Trinity … and hell on earth

Percy from the Pews provides a timely reminder for Tasmanians ahead of Remembrance Day tomorrow …

It was hell on earth, on the worst battlefields in the horror that was World War One. It also had a special significance for Tasmania, and the parishioners of North Hobart’s Holy Trinity Church.

The terrible place of death was in Belgium in a foul quagmire of glutinous mud, made worse by the frequent heavy rain in an area notorious for it. It was in this that soldiers braved the bombardment of shells and the added threat of mustard gas that blistered the skin and bled the lungs. If the soldiers weren’t killed or injured in the fighting then they were at constant risk of drowning in the stinking bogland, horses and pack mules with them.

This was Flanders of 1917, the Western Front, in what was the Third Battle of Ypres – more simply known as Passchendaele, a terrible milestone in one of the most brutal of wars.

Over that July through into November, in a series of battles of a campaign that became one of attrition, more than half a million lives were lost. The death rate reached 2,121 a day. Some quarter of a million Allied soldiers perished. And they were fighting for a few miles of churned-up swamp that scarcely fitted the description of being “land”. Many thousands of victims were never identified, and bodies never recovered. The Australian toll was massive.

It was at Passchendaele in October that a remarkable story linked to Holy Trinity Church is found – when a man of the church buried another of the church.

Sergeant Eric Arthur Hall, aged 22 years and six months, from Glenorchy, died after he was badly wounded in the stomach by shrapnel on October 18. The records show that it was at Broodseine Ridge, and this was an historic place for the men of the Australian Imperial Force – the first time all of its divisions had fought side by side.

Eric had survived being wounded almost exactly a year before.

Nicknamed “Joker”, he had gone to Trinity Hill School, had later worked at the Mercury on its linotypes, and was still single when he enlisted with reinforcements in late 1914, sailing from Melbourne just three days before Christmas.

In the battle he had gone out with a night party and was returning just before dawn through no man’s land when he was hit – just a few yards from his unit’s trench.

He was buried on the ridge, and this duty fell to a brave chaplain from Trinity, a man whose own story of courage has been told previously on this website (Heroism . . . and the closure of Trinity) – the Reverend Donald Burns Blackwood, who the month before had been Mentioned in Despatches, and within another few months was to win the Military Cross in France.

The Trinity minister wrote of how he had personally buried his fellow Tasmanian, with the help of Canadian field artillerymen: “I nailed his disc on a small rough wooden cross we erected over his grave.”

Chaplain Blackwood wrote to Eric’s mother in Hobart with the details. She had been a widow, and she had also been grieving over the earlier loss of another son.

Lance-Corporal Norman John Alexander Hall, aged 25, a storeman and packer in civilian life, was killed in action and buried near Pozieres in France on August 14, 1916. He had previously survived six months at Gallipoli.

There was a strange parallel with his brother’s death a year on – Norman had also gone out with a party, taking rations to the trenches about a mile away. There was a barrage and when the party returned the next day two of the men were missing. Norman Hall was one of them. A search party could find no trace of the bodies and believed the two had been buried in a shellhole when hit during the barrage.

It was sheer bad luck that Norman had even gone out with the rations party. He had tossed a coin with his corporal to see who should go, and lost. Norman is commemorated at Villers-Bretonneux.

Last weekend, at St Alban’s Church Lyons, ACT, the names of the 101 Holy Trinity parishioners who died in that war were laid on the church’s Holy Table during the evening communion service for All Souls Day. This gesture honouring their memory was done by a man keenly aware of their sacrifice, Peter McCabe, son of a former Holy Trinity rector; Peter lost two brothers in World War Two.

He has campaigned with the Holy Trinity Support Group for the protection of the war memorials in the now closed Holy Trinity Church. It remains to be seen if they will be.