Villers-Bretonneux, Adelaide Cemetery

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Villers-Bretonneux, Adelaide Cemetery

Villers-Bretonneux, Adelaide Cemetery

24 April 1918 – A very critical period
Known unto God

Known unto God

Adelaide Cemetery, Villers-Bretonneux. [DVA]

Nobody quite knows how Adelaide Cemetery got its name. Was it from a homesick South Australian battalion? What is known is that the cemetery was begun by Australian units in 1918 making it a ‘battlefield’ burial ground and those in Plot I to the right of the Cross of Sacrifice are the original burials. By mid-August, the battle had moved away east over the Somme uplands – the Santerre – towards Péronne, and the last date on an AIF headstone at Adelaide is 20 August 1918. When the war was over, more than 860 graves were brought in from smaller cemeteries and isolated burial sites.

Bodies exhumed from battlefield graves being transported to a war cemetery for reburial by members of the Australian section of the War Graves Commission, France, April 1919. [AWM A02498]

The remains of Australian soldiers exhumed from battlefield graves, awaiting re-burial at Adelaide Cemetery, France, June 1919. [AWM E05432]

The dates on the headstones provide a virtual map of the AIF in action in this region between late March and mid-August 1918. For example, here are fourteen men from those battalions which saved Villers-Bretonneux from German occupation between 3 and 5 April, thirteen of them from the 35th and 36th Battalions raised in New South Wales. On the afternoon of 4 April, the 36th, along with other Australian, British and Canadian units, charged German forces advancing towards Villers-Bretonneux from the east. Charles Bean gives the battalion’s casualties for this First Battle of Villers-Bretonneux at 145, a quarter of its strength, and describes how, as they went forward into a hail of gunfire, men fell ‘thickly from the first’. Private Christopher Hall, a 43- year-old wheelwright from Coonamble, New South Wales, was one who died. He is buried in Plot III, Row Q, Grave 2.

Headstone of Private Christopher Hall, 36th Battalion (New South Wales), Adelaide Cemetery. [DVA]

His mate, Private Andrew Young, described Hall as ‘about 45, short, solid build, full face, very little hair, widower’. As Hall went down, he called out, ‘I’m done’. After the war, in responding to an official circular from the Australian War Memorial, his mother wrote simply that her son was born ‘in a small country town’.

They did not have to move 21-year-old Private Thomas Farr, 59th Battalion (Victoria), of Bangerang, Victoria, far to his final resting place in Plot III, Row M, Grave 19.

Headstone of Private Thomas Farr, 59th Battalion (Victoria), Adelaide Cemetery. [DVA]

Farr was one of Lieutenant John Christian’s little patrol that fought so well just over the railway line from the cemetery on 24 April 1918. As the Germans advanced out of Villers-Bretonneux, Farr doubled back in an attempt to retrieve a machine gun to stop it falling into enemy hands when he was hit by a sniper’s bullet. According to Private William Payne, who knew him, Farr was ‘buried where he fell, quite roughly on the spot, and a crude sort of cross was put up’.

New headstone on the grave where the Unknown Australian Soldier lay until his exhumation on 2 November 1993 and return to Canberra. [DVA]

Headstone of Private G S Bullock, Devonshire Regiment, killed near Villers-Bretonneux, 24 April 1918. Bullock, one of the few British soldiers buried in the Australian plot at Adelaide Cemetery, lies next to the grave from which Australia's unknown soldier was taken on 2 November 1993. [DVA]

Behind all the headstones in Adelaide Cemetery are the stories of soldiers who met their deaths in battle. Names, units, dates of death – these details enable us to search the archival records and published histories to uncover their stories. But of one man, who lay here for decades in a grave marked simply, ‘An Australian Soldier of the Great War, Known Unto God’ nothing is known. His name was lost among the hundreds of thousands of missing men along the Western Front between 1914 and 1918. On 11 November 1993, this soldier’s remains lay in a coffin on the Stone of Remembrance on the parade ground in front of the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. In now famous phrases, Prime Minister Paul Keating, told the great crowd gathered there for this, the Funeral of the Unknown Australian Soldier:

We do not know this Australian’s name and we never will. We do not know his rank or his battalion. We do not know where he was born, nor precisely how and when he died. We do not know where in Australia he had made his home or when he left it for the battlefields of Europe. We do not know his age or his circumstances – whether he was from the city or the bush; what occupation he left to become a soldier; what religion, if he had a religion; if he was married or single. We do not know who loved him or whom he loved. If he had children we do not know who they are. His family is lost to us as he was lost to them. We will never know who this Australian was.

Prime Minister Paul Keating, Eulogy for the Unknown Australian Soldier, Canberra, 11 November 1993,
internet version, http://www.awm.gov.au/commemoration/keating.htm

Graves of Australian soldiers being tended by French children, Adelaide Cemetery, Villers-Bretonneux, France, August 1919. [AWM E05925]

Today, the Unknown Soldier lies in a tomb beneath the dome of the Memorial’s Hall of Memory in remembrance of all Australians who died in war. For 75 years he rested in France under a headstone in Plot III, Row M, Grave 13 in Adelaide Cemetery. There is still a headstone there but it carries this inscription:

The remains of an Unknown Soldier
lay in this grave for seventy-five years.
On 2 November 1993 they were removed
and now rest in the
Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier
at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra.

The original headstone erected in the 1920s for an Unknown Australian soldier buried in the Adelaide Cemetery, Villers Bretonneux, France. The soldier's remains were exhumed in November 1993 and re-interred in the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra on 11 November 1993. [AWM REL25221]

The grave of Private Francis Isaac Dickson, 27th Battalion (South Australia), of Jamestown, SA, killed in action 13 July 1918, Adelaide Cemetery, Villers-Bretonneux, France, February 1919. [AWM J00040]

The remains of a dead German soldier and a horse near Villers-Bretonneux, France, 1918. [AWM E02966]

Original grave location of Australia's unknown soldier, Adelaide Cemetery. [DVA]

24 April 1918 – A very critical period
Known unto God

Villers-Bretonneux, Adelaide Cemetery

Known unto God

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