‘Be prepared for the worst to happen any day’

‘Be prepared for the worst to happen any day’

ANZAC Lieutenant Bert Crowle penned these sober words in a letter to his wife, Beatrice, from his bed in late August 1916.

Days earlier, Bert had shepherded his ‘shaken’ men into no-man’s-land in a futile attack upon Mouquet Farm on the Somme. 

Two machine-gun bullets had struck Bert in the thigh, with a third ricocheting off the periscope in his pocket. 

Bert survived the wound. 

Stretcher-bearers walked four miles across open ground to get him back to a casualty clearing station. 

The station formed part of an intricate network of aid posts, dressing stations, and hospitals (pictured) that would treat over two million of the empire’s wounded in the Great War. 

After three days of treatment, Bert realised things weren’t good. ‘Had I been brought in at once I had a hope,’ he told Beatrice. 

The Somme soil, laced with manure, had infected the wound. Surgeons were forced to remove pounds of flesh from his buttocks to excise the gangrenous tissue, but it had already gone too far. ‘It is no use trying to hide things. I am in terrible agony’ he wrote. 

‘You must be prepared for the worst to happen any day,’ he warned Beatrice. ‘I am very sorry, dear, but still you will be provided for as I am easy on that score.’ 

Nurses placed salts in and around the wound to cleanse it, but Bert sensed it was all but futile. ‘It smells rotten,’ he wrote. 

Bert died the next day. 

Back in Adelaide Beatrice would duly receive Bert’s letter, along with his personal belongings which included a damaged periscope.

One can only imagine how Beatrice broke the news to their infant son, Billy. 

 

Photo credit: ‘A Corner of a Foreign Field’

Excerpt from: ‘Pozieres: the ANZAC story’

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