Lest we forget
PART 2: The story of Syd Worth’s war continues …
LETTERS covering Syd’s experience on the Gallipoli Peninsula are missing — we can only guess at what he saw there — but they commence again with him arriving back in Egypt. Camping at the famous Moascar military camp, a highlight was his company being inspected by “none other than the Prince of Wales”.
Then the ship to Marseilles, France. Syd’s letters reveal him revelling in the beauty and normality of it all compared to what he had been through at Gallipoli and in Egypt.
Of his journey through the Rhone Valley to Lyon, Syd wrote: “No matter how far we travelled, lovely, picturesque country met our gaze.”
It is now Easter, 1916. Missing home, Syd retains his sense of humour throughout: “Good Friday — baker neglects to deliver buns!” and “The flares and star shells which are fired all night over ‘no man’s land’ reminds one of Henley on the Yarra, that is what you might call the height of imagination!”
At times, Syd had charge of battalion prisoners. “June 4, 1916: My natal day. Still at the prison. Awake on my birthday morn surrounded by cows, cats, rats, mice and lice. I was not born in a manger but I certainly spent a birthday in one!”
There were times of respite, regrouping and relocating. The company marched through and were billeted in several French villages, being warmly welcomed: “The girls invade our lines, exchange jokes and the more venturesome, kisses.”
And, with apparently bad local drinking water, “we had to do as Rome does, the villagers drink wine, beer and champagne, so we follow suit”!
As Syd’s company approached Pozieres and the Battle of Mouquet Farm, he wrote that “after a week or more marching with full packs, we have reached the last billets before we face the music. We will be properly into it this time”.
Then it was into the Somme’s trenches, which he describes as “a contrast to anything we had seen before, especially Anzac, the mud and water on our hands makes things very disagreeable. Incessant rain, day night”.
“Our artillery never gives Fritz any peace — result is that bombardments are as regular as our daily bread. Hellish fire of thousands of shells poured over our heads, the strain on both mind and nerves was terrible. Matters are very much reversed in a soldier’s life — night comes when no man can sleep ... for the heaviest bombardments are always at night.”
Often his words talk of the pain of losing mates: “One of my old boys of No.10 Geo Heywood is killed during the bombardment. A fine lad of sterling qualities.
“One of my section killed during this night — I try not to look into what the future may have in store for us all.”
On a fine weather Sunday, when the guns went quiet: “War seems a cruel thing on days such as these — man’s inhumanity to man.” Syd’s writings surely spared his mother the true horrors he was witnessing and the deprivations he was experiencing.
Syd’s letter No.41 — he maintained a meticulous numbering system — dated July 21, 1916, begins “waiting to take part in a push” and ends: “If I am spared to come through the treacherous job before us, I will send you a telegram before you receive this letter.”
That telegram never arrived. Letter No.41 was to be his last. His hoped-for “great day of homecoming” was not to be. Sergeant Sydney Herbert Worth died in the Battle of Mouquet Farm on August 22, 1916. No details are recorded on any official site I could find, but such details seem irrelevant in the face of the ultimate, tragic loss of this good man. There is no grave. My father was born in February 1917 and although known all his life as “Bert”, his name was Herbert — in honour of Syd Worth, my father’s great aunt’s son and only child.
Syd’s is one soldier’s story, tragically replicated by tens of thousands a century ago.
For me, never have the opening words of the iconic Anzac Day ode become so real.
“They shall not grow old....”.
May Syd Worth rest peacefully in Flanders Fields.