One Man's War

The historians who scripted Ken Burn’s award-winning American documentary series The Civil War, told me their secret was simply ‘telling the big story through the little story.’ That meant tracking the lives of individual soldiers through their letters and photographs to create a highly personal window through which to look at a mind-numbingly large and graphic story.

When Reg Nancarrow entered the world in outback Bourke in 1887, there was nothing to suggest this boy would die half a world away in Belgium, leading headlong advance of Australian troops over what one eyewitness described as ‘a carpet of corpses’ at the battle of Polygon Wood.
 
By the time he left for the war in 1915, the thirty-year-old bush-bred lieutenant was a popular sportsman around Orange and his first-hand reports from the Front were being eagerly followed by readers of The Orange Leader as a kind of virtual experience of what ‘their boys’ were going through.

This Remembrance Day, my journalist son Jonathan, used Reg Nancarrow’s experiences in the Orange City Life in a moving piece which transports his readers back to a soldier’s life on the Western Front in 1917. He kindly allowed me to publish a shortened version here.
 
Read together, these snippets of Reg’s letters home paint a picture, not just of one man’s
service, but of the hopes and fears of his friends and family in Orange, thousands of
kilometres from the war raging in Europe.
 
Friday 23 July 1915
Reg Nancarrow is off to the war. The call of his western comrades has been answered, and
this, one of the most popular of our young men of Orange, hastens to greet them in the
trenches of Gallipoli. Well done, Reg.
 
Friday 8 October 1915
Sergeant Reg Nancarrow, who is now in camp at Liverpool, received word this week…
to report himself to the School of Instruction …to undergo a course of military instruction… it is distinctly a feather in the cap…to be one of those chosen. There is not a shadow of a doubt that he will…obtain a commission, and his legion of western friends will heartily congratulate him on it.
 
Friday 29 December 1916
A letter was received yesterday. Reg goes on to say that where they are camped is a cold hole, with the wind whistling merrily along at the rate of 60 miles an hour, and at the time of writing it had been raining a fortnight. Still he states, the boys all act up to the…‘Smile, blank you, smile’ axiom, and are making the best of it. Though anxious to get into the firing line, the military big wigs consider that Lieut. Nancarrow is doing better work in instructing his men in the art of bomb throwing…
 
Friday 13 July 1917
Mr. J. Nancarrow received a cable from his son, Lieut Reg Nancarrow, yesterday, stating
that he was leaving …on the 11th of July, for the firing line at France…many friends at Orange hope that he will pull through his experiences without a scratch.
 
Thursday 13 September 1917
Lieut. Reg Nancarrow writes: Dear Mum and Dad,—There is nothing much to write about,
but I must keep the letters up to you. The only thing of importance is that we will be going to make history in a day or two, and I believe the sector we are going to is a pretty hot shop. I am in C Company, 31st Battalion. We have 12 officers, but only four go up into the fight, and I am one of them, so this may be my last letter. God alone knows. I have a good lot of men to command, and they will do anything for me, so I am right on that score.
 
Weather permitting, I think we will do what is asked of us, as the Australians are frightened of nothing, and at the present very fit after their four months spell…You have, no doubt, read of the new German gas. It is very bad. There is no very great permanent effect from contact with it, but where it touches it blisters. Some poor devils have had it all over them. Just imagine the Scotties in kilts, it would tune them up..
 
(This letter was written two weeks before Reg’s death on 26 September but did not reach his parents until early November.)
 
Friday 5 October 1917
Captain-Chaplain J. A. Malcolm writes: Dear Mr. Nancarrow —It is with profound regret I
inform you that your son fell in action on 26th September at Polygon Wood, Belgium. It is
difficult for me to say all I would like, because your departed son and myself were great pals. Two nights before he…went over the top… he and Lieut. Chute—also fallen—were in my tent chatting and joking. Now he is gone, but his memory will be ever sacred to me. He was a true comrade and valiant soldier.
 It was a great fight and an historic one. Time will reveal what the 31st accomplished on the 26th and 27th Sept., 1917. Their work earned and merited the praise of those in high command. We realise that you dear fathers, and mothers are bearing the heaviest burdens of this awful war and to you our deepest sympathy is extended…
Many a time your son and I talked of home, sweet home, and about eternal things. He seemed to delight in the church parades. Do try and realise the presence and power of Christ. Some day I hope to see you and have a good talk about your son and our experiences
 
Friday 12 October 1917
LIEUT. REG. NANCARROW KILLED IN ACTION. The Last Post..has sounded for one of the most popular young men that ever left Orange to fight for Australia…Australia can ill afford to lose men of the stamp of Lieut. Nancarrow — they are too few and far between, and when the news of his untimely end came to hand yesterday, the whole of Orange was shrouded in gloom, and sorrow was expressed on all sides. A manly man, straight as a rush in principle…
 
Reg Nancarrow was 30 years old when he died at Polygon Wood. With no known grave, his
grieving parents named their Sale Street home “Polygon” in memory of their lost son. Lest
we Forget.
 
PHOTOS 
A landscape by George Edmund Butler of the battlefield at Polygon Wood, painted in
1918
This mound, which stood on the far side of Polygon Wood, was the objective taken on
26 September, the day Reg Nancarrow was killed.