The unknown battle: More than 1000 Kiwi soldiers killed at La Basse-Ville

The Unknown Soldier atop the Cenotaph which will be the focal point of Gisborne city Anzac Day commemorations tomorrow. The dawn and civic services will again be combined as one service at the Cenotaph. Participants are invited to meet at Lawson Field Theatre at 5.15am for a hot drink followed by fall-in at 5.45am and the march to the Cenotaph. Gisborne Herald file picture

As we count down to Anzac Day — a time to  commemorate those who died in war and honour the many returned servicemen and women — East Coast man Marcus Williams recounts meeting a Belgian historian who wrote a book on the 1917 Battle of La Basse-Ville and later discovered her grandmother had met his grandfather, Toby Nolan, during World War 1.

In 2017 our family was contacted by a lady from Belgium.

She had recently discovered a photo of our grandfather, H C (Toby) Nolan, MC.

He sent the photo to her grandmother in December 1918.

It was a formal military photo which he had written his name, address and date on the back thereof.

But this happened after she had become very familiar with New Zealand and the New Zealand military action at La Basse-Ville in 1917.

Dominique Cooreman was appointed a judge in Brussels at the age of 30.

After 20 years she came to New Zealand  “for a break” and ended up at the beach at Porangahau in Hawke’s Bay.

It so happens that there were families living in Porangahau with connections to La Basse-Ville in Belgium to the extent that some had been given names which reflected La Basse-Ville.

Dominique became involved in conversations and spent about half of the next 12 or so years in New Zealand researching and uncovering a battle which has been “avoided” by history.

That battle was at a small hamlet called La Basse-Ville, part of the town of Warneton which is on the border with France.

Unfortunately, the name La Basse-Ville disappeared off the maps sometime after the war and Kiwis who went looking for their relatives’ graves couldn’t find them.

Some went to La Bassée, 30 kilometres  away in France, but Kiwis had not fought there.

Other factors that might have influenced the confusion; in Belgium, the use of both Flemish and French languages; that La Basse-Ville was on the border between Belgium and France on the river Lys (or Leie); the possibility that Kiwi soldiers were used as a decoy manoeuvre leading up to the battle of Passchendaele.

Ninety-nine years after that battle, Dominique had assembled a large amount of information and stories, including the names of 1001 Kiwi soldiers who died at La Basse-Ville. She published a 416-page book in 2016.

Only then did she become aware of the photo of my grandfather that he had sent to her grandmother in 1918.

She contacted us, via the internet, through a family connection with Toby’s mother.

She visited Gisborne in December 2017, celebrated her 64th birthday at the Farmers’ Market and then walked across the street into the C Company Memorial House where she named a surprising number of the soldiers whose photos were on the walls therein.

I sent a copy of her book to the late Field Marshall Sir John Chapple who commented: “A lot of fascinating stuff I’d never seen before — a really well-researched piece of military history.”

Soldiers’ ‘voices’ perhaps guided author to New Zealand

When Dominique published her book, she had the names of 1001 Kiwi soldiers who had died there.

She ordered 1000 books but received 1009. Conicidentally the number of Kiwi soldiers names she had received by that time was also 1009.

One of the casualties was Charles Sciascia, who was a young and promising Māori All Black. Dominique devoted a chapter in her book to Charles and his family.

She created a monument to Charles at La Basse-Ville and when it was unveiled, New Zealand’s Governor-General Dame Patsy Reddy officiated at the ceremony.

Given her judicial background, we can be confident Dominique’s research was very thorough.

It seems more than appropriate that a battle which claimed the lives of 1010 Kiwi soldiers should be remembered and the place where they died. The number who died there was 5.6 percent of New Zealand’s world war losses and is the equivalent of more than one-third of the Kiwi casualties at Gallipoli.

The expanded title of the book is La Basse-Ville 1917 - New Zealand Voices from Flanders Fields.

It might seem that the “voices” of the Kiwi soldiers (and their families) called Dominique to New Zealand and guided her to Porangahau to uncover this history.