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very few were buried. I am afraid he would be “left out” wrote one
informant.
Unfortunately, both sides refused to allow the opposition soldiers to return
to No Man’s Land to retrieve their opponents dead or wounded.
Therefore, some wounded soldiers died for lack of medical attention and
soldiers were left between the trenches, forever unknown. In many cases
the bravest of men were the stretcher bearers who went, often from shell
hole to shell hole, into no man’s land under heavy fire, to retrieve
wounded soldiers.
As the trench line in this area of the front remained the same for the war’s
entirety you can imagine the horrors that faced our soldiers including the
smell of rotting corpses, possibly of best mates whose smell hung over the
Front.
Informant C J R Clark wrote about Mondy he was “Left with his Lewis
Gun after the German first line of trenches”, but another witness was
more certain of his fate, “He was killed outright with a shell. …..” He was
a seaman, a big well built fellow and a married man”.
John Mondy, Charles’ younger brother survived the war.
The great numbers of missing and unburied soldiers in this sector of the
trenches is demonstrated by the formation in Australia of a
Missing
Soldiers of Fromelles Discussion Group
on the internet.
NATIONAL LIBRARY
The National Library provides a wealth of knowledge on a wide variety of
Australian wartime topics that can be sourced by Australians.
The National Library can utilise the resources of over a thousand
Australian libraries.
“TROVE”
a super search engine gives Australians access to a multitude
of Australian materials, the most important of which, from the point of
view of our topic, are newspapers, books and photographs.
With regard to newspapers not all have been digitalised so researchers
need to search within the period of time that the newspaper has been
digitised.
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