Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

#234 MOUNTFORD D’Arcy (Darcy)                41st Battalion
 
Darcy Mountford was born at South Pine (now Lawnton) to parents Harrington and Emma Mountford. The family moved to the Stanmore district outside Woodford in time for Darcy to attend school at Stanmore State School, after which he worked on the family farm. As an adult, Darcy had taken up a selector’s block and was also working as a timber getter.
 
Darcy travelled by train to Brisbane on 28th December 1915 to enlist in the AIF. He may have been accompanied by his younger brother, Charles. Darcy informed the recruiters he was a 35 year old labourer. He named his widowed mother, Emma, as next of kin. Charles Mountford was 13 years younger than Darcy. He enlisted four days later on 1st January 1916. The brothers were accepted into a depot battalion at Enoggera but when being assigned to permanent units were placed in different battalions. Darcy was assigned to the 41st Battalion, which was being raised at Enoggera before being sent to England for further training. The 41st Battalion was part of the 11th Brigade of the 3rd Division AIF.
 
Unlike the other four divisions in the AIF, the 3rd Division would not be constructed around a core of experienced veterans. Instead, the 3rd Division battalions were raised in Australia from new recruits and then sent directly to England where a new divisional training camp was established at Larkhill near Stonehenge. The training would be overseen by the newly appointed divisional commander, Major General John Monash (who was one of the few Gallipoli veterans in the Division).
 
On 16th May 1916, the entire 41st Battalion boarded trains and travelled via Wallangarra, where trains had to changed due to a change in gauge, and then on to Sydney where they embarked on the “Demosthenes”. The ship took seven weeks to reach Southampton, during which time the troops were kept fit with drills and boxing matches.
 
The battalion spent four months in Southern England, while the rest of the AIF faced the might of the German Army on the Somme. Monash had become a minor celebrity in England as a result of his service at Anzac and his many years in the Australian Citizen Forces before the war. In a rare tribute to Monash and his division, the King, George V, travelled down to Larkhill to meet Monash and inspect the division. The King was concerned that the ‘colonials’ had insufficient clothing for the coming winter. Monash assured the King that his men were well catered for clothing wise and that his division would prove to be the best trained in the AIF. He was right.
 
The 3rd Division, all 22,000 men and equipment began to deploy to the continent on 25th November 1916. The Division arrived just in time for the bitterest winter in over 40 years. The ground froze, trenches filled with freezing mud leading to trench foot and there was heavy snow and frost. Very little fighting took place until the spring in March 1917. The major offensive conducted by the British in 1917 was centred on the Ypres salient in Belgian Flanders. The lessons learnt on the Somme the previous year led to a much greater reliance on planning and overwhelming artillery. A major obstacle was the German presence on the Messines Ridge which overlooked the flat land upon which the British would assemble their forces. The battle of Messines was timed to begin on 7th June 1917.
 
In preparation for the Messines offensive, British and Australian tunnellers had been undermining Messines Ridge. Twenty-one caches of high explosive were packed into the tunnels directly under the German defences. At 3:10am on 7th June 1917, nineteen of the mines were fired simultaneously, creating an explosion that was heard as far away as London. As the smoke and dust cleared, the battalions of the 3rdDivision rose up from the jumping off tapes and scrambled across the broken ground. During the advance, Darcy received a gunshot wound to his foot. He made his way to a dressing station and then on to a casualty clearing station where he recovered. He returned to his battalion 12 days later but the wound was not properly healed and he reported to a Field Ambulance with a septic foot.
 
Darcy returned to his battalion on 23rd July but only lasted eight days in the firing line before again reporting to a Field Ambulance, this time with a minor shrapnel wound to his left hand. When he rejoined the battalion, the 41st had been relieved and was resting in the rear areas around Poperinghe after a fairly torrid time at Messines.
 
With Messines secure, the main part of the campaign called for a series of “bite and hold” battles which would, one step at a time, move the front from the Ypres ramparts along the Menin Road to Polygon Wood, Broodseinde Ridge and ultimately the village which gave its name to the six month battle, Passchendaele. The 3rd Division did not re-enter the fighting until 4th October when in conjunction with two other AIF divisions and the NZ Division, the division advanced up Broodseinde Ridge to secure a new front line at a significant structure, a concrete blockhouse given the name Tyne Cot.
 
The 4th October marked the end of favourable weather and with the arrival of unseasonal rains, the churned-up ground became an ocean of mud which claimed men, animals and equipment. Darcy and the men of the 41st Battalion slogged through the mud and slush as they moved up and back to the front for two weeks. The mud exhausted the troops and the unstable ground prevented any meaningful support from their own artillery which sank into the ooze after firing only a few shells. The German artillery which was placed on higher ground rained high explosive and gas shells on the miserable men in the trenches, who were often up to their waist in mud.
 
The Supreme British commander, Sir Douglas Haig, with scant knowledge of the conditions under which his troops laboured, continued to order attacks to move the front forward. The 3rd Division managed to reach the outskirts of Passchendaele itself by 12th October but could go no further. On 19th October, Darcy Mountford was reported killed in action; almost certainly a victim of heavy shelling. Darcy’s remains were never located or if they were, were unable to be identified. He may be one of the 800 unidentified Australians buried in the Tyne Cot Cemetery which was established at the end of the war and with 12,000 burials is the largest Commonwealth War Cemetery in the world. The Cross of Sacrifice in the cemetery is constructed on top of the Tyne Cot blockhouse and records that the blockhouse was captured by the 3rd Australian Division on 4thOctober 1917.
 
Darcy Mountford’s remains were never located. He is one of 56,000 men, including 6,178 Australians, who served in the Ypres campaign and who have no known grave. Their names are inscribed on the Portland Stone Tablets under the arches of the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing in the city of Ypres (now Ieper).
Since the late 1920’s, with only the brief interval of the German occupation in the Second World War, the City of Ypres has conducted a ceremony at the Memorial at dusk each evening to commemorate those who died in the Ypres campaign. The ceremony which draws large crowds concludes with the laying of wreaths, the recitation of the ode, and the playing of the Last Post by the city’s bugle corps.
Darcy is commemorated on the Honour Roll of St Mathias’ Church, Woodford and on a family gravestone in the Woodford cemetery. A tree with plaque is included in the Woodford Avenue of Honour.