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imagine that in a more “religious society” the heartache that this aspect of
the war must have caused.
Why did so many soldiers go missing? It is obvious that the bodies of so
many soldiers were lost due to the slush and muck of “No Man’s Land” in
Belgium and northern France see the photographs before in
Trench
Warfare
.
Constant and destructive heavy artillery fire and very poor winter
weather was a lethal combination. Another consequence of these
conditions was the inability of infantry to make quick progress, under
heavy fire, across the terrain. Imagine carrying heavy equipment forward
and falling into the artillery shell hole crater shown in the Herald’s
photograph shown before in Killed and Lost page 83. In this situation
hopefully, your mates would help to pull you out.
The constant fighting in the period of a battle and in most cases the little
progress of your starting trenches meant that little time could be spent in
retrieving and burying a dead soldier. Even if you were able to dig a
rushed and shallow grave it was difficult to go back to the contested
ground to find the grave or a marker destroyed by enemy fire. Remember
Herbert Bradley’s story.
EMBARKATION ROLL
The World War 1 Embarkation Roll consist of nominal rolls of about
330,000 personnel of the AIF and the military component of the
Australian Naval & Military Expeditionary Force as they embarked for
overseas service during the First World War.
The AIF included the Australian Flying Corps (AFC) and the Royal
Australian Naval Bridging Train (RANBT)
The Embarkation Rolls do not include those who joined the AIF but did
not serve overseas.
The importance of this Roll is that virtually all soldiers had to complete
the Roll on boarding their transport for Europe. Therefore, as an
instrument to compare many details, it is an important starting point for
researchers. In some cases it was only the Embarkation Roll that provides
the only reliable information about members of the AIF.
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