Unknown then, and even more so now

Bruce Scates
July 17, 2006

It has been almost three months now since Private Jake Kovko's body was finally returned to Australia. For those who knew and loved him the sense of loss was overwhelming.

The agony of the Kovko family reminds us of a grief that has shadowed generations of Australians.

The vast majority of our war dead were never returned. They lie in foreign fields, their bodies blending with the soil of any of the dozens of countries Australians have been sent to fight and die in.

In the case of the Great War, more than 20,000 of about 60,000 dead are still listed as "missing".

Families were told their remains had "vanished without trace", but that simple phrase conceals a much more sordid reality: bodies that sank in the mud, withered in the sun or were simply blown to pieces.

For almost six years after the war had ended, special "graves detachments" searched and re-searched all the major battlefields. Only one in five bodies wrested from the earth could ever be identified. Nor was that surprising since the identity discs issued to Australian soldiers for much of the war were made of nothing more than compressed cardboard. They bleached, buckled and decayed almost as quickly as the bodies they belonged to.

The unburied dead of the Great War still return to haunt us.

Wednesday marks the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Fromelles, a costly, ill-planned diversion at the height of the Somme offensive. It was the first time Australians were sent over the top on the Western Front, and in the first day of fighting the Australian Imperial Force suffered more than 5000 casualties.

The "feint at Fromelles" characterised the carnage of the Western Front: an artillery barrage that failed to cut the wire; a charge across open ground into well-sited enemy machine-guns; a failure to reinforce the men who somehow managed to take the trenches; a callous refusal by British and Australian officers to observe a truce and bring in the wounded.

Many of the men who died at Fromelles were left to wither in no man's land or buried, with little show of ceremony, in mass graves hastily dug by their enemy.

Throughout the 1920s, grieving families and units from the War Graves Commission searched in vain to find them.

In the middle of last year the Australian Government reopened the case of Fromelles. Bending to public pressure, it appointed a national committee to determine whether "sufficient" evidence exist to resume the search for remains there.

The evidence that a mass grave exits is substantial. Aerial photographs taken some months after the fighting show distinctive dark shadows in a clearing near Pheasant Wood, entirely consistent with the mass graves reported by German, Australian and British sources. Knowledge of the graves is an open secret in the small French community; the existence has long been debated by local staff of the War Graves Commission.

The problem is not so much whether the graves exist as whether the Australian Government and (for that matter the people) has the will to find them. Ninety years have pased since the fighting; the descendants of the dead could never have known these men as individuals.

Some argue recovering the bodies could serve no material purpose. Can we mourn the loss of those we never knew? Can we lay people to rest so long after the war that claimed them? And recovering the bodies would be no easy process.

The burial pits were dug on private land. French farmers who wrest their living from the soil are said to have little sympathy for fossicking Australians. Inevitably, recovering the war dead seems to privilege one country over another. Why make such a fuss when France lost so many?

Not far from the Belgian border, the fields of Fromelles are strewn with the dead: German, Algerian, British, French as well as Australian.

Finally there is the question of commemoration. Many would prefer the Australian dead rest where they lie, marked perhaps by a border of gum trees. But the charter of the War Graves Commission makes no such concessions.

Each war dead must be individually recovered, identified if possible, buried as an "unknown" if not. Exhuming the missing of Fromelles, disentangling long-commingled bodies, will be a grim, lengthy and inconclusive enterprise.

But long, grim and inconclusive is an apt description of the Great War. There should be no easy answers for the dead of Fromelles, no simple solution that literally buries the problem.

Ninety years after the battle of the Somme, its pain and pointlessness still echo.

Every year Australians pay homage at Gallipoli. Mourning the dead of the Somme seems no less pressing an obligation.

Associate Professor Bruce Scates is the author of Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War. He is a member of the Army History Unit and serves on the national committee inquiring into the missing of Fromelles.
