French Flanders in summertime, especially around the small village of Fromelles, always seems so improbably beautiful when you consider the vast horror that unfolded there a century ago.

The peal of church bells converges with endless lark song, lending this unsettling place a discordant languor. The milky light, those corn-coloured fields, the poppies, so vivid and so perfectly poppy-shaped they seem a cliche, are the backdrop on the European western front for all those picture-postcard villages flattened during the global cataclysm we’ve come to refer to incongruously as the “great war”.

The Lost Legions Of Fromelles by Peter Barton – book review Read more

The graveyards, with their blond stone tablets and crosses, and their modest, moving messages – My only darling son; Another life lost hearts broken for what – give too much away, of course.

Regardless, visitors to this place, where millions – including some 46,000 Australians – died during world war one, invariably remark how peaceful it all is now that the landscape has enveloped the trenches and the guns remain silent.

Many Australians will be in Fromelles, a stone’s throw from Ypres, this week to commemorate the centenary of what remains the darkest day in Australian military history – the attack on a German stronghold outside the village that claimed 5,553 Australian casualties including 1,917 dead and 470 prisoners.

Like most such Australian military moments, the barnacles and moss of myth, perpetuated by official history and politics, had for so long obscured the truth about what happened.

Some scholarly work, not least by Peter Barton in his The Lost Legions of Fromelles, has further exposed the true folly and the horror of this Australian infantry charge.

Men of the 53rd Battalion waiting to don their equipment for the attack at Fromelles. Only three of the men shown here came out of the action alive, and those three were wounded. Photograph: Australian War Memorial

There are few certainties in war. But one is that governments will coerce or force young men to fight it. Another is that many of them will die. It is for the politicians to justify the cost; this, they predictably tried to do after the abysmal slaughter at Fromelles, just as they continue to do in conflicts where Australian involvement, and death, seems no less pointless.

And this week, hopefully, the Australians who’ve crossed the world for the fields of Flanders to commemorate the dead, will think about the utter pointlessness of what happened there and what, if anything, Australia has learned from it a century later.

Australian war memorials across the country, from swimming pools in suburban Brisbane to obelisks and stone diggers that mark junctions in countless country towns, are inscribed with the names of Australians who died at Fromelles on 19 and 20 July 1916. Invariably, they’re called the “fallen”, but they are now just the dead. And there is no escaping the horror of the way they “fell” as part of this abysmal, needless British operation.

The memorials around Fromelles signal broadly what happened. The Commonwealth cemetery at VC Corner – standing today in what was then the “no man’s land” between the British and German lines – has no individual gravestones. It has two big stone crosses under which about 400 Australians are buried en masse.

The novelty of being a soldier wore off in about five seconds … it was like a bloody butcher’s shop Private Jim Cleworth

None of them could be identified or named at death.

On a nearby wall is inscribed 1,299 names of Australian men who went missing at Fromelles or who could not be identified at death.

In recent decades, hundreds of Australian and other bodies have been located and exhumed around Fromelles. On Tuesday at Pheasant Wood cemetery in Fromelles there will be a dedication ceremony for the headstones for some of those whose bodies have been discovered and identified.

The attack on Fromelles was essentially a diversionary tactic to stop the Germans from sending reinforcements south in order to help counter the great British offensive on the Somme that had begun on 1 July. The Australian 5th Division was attached to Britain’s XI Corps, under the command of General Sir Richard Haking. Intent on minimising casualties while creating the intended diversion, Haking proposed an assault on a distant German position, Aubers Ridge. But British high command wanted a major artillery bombardment followed by a direct attack on the German front’s concrete stronghold, “Sugarloaf”, and on the secondary German defences north of Fromelles.

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The attack had been planned for 16 July. Heavy rain postponed it for three days, giving the Germans plenty of opportunity to prepare for what was clearly going to be a frontal assault on their position. When the Allied troop movements coincided with a massive barrage of British artillery throughout the relatively clear day of 19 July, the Germans knew the attack was imminent.

The Australians had no hope.

British troops had been slaughtered in similar circumstances in May 1915. It has since been pointed out by Barton and others just how closely the events of July 1916 replicated the failed British attack.

To imagine the indescribable horror of the Australian experience at Fromelles, picture this: the Australians made heavy going through the swampy ground between their trenches and the German position, trudging through the fetid bodies of the British who’d died a year earlier, and falling among them when wounded.

They were cut down in droves.

Private Jim Cleworth of the 29th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force, said of his first action: “The novelty of being a soldier wore off in about five seconds; from that point on it was a question of survival. Fromelles was confusion at best. It was like a bloody butcher’s shop, it was terrible.”

For his part the Australian commander, Harold “Pompey” Elliott failed to successfully challenge the nonsensical order for Australian advance. He wept as he watched, through his field glasses, his men cut down in the slosh.

Elliott got it right when he described the Fromelles action a “tactical abortion”. It, and much else about that war, scarred Elliott, who, suffering what would today have been recognised at post-traumatic stress, suicided in 1931.

This first substantive action by the Australians on the western front at Fromelles was prescient for all the death yet to come.

By war’s end more than 46,000 Australians would die on the western front. That includes 18,000 who would never be identified or found; naming the dead, if not finding them, and remembering them, is a valuable and (for descendants) cathartic part of restoring identity stolen in battlefield death.

The Australian western front dead include 6,800 who died fighting in and around Pozières in August and September 1916.

You’ll hear a lot about Australian “sacrifice” in the next few days as politicians, military leaders and the families of the dead converge on Fromelles for the commemorations.

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But it’s worth remembering that few of those who went over the top at Fromelles to trudge across the sodden no man’s land filled with decaying British bodies, would have viewed their actions as such.

They didn’t sacrifice themselves.

The Australian politicians and the British sacrificed them.

And what did Australia learn? Not enough.

Australia continues to volunteer for more and more distant imperial wars. Meanwhile, our politicians still justify the “sacrifice” of those (mostly) young men who they send to die in them.