Scott Bennett

The Somme: 'It broke my nerve'

Nineteen-year-old Archie Richards from Cornwall spent two harrowing months inside a tank on the Somme in 1916.

‘It broke my nerve,' he later recalled.

Like many men labelled 'nervy', Richards returned home carrying the invisible wounds of shell shock, struggling to re-enter civilian life.

His condition was poorly understood and pension authorities dealt with claims inconsistently.

Most veterans never sought treatment at all.

This is hardly surprising.

Post-traumatic stress disorder would not be formally recognised as a war-induced illness until the 1980s.

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Italy’s disastrous efforts to carve out a corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Europe, inflicted one million dead and another million wounded upon the nation in a he Great War.

The price paid is reflected in the countless memorials dotted around the country.

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‘The first wave gets cut down to the last man.’

Private Stanley Brown recounted the chilling warning from troops he was relieving on the Somme.

Soldiers almost certainly sensed they were in it up to their necks as they marched toward the battlefield.

‘Oh don’t worry you will all be skittled,’ one soldier warned 19-year-old Melbourne clerk Private Fred Hocking, who marched toward Pozières.

‘In an attack up there the first wave gets cut down to the last man.’

Private Vic Graham noticed the stink in the air near Pozières.

He then understood what the French peasants meant when they whispered ‘Bo coo Australie, fini Pozières’

It translated roughly to ‘a lot of Australians finished at Pozières’

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Majorie Grimsby of the Voluntary Aid Detachment recalls her harrowing work at a Casualty Clearing Station during the Great War in France.

'It was just one after another - we didn't really know what we were doing, we were just anxious to put them out of their pain, she recalled.
Initially only fully trained nurses were allowed to serve at the front, but by autumn of 1915, the medical services were so overrun that unpaid volunteers, such as Majorie, were urgently needed.

Majorie's story is recounted in the superb series 'Timeline’.

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