Belgium 1914

Battle of the Yser

France 1915

Notre Dame de Lorette

France 1916

Battle of Fromelles

The Battle of the Somme

France 1917

Battle of Vimy Ridge

Advance to the Hindenburg Line

First and Second Bullecourt

Belgium 1917

Battle of Messines

Third Battle of Ypres

Battle of the Menin Road

Battle of Polygon Wood

Battles of Broodseinde, Poelcappelle and Passchendaele

France 1918

Defence of Amiens

Battle of Hamel

Battle of Amiens

Battle of Mont St Quentin

Hindenburg Line

Armistice

Treaty of Versailles

Bapaume

An uncanny feeling of an evil spirit – Bapaume Mairie (Town Hall)

In the middle of Bapaume is the Mairie, the Town Hall. To most visitors this impressive structure exudes an air of venerability and times past. Like most of the town, however, it lay in ruins by the end of March 1917 and was rebuilt after the war. As they pulled back from Bapaume, and other villages further to the east, the Germans left some surprises for the Australians, pretty much as the Anzacs had themselves done for the Turks when they evacuated the Gallipoli peninsula in December 1915. The surprises were ‘booby-trap’ bombs, concealed in places or objects such as chimneys, fountain pens and old boots, which killed a number of unwary soldiers. Charles Bean, ever the soul of gentlemanly fairness, saw the cruelty in these bombs but he viewed the purpose – making your enemy forever anxious and cautious – as legitimate in war. British journalist Philip Gibbs more colourfully wrote of German ‘monkey-tricks’ and an ‘uncanny feeling of an evil spirit’ left behind by the Germans in places like Bapaume.

On the night of 25–26 March 1917, a German mine exploded under the Bapaume Town Hall, more than a week after the Germans had left the town. The bomb, concealed in a cellar, was triggered by a spring operating a striker. The spring was set in motion by the eating through of a steel wire suspended in acid. About thirty men, mainly Australians, were asleep in the Town Hall at the time, including two French parliamentarians, Captain Raoul Briquet and Albert Tailliandier. Both of the Frenchmen and a number of the Australians were killed, but others from the 13th Field Company and the 13th Light Horse were ‘confident they would be dug out, and merely ‘turned in’ to sleep until rescued’.

Digging parties from Australian units, among them the 18th, 22nd and 30th Battalions, worked all night to get at the survivors. Among the dead was Private Charles Neild, 8th Battalion (Victoria). An old boy of Scotch College, Melbourne, Neild was nearly 45 years old when he was killed, and he had been working with the Australian Comforts Fund at the organisation’s famous tea and coffee stall at Longueval during the Australian occupation of the Somme trenches in the winter of 1916–17. Neild lies buried in Bapaume Australian Cemetery, Row A, Grave 29. Also buried in this cemetery is Private Alexander Gunn, 6th Battalion (Victoria), aged 42, in Row A, Grave 27. Gunn also worked at the Australian Comforts Fund stall at Longueval and was killed in the explosion in the Bapaume Town Hall on 25–26 March 1917. In 1921 Gunn’s widow, Henrietta, wrote to the AIF authorities in Melbourne to thank them for obtaining extra photographs for her of Gunn’s grave in far away Bapaume.

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