 STOKE HILL PRESS IS a sports publisher. So why I did decide to publish this collection of war stories? One reason is that Mike Colman is a friend, a good man and a great writer. Over the years, beyond his impressive catalogue of sports writing, he has produced some superb award-winning stories on the subject of war, not so much about the battles as about the soldiers who fought in them and the people back home who were affected by them. They deserve to be collected in one volume.
For me, it resonates deeper than that. Mike’s war stories are about ordinary people (if ‘ordinary’ is the right word), who found themselves in extraordinary circumstances and were asked to do extraordinary things. When he writes of Ray McMillan or Keith Payne, Charlie Blackman or Jack Anning, Cliff Hopgood or Charlie Marshall, he could just as easily, in my mind, have been writing about my grandfather, Francis Edwin Armstrong. It’s not that my grandfather’s story is similar to any other told in this book — it seems to me that no two war stories are ever the same — but like the heroes Mike meets or remembers in his stories, ‘Pa’, as we grandchildren called him, also went far beyond the call of duty, and made us all eternally proud of him. Ted Armstrong was a schoolteacher. He was 21 years old and working in classrooms in around his hometown of Wallsend, about 10km from Newcastle, 160km north of Sydney, a world away from France and England, when he enlisted for the Great War on July 24, 1915. As a kid, he’d been resourceful enough to earn a scholarship to Newcastle High School, ‘tenable for three years [and] with a free supply of textbooks’. He joined the 19th Battalion and five months later left Sydney on the HMAT Suevic, bound for Egypt. The voyage, he wrote in his diary, was ‘monotonous’, but such was his sense of adventure in the days and weeks before he was summoned to the trenches, he fell ‘in love’ with his new surroundings. The area around the Ferry Post at the Suez Canal would, he wrote, ‘do me for a long time’. That, of course, is not how war works. Transferred to the 55th Battalion as part of the reorganisation that followed the Anzacs’ Gallipoli campaign, he was promoted to sergeant, shipped to France, and suffered gunshot wounds at the Battle of Fromelles on July 20, 1916, during an exchange he described as ‘veritable hell’. More than 5500 Australian soldiers lost their lives — a disaster the renowned military writer Les Carlyon described as ‘one of the worst in Australian history, probably the worst in terms of the scale of the tragedy and the speed of it, a mere 14 hours’. Among the dead was Lieutenant Berrol Mendelsohn, aged 25, from Bondi in Sydney, a swimmer of some ability who had served at Gallipoli before he joined the 55th. Five months later, Pa wrote to his late comrade’s family. A friend of mine, Pte A.E. Rodda, received a communication from you, asking for particulars of the death of Lieut. B. Mendelsohn of this Battalion and as I, perhaps better than anyone else, can supply those particulars, I have undertaken to write you, and do so. Lieut. Mendelsohn was platoon commander of No. 3 Platoon, and I was platoon sergeant of No. 4 Platoon. On July 19, when I reached our trenches with my platoon, Lieut. Mendelsohn, by some chance separated from his own platoon, was near us. He immediately took command of those men near him, and blowing his whistle led the way over the parapet towards the German trenches. When I reached the German first line of trenches, I found that Lieut. Mendelsohn was not with us, but on reaching the German second line, he was already there. This was about 7pm, July 19. As soon as I reached this position Lieut. Mendelsohn gave the order to move along the trench and we occupied a portion of the trench previously unoccupied. We were together here all night, except for a short period when Lieut. Mendelsohn moved down the trench. At about 2am on July 20, the Germans counter-attacked heavily and we stood to, to withstand the attack, Lieut. Mendelsohn in command. At about 2:30am, he was shot through the head standing alongside me, whilst urging his men on to greater effort. Death was instantaneous. I was myself wounded shortly after, but have ascertained that Lieut. Mendelsohn’s body was not removed from the trench and was probably buried by the Germans. The remains of Berrol Mendelsohn, a great uncle of the actor Ben Mendelsohn, would not be formally identified and re-buried until 2010, after archaeologists searched an area at Pheasant Wood, near Fromelles, and discovered mass burial pits that had been missed by grave recovery parties immediately after the war. What might he have achieved, had he survived the war? General Sir William Birdwood, commander of the Australian forces on the western front, wrote to Mendelsohn’s mother Abigail: ‘He was an officer of the highest ideals, very efficient, and his loss has consequently been most severely felt by the battalion, and by his colonel, who regarded him as such a trustworthy friend.’ After rehabilitating in England, my grandfather returned to the frontline two months after the carnage at Fromelles, was promoted to lieutenant, and survived fierce exchanges with the Germans at Amiens, Villers-Bretonneux and Morlancourt. At the end of September 1918, during the 55th’s assault on the Hindenburg Line north of Bellicourt, his ‘conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty’ earned him a Military Cross, the citation reading in part: Early in the attack, the attacking troops were held up by the enemy’s extremely heavy machine-gun fire. Lieut. Armstrong, moving amongst the men of his Company, encouraging them by his personal bravery and total disregard of fire, reorganised them for the final rush at the M.G. nests. Jumping out at the head of the Company with the cry ‘Come on Lads’, his men bravely followed him with a cheer as he struggled forward in the face of the spitting guns. Urged on as they were by this officer, his men pushed home the assault with bayonet and bomb with such determination and dash that the Huns were overpowered before they realised what had happened. The result was that the danger from the enemy's miniature fortress which was holding up all the attacking troops of the Brigade was now removed and the advance of the whole line was allowed to continue unharrassed. Family folklore has it that Pa received his Military Cross personally from King George V. From what my dad told me, my grandfather rarely talked about his war experience, at least not with members of his family. He died on November 29, 1966, when he was 73, and I had just turned 5, so I never had the chance to pry. When he returned to Newcastle in 1919, he told a welcome-home reception that he’d ‘been on the move for so long it would require some time to get back to the old order of things’. And he added flatly: ‘I, with the others, went away to do my bit, and if you are satisfied that that has been done, and are satisfied to have me back again, I am satisfied to be back.’ With that, he thanked everyone for their ‘hearty welcome’ and retreated back into civilian life. Or at least I imagine that might have been the plan. Ted Armstrong returned to teaching, working at various schools in the Hunter region, but he quickly became dispirited with the way many returned soldiers were treated. So began a lifetime of civic service. He became President of the Wallsend branch of what we now know as the Returned Services League (RSL), and in November 1922, the Newcastle Morning Herald reported, decided to cancel that year’s annual Armistice Day picnic ‘on account of the distress existing amongst Diggers’. Instead, he asked everyone to ‘contribute to the Red Cross Society for the purpose of aiding their work of relieving the distress’. Late in 1924, he was appointed to the headmaster position at Baradine Public School in western NSW, and two years later was transferred to nearby Binnaway Public School, where he also took over as president of the RSL, was elected president of the local Progress Association and joined the committee for the Binnaway Show. In 1933, he returned to the Newcastle area, as headmaster at Boolaroo Public School, where he stayed for seven years, until he was called to the city to take charge at Parramatta North Public School. My grandfather would become a prominent public figure in western Sydney. I’m not sure he ever sought the spotlight, but he’d learned that you could hardly ask others to get involved if you weren’t prepared to do so yourself. He joined the Volunteer Defence Corps. He was elected to the committee of Parramatta RSL and was named president in 1945. A year later, he became an alderman on Parramatta Council. His sons went to Parramatta High, and he soon became the secretary of that school’s Parents and Citizens Association. He was one of the founders of the Parramatta division of Legacy, was on the committee of Parramatta Rotary and was a member of the City of Parramatta War Memorial Trust. His motivation might have been captured in part by his remarks at an Armistice Day service in 1945: ‘Remember, not only the men who died. Remember also the men who lived. Help them.’ Nineteen months earlier, Pa had spoken passionately at an Anzac Day ‘smoke concert’ at Parramatta’s Soldiers’ Hall: To me the real significance of the day we celebrate is not merely to remember the landing at Gallipoli as a glorious operation — which it was — but to remember the old Anzacs and the new Anzacs, and to pledge ourselves that the new Anzacs who come back will have a better spin than the old ones did ... He said that for the participants of the two Great Wars, different days had ‘their own significance, their own memories’. The day we celebrate is not merely April 25, 1915, but all those other days I have spoken of. We gather together to remember our mates who were left behind, whether in the first war or the second. As we think of them, what do they think of us? They’re looking down on us and asking what we have done in their memory. I don’t think they want us to mourn. They want us to remember them, but not to go around with gloomy faces. They want us to remember them as they fell with a smile on their faces. They want us to remember those they have left behind. After the last war, what happened to the dependents of those who fell? What happened to those men who came back — and wanted work? You know what happened! What’s going to happen to the men who come back this time? To the dependents of those who fall in this war? Ted Armstrong’s commitment to his fellow returned soldiers and the wider community never wavered. He shifted from Parramatta North to Blaxcell Street Public School at nearby Granville in 1953, and succeeded in turning his new responsibility from a place many parents tried to avoid into ‘one of the greatest schools in the state’. That’s how Maurice de Ferranti, the District Inspector for the Education Department, described it. ‘I have always believed in handing responsibility to staff, young or old, and treating members of staffs as members of a co-operative organisation,’ Pa said. Even after he retired at the end of 1958 he continued to work as a maths teacher until his death — in part because, as the city’s population boomed, good teachers were hard to find, but also because, simply put, he loved it. He was one of the ‘lucky’ soldiers in that he lived a long life and he had the chance to let his experiences — on the battlefields of France and later as a teacher and good citizen —shape his life and character. In 1953, as president of the Parramatta RSL, he was asked to speak at a function organised to honour a 22-year-old cricketer from the local Cumberland club named Richie Benaud who had just been chosen to tour Britain with the Australian cricket team. Cumberland (now known as Parramatta) had previously provided three Test men — Gerry Hazlitt, Frank Iredale and Bill Howell — but they had learned their cricket elsewhere before joining the club as established players. Benaud was the first cricketer from Parramatta to wear the baggy green. It is impossible to underestimate the pride the district felt for their new hero. ‘Richie, your skill has gained you the honour of an English tour,’ said Ted Armstrong, the RSL president, headmaster, the soldier who had received his Military Cross from the King. ‘It is unique, because you are the first local boy to achieve this distinction. You will associate with the highest in the land … ‘I hope that you never lose the common touch.’ That was my grandfather’s advice. That’s what mattered to him, an ‘ordinary’ person who did extraordinary things. I can imagine the Man Next Door and many of the other leading characters you have read about in this book offering a similar suggestion. I’m sure there are many families who have forebears whose experiences and ordeals fighting for Australia shaped them in a similar way. We rely on exceptional writers such as Mike Colman to tell their stories, and to tell them well, so we can remember them and learn from them. That’s why I was so keen to publish this book. |
