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From François Berthout

Lieutenant Elvas Elliott Jenkins
1st Australian Pioneer Battalion
 
Under the sun of the Somme, rest in peace, in the light and in eternal remembrance, thousands of young men who, for their country and France gave their all, gave their lives for the peace in which they are united side by side and stand proudly, silent but present through the rows of their white graves between which grow poppies that remind us every day that if we live today, it is thanks to the courage, determination and sacrifices of a whole generations of heroes who will forever, in the Somme, be remembered and honored with care and love so that they will never be forgotten.

Today, it is with the deepest affection, with gratitude and respect that I would like to honor the memory of one of these young men, one of my boys of the Somme who gave his today for our tomorrow.I would like to pay a very respectful tribute to Lieutenant Elvas Elliott Jenkins who fought in the 1st Australian Pioneer Battalion and who was killed in action 105 years ago, on July 19, 1916 at the age of 28 on the Somme front and is believed to be the first Australian soldier to be killed in the Somme.

Elvas Elliott Jenkins was born in 1888 at Ararat, Victoria,and was the eldest of seven children of James Elliott and Bertha Ellen Jenkins, of 14 Sorrett Avenue, Malvern, Victoria. When Elvas was twelve, the Jenkins family moved to the Melbourne suburb of Ivanhoe where he attended the Fairfield State School. He was a popular boy, described as "sturdy, high-spirited, fond of fun, full of mischief, unselfish, good-tempered and reliable".

In Ivanhoe, Elvas became an enthusiastic member of the local Methodist church. There at a "Decision Day Service", the young teenage boy "gave himself to the Lord Jesus", a decision that would influence the course of his young life, and even the nature of his death.
Elvas quickly became thoroughly involved as one of the leading young people in the life of his church, teaching Sunday School and becoming secretary of the local YPSCE (Young People's Society of Christian Endeavour).After a few years he became a local preacher.

In 1903, Elvas left school at 15 to take up an apprenticeship with a Melbourne printing firm, McCarron Bird and Co. He was good at his job and well-liked by his work mates, but in the end, it was not enough for Elvas. In 1910, at the age of 22, he left the printing trade to train for the Methodist ministry.

Elvas entered Queen’s College at the University of Melbourne to study theology. It was almost certainly there at the University that he met Jeanie Reid, who was studying medicine. Elvas and Jeanie had a special understanding. Officially or unofficially, she was his fiancée. They were in love and they planned a future together.

Elvas completed his studies in the middle of 1914 and was ordained into the Methodist ministry. A month later, in August 1914, Britain declared war on Germany. Almost immediately, like so many other young Australians,he volunteered for military service. His official date of enlistment is September 17, 1914. He was placed in the 2nd Field Company Australian Engineers as a sapper, part of the first AIF (then called the Australian Infantry Expeditionary Force).
In his enlistment papers, Elvas is described as having average height and build, fair hair, brown eyes and a bronzed complexion. He left Melbourne for the war in the first convoy of AIF troops on the transport ship Orvieto on October 21,1914. A little over a month later they arrived at Alexandria in Egypt where the Australian troops were gathering and training ahead of active deployment to the battlefield. The 2nd Field Engineers were sent to Mena Camp.

It was in Alexandria that Elvas obtained the New Testament that he carried to Gallipoli. Curiously, it was a French New Testament. It is uncertain exactly how he got it. There was a substantial French quarter in Alexandria and indeed French is still one of the languages spoken there today. Given Elvas’s Christian background and his theological interests, it is hardly strange that his souvenir of Alexandria would be a Bible.

But it is a very particular Bible. It is the 1901 edition of the 1894 revision of the Ostervald translation of the New Testament, an important French Protestant edition published in 1774. An intriguing possibility is that one Sunday Elvas, as usual, sought out a Christian church in Alexandria, and found a French Protestant Church. That may be how he procured his little French New Testament and Psalms. The inscription in the front reads,"Elvas E Jenkins, Mena Camp, Egypt, 1914. 1st A.I.E.F."

After three months training, Elvas was promoted to Lance Corporal just a few days before his unit was deployed to Gallipoli in April 1915. Australian and New Zealand forces began landing at Gallipoli at 4:30am on Anzac Day, April 25. By 7am, Elvas’s 2nd Field Company Australian Engineers had landed and quickly set about their assigned tasks, unloading guns and ammunition, constructing a pier, sinking wells to assure water supply, constructing trenches and tunnels and dragging artillery up to the battle lines. Lance Corporal Elvas Jenkins was in charge of one of these groups and, as usual, carried his French New Testament in his shirt pocket, over his heart.

The Turkish Army was shelling the Anzacs with German-made Krupp 75mm field guns, firing shells packed with explosives and shrapnel bullets consisting of lead balls of calibre 295 x 10g. The shells exploded on impact, spraying the shrapnel bullets in all directions. On May 7, a shell landed and exploded where Elvas and his men were working.

Elvas was struck directly over his heart. He was carrying his French New Testament and Psalms back-to-front in his pocket. A lead shrapnel bullet struck the middle of the book, passing through the Psalms and Revelation and piercing the pages all the way to Acts. Beyond Acts, the Gospel pages stopped the bullet. They are compressed but not pierced through. The lead ball still sits there today. In the back of his Bible, Elvas later wrote, "Shrapnel bullet from shell of 75mm field gun. About May 6 or 7, 1915".

His life spared, Elvas fought on at Gallipoli, doing his job well and was promoted to Corporal, then Sergeant. The Anzac evacuation was finally ordered in December 1915. Among the last few to leave, Elvas stepped ashore back at Alexandria on December 27, where the exhausted Australian and New Zealand soldiers rested and recuperated. On March 10, Elvas was transferred to the frontline engineers, the 1st Pioneer Battalion, and immediately commissioned as Second Lieutenant.

The Anzacs were sent to join the BEF (British Expeditionary Forces) fighting in France on the crucial Western Front. Elvas’s 1st Pioneer Battalion arrived on April 2,1916 in Marseilles, where Elvas was one of the men granted leave until the Pioneer Battalion’s role was determined. He formally rejoined his Battalion on June 2 and on June 22 was promoted to full Lieutenant.

The Anzacs were assigned to the Battle of the Somme to attack and take the strong German entrenchment in and around the village of Pozières. The role of the 1st Pioneer Battalion, as its name indicates, was as an advance party, going ahead of the main attacking force to prepare the way, dig trenches, set up barricades, and, if the situation demanded, to repel the enemy themselves. It was an extremely dangerous assignment.

The real attack on the German stronghold in Pozières was scheduled for July 23,1916. The 1st Pioneer Battalion was sent on ahead a week before with new Lieutenant Elvas Jenkins leading a group who were to establish a forward position very close to the German lines.

On July 19, Elvas was in charge of a reconnaissance party determining the precise location of the German trenches. They were in extreme danger. A deeply committed Christian, Elvas briefly led his men in prayer, unaware that he was in the sights of a concealed German sniper. Elvas was shot and severely wounded. Taken to a Field Ambulance (mobile medical unit), he died the next day. His record tersely notes:"G.S.W neck and chest". Elvas was the first Australian to die in the Battle of the Somme.
Today, Lieutenant Elvas Elliott Jenkins rests in peace with his men, comrades and brothers in arms at Dantzig Alley British Cemetery, Mametz, Somme, and his grave bears the following inscription "A life nobly lived and bravely ended."

The Anzacs eventually did take Pozières from the Germans but at a frightful cost. Historian Charles Bean wrote that the Pozières ridge "is more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth".

When Elvas had first arrived in Egypt he had been required to write a will. Leaving almost everything to his brothers, he made a very specific bequest of personal items to Jeanie Lawson Reid, whose address he provided. This included his books. The military authorities kept strictly to the terms of his will. His effects such as clothing were parcelled up and sent to his brothers, who eventually received his medals too. But his French New Testament was a book, and so the authorities sent a little package to Jeanie.

Jeanie grieved for Elvas for a long time. Ten years later, she married another wounded war veteran, Albert Jeays. Theirs was a happy marriage, but Jeanie’s love for Elvas was no secret to the family. Jeanie treasured the little French New Testament, his photos and the letters he wrote from the war. Her family has lovingly preserved Elvas’s memory ever since. It is through the Jeays family that the Bible Society has finally become the custodian of the "Bible with the bullet".

The donation was the direct result of the society’s display of historic Bibles in Brisbane. John Harris had given a lecture at the exhibition and he was approached afterwards by the husband of Jeanie’s great niece.

John eventually located and contacted the Jenkins family. They too had kept alive the memory of their great uncle Elvas. In 1975, his brother Spencer had donated two stained glass windows in his memory which were installed in the chapel of Queen’s College. Here, a memorial plaque has long listed Elvas with all those from the College who gave their lives in the war.

Like so many others, Elvas is an Australian hero who gave his life for family, friends and country. He was a deeply committed Christian. We can let his work mates from the printery have the last word. At his memorial service in August 1916, they said they had worked with him for many years and that "we have but one opinion of him: he was one of the best".
Elvas, you who fought with the greatest faith and bravery for your country, for your comrades and loved ones on the battlefields of Gallipoli and the Somme where you gave your life, I would like today, from the bottom of my heart, to say thank you for all that you did for France, for my country which is united with Australia in the strongest and the most beautiful friendship which was born in the trenches of the great war in which Australians and French fought and fell side by side and who today stand together around a generation of young men who rest in peace in the many and peaceful cemeteries of the Somme.Young and brave, these young men left their jobs, their fields, the warmth of their homes, the love of their families, of their loved ones to answer the call of duty alongside their friends to serve their country with pride and marched side by side to join the trenches, the battlefields of northern France in which they fought with exceptional dedication on the land of a country they knew little but learned to know and love as if this country had always been theirs and were deeply loved, respected and admired by the French people who saw in them more than our allies but they became here in the Somme, our sons, our friends, our heroes, an admiration and a love who never disappeared.These young boys came from so far away and thanks to their smiles, their smiling faces, gave the French people the strength and courage to hold on while they lived in destroyed villages in which only ruins existed.United in the mateship, they helped the French people to continue the fight, they helped France to rebuild and after a brief period of rest, joined the front line and fought meter by meter for a country which had become theirs.All over the Somme, they fought with honor and bravery in what was for them among the deadliest battles of the great war but despite horrible losses, despite the fury and horrors they went through, they never lost their faith.In the mud, in the blood and the cold biting the skin, they fought like lions in the trenches and lived side by side among the rats and the lice, they lived and fought day and night surrounded by the death that awaited, devious and silent beyond the parapet, in the shell holes in which fell before them, their friends, their brothers, their comrades under the merciless fire of the artillery and the machine guns which broke in successive waves, the courageous assaults in which were annihilated and mow down a whole generation of men who did their duty with the greatest bravery until their last breath.In this hell, they lived what none of them could have imagined and seeing the bodies of their comrades dismembered by the shells, buried then exhumed by the violence of steel storms, they lost their innocence but not the desire to fight, they remained united and it is with resolution and determination, under the gaze of god that in their turn, they went over the top then charged the enemy trenches by pointing their bayonets forward, their eyes towards their destiny which, in a few seconds, were stopped by deluges of bullets that rifles and machine guns spit out at an incenseful rate and one by one, side by side, they fell into the barbed wire, in the poppy fields of the Somme in which so much blood and tears were shed, where so many prayers were said and which, more than a hundred years later, in silence, can be heard because these young men have not disappeared and still walk on these sacred grounds for which they gave their lives and solemnly ask us to never forget them.Today, as they were before in life and on the battlefields, they are united and rest in peace side by side and eternally grateful, I would watch over them, on their last resting place to bring their stories to life and share their memory to bring them back to life so that they are never forgotten.Thank you so much Elvas,for everything.At the going down of the sun and in the morning,we will remember him,we will remember them.