Like many footloose young men working at humdrum rural labouring jobs when Australia rallied to Britain’s call to war in 1914, Les McGrath from Hargraves wasted little time in heading for Sydney to enlist.
He was just 21 when he answered the call of king and country, joining the 19th Battalion of the Australian Military Forces in February 1915 to begin months of training in camp near Liverpool, before embarking in June on a troopship for Egypt.
Les would see action on Gallipoli and later in the bloody trenches of the Western Front, where he was gassed during a German attack in mid-1916 and hospitalised in England for a time, only to rejoin his unit later and see out the war to the bitter end.
During all this time, from Liverpool camp to Egypt, Lemnos, France, England and the ship that finally repatriated him, Les kept up a stream of letters to folk back home – and to one soul-mate in particular, Mary Petrie.
Today, a century later, those letters to Mary make poignant reading. They are a graphic record of one Australian bushman’s journey through the First World War – of his experiences, his personal encounters, his thoughts and reflections.
As such, they are a valuable collection now vested in the “social history” section of the Australian War Memorial archives in Canberra, but it was nearly not to be.
After Mary’s death in 1975, followed by that of her husband, Ern Sibley, four years later, their daughters were sifting through their parents’ belongings in the Old Police Station in Hargraves that had been the couple’s home, looking at what to jettison.
One of the daughters had filled a box with rubbish destined for disposal down one of the area’s many abandoned mineshafts, and among other items in the box was a peg bag she had found hanging on a hook in the pantry.
It was only when her sister decided to go through the box before dumping it that they discovered the peg bag contained the letters from Les, preserved by Mary “on the quiet” for 60 years. No gold nugget could have represented a more precious find.
No-one knows – or ever will - the full extent of the relationship between Les and Mary, other than that they had obviously knocked around together as teenagers, joined tennis parties on Hargraves properties and shared many friends.
In fact it would not be Mary, but her younger sister Elsie, to whom Les would become engaged following his return to the district in 1919 – only to die in a Mudgee hospital two years later (ironically, on November 11, Remembrance Day) aged just 27.
He was buried in the peacefully sylvan Hargraves Cemetery, where his wartime co-correspondent Mary Sibley and her husband Ern are also interred, and where their grandson, Vietnam veteran David Nelson of Mudgee, intends one day to join them.
Les McGrath spent all his pre-war life in the Hargraves district, where he and his sister were reared by their uncle and aunt (who were also their parents’ brother and sister respectively) following the death of their mother when Les was just three.
Although their adopted parents had nine children of their own, they took on Les and his sister without demur, providing them all with a good basic education through the occasional governess, travelling tutors and a local bush school.
As a young man, Les worked with his cousins at the farm labouring jobs of the era, fencing and rabbiting and sheep handling, but his elegant handwriting and the sensitivity that comes through in his war letters belie his rude bush background.
The letters (photocopies of which are held in Hargraves) reflect the writer’s constant thirst for news from “home”, and the joy that attended the arrival of a letter addressed in a familiar hand.
Writing from Heliopolis in Egypt on the eve of his departure for Gallipoli, Les told Mary: “Oh, if you knew how anxiously I waited while the mail was being sorted & when at last I received mine how eagerly I read them. No one can imagine how one feels going into action without a word from ‘home sweet home’”.
Another recurrent theme of his letters is the weather, which added perpetual discomfort to the other miseries of life at the front. Writing from hospital in France in June 1916 while recovering from the effects of the gas, he observed: “It is supposed to be summer but I have experienced milder Australian winters. Never mind, we will appreciate the climate of our native land a little more when we return.”
A few months later, after a bout of convalescence in England, Les was back in the front line, where he and his fellow Diggers went “over the top” in an offensive during the bloody and largely pointless Third Battle of Ypres.
Writing about it later to Mary, he said “I went over in the same wave as Harold (Ison, also from Hargraves) & returned twenty-four hours later, after spending that period in a place that had a temperature …. somewhat akin to a place we often hear of during church service.
“Also, on the return journey I went back to the days before I learned to walk – that is I thought it rather more sensible to crawl than walk. Under cover of darkness & by remaining perfectly still when ‘Fritz’ sent up his famous flares I managed to wriggle my way some five hundred yards unhurt.
“My luck during that trip alone is emphasised by the fact that a chap who crawled in with me was hit three times during the journey.”
While the earlier letters contain light-hearted chit-chat about people and general goings-on back home, the later ones become more sombre in tone, reflecting both the writer’s deteriorating health and the pervading gloom about prospects of victory.
In August 1917, with the fighting bogged down and Australia riven by conscription debates and industrial turmoil, Les let fly: “I pride myself on being Australian, & when one reflects upon the vast multitude of ‘slackers’, in so fair a land, pride turns to a feeling of shame and sickly disgust.
“Perhaps if they (i.e. ‘slackers’ back home) could see some of the sights to be seen in Belgium and Northern France the spark of manhood which is so small and so deeply embedded may rise to the surface and overcome their fears.”
A little over a year later, when the Allies were at last gaining the upper hand (thanks in large part to the strategic brilliance of Australia’s General Monash), Les was again convalescing in England, and sharing with Mary his thoughts of victory.
“I finally believe that Germany is beaten today,” he wrote on September 14. “Otherwise we would not be able to deliver such successful blows right along the whole front, but we have still to convince the Hun that he is beaten & that will keep us occupied for some time yet.”
In the event, it would be less than two months before Germany capitulated and the war was over, but for Les – like so many others physically and mentally broken – the “victory” would be all too hollow.
Perhaps, in the light of subsequent events, the most poignant of Les’s letters to Mary was the last, written from a camp at Shaftesbury in England in February 1919 shortly before boarding ship for Australia.
“By the time you receive this,” he writes, “I hope to be south of the Equator on my way home to ‘God’s own country’ – Australia. And when I return I do not think that I shall leave again for some considerable time.”
Indeed he wouldn’t: within three years he was dead – but thanks to his penmanship, and a lady’s lifelong attachment to her late friend, he will not be forgotten.
