How an unknown soldier joined the family
To me, he has always been the soldier under the stairs.
That's where we found him in 1997, when we moved into a 1940s house in suburban Sydney. We phoned the previous owners and told them they had left behind an impressively framed photograph of a World War I soldier. Their grandfather perhaps?
"No, we don't know who he is."
For a time he stayed under the stairs. Then I dug him out one Anzac Day and hung him on the wall. We did the same on Remembrance Day. Then he just stayed upstairs all the time. When people asked who he was, I would say he was our unknown soldier.
But there was something compelling about his sensitive face, the jaunty pose that was at odds with his thoughful expression, the serene classical landscape of the studio's painted backdrop, the oak-leaf frame that hinted this soldier had never come home from the "great adventure".
In short, we adopted him. He became a living-room fixture, a fake ancestor, a substitute for real-life great-uncles who fought at Gallipoli and on the Western Front but whose faces had not been captured on film.
This year, as the anniversary of the outbreak of World War I loomed, I resolved to identify my unknown soldier.
There were a couple of clues on the back: the pencilled name "Hardie", and a yellowed sticker for Mack's Picture Frame Shop, "opposite Enmore Picture Theatre" in Newtown ("a large assortment of photo frames, picture frames and framed pictures, etc always in stock").
The cost for the job was also there: 13 pounds, six shillings and sixpence.
It was a start.
First stop: the Australian War Memorial website. About 50 men with the surname Hardie enlisted in World War I, but only a dozen or so came from suburban Sydney.
Was my unknown soldier Arthur Gordon Hardie of Rockdale, or James Thomas Hardie of Surry Hills? Or perhaps one of two Hardie brothers (John and Rupert) from Potts Point? Or was he one of six Robert Hardies who enlisted? I went to the War Memorial site's "Collection" tab and typed the name into a search to see if there were perhaps any photographs who looked like my man.
And up popped my man. My photo, in fact.
His name was Robert Galbraith Hardie, service number 4201. He was a meter reader from Ashfield and the son of Robert and Mary Hardie, then of Lewisham. He had sailed from Sydney aboard HMAT Aeneas on December 30, 1915.
The caption added: "He was killed in action on 7 August 1916 on the corner of Monsterelle Trench, Pozieres, France, aged 32. He was buried by his comrades at Munster Alley, Pozieres. Post war, the grave was never found and he is remembered with honour on the Villers-Bretonneux Memorial, France."
Pozieres. The place Charles Bean wrote was "more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth".
The mournful oak-leaves on the carved wooden frame had hinted that this soldier had never come home. There was something in his expression that showed he, too, had had some sense of that, even as he squared his shoulders in the photographer's studio.
It turned out there was quite a lot more to discover about the life and death of Private Robert Galbraith Hardie.
There are 44 pages of paperwork about him on the National Archives of Australia's website. On the War Memorial's site there's a Red Cross Society "wounded and missing enquiry bureau file" about his fate.
And there's also some information to be culled from the digitised newspapers on Trove, the National Library's wonderful site.
Here then, is the life of my unknown soldier.
Robert Galbraith Hardie was born in Redfern, and raised in Homebush, the son of Robert and Mary Hardie. He attended Burwood Public School and for about eight years was a member of the Sydney Scottish Rifles, a militia group.
When he signed up on September 10, 1915, Hardie was 31 years and eight months old and living in suburban Ashfield. He was five foot, four and a half inches tall, with blue eyes, dark hair, a "sallow" complexion and two vaccination marks on his left arm.
He was Presbyterian, unmarried, and worked for the Water and Sewage Board. The army recorded no will, but Hardie had obviously made one before embarking: newspaper notices note his mother was the executrix.
On October 1 Hardie took the oath to "well and truly serve our Sovereign Lord the King in the Australian Imperial Force" and was given some basic soldierly skills at Liverpool camp, in southwest Sydney, in the 3rd Training Battalion. (By the time of his death, however, he was with the 45th Battalion's B Company, VII Platoon.)
He sailed on December 30, 1915 for Egypt, as part of the 3rd Battalion 13-23 Reinforcements. The Anzacs had been evacuated from Gallipoli back to Egypt just in time for Christmas, and Hardie joined them there in February. He disembarked in Alexandria, moved to Zeitoun Camp, near Cairo, and from there to Tel El-Kebir, where he trained for several months. (Like so many World War I soldiers, he got a dose of VD and was treated in hospital at Serapeum before being "taken on strength" into the 45th Battalion.)
He sailed from Alexandria for Marseilles in early June 1916, and caught the train north to the Western Front. The 45th's first major battle there was in July at Pozieres, a hell that saw about half the battalion's men become casualties. The village that gave the battle its name was blasted from the landscape.
In the days and weeks that followed Pozieres column after column in newspapers back home were filled with the names of the dead and wounded.
Private Alec Raws, who was in the front line at the same time, described the experience: "The wounded and killed had to be thrown to one side... We dug on and finished amid a tornado of bursting shells...
"I was buried twice, and thrown down several times - buried with dead and dying. The ground was covered with bodies in all stages of decay and mutilation, and I would, after struggling free from the earth, pick up a body by me to try to lift him out with me, and find him a decayed corpse. I pulled a head off - was covered with blood. The horror was indescribable."
In the months following Hardie's death, the Red Cross gathered witness statements about what they knew. Most of the soldiers dictated their accounts from hospital beds.
Private George Daniels, from the same battalion, saw what happened to Hardie in the front trench at Pozieres.
Hardie and "three or four others", he said, were "a bit away from the others when a shell burst on the parapet and he was buried".
He added: "When we dug him out he was dead. He was buried just beyond the parapet of the trench and a small wooden cross with his name put over the grave."
Daniels helped to bury him.
Private E.J. Cornish gave the Red Cross more details: "Informant states that on Sunday morning August 6th Hardie was killed close to him by one of our own shells at Pozieres. Informant helped to bury him where he was killed. We held the land for a time but then had to retire."
(That was true. The 45th had valiantly held the land gained by the Australian 2nd Division but eventually withdrew.)
Sergeant P.H. Hazelwood stated: "I know R.G. Hardie was killed by shell fire between 1 and 2 o'clock the night of 6th/7th August. I saw him buried at Munster Alley, Pozieres."
G.R. Williams said: "I was only two yards away when he and two others were killed by a shell on the corner of Monsterelle trench, near Pozieres about 7th August 1916. Hardie was rather short and about 30 years of age. I heard from Sergeant Major Bedford that he was buried close by. I handed in his paybook to the Platoon Officer."
Private A. Cambridge stated: "I helped to bury Hardie in the same grave as G.K. Lumsden, it was in a deep hole behind our trench at Pozieres. We could not put a cross up, because the shelling was too heavy. We called it `Casualty Corner' and several men had been killed or wounded there only the day before. There was no service, for it was the front firing trench, and there was no Chaplain. I saw the identification disc."
I looked up the Red Cross file on 21-year-old Private Glen Kilsyth Lumsden. His family were informed that Lumsden had been buried with E.R. Morris, and a cross erected over them. (One senses not just confusion but compassion in that letter. The dates and descriptions are rubbery. The only thing everyone is clear on was that the fighting was particularly "hot" in that forward trench in early August 1916.)
Like Hardie, Lumsden and Morris have no known graves.
On November 12, 1917 Mr Hardie Snr received his son's personal effects - a brush, polishing pad, one pair gloves, identity disc, wallet, fountain pen, rosary, photos, notebook, button cards, wrist watch and strap.
The late Private R.G. Hardie was remembered in nine Roll of Honours notices placed by family members and friends in The Sydney Morning Herald over September 8 and 9, 1916. A couple of the ads reveal he was known as "Bob".
Judging by what's on the NSW Births, Deaths and Marriages website, Bob was the oldest of six children. I suspect that each was given a framed photograph, and that one of the siblings eventually moved to our house. Bob gradually faded from memory and his portrait grew dusty and worked its way down to the corner under the stairs.
But the earnest endeavours of ancient bureaucracy, coupled with modern technology and some idle curiosity, have worked a miracle.
A hundred years after the soldiers of World War I sailed off to war, the promise that was made to them has been fulfilled: their names will live for ever.
That promise must have seemed very hollow to the mothers, fathers, wives and sweethearts who placed heartbreaking In Memoriam notices in the years and decades that followed.
When another war happened, World War I faded into ancient history. The mothers, fathers, wives and sweethearts died, and no one remembered the old soldiers - until now. Memory fades, but paperwork and old photographs live on.
There is no privacy in the past. Lest we forget.
