In April 1918 the German army came perilously close to a breakthrough which could have made an Allied victory impossible in the first World War.
Also know as the fourth Battle of Ypres and to the Germans as Operation Georgette, it was the last attempt by the Germans to break through the Allied lines in Belgium and northern France and seize the Channel ports.
German successes were such in the early days that the British commander-in-chief Sir Douglas Haig issued a famous edict, “With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end”.
The Germans advanced 15 kilometres in just two days and took thousands of Allied prisoners. Among them was Pte William Rusling of the Northumberland Fusiliers from Sheffield.
Tragically, he was mortally wounded by friendly fire behind German lines where prisoners-of-war were being processed.
He was taken to Le Pilly farm outside France, where there was a German casualty clearing station. His wounds from an exploding shell were so severe that nothing could be done for him.
He was comforted in his last moments by a German soldier, Emil Mannheimer, from Hamburg. He noted Rusling’s address from a letter he kept on him. In July 1919, Mannheimer wrote to Rusling’s widow, offering his condolences. Her husband in his last moments, he recalled, stared at a photograph of her and their children that he had in his breast pocket.
He then asked Mannheimer to read to him the Gospel of St John’s account of the death of Jesus.
“Never in my life have I felt myself so near to my God as in that hour where I, a German and a Jew, helped to ease the last hour of the dying Englishman with the solace of his faith!”
The German soldiers dug a grave for Rusling opposite Le Pilly farm and buried him there. He told Rusling’s widow that her husband was buried beside men from the German Infantry Regiment 56 and beside them there was a mass-grave for Englishmen.
The men most likely to be buried in that mass grave are not Englishmen, but the Irishmen of the 2nd Royal Irish Regiment who were killed at the Battle of Le Pilly on October 19th and 20th, 1914.
The battle took part in the early stages of the war before trenches became the norm and the first World War was still a war of movement. It was a calamity for the 2nd Royal Irish Regiment.
They were isolated, surrounded, massacred or taken prisoner. On October 19th, the strength of the battalion was 20 officers and 881 men. Two days later, it was one surviving officer, a transport officer and 135 men. The regimental diary is chilling in its succinctness. “Unfortunately, little evidence is obtainable of what occurred on this day.”
Some 165 men were killed. The battle claimed the lives of 29 men from Waterford, 27 each from Tipperary and Wexford, 13 from Kilkenny and seven from Cork.
Of those who died, the bodies of 152 men are missing and they are remembered on the Le Touret memorial nearby. Tragically, more than 500,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the first World War have no known grave, but this battle was unusual.
It was small scale by the standards of the war and, aside from this early battle, it was behind the German lines for the duration of the war. Therefore, it ought not to be difficult to find these bodies, but where are they?
Since the Battle of Le Pilly was rediscovered in 2013 by Waterford-based historian Michael Desmond, the conviction has grown among many experts that the site opposite Le Pilly farm is where these Irishmen are buried. The Mannheimer letter only strengthens that belief given that the German regiment who faced them was the 56th.
First World War historians and battlefield guides Iain McHenry and Jonathan Porter have searched burial records and have accounted for a possible 71 men who are buried as unknown soldiers in surrounding military cemeteries which still leaves 80 bodies unaccounted for. A lidar (light detection and ranging) study, which measures underground cavities, has detected a distinct rectangle-shaped perturbation consistent with a mass grave and a magnetometry study found evidence of metal buckles and buttons.
Locals in Herlies erected a beautiful memorial to the 2nd Royal (Irish) Regiment in 2018 and host a commemoration service every October. They have diligently honoured these men for the last decade.
In nearby Fromelles, the remains of 250 men, of whom 205 were Australian, were found in a mass grave. They died in July 1916 in a futile attack which surpassed in bloodshed anything the Australians experienced in Gallipoli.
Excavating the men became a political imperative given the first World War’s seminal place in the Australian national story. Those who could be identified were buried in marked graves.
The men who died at Le Pilly were Irishmen fighting with the British army in France against a German enemy which occupied this part of France for four years. The exhumation of these Irishmen and their erstwhile German foes would be a powerful reminder of western Europe’s bloody past and how far we have come in the last century.
What happened to Mannheimer? The man who wrote the letter to Rusling’s widow fled the country that he had served during the war and died in 1948 in Palestine.