PM: Honour fallen by supporting our troops
can honour the diggers who helped change the course of World War I by supporting the current generation of servicemen and women, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told a dawn service in France.
Mr Turnbull, French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and Prince Charles paid tribute to the Australians who retook the Western Front town of Villers-Bretonneux from German forces in a ferocious battle 100 years ago.
“As dawn broke at this moment a century ago, victory appeared certain,” Mr Turnbull said at the Australian War Memorial in France where 8000 people paused to remember the battle on April 25, 1918.
The stunning victory that changed the course of the war on the third anniversary of Anzac Day came at a terrible cost, with bodies from two Australian battalions left tangled in the German wire.
The sacrifice of those young men fighting so far from their homes was not lost on the crowd on the grassy hill just outside the town, where there were 2500 casualties from 3900 men.
Tears welled in the crowd as heartbreaking portraits of just some of the young men killed in WWI were projected onto the tower as their names and ages were read out.
Mr Turnbull said the best way to honour the courage and sacrifice of the diggers of WWI was to support the servicemen and women, the veterans and the families of today.
Mr Philippe said the children of the town were taught the phrase “lest we forget” in school, so important was their link to Australia. In WWI, 313,000 Australians volunteered and one in six never made it home, he said. “Wherever the French, English and Americans were, the Australians were too,” he said.
“A young nation coming to the aid of old nations.” Earlier, at the opening of the $100 million Australianfunded Sir John Monash Centre at the Australian War Memorial just outside VilAUSTRALIANS lers-Bretonneux, Mr Phillipe provided a moving and extraordinary heartfelt speech.
“Coming here, seeing this centre and tour, looking at the names of the 11,000 Australians who died for France and for freedom, I could not help thinking of the terrible loneliness which these thousands of young Australians must have felt as their young lives were cut short in a foreign country,” he said.
“A foreign country. A faraway country. A cold country whose earth had neither the colour nor texture of their native bush. A faraway, foreign country which they defended, inch by inch, in Fromelles in the Nord region, in Bullecourt in Pas-de-Calais and of course here, in Villers-Bretonneux. As if it were their own country. And it is their own country.
For many young Australians, this earth was their final safe place. For many of them, this earth was the final confidante of a thought or a word intended for a loved one from the other side of the world. Loved ones who would only learn the sad news several months later ...
“We cannot relive these stories. The mud, the rats, the lice, the gas, the shellfire, the fallen comrades – we can never truly imagine what it was like.
“So we must tell them. We must show them – again and again. Show the faces of these young men whose lives were snuffed out in the mud of the trenches.
“Show the daily lives of these 20-year-old volunteers from far away who listened only to their youthful courage, to their love for their country, or that of their parents or grandparents, to die here in Villers-Bretonneux.
“Show it with the help of modern technology, without taking our eyes off the names etched onto the memorial – names which are real, not virtual.
“We will never forget that 100 years ago, a young and brave nation on the other side of the world made history by writing our history.”