On 1 September [1916], when the 13th Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force was relieved after forty hours desperate fighting at the bastion of Mouquet Farm in yet another assault which had gone badly awry, they sent in a casualty list of ten officers and 231 men. In forty hours they had also won between them thirty-two Military Medals and had triumphantly reinforced the reputation implied in their nickname of The Fighting Thirteenth. They were sent north to the Ypres salient to recover, to rest, to absorb reinforcements. When they left again for the Somme on 26 October they were again up to their full strength of 1,028 men. But someone took the trouble to do a calculation. The battalion had also been up to strength when it landed on Gallipoli in April the previous year, but of that Gallipoli force, of the 1,028 men of the battalion, only 157 were left. - Lyn MacDonald, The Roses of No Mans Land, 1980
Posted on: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 11:40:01 +0000
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