. Here, I pick up Mordaunt’s story just after midnight on 25 April on the destroyer Chelmer as it cuts through the Aegean Sea’s silken waters on its fateful journey to Gallipoli.

The soft moon that shone through the clouds that night provided Mordaunt with enough light to discern the convoy’s other six destroyers. Mordaunt turned starboard and scanned the ship’s decks. Sleeping soldiers carpeted its timber quarterdeck: some curled around their heavy packs, others knotted together to ward off the cold, with the remainder sprawled about the ship’s mess decks and alley ways. Despite the momentous events confronting the troops, the rhythmic purr of the ship’s engines, coupled with the crisp sea air, seemed to have soothed their minds, with many descending into a deep sleep. Those who couldn’t sleep sought out the warmth of the ship’s engine room, where they quietly talked and smoked. ³

Sipping from a cup of hot cocoa, 33-year-old Mordaunt Reid reflected on the last few hours. His inspection of the troops earlier that evening had gone exceedingly well — each man had wrapped two empty sandbags around their entrenching tool as instructed, their pouches contained 200 rounds of ammunition, their water bottles were full, and each carried a white cloth bag crammed with two days’ rations. ⁴ After the inspection, the troops had climbed down the rope ladders of their transport onto the Chelmer exactly as they had practised over the last two months.

The peacefulness that Mordaunt felt, standing alone on the quarterdeck, would be swept away when he roused his soldiers. They would gather their packs and rifles, bustle about the deck, and organise themselves into platoon order. A strict timetable would propel the troops toward their destiny on 25 April 1915 of spearheading the largest amphibian landing in the British Empire’s history.

Mordaunt felt confident in his men, who, like himself, came from the goldfields of Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie in Western Australia. After the declaration of war on 4 August 1914, these ‘hard doers’ had downed tools and enlisted. In September, they had arrived in Perth on a special train the worse for wear, after indulging themselves in ‘a right royal send-off’ thrown at the Kalgoorlie railway station. At every station, cheering crowds had greeted the men, and at every stop more refreshments came aboard. ⁵

Back then, in September 1914, the goldfields men didn’t look or act like soldiers, as they marched around the rudimentary training camp at Blackboy Hill dressed in a mix of civilian clothes, army-issued blue-dyed dungarees and flannels. ‘He had in his company from the Goldfields a lot of tough characters, and a few bad hats,’ recorded soldier Thomas Louch in his memoirs, while the 11th Battalion history, Legs-eleven, noted that these men ‘had always been a law unto themselves’. ⁶

Mordaunt impressed on these ‘free spirits’ that careful and exact attention to orders was a prerequisite to good soldiering. He whipped the men into shape with marching drills, musketry training, and battalion movements. While some officers employed a caustic tongue to straighten out the men, Mordaunt’s physical presence — standing almost six foot tall with a deep chest and a blacksmith’s forearms — encouraged their compliance. The soldiers also sensed that Mordaunt genuinely cared about their welfare. Before he dismissed the company after each drill, Mordaunt always checked, ‘Now is there any man who would like to ask any questions?’ Although the occasional wag exploited the opportunity to ask a bawdy question, perhaps about a barmaid’s particulars, Mordaunt still maintained his faith in their soldiering abilities. ⁷ ‘In his eyes all these geese were swans’, recorded Thomas Louch. ⁸

Mordaunt and his men shared the bond of residing on ‘the other side’ of the country in the harsh Western Australian outback. ⁹ They recognised and admired in each other the adventurous spirit and natural curiosity that had stirred them to ‘make a go of it’ on the remote frontier. Yet the similarities between Mordaunt and the enlisted men ended there. While Mordaunt had attended prestigious city schools and attained professional qualifications as an electrical engineer, his men were ‘hard doers’ who had sweated in the desert mines in the elusive search for gold or laboured out east constructing tracks for the transcontinental railway line. While his swans grew up in the outpost colony with struggling prospects, Mordaunt came from the thriving eastern colonies.

Mordaunt grew up on the remote Puckawidgee Station, about 200 miles north of Melbourne. Situated in the heart of the Riverina ram-breeding district, the station covered about 90,000 acres of freehold and Crown lands. Mordaunt’s father, Donald, emigrated from Scotland in 1854 and started work at the wealthy Currie family’s stations as a 13-year-old boy. Donald worked for them for the next 50 years, the last 27 years as the manager of Puckawidgee station. The Currie family recognised Donald as a ‘true and faithful servant’. ¹⁰

Mordaunt experienced an idyllic childhood on the station. He played hunting and tracking games in the bush with the Aboriginal children. Tutors schooled him and his siblings at the farmstead. During the shearing season, Mordaunt sat in the rickety shearing shed and watched as long rows of shearers straddled the merino sheep, and with sweeping strokes of their mechanical shears, removed their prized fleeces. In summer, Mordaunt competed in doubles tennis matches against his sisters, who played in long, flowing dresses, and hats, while the rest of the family sat in the shade of the court’s hut and enjoyed refreshments. On Sunday afternoons, Mordaunt and his siblings enjoyed leisurely horse rides between Conargo and Deniliquin.

Mordaunt completed his secondary school education in Melbourne at Surrey College. The school attracted regional students with the promise of combining country life with city teaching, and the opportunity for boarders to dine each evening with the principal. ¹¹ After completing secondary school, Mordaunt studied at the Technical College in Latrobe Street, Melbourne. The ‘Working Man’s College’ offered Mordaunt the opportunity to be its first diploma graduate in its new course of electrical engineering. He attained first-grade certificates in electricity, magnetism, and geometry, with honours in algebra.

The lure of adventure and boundless opportunity inspired Mordaunt to shift to Western Australia in 1905. He settled in Coolgardie, an outback town founded in 1892 after speculators discovered significant gold deposits there. Located 350 miles east of Perth, the isolated town boomed after the discovery of alluvial gold, and within a decade it became the third-largest town in the colony. Droves of men flocked to the new Eldorado by rail, camel, or horse, seeking to make their quick fortune. At its peak, 700 mining companies based at Coolgardie were listed on the London Stock Exchange.

Coolgardie yoked together an unlikely mix of prospectors, speculators, businessmen, Afghan camel drivers, blackfellows, Japanese launders, and prostitutes of the maisons tolérées. The town’s fortunes surged and tumbled on flighty rumours of gold strikes. As a rumour spread, prospectors rushed into the desert on camelback or bicycles to blindly peg out new lines of country that might hide the supposed quartz. The thin promise of riches meant that Coolgardie’s inhabitants tolerated its red dust storms, suffocating heat, and water shortages that often resulted in the hospital’s nurses damp-sponging their patients with whiskey and brandy — two liquids that never ran out. ¹²

Mordaunt secured a job as the manager of the Electrical Supply Company of Western Australia Limited. Mordaunt carried out his duties ‘with credit to himself’, and his impeccable administration gave ‘the greatest possible satisfaction to the municipal authority’. ¹³ As the town boomed on the back of the gold rush, the infrastructure to support it rapidly expanded. The emerging field of electricity generation played an important part in Coolgardie’s transformation. Mordaunt negotiated with a cost-conscious council an arrangement to light the town each evening with 32-candle-power incandescent light. ¹⁴ Modern electrical lights soon replaced the hurricane lanterns that lined the main street, while electric-powered machinery replaced the toil of men on pick and shovel. Mordaunt marvelled at the limitless opportunities that electricity offered, and he felt proud that his contribution had transformed Coolgardie from a dirty backwater into a modern-day town.

Outside of work, Mordaunt pursued his passion for soldiering. His elder brother, Leonard, who fought in the Boer War with the 4th Victorian Imperial Bushmen, nurtured his interest with stories of the South African veldt. As part of the nation’s universal military-training system, Mordaunt assumed the role of area training officer for the Coolgardie and Southern Cross and Norseman districts. By 1910 he had achieved the rank of Second Lieutenant in the Goldfields Infantry Regiment. The regiment paraded at the drill hall in Boulder, performed night exercises around Kalgoorlie, completed musketry training at the commonwealth rifle range, and exercised in battalion movements. Campfire concerts capped off most drill exercises. ¹⁵

Mordaunt shared his outback adventure with his sweetheart, Pauline Dowd. Mordaunt and Pauline had married in 1905 at Australia Church in Melbourne. Thirty-two-year-old Pauline shared her husband’s adventurous spirit, and didn’t hesitate for a moment to relocate to Coolgardie. While Mordaunt worked, she designed dresses, participated in council committees, travelled to Fremantle for holidays with her friends Walter and Laura Blaxland, and occasionally travelled overland to Melbourne.

The couple embraced Coolgardie’s social life. The town, which boasted handsome thoroughfares, municipal gardens, and fine stone buildings with broad shading verandas, offered a vibrant setting for social events. Mordaunt and Pauline regularly attended the annual Coolgardie Cup Day, a marquee event of the goldfield’s racing carnival. Trainloads of Kalgoorlie visitors and locals turned it into a standing-room-only affair. Pauline always stood out among the well-dressed ladies in her finest pale-green muslin dress and dark-green mushroom hat. ¹⁶

The couple enjoyed picnics at the Coolgardie shooting range. Mordaunt was one of the best rifle shots in the district, and competed each year for the prestigious Mills Cup. Contestants shot over 200-, 500-, and 600-yard distances. The local newspaper noted that scores typically fell after lunch, which spoke ‘well for the lunch provided’. ¹⁷

The churchgoing couple manned the art gallery stall each year at the Easter Fair to raise money for Saint Andrews Church. They guided discerning guests through The Royal Hall, which displayed 60 to 70 framed pictures and long tables of exhibits. ¹⁸

The palatial Victoria Hotel became the couple’s preferred venue to entertain friends. In the social room, Pauline racked up many tricks in energetic card games of whist, while Miss Hunter belted out lively piano music in the background. In the main bar, Mordaunt and his game-shooting cobbers, Hughie and Bung, swapped tall stories about bagging ‘wild as billy-ho’ ducks out at the Gorge. ¹⁹

While the couple revelled in their vibrant lives, Mordaunt kept a watchful eye on the troubling events in Europe in July 1914. Each day, when the train delivered the all-important city newspapers to Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie, Mordaunt and the townsfolk dissected the latest news.

On 6 August, a stunned Mordaunt read the bolded newspaper headline that Great Britain had declared war on Germany. A day earlier, London had sent a cablegram to all state governors in the commonwealth announcing that war had broken out between Great Britain and Germany. With Britain at war, so too was Australia.

Joseph Cook, the Australian prime minister, committed to despatching 20,000 troops overseas. Recruiting offices opened in Perth, Fremantle, and Kalgoorlie. Young men from the Transcontinental construction camps caught the first train westward-bound and enlisted at the Kalgoorlie drill hall.

Mordaunt tidied up his affairs and enlisted on 7 September 1914. As Coolgardie’s district area training officer, Mordaunt’s skills would be vitally important in preparing the goldfield’s raw recruits for war. On the other side of the country, in Melbourne, Mordaunt’s younger brother, 25-year-old Cyril ‘Lindsay’ Reid, had enlisted a day earlier. Although separated by eight years and 2,000 miles, the brothers had similar professional backgrounds: Lindsay had completed his cadet training at Scotch College, had qualified as an electrician, worked for the Electric Supply Company of Victoria, and had played an instrumental role in bringing electricity to the country town of Euroa.

By mid-September, commanding officer Major-General William Bridges had his full complement of soldiers that would form the 1st Australian Infantry Division of the Australian Imperial Force. Mordaunt and Lindsay would form part of this expeditionary force that would be despatched overseas.

It was a difficult decision for each brother to join up. Lindsay agonised over his choice as his mother, Mary, a widow in poor health who lived in Elsternwick with her daughter Florence, relied on him for financial support.

The anguish surrounding Mordaunt’s decision related to him leaving Pauline alone in Coolgardie. Pauline quickly realised that with no family in Coolgardie, and with mining in gradual decline, there was no reason for her to remain there. She decided to train as a nurse so she could serve overseas — a bold choice in a time when women were confined to roles of wives and mothers. In September 1914, while Mordaunt trained at Blackboy Hill, Pauline shifted to Perth and started as a probation nurse at the Perth Public Hospital. She left behind an Eldorado that had lost its lustre — a place where blackfellows now squatted under the poorly maintained electric lights, and dispirited Diggers burnt effigies of mining officials.

After a few weeks of preliminary training, Mordaunt’s battalion embarked on the SS Ascanius on 31 October 1914 bound for Egypt, while Lindsay’s 7th Battalion sailed a month later.

By mid-December the 1st Division had arrived at the Mena Camp in Egypt, at the foot of the pyramids. For Mordaunt, Egypt meant long months of intensive training in the hot desert. Each morning, Mordaunt’s men trooped through Mena’s sand hills in full marching order carrying 80-pound packs to a distant location. They repeatedly mock-charged, through the loose sand and dust, the remote Tiger’s Tooth escarpment. Mordaunt and the weary soldiers would only down their packs and rifles, and unwind, when the Egyptian boys appeared from nowhere in the late afternoon, yelling, ‘Oringes — big wun — two for a half.’ ²⁰

Mordaunt celebrated Christmas Eve of 1914 in Cairo. Throughout the warm night, Mordaunt, among the thronging crowds of Australian soldiers, revelled in the light and colour of the Egyptian capital. Broad Australian accents breaking into song contrasted against the frequent Arabic retorts of ‘saida’, ‘tala-hena’, and ‘baksheesh’. ²¹

After the festive Christmas celebrations, Mordaunt returned to the desert camp in Mena. Lying in his canvas tent, beneath the pyramids and under the bright stars, he reflected on 1914 and contemplated what 1915 would hold for him. Unbeknown to Mordaunt, politicians, statesmen, and generals on another continent had hatched plans that would decide his fate and that of thousands of other Australians.

On a dreary London day on 2 January 1915, the British War Council met and agreed to ‘make a demonstration against the Turks’ in response to an urgent request for assistance from the commander-in-chief of the Russian army. News from the Russian leadership in late December suggested that the Ottoman army was on the verge of encircling the Russian army in the Caucasus. ²²

Lord Horatio Kitchener, the British secretary of state for war, thought it imperative that Britain assist its ally. Kitchener believed that striking the vital commercial shipping route, the Dardanelles, presented the best option. If the straits could be seized, it would open the way to ship valuable supplies to the Russians. The seeds for the Gallipoli campaign were sown.

In late February, Kitchener ordered the British commander in Egypt to despatch 36,000 Anzac troops to the staging location of Mudros, some 50 miles from the Dardanelles. ²³ The Anzacs represented a significant portion of the 75,000-strong force, which also included the British 29th Division, and some French regular and colonial troops, tasked with capturing the straits and opening the way to seize the Ottoman capital of Constantinople. ²⁴

In January 1915, Mordaunt’s battalion resumed its punishing training regime in the Mena desert. On 10 January, the troops paused to participate in an extraordinary event. The entire 11th Battalion posed for a photograph at the Great Pyramid of Cheops. The officers positioned themselves in the front rows and the ranks higher up upon the pyramid’s stone ledges. The desert’s dry atmosphere helped the photographer