Union Soldiers

BA history & Politics

Dip. Professional Writing & Editing

Standing With Union Soldiers

In November a group of ETU unionists took a trip to the Western Front. Our aim was to learn more about what our soldiers had gone through and honour their memory by understanding why they were there.

We were guided by Tim Whitford, a Great War historian and guide at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. Tim opened up the Western Front to a unique and personal experience; each day proving to be a day of learning, a day of highlights and a day of remembrance. 

For eleven days we criss-crossed the Flanders fields sector in places where war played out; walking the ground over undulations that were once trenches, mine craters, and shell holes, and where soldiers still remain under the soil.

We aligned ourselves with German and Allied front lines and learnt of the strategies that pushed those front lines back and forth for four years.

Tim introduced us to Belgian and French people whose lives revolve around the war history in the areas in which they live; and enough cannot be said about the way they welcomed us into their lives and became our friends.

We visited many of the Commonwealth Graves Cemeteries and discovered how many had first been field hospitals or dressing stations where those wounded soldiers who didn’t make it were buried. As one soldier said of the nurses who where their to tend to them;

Then I turns me éad an’ sees ‘er
A dinkum Aussie sister
With a bonzer face, and eyes just like two stars.
Ar, strike! It fairly blinds me”
Made me think of good old Aussie;
Made me think of Dad, and Sis, and dear old Ma. In May Tilton, The Grey Battalion, p291

We stood for the Last Post at the Menin Gate and viewed the memorials of Thiepval, Villas- Brettenaux, Tyne Cot and Vimy Ridge; memorials that display the names of thousands of soldiers whose graves are unknown. 

And through it all, as if it were a pilgrimage, we sought out our own union soldiers. As we found them we placed poppies and ETU messages at the base of their head stones and stood in reflection for a few moments.

Ernie Humphrey was one of our ETU members: he was gassed in March 1918. We couldn’t begin to appreciate how it was for him but the nurses in the dressing stations could;

Most of the poor boys died, but those who lived, to die later, suffered intensely. This mustard-oil gas burned their bodies. Such frightened expressions met our eyes as we bent over them, working to relieve the pain, bathing their poor smarting eyes… The odour of the war was in our nostrils for weeks… May Tilton, The Grey Battalion, pp254-5.

Ernie Humphrey took a week to die.

Standing at the place where each of our union soldiers was laid to rest was as if we were to put a hand on his shoulder and say; ‘Mate, you gave your life fighting for a better Australia and we will never forget.’

And as we stood with these soldiers it crossed our minds that, for many of them, we would have been their only visitors.

Now, ninety seven years on, we can only make of it what our imaginations will allow; the personal realities of that war are buried with the soldiers and our only connection is with their names on the endless rows of headstones in the many war cemeteries. But we can and will tell their stories and provide avenues along which other ETU members can walk in search of those they too wish to remember.

Our only real regret was that there were four ETU soldiers, buried on the Western Front, that we were not able to visit. They, along with those ETU soldiers buried in graves beyond the Western Front have become unfinished business. There is now a duty, for us as fellow unionists, to visit those union soldiers and spend a moment with them too, never to forget.

Soldiers still to visit