‘So young and wistful’: Private Percy Weakly.
When Sharon Summers answered the phone on Wednesday night she could hardly believe what she heard.
”I had this great intake of breath, I still get goosebumps talking about it,” she said.
The phone call, from Army HQ in Canberra, was to tell her that her great, great uncle Private Percy Weakly, who went to war and never came home, had been identified almost a century after he died in battle.
One of 250 soldiers buried by German troops in a series of mass graves following the Battle of Fromelles in July, 1916, the South Australian-born Private Percy had left his wife Margaret and young daughter Lorna in Brisbane to join the 31st battalion. A labourer on the Brisbane docks, he was 31 when he signed up.
He is among 20 soldiers the Australian government will soon announce have been identified this year. It takes to 144 the number of Diggers identified by name in the five years since the project began.
”He was 31 but in his photo, he looks so young. And wistful,” Mrs Summers said from her home in Goulburn in New South Wales.
Private Weakly was born in Parkside, in South Australia, the youngest of William and Emily Weakly’s nine children. His name is inscribed at VC Corner – the only all-Australian cemetery on the Western Front and very near the front line from where he would have left the allied trenches.
Having been exhumed from the pits at Pheasant Wood on the outskirts of the small farming village in northern France, Private Weakly’s DNA was sampled and his remains studied by a team of scientists, including anthropologists and molecular geneticists who were able to make a match with DNA volunteered by his descendants.
Now Mrs Summers is not only planning a trip to Fromelles in July to be at the dedication ceremony to unveil Private Weakly’s new headstone, she is co-ordinating the brainstorming taking place among family as they search for the words to be inscribed on the white headstone.
It won’t be her first visit to Fromelles – that took place last year. ”When I went over in August and he was still unknown, I stood in front of an unknown soldier’s grave at Fromelles [Pheasant Wood] Military Cemetery and I said ‘are you my Percy’? It was quite emotional. But I was convinced that one of them was going to be Percy.”
Mrs Summers’ belief was reinforced by the fact that Private Weakly’s identification tags were returned to Australia by the Germans via the Red Cross. His name also appeared on a German list of 191 soldiers buried after battle.
Also among the 20 soldiers identified this year is Private Archie McDonald, from New South Wales, who served in the 54th battalion.
source: smh.com.au
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