Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

# 4379 BEIL Marmaduke        25th Battalion
 
Marmaduke Beil was one of 11 children born to Tobias and Elizabeth (Bessy) Beil in Warwick on the Southern Downs of Queensland on 28th May 1886. The family was living in the farming communities around Thane Creek and Pratten, just outside Warwick. Marmaduke was one of the original pupils to attend the Thane Creek State School when it opened in 1892. Thane Creek was at that time a small alluvial gold field but it is most likely that the Beil family were farming in the district.
 
Tobias Beil died in 1910 and was buried in the Pratten Cemetery. Around the same time, several of Tobias’ sons took up selection blocks at Bell and Bessy Beil moved in with one of her sons at “Ermelo.”
 
Marmaduke and his younger brother, Herbert, presented themselves for enlistment to the Toowoomba recruiting depot on 4th September 1915. The newspaper reports of the Gallipoli landings were getting wide coverage at the time and enlistments were soaring. Both boys, Marmaduke was 29 and Herbert 21, stated their occupations as labourers. Marmaduke was almost 6 feet tall and weighed 140 pounds. Both boys named their mother, Elizabeth Beil of “Ermelo”, Bell via Dalby as next of kin.
 
The brothers took the train to Brisbane where they reported to Bell’s Paddock Camp at Enoggera. After three months in a depot battalion during which time the brothers trained in musketry, drill and army discipline, Marmaduke and Herbert were assigned to the 11th draft of reinforcements for the 25th Battalion. Prior to the 11th reinforcements leaving for overseas, home leave was granted so that men could spend a few days with family and friends. It may have been around this same time that the group portrait of eight soldiers, two of which are Herbert and Marmaduke Beil, was taken at Poulsen’s studios in Queen Street, Brisbane. Prints were probably handed to relatives and friends as mementoes. A copy of the photo appears on the VWMA page.
 
The 11th reinforcements finally departed Brisbane by train in late March 1916, arriving in Sydney where they boarded the “Star of Victoria” on 31st March 1916. The embarkation roll shows that Marmaduke and Herbert, who had successive regimental numbers, each allocated 4 shillings of their five shillings a day pay to their mother. The reinforcements landed in Egypt at the end of April. The 25th Battalion, which the boys were destined to join, had already departed from Egypt and was already in France. The reinforcements went into camp around Ismailia on the Suez Canal. It was there that Marmaduke contracted a severe case of dysentery. His mother was informed by telegram that her son was “dangerously ill”, but two days later was “out of danger” and finally “convalescing.”
 
While Marmaduke was recovering, his brother Herbert was posted to the AIF depot at Etaples in France. Marmaduke was sent to the 7th Brigade training battalion at Lark Hill on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire before being sent across the Channel to Etaples where he was reunited with his brother. The pair were finally taken on strength by the 25th Battalion on 8th August 1916.
 
July and August was a difficult time for the 25th Battalion, losing 25 officers and 660 men killed or wounded at Pozieres as part of the great Somme offensive. The battalion was in serious need of a period of reorganisation and rest. By September, the 25th was resting in comfortable billets in Nissen huts around Poperinghe in Belgian Flanders. In late October, the entire AIF returned to the Somme for one last effort to dislodge the Germans around Flers and Bapaume.
 
On 9th November, Marmaduke reported to a Casualty Clearing Station with a recurrence of the dysentery which had afflicted him in Egypt. After spending two weeks in hospital with no improvement, Marmaduke was loaded onto a hospital ship for England where he was admitted to the 3rd Australian General Hospital at Harefield. He was discharged on 12th February 1917 and posted to a convalescent camp at Weymouth before reporting to the infantry depot at Perham Downs.
 
Marmaduke arrived back in France in time to re-join the 25th in June 1917 where the battalion was resting in Belgium after a month of action against the Hindenburg Line at Bullecourt, where Herbert Beil was seriously wounded. The 3rd Battle of Ypres, sometimes known as Passchendaele, began in June 1917 at Messines Ridge in Belgian Flanders. The aim of Messines was to dislodge the enemy from strategically important high ground. Once that high ground was secured, the real campaign could begin, beginning with an assault against the Gheluvelt Plateau. The 25th Battalion as part of the 2nd Division AIF had been training for this operation, known as the Battle of Menin Road. The battle began on 25th September and the 25th Battalion successfully reached their objective capturing prisoners and machine guns. The 25th was relieved and went into the support lines while the 4th and 5th Divisions of the AIF followed up with an advance against Polygon Wood.
 
In the beginning of October, the 2nd Division was called back up to the line for an attack against the village of Zonnebeke and Broodseinde Ridge. Following the plans which had succeeded at Menin Road and Polygon Wood, the men of the 2nd Division moved up to the jumping off tapes in the early hours of 4th October 1917 to await the barrage of British and Australian artillery which would creep forward at a walking pace with the troops close behind. In a cruel twist of fate, the Germans had planned a counterattack at exactly the same time and place and their advancing infantry were cut to pieces by the British barrage.
 
By the end of the day, the German defenders had been pushed further back and the 25th was holding the line of the first objective as subsequent battalions leapfrogged forward to further gains. Broodseinde Ridge was the third offensive in 15 days along the line of the advance and the enemy had been forced back to the high ground around Passchendaele. For the 25th Battalion, the day’s success came at the cost of some 40 men killed and 200 wounded. There were also 16 missing; either lying unidentified, blown to pieces or drowned in the mud. Marmaduke Beil was one of the missing.
 
When Marmaduke’s mother learned of his fate, she instituted enquiries with the Red Cross to see if she could learn something of her son’s fate but searches of unidentified wounded and prisoners of war failed to provide any comfort. There was not even a fellow soldier who was near Marmaduke, who she stated was acting as a stretcher bearer,  during the events of 4th October who could shed some light on his fate.
 
In due course, a Court of Enquiry conducted in February 1918 determined that Marmaduke Beil had been killed in action on 4th October 1917, no grave recorded. His mother received a parcel of personal effects which included a tobacco pouch, a pair of spectacles in a case, a flag, three hairbrushes, a testament and prayerbook. Bessy Beil was granted a pension of 2 pounds per fortnight.
 
Marmaduke Beil’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
Since the 1930s, with 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 concludes with the laying of wreaths, the recitation of the ode, and the playing of the Last Post by the city’s bugle corps
The commemoration of the Menin Gate Memorial on 24 July 1927 so moved the Australian war artist Will Longstaff that he painted 'The Menin Gate at Midnight', which portrays a ghostly army of the dead marching past the Menin Gate. The painting, which now hangs in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, toured Australia during the 1920s and 30s and drew huge crowds.