We stand here at the memorial to our fallen soldiers to
remember.
To remember our loss and pay tribute to its legacy.
Unlike other forces, our soldiers were not forced to
march but chose to walk – an army of volunteers.
Pozieres was a bloody and brutal battle. A military
success - our soldiers captured the village and held it
but success came at a terrible cost. More Australians
were lost in eight weeks of fighting in France than
during 8 months on Gallipoli.
They volunteered to serve despite the risk, the
greatest risk of them all.
Two brothers, Goldy and Alec Raws, epitomise this
volunteer spirit.
Goldy enlisted early and served at Gallipoli.
When their father the Reverend John Raws discovered
that his other son Alec was also looking to enlist, he
wrote to him pleading to reconsider.
The Reverend was acutely aware of the toll war was
taking on other families back home.
Alec would hear nothing of it.
Writing to his father, he explained his decision
simply: “I do not think that I was ever a great man for
heroics but I do believe that there are some things
worth more than life.”
Both Alec and Goldy Raws would serve in the 23rd
Battalion here at Pozieres and Mouquet Farm.
On July 23, when the Australian forces moved on
Pozieres, Goldy Raws was amongst the first push as the
Australians captured the town.
A victory that allowed the British forces to also
make gains.
But the Australians were now a high and easy target
for German artillery.
The bombardment suffered by the Australians over the
next few days was some of the most severe of the entire
First World War.
Australia’s official historian Charles Bean described
it: “The shelling at Pozieres did not merely probe the
character and nerve; it laid them stark naked as no
other experience of the AIF ever did. In a single tour
of this battle, divisions were subjected to greater
stress than in the whole of the Gallipoli campaign.”
Australian men had volunteered to walk in to hell.
While many were blind to the reality of what they
would face, when they finally saw the horror they stared
it down with unbending resolve.
Alec arrived at Pozieres to join the fighting and his
brother on the 29 of July.
He could not wait to be reunited with Goldy, who he
had not seen since he had left for war more than a year
earlier.
Tragically the first news he heard of his brother was
he had been listed as missing in action the day before.
Like many in the first few days of the offensive,
Goldy could not be found and had not returned to the
trenches.
With his brother at the front of his mind, Alec along
with his fellow Australians would bear the full brunt of
the German guns in the next few days.
He wrote in a letter home: “The horrors one sees and
the never-ending shock of the shells is more than can be
borne. Hell must be a home to it. The Gallipoli veterans
here say that the peninsula was a happy picnic to this
push... I have had much luck and kept my nerve so far.
The awful difficulty is to keep it. The bravest of all
often lose it. Courage does not count here. It is all
nerve... Poor wounded devils you meet on the stretchers
are laughing with glee. One can not blame them. They are
getting out of this.”
For two weeks amidst the shelling, the Australians
moved by night to avoid detection from German artillery
spotters.
They fought off German counter-attacks and
successfully held their ground.
All the time Alec remained hopeful of finding news of
his brother and wrote to his father that the constant
moving along the line to avoid the shelling might be the
only reason he had not received it.
As his battalion pressed towards Mouquet Farm, he
wrote: “I write of him coldly and without emotion,
because, Father, it is impossible that one give way to
the expression of grief just now. And I do trust that
you and Mother, should good news not have reached you,
will be able to sustain yourselves.”
It was Alec’s last letter home.
Four days later the German bombardment took him and
several others with a single shell.
Goldy and Alec Raws, like the 6,727 other Australians
who died around Pozieres, saw the need to serve as
something larger than themselves.
They were of a generation where sacrifice had no
bounds.
We gather here to remember Goldy and Alec and an army
of volunteers.
They did not consider themselves heroes. But their
quality, conduct and actions belie this.
They left their homes.
They left their families, friends and loved ones.
They left their futures.
Heaven bound having been to hell and back.
They stepped forward to serve, to volunteer.
It is a legacy today that we still treasure – the
willingness to put oneself forward at a time of need, a
resolve to offer oneself freely no matter what the cost,
to do the job required.
It is why we remember here at Pozieres today not only
the hell encountered, or the heroics achieved but the
legacy.
That there was a generation that bestowed on us a
belief - that there is a need to give of ourselves for
our community and for our nation.
It is this humility to serve and legacy left that we
commemorate.
Lest we forget.
