It was September 1918 when a young Queenslander, Claude Fraser, left for England assigned to the 9th within the Royal Queensland Regiment.
By the time the 18-year-old from Gympie reached the western front, the first world war was over.
But the unpleasant job of locating, exhuming and reburying Australian war dead was about to begin. An eager Fraser put his name down.
Now, owing to anonymous volunteers at the State Library of Queensland, Fraser’s diary from 1919 has been transcribed, offering a rare insight into the little-known service undertaken by Australian troops.
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“There’s nothing like a first-hand account of history,” the library’s Robyn Hamilton says. “It’s just so much more vivid when it’s expressed through the account of someone’s actual lived experience.
“Claude was also quite the writer.”
In January 1919 a giddy Fraser went sightseeing in London for the first time and visited family in Edinburgh, before being sent to France.
All the destruction caused by the fighting is being cleaned up with the German prisoners. The whole countryside was dotted with groups.
I went for stroll in no man’s land; had [to] look over old dumps & exploded several mines, grenades.
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Grave work began in April, when Fraser and his comrades searched for bodies in fields near Hamel, Amiens and Villers-Bretonneux, where many Australians had died.
“You get the sense in his diaries that he was serious about it, the daily work of locating, exhuming and then reburying the dead,” Hamilton says.
“Here is an earnest young man with a fairly sobering task before him.”
About 1,100 Australian ex-servicemen, volunteers and new recruits took part in the postwar graves effort, within the Graves Registration Detachment (GRD). It was the Australian subsection of the Imperial War Graves Unit, led by the British, and the very early form of what is now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
Horrifying numbers
The task was daunting and grim. Bodies were scattered all over the western front, some buried almost where they fell with no formal markers.
In some cases, soldiers had time to make note of where they buried comrades, before the frontline shifted. Identity discs, coloured battalion patches and letters from loved ones stuffed in pockets offered clues for identification.
Tuesday 15 April 1919:
Commenced work at 8.30am; started from V.Bx [Villers-Bretonneux] … seven bodies in one shell hell, bodies hardly decomposed, one of the boys found gold signet ring & half penny on one corpse.
Some of the bodies had been buried for more than a year.
“By the time Fraser and his comrades reached them, the decomposition would have been almost complete”, Hamilton says. “I’m sure they didn’t manage to identify as many as they’d hoped.”
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The numbers were horrifying. On a single day, 17 April, Fraser wrote: “15 bodies exhumed … 35 exhumed bodies … 18 bodies exhumed.”
Once bodies were exhumed, they were wrapped in hessian with identification tags and transported by stretchers, or for longer distances on horse-drawn wagon, and reburied in a Commonwealth cemeteries. A cross was placed over each grave, and a photograph taken to send to the dead man’s family in cases where the body had been identified.
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Missing soldiers whose bodies were not found had their names recorded in memorials at Villers-Bretonneux, Menin Gate and Lone Pine (Gallipoli). At the time, it was believed “every dead soldier, if not able to be repatriated home, should be honoured with a gravestone”.
About 46,000 Australian servicemen died on the western front, but less than half that number of bodies were found. No bodies were repatriated.
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The most beautiful poppies
By the end of 1919, the GRD exhumed and reburied 5,469 bodies.
The unit has not escaped controversy. An inquiry in 1920 heard allegations of “body hoaxing”, misconduct and mismanagement by those charged with finding and exhuming the bodies, as recounted in the 2018 book Missing In Action.
Fraser’s diary does not detail anything of this nature. His frank yet expressive entries capture the “very monotonous” work and “awful” stench of the bodies he handled for six months.
The cemetery is – I am sorry to say – growing larger each day. Contains French, British, Canadian, American & Australian Soldiers … close on 2,000 bodies.
When we raise the bodies most of us are on the verge of vomiting.
He juxtaposes the dark moments with the only lightness he can see in his surroundings.
I have never seen so many beautiful wild flowers as I have seen in France. The most beautiful poppies, extraordinary size, large as a large saucer.
Fraser returned home in September 1919 and became a successful businessman.
Hamilton and her team found the diary among a collection of records from the Brisbane Cash and Carry store – probably Australia’s first cash-and-carry – which Fraser opened in May 1923. The city’s “original and exclusive self-service cash and carry grocery store”, as the Brisbane Courier later described it, was a huge success, and Fraser later sold the store to Woolworths.
In 1954, Fraser went back to France with his wife and four children to see the cemeteries “where he had laboured over 30 years before”.
His diary would not be found for more than 100 years after it was written, but a full transcription can now be read online.
“Diaries are different,” Hamilton says. “They are, I guess, the most intimate form of communication.”
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