The Wicked Boy (31 page)

That month Robert was
recommended for a Military Medal
for his service at Gallipoli, especially at the landing and in May. He was ‘one of the few survivors of the 13th battalion stretcher-bearers', noted the citation, ‘who were thanked by Col Burnage & Major Ellis for services during the first 2 days'.

In July the 4th Division was ordered south to the Somme, and at the beginning of August they reached the town of Albert, a few miles behind the front line. The golden statue of the Virgin Mary on top of Albert's cathedral had been jolted out of place by a bomb, and the Madonna now pitched forward over the town square, clutching her infant son. From the streets of Albert at night, the men could hear the bombardment at the front line, see the sky flush red with shellfire. Two men in Robert's sanitary section were wounded in an attack.

The division was sent in to battle on 5 August, with the objective of holding on to the village of Pozières, which had just been won back from the Germans. The Germans were waging a vigorous counter-attack, in which they shelled the Australians with explosives and shrapnel day and night. The stretcher-bearers and ambulance units struggled to convey the wounded back to safety. Some of the sanitary men doubled as medics, treating prisoners of war and their own troops. At night, sanitary squads went out to bury the dead.

On 16 August, after eleven days in the trenches, the 4th Division was sent back north. It had succeeded in retaining Pozières, but at a cost of a thousand men. The Australian Imperial Force as a whole had lost 28,000 soldiers in six weeks on the Somme, more than in the whole eight-month campaign at Gallipoli. Its troops had been exposed to the full force of industrialised war.

Both at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, Robert had seen comrades unstrung by the intensity of the fighting, and the
incidence of shellshock
in the 4th Division was particularly high. But he was still stable. His fellow Broadmoor inmate Frank Rodgers, who had killed his mother in 1904, was also now serving in France.
Sergeant Rodgers
proved a very capable soldier, according to his British Army papers: ‘Honest, sober, hardworking, & intelligent.'

In Belgian Flanders that autumn, Lieutenant-Colonel Sydney Herring, the commanding officer of the
45th Battalion
, decided to form a military band. Herring had served with the 13th in Egypt and at Gallipoli, and he had seen how a band could lift the spirits of the troops. On a visit to London in the spring he had bought a set of instruments, paid for by the men of the 45th, and when the battalion was sent north in October he launched a search for musicians. A few of the surviving bandsmen-bearers of the 13th had been moved to the 45th – including Ray Lingard and Harold Sorrell, both of whom had sailed out of Melbourne on the
Ulysses
 – but Herring requested that Robert be transferred to the battalion to lead the new ensemble.

Robert was known as a good soldier as well as a fine musician, and his service record was clean: he had served for two years without missing any days in the field to venereal disease and without being cautioned for any misdemeanour such as insubordination, drunkenness or absence without leave. Herring confirmed his promotion to sergeant once he had been transferred to the 45th. Robert was given a cornet, a badge with three chevrons and a lyre, and an increase in pay to ten shillings and sixpence a day. Later in October,
the
London Gazette
announced
that Robert Allen Coombes had been awarded the Military Medal for the courage that he had shown at Gallipoli. Robert asked that a copy of the announcement be forwarded to Nattie.

Nattie – now chief petty officer stoker, a senior non-commissioned rank – had chosen to remain with the Australian fleet rather than return to the British navy when his term of service expired. His ship had still not seen any combat. On a foggy day in April 1916 the
Australia
collided with another Allied vessel while on patrol near Scotland, sustaining a forty-foot gash in her side, and she was being repaired when the Allies joined battle with the German navy off Jutland in May.
‘It was too bad!'
complained Nattie's fellow stoker Reginald Stephens. ‘The men were absolutely sick about it! We had, during the war, done more running than any other battlecruiser in the navy – and then, owing to an accident, we missed the biggest naval battle by a few hours.' For the rest of the year the
Australia
continued her uneventful patrol of the North Sea.

Robert proved an effective bandmaster
, alert to matters of discipline and deportment as well as musical direction. He sometimes rehearsed the musicians alongside his old band in the 13th Battalion. At the 45th Battalion headquarters, where he was stationed with about ten other sergeants, he made friends with
William Alabaster
, a twenty-three-year-old carpenter from East Ham who had emigrated to Australia in 1912. Bill Alabaster led a unit of pioneers in engineering and construction tasks. He was a tall, fair-haired, jovial chap, who had sailed for Egypt on the same ship as Robert and had served with him at Gallipoli.

The AIF no longer used its musicians
as stretcher-bearers: after the devastating losses on the Somme in the summer, the commanders had decided that the depletion of battalion bands was too damaging to morale. Instead, Robert and the band marched their battalion into the front line, then worked behind the lines before
marching out to meet the troops
as they returned from the action. The 45th was constantly on the move –
it struck camp once every five days
, on average, during its two and a half years on the Western Front – and
the band sometimes led the way
on the marches between billets. When the battalion was resting, the musicians staged concerts for the men. In place of the crazed racket of the front – the roar, scream and bark of artillery – the band made sweet, stirring music, summoning the numbed troops back to themselves with plangent, sentimental tunes, rousing martial marches, playful rags. The bandsmen struck notes of innocence, defiance, fellowship, pity, romance with a sincerity that briefly pierced the Australian soldiers' armour of laconic mockery, their fabled coolness and ‘hide'.

In late October the battalion was sent back to the Somme, where it remained through the terrible winter of 1916/17, being rotated in and out of the front line as the snow gave way to fog and freezing rain.
The mechanisms in the men's rifles
froze; the bolts jammed with mud.
On the coldest nights
, hoarfrost formed on the men's greatcoats even as they sat in their huts with the braziers lit, and their breath froze into icicles where it touched the wool of their balaclava caps. There were spells of rest and pleasure. Robert and two other sergeants spent
Christmas Day 1916
with a French family they had befriended, eating jelly and cream, drinking wine, singing and playing games before rolling back to camp in the early hours of Boxing Day.

In the thaw of 1917, the mud sucked at the soldiers' boots as they moved between camps. The troops trudged through flooded shell craters in fields strewn with dead men and dead horses, wrecked wagons, scorched and blasted trees. The Germans often targeted the support lines, and the Australians became accustomed to the strangled shriek of a descending shell, the roar and flare as it hit the ground, the sight of a ‘cobber' blown to bits where he stood. ‘
We live in a world of Somme mud
,' wrote Private Edward Lynch of the 45th Battalion. ‘We sleep in it, work in it, fight in it, wade in it and many of us die in it. We see it, feel it, eat it and curse it, but we can't escape it, not even by dying.' In the dismal village of Dernancourt, the battalion hid from the German planes during the day in the cellars of ruined buildings, coming out at night to repair roads and bridges and to dig graves. ‘We hate this hole,' wrote Lynch. ‘We're as mud-stained, wet and weary as the place itself.'

The British commanders were increasingly assigning the Australians to the more difficult actions on the Western Front – a tribute to the effectiveness of the soldiers, and the reason that the AIF suffered a higher percentage of casualties than any other Allied force. The 45th was awarded thirty-seven decorations for bravery at Gueudecourt in February 1917. In June it took part in an elaborately planned action at Messines Ridge, in Belgian Flanders, which opened with the Allies detonating a million pounds of explosives next to the German trenches, instantly killing 10,000 enemy soldiers. The blast was heard in London and felt across southern England. In the fighting that ensued, Bill Alabaster led the parties carrying grenades, ammunition and water from the 45th Battalion headquarters to the troops at the front line, across open ground raked by artillery and machine-gun fire.
Herring recommended him for the Military Medal
. The 45th lost seven officers and 344 other ranks over four days of combat.

‘
We're a pretty casual sort of army
all right,' observed Private Lynch, ‘yet notwithstanding this, the battalion has never lost a position to the enemy and much of their worth lies in this casual-going attitude. They'll stand amidst a tornado of screaming, crashing death and pump bullets into an enemy attack, or attack the strongest-held enemy position with the same casual air that they'll chuck, or fail to chuck, an off-handed salute to the British staff officers on the Strand.'

Robert and his friend Bill Alabaster
went on ten days' leave in September 1917. They crossed the Channel to Folkestone and then caught a train to Victoria station in London. Most Australian soldiers on leave in the capital called at the AIF headquarters in Horseferry Road, near Victoria, to store their packs and collect their back pay before setting off to see the sights, make merry in the pubs and music halls, and call on British family and friends. Robert joined Alabaster on a visit to his parents' home in Forest Gate, just north of Plaistow.

When the two returned to France at the beginning of October, their battalion was taking part in an attack on the Germans at Passchendaele. The landscape was desolate: gaunt, stubby trees rose from sodden fields; the bodies of soldiers lay mired in the mud. Under fierce bombardment in the atrocious terrain, the Allied assault ground to a halt in early November. Again the 45th Battalion suffered heavy losses: seventy-four men were dead and 210 wounded, altogether about a third of its force.

After Passchendaele, the 45th was granted a long period of rest in the north. By now Robert and the other veterans of Gallipoli had spent more than three years at war.
A photographer took a series of pictures
in their camp in March 1918. In one of these, Robert sits at the centre of his military band of twenty men, clutching a cornet. In a photograph of the non-commissioned officers, he and Bill Alabaster are seated side by side, smiling a little.

In late March the Germans launched a massive offensive in the Somme, and the 4th Division, which had already taken part in more fighting than any other Australian unit, was summoned to shore up the line. The 45th Battalion moved swiftly to the front. On the roads near the Somme the men passed hundreds of French villagers fleeing the Germans, and then came upon the ruins of Albert, grey with smoke, the leaning Virgin still catching the sunlight.

Near Dernancourt, the village in which it had been so miserably housed during its first winter in France, the 45th helped to halt the German attack, losing almost 250 men in the process. Bill Alabaster was one of them.
On 5 April he was hit by a shell
while going into the line. Robert saw his friend lying in a trench, wounded in both thighs. ‘I've got badly smashed,' said Alabaster. Two stretcher-bearers carried him to a clearing station, and from there he was taken to a military hospital, where he died.

On 8 August, the 45th Battalion took part in a triumphant Allied advance near Amiens, capturing 400 enemy soldiers and an immense quantity of artillery. A few days later Robert and his band were sent to perform in
the Grand Theatre
in the port of Le Havre, where they shared a programme with the celebrated Anzac Coves pierrot troupe. Band and battalion were reunited towards the end of August.

The Allied armies continued to advance on the Germans, and that autumn Robert was
granted special leave
to return to Australia, a privilege given to those who had served continuously since 1914. He sailed south on 23 October. Nattie had transferred in August to the Australian destroyer HMAS
Swan
, which was engaged in anti-submarine patrols in the Mediterranean and Adriatic. Both brothers were at sea when the Armistice was declared on 11 November.

Robert reached Sydney on Christmas Day 1918.
He and the other soldiers were greeted
by the governor-general of New South Wales, plied with flowers and cigarettes, taken on a ‘joy ride' through the flag-lined streets to a welcome-home buffet and tea. At Gallipoli, declared the commander of the AIF, Australia had ‘leapt into manhood – or rather I should say into nationhood by the valour of her sons'. Robert was returning to a land that believed itself to have finally come of age in the Great War, a country that he had helped to define.

Of the 32,000 men
to volunteer for the AIF in 1914, Robert was among the 7,000 still serving in 1918. He came back to Australia with the knowledge that he could not only stay steady in a harrowing and chaotic world but could act with honour. He had saved lives.

EPILOGUE

Another Boy

I began researching Robert Coombes's life in the summer of 2012, after coming across an account of his arrest in an old newspaper. I was intrigued by the story, so I looked up the transcript of the trial at the Old Bailey, then more articles about the case. Some of the reports dubbed the matricide ‘The Plaistow Horror'; others called it ‘The Plaistow Tragedy'. The story of Emily Coombes's murder and its aftermath did seem at once tragedy and horror show, a tale to make you recoil in disgust and to pull you close in pity. I was fascinated by Robert: in his court appearances he seemed hollow, light, scoured clean of feeling; and yet the killing suggested a catastrophic disturbance, an unbearable intensity of emotion. There was something disjointed and fractured about his story. At the time of the murder, many believed that Robert simply had no feelings for others – that he was, in modern terminology, a psychopath. Others held that he was weird because he was insane – that he suffered from a psychotic illness. I wondered whether his strangeness might have sprung more from events in his life. I wanted to know if his history had a bearing on his crime, and I decided to find out what I could about his boyhood.