Albert

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Albert

Albert

Albert, France, with the tower of Notre Dame de Brebières. [DVA]

The Rue de Amiens-Albert, in Albert, as it appeared in 1914. [AWM C04921]

Albert in 1914. The basilica, Notre Dame de Brebières, from which the gilded statue of the Virgin and Child hung after being struck by shellfire in 1916, is on the right. [AWM C04922]

Directions: Albert is 28 km north-east of Amiens. The Communal Cemetery is on the south-east side of Albert and at the junction of the roads to Peronne (D938) and Bray sur Somme (D329). The Albert Communal Cemetery Extension is entirely enclosed by it. The main entrance to the cemetery is on the Peronne road. More

On the night of 21 July 1916, Australia’s official correspondent (and later official historian) Charles Bean was ensconced in a house in the French town of Albert in the Department of the Somme. Bean was pleased; in this damaged frontline town he had been allocated a house with all modern conveniences, something ‘too good to be true’. Indeed it was. That evening the Germans began again to shell Albert, an experience that Bean, despite nearly eight months spent in the dugouts of Gallipoli, found unnerving: ‘… a curious situation sleeping in a house in a strafed town – rather an uneasy one’. Equally unnerving was the noise made by the immense British bombardment of the German lines only kilometres away to the east. British shells passed constantly over Albert on the night of 22 July heading towards Pozières, soon to be attacked by the Australians:

Guns are banging off all roundabout 40 or 50 to the minute, sometimes more all the time. Some are near – one or two big ones every five minutes or so whose great report makes one jump and one can hear the shell climbing with the swish of a great rocket, or escaping steam. Every now and then wagons or motors or two wagons galloping through. Then the put put of a despatch rider’s motor cycle’.

Bean, quoted in Dudley McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme, the story of CEW Bean, Sydney, 1983, p.235

The Albert basilica in 1916 after the town had been destroyed by shellfire. [AWM C05062]

The shelling also unnerved the Headquarters of the 1st Australian Division which was then in Albert preparing for the assault on Pozières; they moved from the Chateau Lamont to new accommodation in 12 Rue de Noyelles.

During 1916, and the early months of 1917, Albert was a town well known to the men of the AIF. Many of them marched through it or within sight of its most famous sight – the leaning statue of the Virgin with the infant Jesus in her arms at the top of the steeple of the church of Notre Dame de Brebières (Our Lady of the Ewes). The statue was hit by a German shell in 1915 and French engineers fixed it in place at right angles to the building.

Albert. [DVA]

To the hundreds of thousands of soldiers on their way to the dangers of the front line the leaning Virgin seemed to symbolise much of the craziness and destructiveness of war and locally produced postcards of this famous phenomenon were sent to families around the world. Some said the war would end when the statue finally fell. It was knocked down in April 1918 by British artillery but the war went on until November 1918. The statue itself was never recovered and is thought to have been shipped to Germany for its metal value. Padre William Devine, of the 48th Battalion AIF, described his unit’s first sight of Albert:

On the 1st of August 1916 they the battalion left Harponville, and resuming the march eastwards soon saw Albert in the distance, and saw for the first time the leaning figure of the Virgin on its church spire. The battalion did not enter the town, for every now and then shells landed in it throwing up clouds of dust and smoke and debris from its piled masonry, and troops went through its streets quickly and only in small parties at long intervals.

William Devine, The Story of a Battalion, Melbourne, 1919, p.34

Notre Dame de Brebières, Albert. [DVA]

Basilique d’Albert, Marcel Auqis, Somme 1915’. This was typical of the postcards sent home by British and British Empire soldiers showing the damaged Virgin and Child on the Notre Dame de Brebières, Albert, during World War I. [sj002257, State Library of Victoria]

Official Australian photographer Captain Frank Hurley’s colour image of the shell-damaged Albert Cathedral taken in September 1917. [AWM P03631_189]

The leaning statue acquired the name ‘Lady of the Limp’ or, to the Australians, ‘Fanny Durack’ after the famous Australian swimmer and was something many people wanted to paint or photograph. Shortly after taking up his appointment as Australia’s official war photographer in August 1917, Captain Frank Hurley visited Albert. After dinner in the officers rest club, Hurley ventured out into the ruined town and took what he described as a ‘moonlight flashlight study of the leaning Madonna’. The explosion of his flashlight powder frightened the few local inhabitants who had ventured back to Albert. They thought a bombardment was beginning and were much relieved to discover only a ‘camera enthusiast’. In the morning Hurley spent much time in the vicinity of the ruined basilica attempting to find suitable angles from shell-holed walls and ruined buildings for photographs:

The interior is a very pitiful sight. The roof in most places has been shot away and many of the great supporting columns. The rest are so torn and mutilated by shell fragments as to be irreparable. Whilst the architecture of this great edifice does not compare with other of the famous French cathedrals, it is magnificent nevertheless.

Frank Hurley, diary, 30 September 1917, www.nla.gov.au/nla.ms-ms883-1-5-s59

During the Battle of the Somme, Albert was a place of temporary headquarters for the Australian divisions engaged in the heavy fighting on Pozieres ridge a few kilometres away. The straight Roman road from Albert to Bapaume in the east (now the D929) marked the intended line of advance of the British armies which assaulted the German lines along a front nearly 50 kilometres long on 1 July 1916. Albert had field ambulances which would often treat wounded men before they were taken to one of casualty clearing stations further to the west.

The ruins of Albert railway station, c.1917. [AWM H02112]

Albert

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