The return to Villers-Bretonneux

Saturday - 19 April 2008 - Australian

PRIVATE Thomas Treacy was a front-line stretcher bearer for the Australian Army Medical Corps 15th Field Ambulance during the decisive battle of Villers-Bretonneux, 90 years ago.

He was in the thick of the action on the night of carnage on April 25, when 2473 Australians were killed, along with 9529 Britons and 10,400 Germans, as Allied soldiers fought to retake the village after it was overrun by German troops two days earlier.

It was a critical encounter. Germany's last throw of the dice, its spring offensive of 1918, had been stopped, and from then on its forces would be pushed back until the Armistice in November.

When the battle had ended and the village of Villers-Bretonneux was secure, Private Treacy did what most of his soldier mates did: picked their way through the rubble of ruined buildings, looking at evidence of the insanity of war.

One of the destroyed buildings was the St Jean de Baptiste church - once the centre of village life, like so many others in the small towns of France's agricultural north.

It had been pounded by the artillery shells of both sides, and was a smouldering ruin.

Private Treacy, son of a devout Catholic family from Cairns, bent down and picked up some slips ofpaper.

One was a picture of a saint, the other a prayer card used at the funeral of Villers-Bretonneux resident Francis Postel 25 years earlier, on April 8, 1893.

He put the cards in his pocket and later posted them to his mother, Kathleen, in Cairns, adding a note on the back of the holy picture: "Dear Mum, I found these in the ruins of the church at Villers-Bretonneux."

Tom Treacy died on Australia Day 1939, his lungs finally destroyed by the heavy doses of mustard gas he received while carrying his countrymen out of the front line two decades earlier. He was 48.

When Kathleen Treacy died in 1956, her bible was passed on to her granddaughter, Norma Walsh, of Greenacre, NSW. Inside were the cards.

"I gave the picture card to my niece because it carried Tom's handwriting," Mrs Walsh said. "But I always felt M.Postel's prayer card should be returned."

When Mrs Walsh read of The Australian's Our Other Anzac Day tour to Villers-Bretonneux this year, she contacted tour organiser Paul Murphy and asked if he would carry the card back to its reconstructed church.

"I'm 86, and too old to go myself," she said.

"But it is the right thing to return it, and I'm very pleased that this will now happen."

The card will be part of a ceremony held at St Jean de Baptiste on Anzac Day, during which a replica of the Villers-Bretonneux cross will be presented to the church.

The original cross, made of timber salvaged from the ruined village, hangs in St George's Cathedral, Perth. It is being taken to France for the 90th anniversary commemorations.

Australian government officials expect up to 5000 people will attend the first Anzac dawn service to be held at the Australian War Memorial, near Villers-Bretonneux, on Anzac Day.