Members of the Howe-Bell family, who still reside in the Atherton Tablelands and Cassowary Coast Region, raised a glass in the honour of Private William Robert Bell on September 20.
This date marked the 100 year anniversary of his death during the Great War. Private William Robert Bell – Service No. 6472, 9th Australian Infantry Battalion was born in Irvinebank, north Queensland on January 21, 1894.
The Howe- Bell family was well known in the Herberton and Chillagoe mining community. William, the youngest of 12 children, enlisted on July 5, 1916 and left the shores of Australia at the age of 22. Within two years, Bell was killed in action at Hell Fire Corner, Polygon Wood, Belgium.
2017 is also the 100 year anniversary of the Battle of Menin Road, an offensive operation and part of the Third Battle of Ypres on the Western Front, undertaken by the British and their allies.
Now known as the Battle of Passchendaele, it was planned in order that the British would break through the strongly fortified German defences enclosing Ypres and then sweep on to the occupied Belgian coast where the Germans had their submarine bases. For four years, the main easterly access for the British Army to Ypres was via the twelve mile Ypres-Menin Road. About a mile out of Ypres, the Ypres-Roulers railway crossed the road. This intersection provided a perfect bull’s eye for German gunners and their spotters. It was a place where troops, supply trains and artillery caissons were extremely vulnerable. The location became notorious throughout the British Army as the most dangerous spot on the Western Front and the troops even mounted a sign at the crossing.
The battlefields of Belgium were described as a hellish landscape of shattered trees, mud, shell explosions and machine-gun fire. Soldiers died by the score; blown to bits, drowning in muddy craters and suffocating on poison gas.
Private Bell’s body, like so many others in this battle was never found. Records of Bell’s death appear in the Red Cross Missing and Wounded File:
“He had been with the Battalion only a few weeks…I saw him being carried back, wounded, on a stretcher during our advance at Polygon Wood, on 20th Sept….he had been hit in the head and legs…Bell was being carried on a stretcher, when a shell came over and killed him and also the stretcher bearers.”
The family have in their possession Bell’s last letter home, dated the month prior to his death:
“The last letter I got from you was written on about the first of April and that was the last one I have had and …. That was telling me about mother’s death…don’t forget to write. One likes to get letters from home and I miss getting them from Mum. I will come to a close with best love.”
Sadly, after his death, the family received undelivered parcels of knitted socks, cakes and biscuits that they had sent to him on the front. Bell’s name is honoured on Panel 55 in the Commemorative Area at the Australian War Memorial . Along with the names of some 6,000 Australians missing in Belgium, he also appears on the Wall of Remembrance on the Menin Gate Memorial in Belgium. Although it bears the names of 55,000 soldiers, so great were the casualties that not all the names of “the missing” from the France and Belgium conflicts are listed here.
The Battle of Menin Road finally ended on November 10, 1917. For Australia, 1917 was by far the worst year of WWI. More than 21,000 dead comprised one-third of all Australians killed in the conflict. October 1917, with 6000 dead, was the worst single month. By the end of the Great War in 1918, Passchendaele was a desolate landscape marked with flooded shell-holes, shattered trees and the detritus of war. Today, the name Passchendaele has come to symbolise the vast casualties and pointless attrition of the war on both the British and German sides.
