‘But Why Should You People at Home Not Know?’: Sacrifice as a Social Fact in the Public Memory of War

Lieutenant J. A. Raws, a 33-year-old journalist from Melbourne, Australia, describes here his experience of one of the greatest conflagrations of the Great War. It was 4 August 1916 and Raws was nearing the end of his own personal involvement in the battle for Pozieres on the great Somme battlefield. Australian success in capturing this important strongpoint in the German defensive line created a narrow salient which enabled the enemy to concentrate its artillery on the assaulting forces from three directions. Shells falling short from British support batteries far behind ensured their complete encirclement. The failure of the push on both flanks also meant that most of the enemy’s available artillery could be brought to bear on that one small French village and the gentle ridge that turned its immediate surrounds into a strategic objective. The shelling at Pozieres is often described as amongst the most sustained and concentrated bombardments of the First World War. In seven weeks of fighting here three Australian divisions suffered 23,000 casualties. Thirty per cent of these were killed or died of wounds; the majority of them – Raws and his younger brother Lieut. R. G. (‘Goldy’) Raws included – received no known grave. The two men are commemorated on the Australian memorial at Villers-Bretonneux, 25 kilometres away to the south and west, in the Books of Remembrance at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, the Roll of Honour in the Australian War Memorial in the national capital Canberra, and on a small honour board in the Flinders Street Baptist Church in Adelaide, where their father was minister (Figure 1.1).