WWI Stories – Raymond Pye
Healesville
Philip Cleary shares the story of his Grandfather Private Raymond Pye.
Raymond Pye, born in Healesville, was my grandfather on my mother’s side and I grew up listening to his stories and experiences of the Great War.
My grandfather kept a diary of incidents and experiences that happened to him while he was with the Australian Imperial Force in Egypt, France and Belgium between 1915 and 1919. He was with ‘C’ Company, 29th & 32nd Battalions – attached to the 8th Brigade and arrived in France in June 1916.
His first experience of shell fire was on 11 July 1916 but he wasn’t particularly frightened as he didn’t know the terrible danger of shells at that time. On the evening of 19 July, their division was to hop the bags at Fromelles. One of his best mates was killed that night. On 27 January 1917, it was intensely cold and he was walking up and down a trench to keep some life in his legs and feet. Germans were shelling the area and he just stopped walking when a shell landed in the trench where he’d been. A piece of shell caught him in the leg and he was knocked senseless. It was a real “Blighty” (a wound serious enough to get a soldier to England). He was back in France in May 1917.
My grandfather was lucky enough to survive many battles including “The Somme”, “Polygon Wood”, “‘Ypres” and he finally left France, arriving back in Melbourne on 21 March 1919.
One morning in 1918, my grandfather was in one of four tanks. They got to the Hindenburg line when a dense fog came on, so dense you could not see for ten feet. It lifted as fast as it came on and the enemy with “whiz-bang” guns were only 500 yards away. Three of the tanks were destroyed and the one my grandfather was in escaped. I would not be here today if he had not escaped.
We hold our grandfather on a pedestal.
