When I was growing up in Australia, two unresolved occurrences made headlines across the country. The first was the disappearance of three small children at a beach near Adelaide in the summer of 1966. What happened to the Beaumont children became one of the great mysteries of the time. The police conducted searches, eye witnesses were interviewed, sightings were recorded, a Dutch clairvoyant was flown in. Over the years a variety of suspects came under investigation, but the mystery was never solved. The other event occurred a year later when the Australian prime minister, Harold Holt, vanished while swimming in stormy conditions at a Victoria beach. I recall that incident particularly well, as I was with my family at a nearby beach that same day and our return home was held up while the highway was closed. Holt had vanished without a trace, and a variety of extraordinary theories were suggested for his disappearance, ranging from suicide, to his having been assassinated by the CIA, or the particularly absurd idea that he had been involved in espionage and had escaped to political asylum on a Chinese submarine.
Indeed, Australians love a mystery: perhaps it is in their DNA. A highly popular novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock, published the same year the prime minister vanished, was about of the disappearance of a group of boarding schoolgirls while on a picnic on Valentine's Day, 1900. The tale so enthralled the readers that, though a fiction, it was believed by many to be a true account, and the author, Joan Lindsay, made little effort to dispel the idea, no doubt aware that this would enhance the book's popularity.
On researching for my novel, A Gentle Empire, I came upon a mysterious episode involving Australian soldiers, the name of which sounds rather like the title of an Agatha Christie novel. The Mystery of Celtic Wood is such a good story that I was tempted to make use of it, but resisted doing so for a variety of reasons.
On 9 October 1917, during the Battle of Poelcappelle, an action that was part of the Battle of Passchendaele or the third Battle of Ypres, 71 men of the 10th Battalion of the 1st Australian Division were said to have disappeared without trace during a diversionary attack on positions of the German 448th Regiment in what was known as Celtic Wood. Celtic Wood was a large copse in which, according to Charles Bean, the official historian of the Great War, there were several German pillboxes. Bean wrote that of the 85 officers and men who entered the copse, only 14 returned the following day and the missing 71 were not found after the battle. Nor did their names appear on the lists of prisoners that the International Red Cross later received from the Germans. They appear to have vanished into thin air.
The name Celtic Wood, an invention of British cartographers, certainly contributed to the myth that arose around the disappearance of the soldiers. And like the 71 soldiers, it too has since vanished from the maps, along with the copse itself, the surviving trees having been removed after the war.
Theories explaining the disappearance of the soldiers included the possibility that they had been sucked down in the glutinous mud. This is not as entirely improbable as it sounds, for in the harsh winters in Picardy and Flanders many deaths resulted from soldiers falling off the duckboards into the mud. But it hardly seems plausible that this could explain the disappearance of so many men. Another theory was that the German shelling was so intense that they had virtually been vaporised. This too seems a bit farfetched for the disappearance of 71 men.
Like the detective in an Agatha Christie novel, it is the job of the historian to resolve mysteries like that of Celtic Wood, and indeed numerous scholars and amateur historians have speculated on the fate of the missing soldiers. Some have claimed that they were not really missing at all, and that Bean and later scholars did not check all the sources. Others have suggested that the men were taken into captivity and then massacred by the Germans and buried somewhere further behind the German front. As it is over a century since the soldiers disappeared, and there are no longer any immediate relatives, who would understandably like to see the matter explained, it almost seems a pity to resolve such a wonderful mystery with such a wonderful name.
Robert Cowley, "What Happened at Celtic Woods?", The Quarterly Journal of Military History 4.4 (1992); https://www.historynet.com/happened-celtic-wood/
T. Spagnoly, The Anatomy of a Raid. Australia at Celtic Wood (Pen and Sword, 2012)
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