He climbed out of a trench in northern France to face a hail of German bullets and meet his death but nearly a century later Alexander Clingan is bringing his relatives together in Australia.
The railway boilermaker's assistant from Newtown in Sydney was only 22 when he went over the top in the Battle of Fromelles on July 19, 1916 - a military action that brought the worst loss of life in a 24-hour period in Australia's history.
Private Clingan was listed as missing for months before the Germans confirmed he was dead and sent across his identification disc.
For more than 90 years his remains lay in a forgotten mass grave on the outskirts of Fromelles village, before persistent research by retired Melbourne teacher Lambis Englezos led to archaeological digs, and then a recovery operation in 2009 that exhumed 250 bodies.
The task of putting a name to each fallen soldier is ongoing but DNA samples from two of Pte Clingan's relatives were key to his remains being identified.
One of those relatives is Australian Army Colonel Scott Clingan who on Sunday will oversee a commemoration service at Fromelles, where the remains of his great grandfather's cousin were reinterred at the Pheasant Wood military cemetery, opened in 2010.
Sunday's service marks 99 years since the failed attack by Australian and British troops on the German position known as the Sugar Loaf, where the 5th Australian Division lost more than 5500 men killed, wounded, captured or missing.
The attackers suffered heavily at the hands of German machine gunners and by 8am the next day they were back in their own lines. The German casualties were little more than a thousand.
Col Clingan, who has served in Afghanistan and is now Assistant Defence Attache at the Australian Embassy in Paris, first learned of Pte Clingan by chance in Sydney in 2008 when he came across the war memorial on King Street in Newtown.
"I was just walking past going shopping with my wife and kids. We stopped and looked at it and there was Alexander Clingan," he told AAP.
Col Clingan learned more about his new-found relative online and later responded to a request for possible relatives to be DNA tested to identify the remains of those found at Fromelles.
During the process he connected with Margaret Wright, the other Clingan relative who gave a DNA sample.
The pair met in Canberra in 2013 when Col Clingan gave an address about Pte Clingan at the daily Last Post ceremony at the Australian War Memorial, where yet another Clingan relative turned up.
Col Clingan says the rediscovery of Pte Clingan had "snowballed" into more and more members of the dispersed Clingan family meeting relatives they never knew of.
"We lost him in the tragedy of war but he has brought our whole family together."
Ms Wright, a recorder teacher in Canberra, has been a force behind those reconnections and has gathered information on her lost cousin, who was also known as Alick.
"We have Alexander's letters, and can read his boyish and optimistic comments on what was happening, and his deep affection for his family," she told Robin Corfield, whose 2010 book Don't Forget Me, Cobber: The Battle Of Fromelles helped bring the tragedy of the engagement to the attention of Australians.
"We also know that his widowed mother would go to the docks in Sydney Harbour to meet returning troopships in the hope of hearing news of her youngest child. We always felt that Alexander's story was unfinished, a mystery," Ms Wright said.
"At last he lies in a named grave, in a peaceful country that remembers the young Australians who fought and gave their lives so far from home. His mother would have been content to know that."
Pte Clingan's mother Ruth wrote, in a neat hand, on his roll of honour circular that her son had "obtained the highest individual score in junior grade cricket (Moore Park) in 1915." He had enlisted in August that year.
Col Clingan has visited Fromelles a dozen times since being posted to Paris and admits he still gets "pretty choked up" at a place where nearly 2000 Australians were killed in action or later died of their wounds.
"It is pretty moving, and now I understand more about the battle and how many guys died and how much suffering there was there. To think that I'm related to one of those is pretty heart-rending."
Of the 250 soldiers found in the mass grave at Fromelles, 144 Australians have now been identified by name and work continues to name the other 106.
New identifications are expected for next year's 100th anniversary of the battle when several thousand people are expected to attend the July 19 commemoration service.
Just like Pte Clingan, those newly identified soldiers will have their headstones marked with their names and rededicated in services attended by relatives brought together by their rediscovery and reburial.
Share
