By Larry Schwartz
ANGELS don’t lie. Jim Baddeley was cowering in a shell-hole on the western front when a radiant, white apparition hovered just long enough to tell him, “Don’t be afraid! Nothing is going to happen to you.”
“No good saying, ‘don’t be frightened’,” says the last survivor of the 58th Battalion, 15th Brigade, who had just rejoined his unit after being seriously injured as the German artillery withdrew from the French town of Bapaume in March, 1917.
Many a comrade lay strewn about the battlefield when the angel visited him at Polygon Wood that September. “None of us ever felt that we’d ever come back,” he says.
The angel knew better. Not only did the young postal clerk make it back home to the Victorian gold mining town of Smythesdale, near Ballarat; he celebrates the 80th anniversary today of the German evacuation from Bapaume.
Armed with two walking sticks, he still gets about the block each morning. His modest room in an eastern suburbs home is festooned with cards received on his 99th birthday last Sunday.
When we called, Mr Baddeley and a schoolteacher friend were drafting a letter to initiate correspondence with children in the town of Villers-Bretonneux and strengthen ties since it was liberated by Australian forces in April, 1918.
Although there is no formal celebration today and the Germans would later recapture Bapaume, the retreat was a significant moment for Australian troops massed on the outskirts.
Jim Baddeley played a key role. A good shot, he had been seconded to the battalion’s snipers and observers section. He’d peer through a telescope and, he laughs, “if I saw rabbits, I had to shoot them, you see”.
He looked out from his camouflaged trench one morning and saw “an array of wagons going backwards, backwards”. “I sent word back to battalion headquarters. I thought it would be a good idea to get the artillery on to it.”
An officer and two signallers made their way to the little post he’d nicknamed “gusty trench”. Though it was broad daylight and German observers were likely to be on the lookout, the officer leaned over the lip of the trench for a better view of Bapaume.
“I says, ‘Come down, you fool! Come down!’ ” Mr Baddeley says. “I am an officer,” came the reply. An enemy shell soon landed about 30 metres in front of them, another 30 metres behind.
Mr Baddeley dived for cover as a third shell hit the trench. When the 19-year-old came to he was lying on the lip. “The three others were flattened at the bottom of the trench.”
Temporarily blinded, his hearing permanently impaired, he drank a pannikin of rum and slept until dark in a deserted German dugout. Days later, he was ferried from Calais to London where heart problems were diagnosed at Edmonton Hospital.
“Returning to Unit,” said the orders he carried with him when he sailed for Le Havre that July and was sent “zigzagging across northern France” until he caught up with his unit near Poperinghe. While he was away, one of his seven closest comrades had been killed and two wounded at Bullecourt. Weeks later, he found himself sheltering in a shell-hole, too afraid to seek out a safer place.
It was then that the angel came to reassure Jim Baddeley that there was nothing to fear.
Today he has an old kit bag and a photo of his mates, all gone now, to remind him of those days. And that’s not all. “Yes, I did see an angel,” he says, “and nobody can take that away.”
The Sunday Age, 16-Mar-1997
Larry Schwartz Writer 