AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 159, 8 July 1938, Page 12

AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL

Unveiling’ by His Majesty on July 22. Eleven Thousand Names on Wall

July 22, just twenty-two years

after the great Somme battle began, the King will unveil the Australian National War Memorial at VillersBretonneux. Eleven thousand Australians fell in the fighting around this village, and have no known graves. It Will be the last day of their Majesties’ State visit to France. The Queen and M. Lebrun, President of the French Republic, will be present at the ceremony.

paign. Historians assert that this charge saved Amiens. Then on April 24 the Australians, at great cost, broke the Germans. With other troops they went over with tanks under a smoke screen and carried important hill positions They swept on so swiftly that soon they were among the German artillery and reserves. It was the crushing blow. “After this severe defeat,” wrote General Ludendorfif years after. "I gave up the last vestige of hope.” This striking and unusual memorial, w'hich the King is unveiling, commemorates the "missing” among the Australians in this and other fighting in the neighbourhood. Farther north, at Fromelles, another 2.000 are so commemorated, and the Menin Gate bears the names of 6,000 Australians who have no known graves in Belgium, Altogether, some 60,000 Australians fell in the war.

The link between the French village and Australia is strong. After the war Villers-Bretonneux was “adopted” by Melbourne, and the school was rebuilt largely by funds from Victoria. On commemorative occasions the children of the school sing that stirring song so well known in France during the war, “Australia Will Be There.”

Australia mcst certainly was there in those early Spring months when the fortunes of war fluctuated so terribly

and then so triumphantly for the Allies. P-e3sed back to Villers-Bretonneux in the Fifth Army’s fighting retreat, the Australians, with London troops shoulder to shoulder, made one of the fiercest bayonet charges of the cam-

Some critics assert that Sir Edwin Lutyens has designed nothing finer or simpler than this memorial on the top 3f a little hill by the historic village. It flanks a w r ar cemetery where long lines of crosses mark the graves of

identified soldiers, and its main feature—a massive wall—marks the old bottle line held by the “Diggers.”

On this wall, in ashlar formation forming three sides of a court-yard, are engraved the names of the missing, “known unto God,” with Kipling’s words carved above, “Their name liveth for evermore.”

In the centre is & tower 100 feet high, within which is a staircase leading up to an exit to an outside platform at a level of sixty-four feet. From this platform there are stairways leading to an observation room, feet from the ground, from the large windows of which are fine views of the surrounding battlefields. The side walls are termined by loggias, giving dignity to the central tower. From the observation room, which is a new and a peculiarly appropriate idea, the yisitor looks towards Amiens, twelve kilometres away. To the east lies Peronne; to the north, Corbie—names writ large in the Australian war history. The memorial was planned eleven years ago, and work on it was actually begun, but had to be delayed when Australia suffered so severely in the world depression of 1930.

Among those to attend the ceremony will be Australian Ministers who are in London concerning the revision of the Ottawa Agreement, veterans of the war of most of the Allied countries, representatives of European Governments, and, in all probability, some members of the Australian cricket team touring England.