The Fromelles Missing: ‘bones, badges, and scraps of uniform’.

The Fromelles Missing: ‘bones, badges, and scraps of uniform’. 

The Battle of Fromelles occurred in France precisely 108 years ago this week. 

This photograph of a priest from Fromelles kneeling in front of the remains of a British or Australian soldier was likely taken in early 1919. 

Australian official historian Charles Bean had stood at this exact location months earlier. 

Back on the morning the Great War ended, Bean awoke to hear a few hoarse cheers and the bleating of a tin trumpet. ‘I guessed what it meant. The armistice must have been signed. No more gun flashes, no more flares.’

That morning, Bean travelled to Fromelles to take some photographs before the place changed. He wandered the old battlefield, where almost 2,500 soldiers had been slaughtered in a hellish attack in July 1916. 

‘We found the old no man’s land simply full of our dead,’ Bean recorded, ‘the skulls and bones and torn uniforms were lying about everywhere.’

Bean explored Sugar Loaf salient, which was pitted by shellfire and bombs. He found leather equipment, water bottles, and rusted German wire strewn about in the ditches and water channels. 

As Bean surveyed the battlefield, he must have realised that the muddle of bones and torn uniforms that lay about would be impossible to identify. Tangled in their equipment, the remains were no longer much of anything.

As drizzle fell across the fields, Bean took some photographs. These stark images, which symbolise forlorn hope and thwarted lives, are still held at the Australian War Memorial.  

When Bean published his third volume of the official history in 1929, which covered Fromelles, bereaved families would have eagerly read it, searching for vital clues about their loved one’s fate. 

Yet, beyond sketchy maps, official narratives, and annotated footnotes, there were no answers to be gleaned. 

Those answers eventually came, 93 years later, with the discovery of 250 bodies at Pheasant Wood.  

Excerpt from ‘The Nameless Names: recovering the missing Anzacs’