July 18, 2003
WAR DEAD FOUND
Visit any town in Australia and you’ll find a memorial to those killed in World War I. We lost more than 58,000 from a population of only four million.
Hundreds of the dead may have been located in France:
A mass grave containing the remains of 250 missing Australian soldiers is believed to have been found in a French field, 87 years after they were killed in the battle of Fromelles - one of the bloodiest encounters of World War I.
(Via reader Zsa Zsa.)
They were discovered when the Richter Scale went haywire from a mass rolling over after a De Villepin speach at the UN.
Posted by: James Dudek at July 18, 2003 at 04:36 AMI read the article. Seems as if all the officials want to do is put up a plaque.
Perhaps it would be too much money, but I don't see why they can't recover as many remains as possible and bury them decently someplace? If I had lost someone and felt he may be buried there, I'd appreciate them at least trying to give some a better burial.
These guys paid with their lives. Shouldn't we treat their remains, now they've been found, with as much respect as possible?
Posted by: Chris Josephson at July 18, 2003 at 07:57 AMI toured the Gallipoli battlefields when I was in Turkey last year. Unbelievable. The trenches are still there. I'm sure there are many other unmarked graves still there, due to the mass casualties and the heat they had to be buried fast in many cases.
Posted by: Alice at July 18, 2003 at 11:25 AMWhat weasles!
What a pity that it took the words of an 'enemy' to express exactly what our so called friends should be expressing now:
sons front far away countries
Wipe away your tears,
Your sons are now lying in our bosom
And are in peace
After having lost their lives on this land
They have become our sons as well
Kemal Attaturk
Posted by: nic at July 18, 2003 at 11:34 AMnic, ozzies covey sadness through humour and comedy.To say something like Attaturk would arouse suspicioun and properly, as in:
another bastard climbing the greasy pole on the back of others .
The contrast is Kipling's haunting poem, the first mode war poem, Charge of the Light Brigade,
ending in a melancholy line unequalled before nor since:
`And for half a century they have lain their dead.'
Don't be silly nic.
Posted by: d at July 18, 2003 at 02:04 PMBefore anyone says the fucking obvious: TENNYSON.
But Kipling was pucker too so, nanyah nanayh..ad bloody infinitum.
Nothing to say, but remember each man had a life, a unique personality, a wonderful Aussie outlook and humour, whose memory should be kept as fresh and strong as any loss today.
Posted by: Paul at July 18, 2003 at 05:51 PMLet the dead stay where they are.
The Englishman Rupert Brooke, (who died of blood poisoning on his way to Gallipoli, and who is buried on the island of Skyros)
wrote in his poem
The Soldier,
"If I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England."
Well, there is also a bit of a French field that is forever Australian.
Posted by: Bai at July 19, 2003 at 01:57 AMRegardless of where tthe remains are interred;
They are forever ours
Forever Australians
Never forgotten
Always honoured.
At the going down of the sun,
and, in the morning,
We will remember them.
Piss off , all you pommies and frogs, you didn't give a shit in 1914, you don't give a shit now.
I do- I'm an Aussie and proud of it.
God bless Australia