Bringing Bertie Stevens’ Family Back to Flanders

Some family stories survive because somebody keeps telling them. A name is remembered, a photograph is kept safe, and a few sentences are passed from one generation to the next.

Recently, I had the privilege of taking relatives of Private Bertie Stevens, 2047, 21st Battalion Australian Imperial Force, through the places connected with his final days in the Ypres Salient.

For the family, Bertie had never completely disappeared. They knew parts of his story. They knew that he had gone to war as a very young man, that his older brother Charles had also served, and that Bertie never returned to Australia.

But this visit was different. For the first time, members of his family were able to stand on the ground where his story had ended.

A young man from Victoria

Bertie Stevens was born at Euroa in Victoria around 1898. When he volunteered for the Australian Imperial Force in 1915, he appears to have been under the official age for overseas service and likely added a little to his age so that he could enlist.

He left Melbourne aboard HMAT Anchises A68 and joined the 21st Battalion AIF. His war would eventually carry him from Australia to Egypt, Gallipoli and then across to the Western Front.

By 1916, Bertie was fighting on the Somme. On 24 August he suffered a gunshot wound to his left elbow. He was evacuated, treated and eventually recovered well enough to return to his battalion.

That return would bring him to Belgium.

By September 1917, the 21st Battalion was preparing to move into one of the most heavily contested landscapes of the war, the ground east of Ypres.

Two brothers in the same brigade

Bertie was not the only Stevens brother in uniform.

His older brother, Private Charles William Stevens, 6409, had also joined the Australian Imperial Force and served with the 23rd Battalion AIF.

At first, their military stories appear separate. Different battalions, different service numbers and different journeys to the Western Front.

But there was an important link between them.

The 21st and 23rd Battalions both belonged to the 6th Australian Infantry Brigade, 2nd Australian Division. That meant Bertie and Charles were serving within the same brigade.

Their battalions could use the same roads, wait in the same camps, move through the same assembly areas and fight across neighbouring pieces of ground.

In September 1917, both brothers were in the Ypres Salient.

Two brothers from Victoria had travelled halfway around the world and found themselves, once again, remarkably close to one another.

One final meeting

The family carried one memory in particular.

Bertie had apparently managed to see Charles shortly before he was killed.

During that meeting, Bertie spoke about the dangerous work he was doing. Family tradition remembers him telling his older brother that he would be lucky to make it home.

There is no military document recording that conversation, and there probably never would have been. Battalion war diaries recorded movements, orders, casualties and military events. They rarely recorded a private conversation between two brothers.

What we can check is whether such a meeting was possible.

The surviving records place both battalions in the same wider Ypres battlefield during this period. As units of the same brigade, the 21st and 23rd Battalions were moving through many of the same rear areas and approaches to the front.

We cannot say exactly where Bertie and Charles met. We cannot know the exact hour, and we cannot prove Bertie’s words.

But nothing in their battalion movements contradicts the family story. On the contrary, the records show that a final meeting between the two brothers was entirely possible.

Standing in that landscape with Bertie’s relatives, the old family story suddenly felt much less distant.

Into the Menin Road battlefield

On 20 September 1917, Australian troops attacked east of Ypres during the Battle of Menin Road, part of the wider Third Battle of Ypres.

The battlefield was almost impossible to imagine in its pre-war form. Fields had become shell holes. Woods had been torn apart. Farms had disappeared beneath artillery fire. Roads and tracks were constantly damaged and rebuilt.

The 21st Battalion moved forward into the area around China Wall and Garter Point.

On 21 September, the battalion prepared to move again. That evening its men went forward to relieve troops holding the newly captured positions.

Bertie went with them.

He would not return.

Private Bertie Stevens was killed on 21 September 1917. He was only about nineteen years old.

A grave at Garter Point

His body was recovered and buried close to the battlefield in a small wartime burial ground known as Garter Point Cemetery.

For a time, there was a known place where Bertie rested.

But this part of the Ypres Salient remained under fire. The cemetery was later devastated by shelling and the ground was so badly damaged that the individual graves disappeared.

After the war, burial parties and the Imperial War Graves Commission worked across the former battlefield, gathering scattered graves into permanent cemeteries.

They knew Bertie had once been buried at Garter Point. What they could no longer establish was exactly where.

His individual grave had been lost.

Today Bertie is commemorated by a Special Memorial at Perth Cemetery (China Wall).

That memorial tells a slightly different story from a normal headstone. Bertie was not simply a soldier whose body had vanished during battle. He had been found. He had been buried. And then the battlefield took his grave away.

Following Bertie’s story together

Research carried out from home can tell us an enormous amount. A service record gives dates. A battalion diary tells us where a unit moved. A cemetery register tells us where somebody was buried or commemorated.

But standing on the battlefield adds something different.

Distances suddenly make sense. A place that was previously only a name becomes a road, a field, a ridge or a small cemetery.

With Bertie’s relatives, we could follow the landscape connected with his final days and gradually put the pieces together.

We spoke about the 21st Battalion moving through the area, looked at the ground, discussed the fighting during the Battle of Menin Road and explained why Bertie’s original grave disappeared.

Eventually, we came to Perth Cemetery.

There, among rows of Commonwealth headstones, stands the Special Memorial carrying Bertie’s name.

For more than a century it had been waiting in Flanders.

Now members of his family were standing beside it.

The brother who came home

Charles survived.

He continued serving until 1919 and eventually returned to Australia.

That gives the brothers’ story a difficult contrast.

They had both left Australia in uniform. They had both reached the Western Front. They had both served within the same Australian brigade.

And during the fighting around Ypres, their paths may have crossed for the last time.

Charles went home.

Bertie stayed in Flanders.

Whatever Charles remembered about that final meeting became part of the Stevens family story. It passed through generations long after the battalions had disappeared and the battlefield had returned to farmland.

A family story returns to Flanders

This is why these visits matter.

The First World War is often told through enormous numbers. Divisions, armies, offensives and casualty lists.

Families remember differently.

They remember a photograph. A brother. A sentence somebody once said. A young man who left home and never returned.

More than one hundred years after Bertie Stevens died, his relatives finally stood where his story had taken him.

For a few hours, records from Australian archives, old family memories and the landscape of Flanders came together.

There are still things we may never know.

We may never discover the exact place where Bertie and Charles last met. We may never know the exact words spoken between them. And Bertie’s original grave may remain lost forever.

But the important parts of his story have survived.

A young Australian went to war. His brother followed. Their paths crossed again in Flanders. One returned home, while the other remained here.

More than a century later, Bertie’s family came back for him.