The Human Cost Of Artillery Warfare In World War One | The Memorial | Timeline

hi everybody welcome to this timeline documentary my name is dan snow and here i am in a lancaster bomber cockpit one of the few remaining lancasters from the second world war to tell you about my new history channel it's called history hit it's like netflix for history hundreds of history documentaries on there and interviews with many of the world's best historians follow the information below this film or just search online for history hit and make sure you use the code timeline to get a special introductory offer now enjoy this show in the lead up to one of the most important years in the australian war memorial's history i'll go behind the scenes to learn how the great war shaped a young nation and reveal the powerful stories behind the names on the role of honour [Music] in this episode the story goes that they fight at least 100 million rounds during the war which mathematically works out to be something like 40 rounds every minute of the entire war from beginning to end the horrifying dawn of industrial warfare imagine that grinding towards you or imagine a shell from that weapon landing in your midst it was nowhere on earth more densely sown with australian sacrifice and letters from the front line in time he would become the spokesman for many other voices that were silenced how one young soldier's words defined the great war it's horrible but why should you people at home not know [Music] a year in the life of the australian war memorial the soul of a nation so [Music] the war memorial is one of australia's most popular landmarks and with almost a million visitors each year there is an endless stream of guided tours welcome to the world i'm peter one of the volunteer guards the volunteer tour guides are the heartbeat of the memorial and they're a small but powerful presence and then we've got a whole series of memorials between where we're standing and right up the top now folks we are going into the second world war if you'd like to follow me there is a painting of teddy and i'll tell you more about why teddy is so special i'm a voluntary guide i'm one of about 120 i think it is and each one of us does his or her own tour so even if you did a tour in the morning and a tour in the afternoon you wouldn't be doing the same things and i think that's part of the beauty of it the fact that we all have our own tours it was done by one armed artist stranger that he lost his right hand at the battle of bill court in 1917. so these men were asleep below deck not knowing that there was any danger in sydney harbour that night and they never woke up come and i'll tell you a little story tear you up the exhibition galleries may be the public face of the memorial but to gain a real insight into just how vast the memorial's artifacts collection really is we need to go off site [Music] [Applause] the trello technology centre is the memorial's storage and conservation facility it's also the home of the large technical objects a collection of war artifacts that are simply too vast to be exhibited in the museum's galleries amid all the aircraft rockets vehicles tanks artillery and equipment i'm searching for the weapons that are directly linked to the great war and in particular to the western front when the anzacs arrived on the western front they faced the realities of full-scale industrialized warfare far removed from the primitive hand-to-hand combat of gallipoli what they encountered were the first weapons of mass destruction the battle of the western front was where new death machines dominated howitzers trench mortars machine guns flame throwers and poisonous gas it's the sort of first uh step change in the industrialization of war it introduced massive artillery not only the caliber of the guns the numbers of guns the lethality of all the ammunition that was fired machine guns of course barbed wire tanks introduced aircraft and airships all of this industrialization of war and operating these were the the tiny insignificant men the frail bodies of men who were industrializing the way of producing mass casualties and it's it's sad it characterizes warfare today so i i suspect looking at those instruments of war as they're displayed now on a concrete slab in a warehouse you'd say imagine that grinding towards you or imagine a shell from that weapon landing in your midst by the time the australian soldiers arrived on the western front in 1916 the war was at a stalemate the allies and the germans were deadlocked in the vast network of trenches splitting europe a 750 kilometer long front line snaked its way south from flanders and belgium through france to the swiss border consequently both sides of the battle turned to new technology to break the impasse thus forever changing the nature of warfare mr abbott when did you come to the conclusion that australia and australians should remember the victories of the western front at least as much if not more than gallipoli for us world war one was so much more than gallipoli gallipoli was the beginning but it certainly wasn't the end we lost 8 000 or so at gallipoli but we lost 46 000 in france almost 300 000 australians were involved on the western front and as i say the five divisions of the australian army were in many respects the finest troops of the british empire gallipoli for all its heroism was at a feet meal the western front for all of its carnage was a victory and we should remember our victories no less than out of fates to truly comprehend the grand scale carnage of the western front you have to understand the weapons that dominated the battlefield this is perhaps the most famous british gun of the first world war the 18-pounder so um you know more of these used than any other gun and they fired more shells than any other gun so that's an 18-pound shell that's an 18-pounder that's what it's firing yep that's right and how prolific were these well i built about 8 000 of them from memory but the story goes that they fight at least 100 million rounds during the war which mathematically works out to be something like 40 rounds every minute of the entire war from beginning to end wow and then for every shell that's going in that direction there's a hundred million german shells coming there's at least one coming back you've got to bet on that i suppose what you've always got to try and remember is there was a team of men that lived and died alongside an object like this crew of about 10. so quite a large crew for a relatively small gun but of course a lot of them are busy keeping you supplied with shells so that you can keep firing at the enemy perhaps contrary to many people's expectations this isn't really a war about men charging each other with bonnets it's a war where men are killed by machine guns and overwhelmingly by artillery like this it's the german 77 and the british 18 pounder that probably do the lion's share of the killing on both sides during the war senior curator nick fletcher and his team are selecting weapons to go on exhibition in the memorial's new first world war gallery one of them will be the lethal german maxim machine gun this was such a quantum yes efficient you know 666 rounds a minute 11 earns a second yeah and with no precedent there was nothing before hyrum maxim came up with it yeah exactly he revolutionized the world he just pulled it from a clear blue sky and made this thing evil creation yes yes the devil's paintbrush the fact that its application is dreadful but when you see the guts of it and the inside of it and the ingenuity and the precision with which it's all oh it's a miracle of engineering you know you cannot help but admire we're at that real turning point in history we're past the victorian era and suddenly this is engineering which the modern engineer looks at and approves of the war on the western front for the australians who have come from from gallipoli is is a new world yes they've had machine guns at gallipoli for sure but not in the numbers not with the kind of science applied to their use that we're getting and it's when it makes its noise you think that would have been the last noise that thousands upon thousands of people have in order to comprehend the brutality of these museum relics you have to see them through the eyes of a soldier like young australian alec rose he wrote one feels on a battlefield such as this one can never survive or that if the body lives the brain must go forever for the horrors one sees and the never-ending shock of the shells is more than can be born hell must be a home to it alec rose was a gentle young soldier and a former journalist with the melbourne argus newspaper when he arrived on the western front alec ross soon realized that human beings are never more inventive than when it comes to ways of killing each other he faced modern monsters like the 9.2 inch howitzer it required a working crew of 14 men and propelled shells into enemy positions almost 10 kilometers away the first world war marked the arrival of a brand new weapon by the british to help break the deadlock of trench warfare the armored tank they were designed to survive artillery bombardments machine gun fire and crushed through barbed wire in an attempt to break the stalemate the deadly german mine inverters were efficient killing machines capable of dropping shells and carrying massive explosive loads into the trenches alec ross wanted those back home in australia to understand this gruesome reality of the battlefields copies of the typed transcripts of alex letters were donated to the memorial in 1927 by his grief-stricken father the originals were either lost or destroyed despite their graphic content miraculously the letters were not detected by the wartime censors before they were received by alec's family back home in australia i am quite excited tomorrow i shall be in the midst of it all john alexander ross who cannot tread upon a worm who has never struck another human being except in fun who cannot read of the bravery of others at the front without tears welling to his eyes who cannot think of blood and mangled bodies without bodily sickness this man i go forth tomorrow to kill and meme murder and ravage it is funny but in time he would become the spokesman for many other voices that were silenced shrapnel mine worth his whiz bangs bombs lacrimal shells gas shells and thousands of gaping dead the stench and the hardness of it can but be mentioned i've sat on corpses walked on corpses and pillaged corpses the journey to discover more about alec rose and his letters would eventually take me to the trenches of the western front i've been given special access to the war memorial storage facility where the enormity of the collection not on permanent display is almost too much to take in but the truth is these objects are just so much brass and steel unless they're used as keys to open doors into the ugly horror of the great war and into the lives of absent people [Music] of the 60 000 australians who perished in the great war over 46 000 were killed on the western front cut down by weapons like these [Music] i've been following the story of alec ross an australian soldier who wrote extraordinary letters about his wartime experiences alex destiny is entwined with that of his younger brother a queensland plantation farmer named goldie in 1915 goldie was the first of the two brothers to sign up for the great war miraculously he survived gallipoli and was then transported to fight on the western front it was one year later that alec joined the aif and when he arrived in france he hoped to be reunited with goldie so that the two brothers could fight and protect each other on the battlefield [Music] the memorial's historian aaron pegram has studied the fates of alec and goldie i've been researching the raws brothers story not necessarily from the legacy that they have here at the memorial but mainly from a military perspective i've been able to to look through the battalion war diaries from the period covering the fighting at posier i've also been able to plot down some of the attacks that the rose brothers took part in on regional trench maps from the period so that'll actually inform us when neil and i are on the battlefields about where all this took place where it all unfolded and actually make a lot more sense from from alec raw's poignant letters this is the australian memorial just outside the village of posier on the western front and it was here that tens of thousands of australian soldiers experienced their part of the somme offensive in the summer of 1916 the midpoint of the war australian achievements around here came at the cost of 23 000 casualties nearly 7 000 of them were suffered around this point once occupied by a windmill it was those events and this place that inspired australia's war historian charles bean to say that it was nowhere on earth more densely sown with australian sacrifice i've come here to try and understand what happened to alec ross and to his brother goldie [Music] historian aaron pegram has joined me in posiers to show me the battlefields where alec wrote his graphic letters home so what was the significance of posier as a location in terms of a location posier sits on a very slight ridge and that was deemed the tactically favorable ground for the german troops who came through here in 1914 it was in a landscape just like this that alec ross came to understand exactly what the song was all about in july 1916 here the trenches are still visible as well as innumerable craters from the shells that drop night and day day and night alec had come up here expecting to be reunited with his brother goldie and instead he was here alone in hell we are now actually standing in in trenches from the fighting in july 1916 and it's exactly in trenches like this that that that alec roars fought in at posier can you describe for me what that frontline experience was actually all about for men like alec these trenches probably would have been about six to eight feet deep if you can imagine thousands of men living in close confines in trenches much like this these are only very roughly built constructions that that men would have still had to had to persevere with rats with lice with mud the rain it would have been a terrible existence and if you were in a forward trench at posier men would have been expected to to man that position rain hail or shine the historically significant letters that alec ross wrote from the western front graphically described the horrendous conditions the soldiers encountered the place was not littered but covered with dead and as we were under continuous fire and we're moving about a lot and when still we're in very narrow shallow trenches we could do no burying the last meal i had was one i shook from a dead german what i'm always mindful of is the smell of these places apart from anything else you've got thousands of men who are a long way from proper sanitation but then there's the dead these places must have been foul beyond belief the stench would have been unbearable not only are men living in this troglodyte existence in the earth they are rotting corpses out in no man's land exposed to the sun exposed to the elements being ripped apart by artillery fire you've also got the buzz of humanity you've got men living in close confines to each other you have the stench of cordite from all this shell fire and explosions and when you mix into that thousands of germans trying to kill you for else is in that mix as soon as a man sticks his head up over these trenches he is then going to be drawing fire from machine guns from rifles his position is going to be shelled and he runs the risk of inhaling poisonous gas the stalemate of world war one left men caught in trenches for months leaving both sides to resort to gas and chemical warfare the memorial's collection includes artifacts that represent the desperate measures that were used to combat this new weapon of war once people realized that you could stop an army basically you could put thousands of men out of action gas became you know one of the tools of the trade who was the first interaction with poison gas in world war one uh it's believed the french used a tear gas early in the war but most books that you read it's the germans um on the 22nd of april in 1915. what was it that they used chlorine which is a heavy gas they could see becoming a green cloud and it would roll across the battlefield it drops down into your trenches and goes down into your dugouts and and because it's heavy you can't get rid of it they have to actually sweep it out with like rooms i mean they have two forms of gas in the first world war there's a visican which is a gas like mustard gas it would stick to your skin um it would vaporize it lay around and if you touched it it would be absorbed through the pores of your skin or you swallowed it and it would burn your lungs out then you had irritant gases which chlorine was one of them if you got enough chlorine in your body you would basically drain and what were the first responses because i don't suppose that anyone had any idea what to do with it once the british had got gas they went what the hell is this what's happening how do we actually counteract this so they put the orders out to urinate on your handkerchief if you need to put it over your mouth your nose what's in urine that protects you from like alkaline solution they would other or put these alkaline solutions in buckets or water in buckets anything with liquid until they captured um some germans and the germans were carrying a pad respirator this one basically had a chemical impregnated in it and it was hydroscopic so it kept moist then they went off there's a possibility they were going to get other forms of gas so they went to the p hood and then they went to the ph hood this was also called the tube helmet because it has a tube basically which is an exhalation valve and inside is a metal tube which you gripped in your teeth and you breathe through by the start of 1916 troops were starting to get issues this is a small box respirator this is a completely different technology from just breathing through tightly uh some sort of fabric with some other chemical on it totally why didn't everyone use it much much more after first of all into the second world war everybody was equipped for gas everybody had it no one wanted to use it just seems amazing and amongst all the horror of the first world war there was some element of it that was found to be too horrible yeah and this is it i'll blow you up i'll cut you up i'll smash it to bits yeah but i wouldn't send over poison gas because that's just not nice it's just not nice [Music] the handful of letters that alex sent home to his family and friends reveal a man who's struggling a man cut to the bone by all the horror the carnage that he's seen and the suffering that he's experienced himself and one letter that he sent to his brother-in-law norman is particularly harrowing it was awful but we had to drive them in by every possible means the wounded and killed had to be thrown to one side i refused to let any sound man help a wounded man the sound men had to dig i took it on myself to insist on the men staying saying that any man who stopped digging would be shot we dug on and finished amid a tornado of bursting shells i was buried twice and thrown down several times buried with dead and dying the ground was covered with bodies in all stages of decay and mutilation and i would after struggling free from the earth pick up a body by me to try and lift him out with me and find him a decayed corpse i pulled her head off was covered with blood the horror was indescribable i've had much luck and kept my nerves so far the awful difficulty is to keep it the bravest of all often lose it only the men you have trusted and believed in proved to be equal to it one or two of my friends stood splendidly like granite rocks around which the sea raged in vain they're all junior officers but many other fine men broke to pieces everyone called it chill shock but what 90 percent get is justifiable funk due to the collapse of the helm of self-control the shell shock alec writes off is dramatically illustrated in the memorial's photographic archives among the most poignant are the original negative glass plates of the great war portraits that were taken on the western front in the french village of vinya core thousands of photos were taken of australian soldiers during their brief break from the horrors of the battlefield curator david gist has studied the portraits for signs of shell shock these men who've seen and experienced something awful there's a very famous quote from a man named edgar ruhl with the 14th battalion and he passed the men from first division when they were relieved at police and his description of these men after they've just endured what up until that point was the heaviest activity bombardment that australian soldiers had ever endured he describes men with glassy eyes stary very dollful looking expression the kind of expression which in later conflicts came to be referred to as the thousand-yard stare and we believe that this is what we're seeing in many of these images try to imagine you are in such lethal danger every sense in your body is focused on doing a job not letting your mates down but please god may i survive that's that's washing through you i can imagine how they felt but these deeply experienced soldiers must have felt enormous fear they would know as sure as night follows day that so many of their mates had been killed it must be my turn soon when you look at these pictures one by one what symptoms of say shell shock or some or other psychological trauma do you see this guy here jumps out for me the slump position his hands everything about his body language just says someone who's barely in the room he's a long way away from that seat he's a man who just looks like he has been ground down he's had enough and he's got nothing left what is important to remember neil if you're an australian soldier on the song in the first world war by definition you have been through hell i mean to me you look at a face like that and that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about war without having to read a single book you know i get as well just from looking at them generally you know it's like the gentleman of a jury almost there's something actually today you know it's like they look out at the modern world and you know there's an accusation about why has this happened to me it's a really strong question somehow it's like they're accusing the present our president of what happened to them in the past our job here at the memorial is partly to bear witness and partly to make sure that what these guys endured wasn't for nothing i won't give you my idea of war but if i ever come back i'll tell you be content to know that it is bloody awful i've stuck it all right so far not lost my nerve not gone mad and not falling down on my job and i've had some pretty rotten ones it was in these open fields close to posiers that the lives of both alec ross and his brother goldie were finally cut short how did you go about pinpointing where goldie died in amongst this malay of thousands of men although we don't have an eyewitness testimony as to what happened to goldie we're able to consult the historical records and know where the 23rd battalion was located before the attack and what their objectives were during this particular assault and we're actually we look quite literally we are walking in the footsteps of the 23rd battalion they are advancing in a line up this road through the corn field up to capture the slight uh ridge line here in the fields fields in front of us while goldie was engaged in that advance where is alec rose at that moment alec ross is is not on the battlefield just yet he's serving with the 22nd battalion he has just arrived in france and he's just making his way to the fighting here on the somme alec roz is seeking a transfer to the 23rd battalion so that he can fight alongside his brother but of course goldie roars has already gone into battle and disappeared and he's never seen again it's only after alec ross joins the 23rd battalion several days later that he learns of his brother's death how close did alec come to being reunited with his brother it can honestly said that they missed each other within days before going into this next affair at the same dreadful spot i want to tell you so that it may be on record that i honestly believe goldie and many other officers were murdered on that night through the incompetence callousness and personal vanity of those high in authority i realize the seriousness of what i say but i am so bitter and the facts are so palpable that it must be said please be very discreet with this letter unless i should go under and so what then became of alec we don't know precisely what happened to alec other than the fact that he just disappeared on the 24th of august 1916. we don't know what happened to him but we just know that he was he was killed and that based on the evidence from uh from the war diaries we just know that his unit was was literally just over there in the vicinity of that lone tree there that's correct there's a cruel sense of irony that two brothers who had tried so hard to be reunited in the battle to be fighted together uh are sort of reunited in death i've come to the australian national memorial at velar brittany to pay my final respects to alec and goldie ross when alec arrived on the western front his aim was to find his beloved younger brother but a reunion was never to be the utter futility of war that alec raged against in his letters is all the more agonizing when you see his name carved in stone along with the other 11 000 missing australian soldiers whose bodies were never recovered from the battlefields of france and [Music] belgium the role of honour is in many ways the focal point of the australian war memorial every year thousands upon thousands of people come from all over the country all over the world to look for the names of loved ones ancestors on these huge bronze plaques and tragically this is a piece of work that will never be finished because there will always be more names to add more losses to count and in order to make sure that every name here is eligible each case is carefully investigated and considered to make sure that every name here truly belongs that is the job of a small but dedicated team of men and women who go through all and check and check and check again they are the guardians of the record well we're in the stacks of the bean building here at the war memorial and this row this is my work here these boxes that you can see are the roll of honour cards there's about 102 of these boxes filled with a thousand names each and these cards were put together by the australian war records office without these cards you did not get onto the role of honour assistant curator meredith duncan's work involves scrutinizing every new name proposed for the role of honour she's been investigating a name missing from the world war one panels so on to the uh routine agenda items a first world war case for inclusion on the role of honour this is lance corporal george edward glover of the 59th battalion now meredith you might like to just expand on what the circumstance of that case yeah the story with this one was quite unusual because we were contacted by the family who assumes that he would be on the role of honour and they came to look and he wasn't there we investigated and it was when we looked at the service record that it became apparent how the mistake had happened so lance corporal george edward glover's card caused us a lot of problems because this card went missing when the role was being developed george's card went with his service record to the national archives and because of that his name did not go on the role after her discovery that george glover's card was misplaced for nearly a hundred years meredith is now going to contact one of george's descendants we'll be meeting laurie soon and i've corresponded with lori for more than a year now about his great uncle george glover and when the recommendation came through and had been approved i think the email to laurie went woohoo we've done it and he's he's going on from a role of honour perspective he appears to meet all the eligibility criteria so we'd be recommending at the august council meeting that he be added to the role of honour every story needs that final little you know punch line while meredith waits to meet george's relative in another building at the memorial the phone lines are running hot for the busy donations and collections team hi okay so uh you have something you'd like to donate to the memorial okay can you tell me a bit about your collection please the last 12 months 26 874 items were donated to the war memorial by the public these include 8071 diaries and letters 151 artworks 2 37 items of heraldry and technology 13 097 photos film and sound recordings so what have we got today collection relating to the bow okay emma jones and cameron ross are dedicated members of the memorial's collections team there are times when we'll open something up and go wow this is something very important our something very unusual photographs look at that how much of a backstory did we get on this one unfortunately not a lot anymore the most backstory we have is from his diaries okay so we'll have to put it together ourselves okay a lot of my job is uh making sure that when donation comes in that we document it really well that we write everything down and get quite often we refer to it as the back story what is the story behind the collection very large pile of letters and this whole collection relates to um a lady who had five brothers yeah all who served i have had times where i have been reading through a private uh record collection literally crying to see what these people wrote uh letters of goodbye especially it is the greatest of inspiration to me to know how gallantly he fell oh no look she's obviously cried on the letter oh you can see here where the tears actually smudged the word that's very sad occasionally potentially dangerous items are received people can literally walk in through the door and say here's all my stuff you can see here we've had people walking literally with a suitcase full of material we get a lot of weapons coming in as a donation and of course a weapon is designed to be dangerous so therefore we have very strict uh handling procedures around it i can already see we've got a hazard in there asbestos everyone's favorite there's a lot of asbestos in uh wall related things because it's non-flammable leave that one bagged up i think and occasionally something a little more serious such as radioactivity a lot of glow-in-the-dark material originally was glow in the dark because it had radioactive elements in it and so when a collection comes in we will run a geiger counter over it to get a reading so it was 0.5 millisieverts okay which makes it radioactive but not dangerously radioactive [Music] so you've just come back from afghanistan okay there's always a chance that the next phone call is going to have just an amazing uh collection or amazing story that's going to come in that's one of the great things about working here you just never know what's going to come in next so come on in okay this is where we keep all our new donations uh-huh we've got one that's of particular interest to everyone at the war memorial okay when did when did it arrive in the came about action came about a month ago now this one is this naval uniform as you can see it's a very small set of pants it was made by a nurse who served in the first world war she was she met a sailor in the british merchant navy oh gosh right uh during the gallipoli campaign uh-huh and they got married they're smithers for their children she's made this for her children we got a photograph of the children wearing them so there's a nurse outfit as well oh no that's actually their daughter in the sailors outfit and their son in the nurses outfit oh right okay the daughter's five years old and the sun's right so right so the sons and the nurses out there yes there's a story there i'm sure that is brilliant i think it's fair to imagine that they were an eccentric couple i'd say serious this is how they were treating their children [Music] after extensive research assistant curator meredith duncan has discovered why world war one soldier george glover's name is missing from the role of honour now meredith is meeting with george's descendant laurie jury to inform him the case has been solved [Music] george's name yes yes [Music] so the thing about it laurie is that with george we didn't do the same level of research at the time when we found out about him because all we were doing was finding out why he wasn't in the role so it wasn't until a bit later that i wanted to find out well what was george's actual story these are the actual original bits of paper from the red cross wounded a missing inquiry he was admitted on the 14th with shell wounds so he didn't die straight away and he had shell wounds in the abdomen hip hand face and mouth and he died on the 16th and the the witness says i don't suppose he ever regained consciousness and he was buried at durnin court which is where you went to yeah when you hear about the wounds and that he was um two day he died two days after he was wounded which is different to what i thought i thought he was shell taken to the aid station was pronounced dead there so this is yeah this is new stuff to me on that note i have some things for you to see you haven't seen these have you [Music] [Laughter] he's just a kid my goodness before he left it's really like having everyone's family history as my job you get to know their stories you get to know their families and by the end of it of course you feel like you know that name behind the bronze on the panel the 59th battalion of sadly takes up about three and a half panels on the roll of honour it's actually a long sad walk along here if you look at the names in too much detail it starts to get it gets to panel 167 i believe 59th battalion starts here and this he should have been under gill glacier glenn and then glover and glover that's where he should go glover yeah and they would have known all these fellows well some of them some of them yes they would have been through sick and thin together very sad and sad that that he wasn't there for a hundred years yeah but we're going to find a spot for george that's good that's good eventually they're going to recast what we call the supplementary supplementary panel so if we go to the supplementary panel we haven't got anyone else from the 59th no so george from the 15. it means a lot to me and i know it means a lot to the family to have his name up here um i'm very proud that i've been able to be involved in well you did it better late than never you think it's always better late than never yeah so yeah i agree appreciate it very much meredith what you what you've been doing i know it's been a pleasure i think in my job interview they asked you know how do you see your role fitting into the bigger vision of the war memorial and i did actually say well it's the it's the center of it isn't it and i still feel that it is i think the role of honour is the centre of what we do here and the rest of what is displayed the exhibitions the galleries the objects they hang on the stories of the people that have died and not made at home and it's for them we guard the record they say the role of honour will always be the heartbeat of the memorial soon i would meet with a descendant of alec ross the young soldier who wrote powerful letters home from the western front once again the role of honour would prove to be the place where the past and the present my journey to discover more about great war soldier alec rose and his brother goldie began in the archives at the australian war memorial and would eventually take me to the western front alec rose was killed in the great war and his name is here along with that of his brother goldie unlike so many young australian soldiers he didn't see it as some grand or noble adventure when he embarked from the western front right from the start he saw it for what it was his graphic letters home somehow defied the sensor and even today 100 years later the words still resonate with soldiers from modern wars six shells are bursting around here every minute and you can't much sleep between them guns are belching out shells with the most thunderous clap each time the ground is shaking with each explosion i am wet and the ground on which i rest is wet my feet are cold in fact i am all cold i am covered with cold clotted sweat and sometimes my person is foul i am hungry i am annoyed by the absurdity of war and i see no chance of anything better for tomorrow or the day after or the year after i could think so a few things could weigh so much rainy white is alec raw's great niece although she is aware of the significance of alex letters she has yet to see them on exhibition at the memorial [Music] i feel incredibly calm because i'm normally a very panicky person because it's not about me it's about these lost brothers of my grandfather and i really hope in some way are here today good morning rainey very nice to meet you craig tibbetts so pleased to meet you thank you very much for coming out and welcome to the walmart curator craig tibbetts has organised a private viewing of the letters for rini so it's been a while since your last visit then yeah [Music] straight there yep so this is the um temporary first world war exhibition so we basically through this exhibition it runs pretty much chronologically starting with the outbreak of war and enlistment in 1914 some of those early engagements so here we are at the first western front cabinet and here that's the bound set of letters of goldie and alec rawls oh fantastic so that's been in the collection for nearly 90 years now all right i think we're ready to uh open the glass case [Music] these are really the photostat negatives that the memorial made from the typed copies that their father the reverend rose supplied to us in 1927. this is extraordinary yeah i mean they're family letters but they are from a journalist don't they exactly yeah rini has one more letter to share that is not part of the memorial's collection this letter has nothing to do with the horrors of war deeply personal its words are from a young man lamenting what could have been and what he knows will never be delays thank you for your letter read my heart it is difficult to speak of those things you know owing to one standards of gallantry but i have never proposed matrimony to a blessed soul in this world and i have despite no small efforts never attained to the grand passion since you and never been in love for more than a fortnight this is a matter for sincere regret a deep personal shame i know but god knows i've done my best i seem to be incapable of sustaining passion though it really just tore the heart out of me when i read that this is the way this man leaves the country here feeling as if he won't achieve the personal level that perhaps he was brought up with he was brought up in a very loving family what i get from apart from anything else is each one of them was really something else they were just young men with careers and interests and hopes and dreams and you get a glimpse there of just one man's interrupted life there's no doubting that alec in particular his voice is so loud you know his voice is still clear every evening the memorial holds a last post ceremony and tonight it will honour the sacrifice of lieutenant alec ross we remember and pay tribute to second lieutenant john alexander roars alec arrived in france in mid-1916 to join the 23rd battalion in action at posier however he was too late to find his brother who had gone missing three days beforehand during an attack near muke farm on the 23rd of august 1916 roars was heading to the front line when he was struck by the explosion of a nearby shell blast one of his friends serving in the 23rd battalion said that he preserved his quiet philosophic disposition in his turn of quaint sedona humor to the last alec rose was 32 years old it was nearly a hundred years ago when alec ross put his thoughts on paper and wrote from the front line back then he had no way of knowing that his words would be read by a prime minister who was determined that the sacrifice of all those men who fought on the western front is never forgotten my battalion has been at it for eight days and one third of it is left all shattered at that and they're sticking it still incomparable heroes all we're lousy stinking ragged unshaven and sleepless [Music] even when we're back a bit we can't sleep for our own guns i've one putty a dead man's helmet another dead man's gas protector a dead man's boner my tunic is rotten with other men's blood and partly splattered with the comrades brains it's horrible but why should you people at home not know several of my friends arriving mad i met three officers out in no man's land the other night all rambling and mad poor devils [Music] you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 162,075

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, great war, ww1, war memorial, australia day, first world war, world war one, treaty of versailles, neil oliver

Id: 2rocma-a95s

Length: 53min 6sec (3186 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021