Major George ‘Matson’ Nicholas swept Hilda Rix off her feet

And it was meant to be.

Hilda’s years before meeting Matson had been wracked with tragedy. Hilda, her mother Elizabeth, and older sister Elsie had departed Australia in 1907 after her father had died suddenly. There was a period brief respite when Hilda resumed her love of painting in France and Morocco.

Then the Great War erupted.

The family hastily evacuated from Étaples to England on a crammed liner.

Hilda’s sister contracted typhoid on the trip and died soon after. A bereft Hilda could not bring herself to share the news with her ailing mother, withholding it for three months.

In March 1916 Hilda’s mother also died. ‘I could scarcely put one foot in front of the other,’ said Hilda of that time after her mother’s death.   

Hilda stopped painting.

Yet in the depths of her despair, Hilda met Matson.

Their meetings seemed like providence.

When Matson’s battalion had been based in Étaples, he had stumbled upon Hilda’s paintings, which she had left behind when she had abandoned her studio.

The paintings mesmerized Matson. He was determined to meet their creator.  

Matson bided his time. Then, during his leave, Matson travelled to London to pursue Hilda.

They met in September 1916. Love blossomed.

For the first time in years Hilda felt the weight of ravenous grief lift from her shoulders. Matson embodied everything that Hilda sought in a man.

The dashing Matson had been a schoolteacher before the war. On Gallipoli, he had been wounded, and later, on the Somme, at Pozières, he had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his actions during a daring daylight attack on a German machine-gun post.

A world-wind romance followed.

It culminated with Matson receiving his award at Buckingham Palace, and then their marriage, three days later, at St Saviour’s in London.

For 32-years-old Hilda new possibilities abounded. She envisaged a future of children, a family life, and her own home with Matson once the war was over.

Two days after their wedding, a smitten Hilda completed an intimate sketch-portrait of Matson, which beautifully captured his smile and warmth.

Yet after three days together, Matson was recalled for duty.

A sense of foreboding struck Hilda.

‘News that you have gone back to the Battalion has come and frightens me,’ she wrote in a letter to Matson. ‘Oh dear, dear love. It’s terrible. You are in danger, and I am far away. Oh, this ghastly war. Dear husband, be brave and splendid and always your best, but don’t be wreckless. I need you and love you utterly.’

Matson never received Hilda’s heartfelt letter.

He was killed at Flers on 14 November 1916, just five weeks after they had married.

Ravenous grief once again swept Hilda up.

‘I would have died,’ she wrote. ‘Had I been allowed … I wanted to go.’ Hilda took to sleeping on Matson’s greatcoat.

After a period of deep mourning, Hilda turned to her painting for solace.

Matson’s death deeply affected her work, which became melancholic, and rooted in grief and loss.

In one painting Hilda portrayed a gaunt and tearful woman shrouded in a black cloak, crouched, staring at the viewer amidst a battle-scarred landscape, featureless but for the crosses on distant graves. The work captured the epitome of wasteful ruin.

In another work, she painted the moment that Matson was shot, his arms outstretched in a Christ-like pose of crucifixion.

Hilda returned to Australia in 1918, and later exhibited her work in Sydney and Melbourne.

Hilda then immersed herself in her relentless quest to paint the archetypical soldier.

She portrayed her soldiers – which bore a striking resemblance to Matson – with what she felt was a deep sense of quiet dignity. And her paintings resonated with veterans: ‘All the soldiers who have seen [my paintings] say they would have thought only a digger could have painted it, because I have the absolute spirit of the men “on the field”.’

Hilda then chose a veteran as the model for her most seminal work ‘A Man’. For Hilda, the act of painting ‘A Man’ became a sensuous rendition of honouring Matson.

And her finished canvas presented a haunting image.

‘There is a feeling that the soldier’s outer ‘skin’; his tin helmet, webbing, ammunition pouches and rifle may ultimately fail as protective armour on the battlefield,’ wrote a critic. ‘The figure is framed by turbulent skies, and this suggests his extremely tenuous hold on survival and the ultimate frailty of humans, irrespective of their battle dress. This is a portrayal of vulnerability as much as it is of strength.’

Hilda offered her works to the Australian War Memorial in the 1920s, but she was told that some were too intimate for a national collection.

Hilda returned to France in 1925, where she achieved acclaim, becoming the first Australian female artist to hold a solo exhibition in Paris.

Hilda kept the portraits of Matson for the rest of her life.

She died in 1961, aged 77

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Many veterans returned home and never talked about the Great War. They hoped that remaining silent might help them to forget.

Yet supressed memories could unexpectedly manifest themselves as bad dreams.

On Gallipoli Chaplain Walter Dexter was called upon to perform burials of maggot-infested corpses.

Afterwards Dexter became obsessed with dead men and ‘I am beginning to dream of them,’ he recorded. ‘Last night and tonight I dreamt of miles of dead and me burying them.’

Vivid dreams could also occur years after traumatic events.

The weight of command always haunted General Ewen Sinclair-MacLagan. His decision to halt his brigade’s advance inland on 25 April 1915 would have lasting ramifications for the Gallipoli campaign.

Sinclair-MacLagan’s granddaughter remembered that after war he rarely spoke of Gallipoli, but he could often be heard shouting out orders in his sleep.

Joy Davies remembered how her father, Angus Wilson, rarely spoke about the ‘nasty side’ of war. Yet, ‘Looking back.’ she said, ‘I can remember hearing in the night my father screaming.’

Understandably sleep never came easy for some veterans. ‘You’d be lying in bed with your wife, and you’d see it all before you,’ recalled Fred White, ‘couldn’t sleep, couldn’t lie still.’

Fred often tramped the streets at night: ‘Walking, walking, anything to get away from your thoughts.’

Even those at home were susceptible to bad dreams.

Keith Hancock observed his mother’s continual fretting over her missing son Jim. Keith felt the strain, too. For many years afterwards, he had a horrible dream of Jim returning home, mutilated and mad.

Dreams and reality sometimes became blurred. Case notes from the Callan Park Mental Asylum recorded a despairing mother telling doctors that she was ‘in France last night to see the graves of her sons’.

And did these bad dreams serve any purpose? Sigmund Freud believed that dreams were attempts by the unconscious to resolve a conflict of some sort, whether something recent or something from the recesses of the past.

More recent research suggests that nightmares may be a more intense expression of the body working through traumatic experiences.

Great War veteran and novelist Erich Maria Remarque penned perhaps the most evocative description I’ve read about the debilitating effect of nightmares upon a veteran.

In ‘The Way Back’ Remarque’s main character Ernest suffers a reoccurring dream about a badly wounded English captain. He describes the soldier, raised up like a seal on his forearms, crawling toward him as his puttees unravel from his missing legs.

The setting for these nightmares isn’t the battlefield but Ernest’s bedroom. He resorts to throwing piled-up books at the soldier to ward him off.

Ernest eventually achieves inner peace. ‘I look out into the darkness,’ he says of his solution, ‘because I am no longer afraid of the past.’ Only then ‘the dead will be silent, and the past will stop persecuting me and start to help me.’

In a nod to Remarque, the main character in ‘Night in Passchendaele’, the war-damaged Wilfred Rhodes, suffers nightmares and hallucinations.

Upon arriving in the village of Tristecourt, Rhodes registers that:

‘Those recurring nightmares from the past have returned to me. The moments after my platoon stumbled out of the pillbox and into the Passchendaele abyss have always been lost to me –not even registering as a blur in my conscious mind. That is, until I sleep. In the stillness of the night those lost moments reveal themselves like a stuttering newsreel – disconnected frames flickering and then exploding in my mind – flames, mud, stumbling men, and faces.’

Yet Rhodes soon finds that the idyllic village also provides the opportunity for him to stare into the darkness of his past.

Even though the Battle of the Somme ended 108 years ago today, the iron harvest from the surrounding fields continues.

Today the French Department of Mine Clearance still recovers about 900 tonnes of unexposed munitions every year. Approximately 630 French minesweepers have died handling such munitions.

When General Douglas Haig closed down the offensive on 18 November, the Allied and German armies had hurled tens of millions of shells at each other and suffered around one million casualties. For Australia, the toll was intolerable with 23,000 soldiers killed or wounded at Pozieres to capture a few miles of lunar landscape.

The Unknown British Warrior interred in Westminster Abbey in 1920 was meant to honour the whole Empire’s missing. Yet, Australians were divided about whether or not their government should repatriate its own unknown soldier. ‘London is the seat of the British Empire,’ reasoned one veteran, ‘and I think that Australia should be content to know that a soldier of the British Empire is buried in the abbey.’ Another veteran disagreed, arguing that the burial of an unknown soldier in London was insufficient, ‘owing to its distance from the outlying parts of the Empire’.

By the 1990s, new factors supported the entombing of an unidentified Australian soldier. First, the seventy-fifth anniversary of Armistice Day was approaching. Second, the prestige of the British Empire had dimmed. And, lastly, the number of surviving war veterans had diminished. The entombing of an unknown Australian soldier would act as a communal farewell to the Anzacs.

After months of negotiations, government officials agreed to exhume and reinter an unidentified Australian soldier from France into the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial on 11 November 1993.

On a quiet November day, a small team gathered at the Adelaide Cemetery near Villers-Bretonneux, randomly selected a grave and then delicately exhumed the soldier’s remains. The presence of Australian badges and uniform confirmed that the skeletal remains were those of an Australian. One observer noted that the soldier’s boots appeared good enough to walk in.

An unknown Australian soldier had been exhumed after 75 years of rest, enlisted back into the nation’s service, duty-bound for eternal anonymity.

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In 2010 the Australian War Memorial retrieved 305 dusty cardboard boxes from its archives. In these boxes were 32,000 files – each containing the harrowing correspondence between the Australian Red Cross inquiry bureau and an anguished family of a missing soldier.

What was remarkable about the bureau’s letters to families, was that tens-of-thousands of them carried Vera Deakin’s signature.

Vera was the bureau’s honorary secretary throughout the Great War, firstly in Cairo and then in London. Vera and her volunteers unrelentingly searched for answers on behalf of families of missing soldiers.

Emma McQuay always believed that her son George would return home from France, even though he had been listed as missing since 1916.

When the war ended, Emma visited the docks and searched the faces of the homecoming soldiers hoping to see George. Emma attended every Anzac Day service. As she watched the veterans march by, she found herself staring at their faces. This ritual seemed to lift her spirits. She always returned home with a renewed strength, convinced that George would return one day.

 

Two incidents compelled me to research the Great War’s missing. Firstly, standing beneath the Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres that lists 55,000 missing British Empire troops. I felt numbed and unable to penetrate the endless lists to connect with an individual name. And secondly, reading a 1926 article about a French father who climbed the Arc De Triomphe and then dived to his death. He had been tormented by the belief that it was his missing son who had been interred in the Unknown Soldier’s Tomb beneath the arch. The story made me reflect on how the unresolved fate of missing Anzac soldiers must have affected Australian families.

My approach to research is to dive deep and find those hidden facts that no other researcher has bothered to uncover. It’s a bit like gold panning — hours of boredom sifting through tailings, which are suddenly forgotten when you discover a nugget. One of those priceless nuggets was Kath Chapman’s story. I stumbled on it when reading a private family history, which contained an uncaptioned grainy photograph of a woman standing over a white headstone. That photograph helped reveal the mysterious story of Kath leaving Australia in 1920 to grieve at the grave of her beloved Theo Pflaum. That photograph captured for me more poignantly than any other the link between feelings and place.

Pauline Reid’s story was another nugget. She was the wife of a missing soldier I featured in the book, Mordaunt Reid. While Mordaunt’s story was compelling, what was unexpected was the gradual unfolding of Pauline’s story. Research revealed that Pauline travelled to Cairo in her search for Mordaunt, and then onto London, where she worked for the Red Cross Prisoners of War Department. In 1920 she was awarded an Order of the British Empire in recognition of her war work. Remarkably her story also intersected with other characters in the book, such as Vera Deakin.

Often I am most excited about a minor detail I uncover, which helps render a character or scene. It might be Theo Pflaum scratching his name into the soft mortar beneath his homestead in 1910 or Theodor Pflaum’s drawing room carrying the faint smell of cigar smoke.

And finally, no matter how riveting a piece of research is, it must ‘fight for its life’ to survive the editing process.