The Last Post Ceremony commemorating the service of (1504) Sergeant George Payne Cross, 13th Battalion, AIF, First World War.

The Last Post Ceremony is presented in the Commemorative area of the Australian War Memorial each day. The ceremony commemorates more than 102,000 Australians who have given their lives in war and other operations and whose names are recorded on the Roll of Honour. At each ceremony the story behind one of the names on the Roll of Honour is told. Hosted by Richard Cruise, the story for this day was on (1504) Sergeant George Payne Cross, 13th Battalion, AIF, First World War.

1504 Sergeant George Payne Cross, 13th Battalion, AIF
KIA 11 April 1917
Photograph: H11852

Story delivered 11 April 2017

Today we remember and pay tribute to Sergeant George Cross.

George Payne Cross was born in 1888, one of four sons of Thomas and Rhoda Cross of Brixton in London. After attending Jessop Road School, Cross was employed as a correspondence clerk, and then as a steward with the P&O Steam Navigation Company, which ferried mail, passengers, and cargo between Britain, Spain, Egypt, India, the Far East, and Australia. Cross made at least seven voyages to Australia between 1907 and 1913, and was perhaps residing in short-stay accommodation in the Sydney suburb of Kogarah when the British Empire went to war in August 1914.

George Cross enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force at Liverpool in January 1915, and embarked for Egypt with reinforcements for the 13th Battalion two months later. He landed on Gallipoli on the evening of 25th April 1915, and was involved in establishing and defending front-line positions in the area that became known as “Quinn’s Post”.

After about a month on Gallipoli, Cross was evacuated suffering from wounds received in action. He also received treatment in Egypt from a hernia, but became sick following an operation and was transferred to England, where he spent the following six months recovering. During this time he returned to Brixton to visit his parents, and married Daisy Anscombe, becoming a loving step-father to her daughter Katherine.

Cross returned to Egypt in January 1916 after Australian troops had withdrawn from Gallipoli. He rejoined the 13th Battalion and spent the following months training as the AIF expanded and prepared to move to the fighting on the Western Front.

The 13th Battalion arrived in France in June 1916, and spent several weeks in the relatively quiet Armentières sector before joining the fighting on the Somme with the rest of the 4th Australian Division.

Cross was promoted to lance corporal in July, and entered the fighting at Pozières on 5 August. Two days later, the 13th Battalion helped to repel a fierce German counter-attack. Over the next week it bore the brunt of a sustained German bombardment as the division made no less than six successive night attacks on positions towards Mouquet Farm. The 4th Division was relieved after just nine days, having suffered over 4,600 dead, missing, and wounded during that time.

Despite these losses, the 4th Division returned to Pozières for a second time on 27 August. Cross was promoted to corporal and almost immediately showed exemplary leadership under adverse conditions during a night attack at Mouquet Farm. Separated from the main body of his company, “with great coolness and determination” Cross held his section together until he could locate his company’s whereabouts, exhibiting “great bravery and resource in the trenches”. When the division was finally relieved from Pozières, Cross was promoted to sergeant and awarded the Military Medal for “conspicuous bravery”.

He was, by all accounts, “as fine a soldier as you could get”.

After Pozières, the 4th Division spent the harsh Somme winter holding positions between the villages of Flers and Gueudecourt where the mud, rain, and frostbite proved far greater enemies than the German army. The 13th Battalion carried out a number of operations against the German positions, most notably the successful raid on Stormy Trench in February 1917. It also participated in the advance that followed when the German army relinquished its Somme defences to take up positions 30 kilometres to the east, along its recently-completed defences known as the Hindenburg Line.

On the morning of 11 April 1917, the 4th Division made a costly and unsuccessful attack on the Hindenburg Line at Bullecourt that resulted in over 3,000 casualties.

Sergeant Cross was listed as missing in action, and his wife, Daisy, wrote often to the Australia Red Cross office in London seeking information. “I would be most grateful if you could only relieve my suspense, should you happen to have his name among the Prisoners”, she wrote in June 1917.

Australian prisoners later described last seeing Cross in the thick of fighting in the German trenches, but his name did not appear among those confirmed as prisoners of war. One eyewitness described how “He was in charge of a bombing party in a sap [which] bombed the enemy back, but they returned [and] he was left to cover our retreat”. Another claimed to have seen him killed by German machine-gun fire while searching for grenades to repel the attacking German troops.

Without any further word of his whereabouts, a court of inquiry later determined that George Cross had been killed in action during the bitter fighting of the 11th of April 1917.
He was 28 years old.

Today his name is listed on the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux with more than 10,700 other Australians who died in France during the First World War and have no known grave.

It isa also listed on the Roll of Honour on my right, among more than 60,000 Australians who died while serving in the First World War.

This is but one of the many stories of service and sacrifice told here at the Australian War Memorial. We now remember Sergeant George Payne Cross, who gave his life for us, for our freedoms, and in the hope of a better world.

Aaron Pegram
Historian, Military History Section