Battle of the Yser
Thiepval, Thiepval Memorial
This happened in no–man’s–land
The Anglo–French Cemetery, Thiepval. [DVA]
Behind the Thiepval Memorial is a unique cemetery – the Anglo–French Cemetery. It contains the bodies of 600 soldiers – 300 Frenchmen and 300 British and Commonwealth soldiers. It was decided to build this cemetery in 1932 to symbolise the alliance of the British Empire and the French Republic, the central alliance that had fought the ‘Great War’ against Germany. Of France, Captain Francis Coen, 18th Battalion AIF, of Yass, New South Wales, who died fighting at Pozières on 28 July 1916, wrote to his mother:
...these poor people know the horrors of war, and yet their heroism and their love of France is so great, so noble, that they hide their grief, and present only smiling and apparently happy faces to the outside world … it is a privilege for one to be given the opportunity of spending a portion of this life in fighting for the liberty of a people so truly noble.
Captain Francis Coen, letter, 2 May 1916, AWM 1DRL/0203
The Anglo–French Cemetery, Thiepval.
Inscription, Cross of Sacrifice, Anglo–French Cemetery, Thiepval. [DVA]
Inscription in French, Cross of Sacrifice, Anglo–French Cemetery, Thiepval. [DVA]
Evidence of the price Australia paid for being part of the Anglo–French alliance can be found in this cemetery. Among the 300 British and Commonwealth graves are ten men of the AIF, six of them unknown. Three of them died close to Thiepval. Private John Tutton, 28th Battalion, was an Englishman from Bristol who enlisted in Kirup, Western Australia. He was killed on 29 July 1916 close to the Windmill site at Pozières. Months later Private William Trollope, 28th Battalion, told the Australian Red Cross:
...the company was attacking in front of Pozières but was caught on the enemy barbed wire and cut about badly. Soldier Tutton was blown to pieces and it was impossible for him to be buried. This happened in no–man’s–land … knew soldier well, being in the same company.
Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau files, 1914–1918 War, AWM 1DRL /0428
Headstone of Private John Tutton, 28th Battalion (Western Australia), Anglo–French Cemetery, Thiepval. [DVA]
As Trollope states, Tutton’s body would at that stage have been impossible to bury. His remains lay undiscovered until, in 1932, they were uncovered, identified, and brought to Row J, Grave 13 of the Anglo–French Cemetery. Two months before John Tutton died, his brother Reginald was killed in action while with the 11th Battalion from Western Australia.
In 1918, after the Battle of Hamel, Georges Clemenceau, Prime Minister of the French Republic, went personally to address and thank the AIF for their sacrifices on French soil:
I shall go back tomorrow and say to my countrymen: ‘I have seen the Australians, I have looked into their eyes. I know that they, men who have fought great battles in the cause of freedom, will fight on alongside us, till the freedom for which we are all fighting is guaranteed for us and our children’.
Clemenceau, quoted in ‘Hamel – The Textbook Victory, 4 July 1918’, AWM exhibition, ‘1918 Australians in France’
Georges Benjamin Clemenceau, Prime Minister of France (left), with Major General Ewen Sinclair–MacLagan, commander, Fourth Australian Division, and Lieutenant General Sir John Monash, commander, Australia Corps, on his visit to the Australians at Bussy, France, 7 July 1918. [AWM E02527]
British soldiers from the Wiltshire Regiment advancing to attack enemy positions at Thiepval, France, August 1916. [AWM H15925]
An estimated 1,357,000 French servicemen died in World War I compared to 1,115,000 servicemen of the British Empire and Commonwealth. Perhaps it is appropriate that beneath the Cross of Sacrifice at the Anglo–French Cemetery is this inscription:
That the world may remember the common sacrifice of two and a half million dead here have been lain side by side, soldiers of France and of the British Empire in eternal comradeship.
British soldiers in the front line at Thiepval, France, 1916. [AWM H08400]
Sunset over the ruins of Thiepval, France, March 1917. [AWM E00399]
![A British Soldier of the Great War, Anglo–French Cemetery, Thiepval. [DVA]](images/thiepval-29.jpg)
A British Soldier of the Great War, Anglo–French Cemetery, Thiepval. [DVA]
An Australian Soldier of the Great War, Anglo–French Cemetery, Thiepval. [DVA]
The Thiepval Memorial from the Australian memorial at Mouquet Farm. [DVA]
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© 2008 Department of Veterans' Affairs and Board of Studies NSW :: Last update - November 2008