Searching for Charles Wakeman
The strong ties that bind Australians with the French village of Fromelles are evident in the window display of the Au Gallodrome café and pub beside the church in the centre of town. The rising sun logo of the Australian army, a kangaroo and an Australian flag send Australian travelers the clear that they are welcome here. Inside, photos and scrapbooks recording the village’s wartime history are on display. Many document Australia’s contribution to France’s war effort. A teddy bear dressed in the uniform of a World War I Digger stands to attention on the bar.
The friendly proprietress welcomes Australians every day. Au Gallodrome is typically a starting point for visits to the nearby battlefields and memorials. Australians are drawn to this village 16 kilometres from the northern French city of Lille, to pay respects to Australian soldiers who died during the terrible battle that was fought near here at the height of World War I. On a single night on July 19-20 1916, nearly 2000 Australians died and more than 3000 more were wounded in the greatest loss of life in one day in Australian history.
Many visitors are on a personal pilgrimage to make a connection with ancestors who fell here, most of whom have no known gravesite. I have come in search of one of them; my great grandfather, Charles Wakeman Reynolds. I am hoping to make a connection with him by walking through the site of the battle and visiting the VC Corner cemetery where he is commemorated. But I haven’t always wanted to connect with him.
My earliest memories of my great grandfather surround a memorial plaque sent to my widowed great grandmother after the war. It had been handed down to my brother as the last male in the family. He kept it in his sock drawer. When I was little he would sometimes get it out and show it to me and remind me I mustn’t touch it. He needn’t have worried. I found it singularly uninteresting.
My great grandfather remained attached to an uninteresting relic in my brother’s sock drawer for nearly 30 years. I met him properly for the first time at the kitchen table of my aunt’s house in Townsville during a visit in 2003. She spread out the paperwork she’d collected over a number of years of researching our family history and we talked long into the night about what her husband and daughters call her ‘Charles Wakeman obsession.’ Listening to her stories I was quickly hooked. Margaret’s research often raised more questions than it answered about our family mystery man and sometimes provided answers she might rather not have found.
Born in St Martins, Canada around 1882 Charles Wakeman enlisted in the American navy then somehow ended up in Australia. We don’t know how or why. No photos of him exist. He wrote no letters that we know of. I determined then that if my aunt had struggled to find the beginning or the middle of Charles Wakeman’s story I was at least going to find where it ended.
I began my own smaller research project to find and eventually visit his resting place. A simple search of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database was all that was needed to point me in the direction of VC Corner at Fromelles. So as I set out on my walk from Au Gallodrome to VC Corner my aunt is walking with me at least in spirit.
The atmosphere along the quiet country roads and lanes that wind through the fields and residential areas near Fromelles today is peaceful yet eerie. Walking past the neat houses with their pretty gardens and the cows grazing quietly in the fields, it’s difficult to imagine that this ground once shook under artillery bombardment and the air was thick with bullets that cut men down by their hundreds. But look closely and reminders of what took place here during that terrible battle are all around. Remnants of concrete blockhouses (including one said to have housed a young Corporal Hitler) and shelters that German soldiers constructed to protect their front lines protrude from the fields. At times I can’t help but wonder if I’m walking over a place where someone died or if some of the dead still lay here undiscovered. I experience a strong sense that these fields are haunted and that ghosts watch me walk. I’m not afraid of them.
Soon the unmistakable sight of an Australian flag flying in the near distance lets me know that I’m nearly there. The flag is flying over the Australian Memorial Park and just beyond it is VC Corner. At Australian Memorial Park stands the statue Cobbers by Peter Corlett that depicts the heroism of Diggers who tried to retrieve their dead and wounded mates from ‘no man’s land’ under heavy fire.
An information board indicates that the field just to my left was the site where my great grandfather’s 60th Battalion fought and was all but wiped out. These fields were the site of a bloodbath. I’m probably standing very close to the place where he died. A tractor is plowing the field and its engine fills the air with a chug-chug-chugging. My mind is also chugging as I ask ‘are you here?’ The tractor makes it impossible to avoid the somewhat macabre thought that fallen soldiers left lying in these fields may have been simply ‘absorbed’ by the soil as the people of Fromelles rebuilt their lives.
All of the Australian soldiers who died at Fromelles are commemorated at VC Corner, just 200 metres further along the road from Australian Memorial Park. I walk through the small gate and take in the scene before me. The cemetery is neatly laid out on a small block of land surrounded by farms. A manicured green lawn has two large white crucifixes set into it bordered by beds of immaculate red roses. A wall bearing the names of more than 1200 fallen Australian soldiers stands above the lawn.
It only takes a few moments to find my great grandfather’s name carved into the wall. My solemn mood is broken for a moment as I recall that this is not the first time I’ve sought out the name Charles Wakeman Reynolds on a roll of honour. I found it at the War Memorial in Canberra two years ago. Afterwards I stood almost cringing while a friendly research officer talked me through his military records. “Don’t worry love. There’s one in every family,” he reassured me kindly. My great grandfather’s military record read like a petty criminal’s rap sheet. His list of offences included several charges of being AWOL, for which he was court martialed while training in Egypt, being drunk and disorderly, losing government property by neglect (his gun), using obscene language and a strange crime of committing ‘conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline.’ Oh dear.
VC Corner is the final resting place of just 410 Australian soldiers whose remains were recovered from ‘no man’s land’ after the armistice, all them unknown. It’s the mass grave of the Unknown Soldier. I have no way of knowing if my great grandfather is one of them or not. In case he is here, I pace like a police officer conducting a line search up and down every metre of the cemetery. If Charles Wakeman is lying here I will walk by him even if I may not know it. Although I don’t believe in such things I hold out some hope he might send me some kind of sign to let me know he’s there. Nothing.
It’s a rather a shame to have come all this way and still have no firm conclusion to his story. VC Corner provides an important place for the hundreds of Australian families like mine whose loved ones have no certain final resting place. It gives us a place to come and reflect and provides a physical connection with Fromelles. But I still feel cheated because I can’t tend his grave or go home and describe his resting place to my aunt and other family members who will probably never make this journey.
It seems strangely fitting that a man whose tragically short life story has an uncertain beginning and an uncertain middle should also have an uncertain end.