Forêt de Compiègne, La Clairière de l'Armistice

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Forêt de Compiègne, La Clairière de l'Armistice

Forêt de Compiègne, La Clairière de l'Armistice

The very flower of our manhood

That morning (11 November 1918) Charles Bean had gone back to where Australia’s war in France had really begun – the battlefield of Fromelles. There in 24 hours on 19–20 July 1916 the Australian 5th Division had suffered more than 5,300 casualties. Bean felt he needed to quickly get photographs of that terrible battlefield before peace returned it to farmland. And so, as the killing stopped, the man who had done more than anyone else to record for Australia what had happened to its soldiers on the Western Front stood in the old no-man’s-land of Fromelles still littered with human remains.

The remains of the Sugar Loaf salient and its concrete shelters, two years after the battle of Fromelles, in which Australia suffered more than five thousand casualties, Fromelles, France, 11 November 1918. [AWM E03964]

Barbed wire entanglements in the old no–man’s–land, Fromelles, France, 11 November 1918. [AWM 03968]

As the guns fell silent, rejoicing erupted in cities from Paris and London to Sydney. Citizens came out into the streets waving flags and dancing for joy. An understandable reaction, but one not initially shared by many of those who found themselves on the front line in France or close to it. One was Corporal Roger Morgan, of Richmond, Victoria.

He had left Australia in the later part of 1915 to serve with the 1st Australian Field Ambulance and arrived with his unit at Marseilles on 28 March 1916. He spent the next two years and eight months on the Western Front, being twice wounded during that time. In early November 1918, Roger Morgan was serving on attachment as a medical detail with the 2nd Battalion AIF as it prepared to go back into action north of Le Cateau. They never went as hostilities ceased on 11 November. Private Roger Morgan was reflective as he contemplated the death of one of his comrades:

At about noon … was told an Armistice had been declared … it was hardly creditable … one sits and ponders sadly of those pals who are gone to that ‘home from which no wanderer returns’. It seems so strange that it should be, that one’s dearest pals should fall and that I even I should still be here. The very flower of our manhood have paid the greatest price, not willingly for not one of them but longed to live, return home and forget … Brude, old pal of mine, would to God that you were here with me this day, but no, God willed it otherwise and so ‘farewell’.

Corporal Roger Morgan, diary, 11 November 1918, AWM 2DRL/0218

Brude, unfortunately not further identified in Morgan’s diary, was one of 46,000 Australians who would never ‘return home and forget’. Their graves and memorials lie scattered across northern France and Belgium where they remind visitors of the price paid by a distant nation in the South Pacific for involvement in the so–called ‘war to end all wars’.

Celebrating the news of the signing of the Armistice, Martin Place, Sydney, NSW, 11 November 1918. [AWM H11563]

The declaration of the signing of the Armistice of 11 November 1918, Parliament House, Adelaide, South Australia. [AWM H11593]

Celebrating the signing of the Armistice, Sydney, 11 November 1918. [AWM A03281]

Remnants of the kit of Australian soldiers killed in the Battle of Fromelles on 19-20 April 1916, photographed by Charles Bean on that battlefield on 11 November 1918. [AWM E04037]

Forêt de Compiègne, La Clairière de l'Armistice

The very flower of our manhood

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