I was probably in pre-school when I became aware I had a great uncle who’d died in the First World War. I remember that on visits to my grandfather, also a veteran of the war, I saw the bronze memorial plaque presented to the families of those who’d died in the war.
At first I was puzzled as to why my dad’s name was on the plaque — Valentine Augustine Rochfort — until I was told he had been named after my great uncle. During family history research I began to be interested in the fate of my long-dead great uncle, who lay somewhere in France in a grave that no-one had visited for decades, but was still fondly remembered by those who knew him.
Both my grandfather Frank and his brother Joe, Valentine’s brothers, also served in the war with the Australian Imperial Force. Before Frank was shipped home after the war, he visited his brother’s original grave at Vaux on the Somme. I remember my grandfather being very prone to nightmares when he lived with my family in his final years.
Valentine’s other brother, Joe, was a medical orderly on Lemnos, as dramatised by the recent TV series Anzac Girls. He was very bitter about the death of his little brother, never attending an ANZAC day service or march.
Valentine had done well at school. In 1912 he topped sixth class in composition and arithmetic and he went on to be a boarder at St Patrick’s College, Goulburn.
He enlisted on April 28, 1916, aged 18, almost straight out of school. His occupation was recorded as ‘farmer’, his height as 5ft 10. He could have been discharged due to poor eyesight — his medical records showed he had a detached retina — but he wanted to do his bit. As he was under 21, consent for his enlistment was given by his mother, Emilie.
Val embarked on the ‘Ceramic’ in Sydney on October 7, 1916, arriving at Plymouth on November 21. He was sent to the 1st Training Battalion at Larkhill.
A medical examination in early 1917 found his eye problem and he was pronounced medically unfit and allocated to home service.
He served at three Australian training establishments on Salisbury Plain, all near Stonehenge. During this time, family legend has it he was involved in training troops and was disturbed to see so many of them go to their deaths so joined the Medical Corps, despite loss of rank.
He met the criteria for training as a stretcher bearer. He was allocated to the 9th Field Ambulance on December 3, 1917. The unit was resting at the time, after involvement in the battle at Passchendaele, in October. The unit performed its role admirably, struggling with the mud in appalling conditions amidst extreme carnage.
The role of the unit was the collection of casualties from the forward areas, and the stabilisation of their condition before evacuation to more substantial medical facilities to the rear of the front. They were the second in a line of medical support facilities, as each battalion had a Regimental Aid Post or RAP at the front line.
Both sides generally respected stretcher bearers as being non-combatants so they were not specifically targeted but were often hit in indiscriminate artillery barrages, or with machine gun fire.
Stretcher bearers, like all Field Ambulance staff, were unarmed, and generally worked in parties of five, one to each corner of the stretcher and another who performed first aid on the patient.
They had to be very fit, perhaps even more so than the average soldier as they had to carry a wounded man with three other bearers sometimes many kilometres back from the RAP to the Advanced Dressing Station (ADS). It could be exhausting work, as can be seen in photos by Frank Hurley of bearers (including those of the 9th Field Ambulance) at Passchendaele.
The evacuation path for the wounded from the ADS stretched back through many miles to field hospitals in the rear or even back to England. From the ADS this was achieved using horse-drawn ambulances and later in the war, motorised vehicles.
People who joined Field Ambulance units came from all walks of life, not just from civilian hospitals. They performed a noble task in the face of the destruction and carnage they were part of in the wider sense.
Valentine was killed in action near Bray-sur-Somme, on Friday, August 23, 1918 in the final days of the Allied advance to victory in which the Australians played such a major part. He was the only Rochfort to die in action in the AIF during WWI.
The date of his death is significant. The days of 21-24 August, 1918 were during the Allies’ rapid advance on the Western Front, with the Australians very much to the fore. Two Australians won the Victoria Cross on the date of Val’s death. Val’s cousin, Ernest Wylie Clout of Wagga Wagga, was killed by shell fire on the same day, in the very battalion Val would have been a member of if he had not had the eye problem.
The chain of events which led to Val’s death began on August 8 when the Allies launched a counter-offensive from around Amiens. Large tracts of the ground recently won by the Germans were won back on the first day. After the Battle of Amiens, as it became known, the front line on the Somme River was about two kilometres west of the village of Bray.
By the 21st of August, the Allies were ready for a further offensive to regain the rest of the ground recently lost, and to push towards a final victory. This phase of the war is known as the Hundred Days Offensive and it ended the war.
The Germans had repulsed an attack on Bray by the Allies on August 22. They counter-attacked on the 23rd with an artillery barrage — during which Valentine was killed — but the town was taken by the Allies the next day, August 24.
The exact date and time and the approximate place of Val’s death were well recorded. He was working as a stretcher bearer near Sailly le Sec in the early morning with Pte L. Schaefer and Pte Harry Johnston. The three were in a dugout while shelling was going on. At about 4am two shells dropped, the first just outside their dugout. Johnston and Schaefer made a run for it. The second fell right on the dugout, and killed Val and a man from another field ambulance. Val’s body was brought to the 9th advanced dressing station at Sailly le Sec by car.
The official report of his death said Val was ‘‘a great talker and a very pleasant fellow’’.
One of the stretcher bearers from his unit gave this description of Val: ‘‘I knew Rochfort well. He was about 21 years of age, tall, slight and dark, and was very well liked. About 4 a.m. on the 23rd August, 1918, we were between Bray and Suzanne attached to the 44th Battalion. A shell went through the dugout, in which Rochfort was at the time, and killed him instantly’’.
Another colleague was recorded as saying ‘‘He was very popular with all the men and I cannot speak too highly of him’’.
He was buried initially at Vaux-sur-Somme and was moved later to the Military Cemetery at Villers-Bretonneux, the only one of his unit to be buried there. In 2013 my partner and I found the site where he died, now in a cow paddock, using old military maps and accounts from the time.
A letter about Val’s death published in the Cowra Free Press in November 1918 said he was ‘‘admired for his straightforwardness and clean living, and one who was always ready when there was work to be done. Never complaining, he always kept cheery, making the best of things when they were going wrong’’. Effects returned to his mother included a disc, a wallet, letters, cards, a gold ring, a card case, three notebooks, a German wallet and a YMCA wallet.