Review of Peter Stanley, Men of Mont St. Quentin: Between Victory and Death. Melbourne: Scribe, 2009. 298 pages.
By Dr Tim Cook, Canadian War Museum
Peter Stanley is one of Australia’s leading military historians, director of the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia, and author of an astonishing 21 books. In Men of Mont St. Quentin he provides a moving story of Australians fighting at the 1 September 1918 battle of the same name. While Stanley had initially thought to write a detailed operational history of the battle, his plan did not survive contact with his research. He has instead offered a far different, more complex, and innovative book.
Stanley focuses on the soldiers of Nine Platoon, 21st Australian Infantry Battalion. By drilling down to the micro-level, Stanley uses the dozen men who fought in these shell-cratered fields as the pivot to explore their prewar and postwar lives. For three of them, however, their lives ended on the battlefield on 1 September within a few hours, and five more were wounded, with one dying a few weeks later. Such was the shattering effects of war.
The story of Nine Platoon does not end on the battlefield. Stanley is able to take the story forward because of the driven work of Garry Roberts, father of one of the dead. Like 60,000 other Australian families, the Roberts were shattered by the death of Frank at Mont St. Quentin, with the grief rippling out from the parents, to Frank’s wife and baby daughter, to friends, neighbours, and co-workers. Garry Roberts used his grief to find closure. With no body returned home, the senior Roberts set himself to exploring son Frank’s military service. He collected letters and scraps of information; he contacted official authorities and wrote to Frank’s overseas surviving comrades. Each piece helped him put together the story, but each piece seemed to beg for more study, more research, more letters. The crusade to know the truth was never ending, and increasingly all encompassing. His memory books filled up and new ones were created. He began to collect information on all the members of Nine Platoon, and he continued at this, driven by the need to know the fate of his son, for over a decade. His final books of grief and mourning were monumental, and provide deep insight into the men of Nine Platoon, and especially the harsh postwar years, as the veterans struggled with wartime wounds, holding down jobs, and raising families.
In the vivid prose of an expert story-teller, Stanley pushes the narrative relentlessly, although it is always underpinned by archival research and deep knowledge of the experience of battle, postwar Australia, and commemoration. While Garry Roberts’s grim crusade is the focus of the book, Stanley has expertly woven in the competing and contrasting strands of memory. Stanley has mined deeply into the archival and visual records, and he constructs and reconstructs the many ways the Battle of Mont St Quentin has been imagined over time, from first generation histories and official war art, to the important memorialisation work of the Australian War Memorial and the place of the battle in the collective Australian military experience. This peeling away of the memory layers surrounding a single battle is a powerful reminder of the complex issues at play as terrible loss mixes with national pride to form the shifting contours of public understanding and increasingly accepted myths.
This deeply personal story – of a dozen men at war and their families – tells us much about national reputations, the myth-making that surrounds and infuses the past, the traces of historical evidence, and the lives of postwar veterans. While this is an Australian study, it will be of use to all historians of the Great War, regardless of nationality, and will stimulate thought for new roads of inquiry in multiple fields.
Tim Cook
Canadian War Museum