Mum’s plea from half a world away

THE soldiers were not the only ones doing it tough as World War I played out in Europe.
There was just as much pain, angst and heartache on the home front, clearly demonstrated by a letter from a distraught mother published in the Berwick Shire News and Pakenham and Cranbourne Gazette in late April 1916.
Mrs Roberts of Berwick had received the terrible news in October 1915 that her son, Corporal Dave Roberts, had been transported from the trenches of Gallipoli to Netley Hospital in London, near Southhampton, seriously ill. Days later he had succumbed to enteric fever, or typhoid as it is now more commonly known.
The grief-stricken mother’s pain was made worse by the realisation that her 25-year-old eldest son lay in a grave half a world away.
So she wrote to newspapers around the Southampton area hoping to find someone who may tend to her son’s grave.
She received a reply from a B. Robertson, who said she could not perform the task herself, but had an undertaking from others that they would attempt to.
The writer assured Mrs Roberts that when her friends did arrive at the cemetery, others had already been and the grave was suitably decorated with flowers.
“He passed away to the great Homeland, having fulfilled his gallant part in this heart-ending war, and your grief has been made greater because your dear one has been laid to rest in a strange land; and yet not in a ‘strange’ land, after all when you remember it is England, the Mother country, but too far away for you to visit that sacred spot,” Mrs Robertson wrote.
The Shire News reported that Corporal Roberts was a fine type of a young man – tall, strong and athletic – and was a playing member of the Berwick football team the previous season.
“On active service he was in charge of a machine gun section and had become an expert manipulator of that deadly instrument of modern warfare,” the report said. “Being steady and reliable, he quickly won the respect of his superior officers and, incidentally, his stripe.”
Corporal Roberts’ younger brother Thomas, a 19-year-old farm labourer, had signed up before his elder brother and remained on the front.
The family had received letters from the boys when they were in Egypt, including graphic descriptions of the pyramids.
Thomas survived and returned to Australia in March 1919 – much to his mother’s relief.