Former Bendigo WWI soldier Eugene Vogel Finster was one of the few survivors pulled from the rubble of the Bapaume Town Hall bombing in France on March 26, 1917, and next week he, and many other Australians, will be honoured.

When two worlds meet

Eugene Vogel Finster lived two lives.From the burning ruins of German-invaded cities to a wife and family in the suburbs, Eugene’s lives were worlds apart and they barely met. Until now.Eugene was one of the lucky ones. For unlike thousands of other Australian WWI soldiers, there was life after war for the former Bendigo man.Next weekend Eugene’s grandson, Ken Morris, will represent his grandfather and a number of other Australian soldiers at a ceremony in Bapaume, France.A traffic control party from the 13th Light Horse regiment was sleeping in the Bapaume Town Hall cellar on March 26, 1917, when a booby-trap bomb left by the retreating Germans exploded.

• Click here to see archival footage of the 1917 Bapaume bombing

More than 20 men were killed. Fellow soldiers worked through the night to dig the few survivors from the rubble. Among them was Eugene.Seriously injured, he was repatriated to Australia.The first and only time he spoke of the bombing, at least to his children, was when Ken’s mother found a small piece of leather, stamped E.V. Finster. The leather legging had been found after the war beside an unknown soldier who had been killed in the town hall.“Mum asked him about that as a teenager and that’s the only time he ever spoke about it to her,” Ken said.“The story goes they were chasing him right through the ‘20s trying to track down who the officer was.“He didn’t know who the dead Australian officer was, he was someone who’d only come along hours before the bombing.“He asked for the piece of leather back. He had it in his possession for all those years and now it’s in the Australian War Memorial.”Eugene may have been reluctant to talk, but the Bendigo Advertiser did a wonderful job of recording his words when the paper published a feature story with him on August 10, 1915, after he’d been injured in Gallipoli and sent back home.“How was I wounded? I was fixing up a wounded man, and he died with his head on my knee,” Eugene said.“I had just laid him down, and a Turk, who was 40 yards from us, fired, and a bullet struck me in the arm and just under the armpit.”The Bendigo Advertiser has republished that harrowing, firsthand account of one man’s Gallipoli experience. See related articles to the right of the screen.

From Bendigo to Bapaume

Ken Morris was 10 when his grandfather died. He remembers him as an old man. But a love of history and thirst for family stories has brought him closer to knowing his grandfather in his prime. Eugene was a second-generation Bendigo resident of Prussian descent. His grandfather, Arthur Guido Finster, was a musician and professor who arrived on the goldfields from Prussia in 1849.Interestingly, a statue beside the Bapaume Town Hall which was damaged in the bomb blast honours General Louis Faidherbe, who won several victories against the invading Prussian army in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.Perhaps another example of the futility of it all. “I read a lot about war and the thing that irritates me is we don’t learn from it,” Ken said.Eugene must have inherited his grandfather’s adventurous streak. He enlisted in the army six times, first with the 2nd Field Ambulance in Gallipoli, later with the 13th Light Horse.Researching Eugene’s experiences online, Ken stumbled across an American man whose descendant had been in the unit which left the bomb in the Bapaume Town Hall.According to the book, My Corps Cavalry by Doug Hunter, “The delayed explosion was achieved by using a trigger-device involving a steel rod in a container of acid. The acid took several days to eat through the steel and thus detonate the bomb, by which time the advancing army had occupied the building.” Next week, life will be breathed back into names which lay dormant for many decades after that explosion.Ken will read the names of the Australians involved at a special commemoration ceremony.“Two French politicians were also killed and they were commended right from the start,” he said.“Next week will be the first time the Australian soldiers are recognised.”Ken was feeling quietly honoured at being asked to perform the job at hand.“I’m just following something pretty important. I’m just doing a job,” he said.“I’m probably more humbled than anything else.”- Do you have information to add to this story, either on Private Finster or any other Bendigo WWI soldier?

• Email laurenm@bendigoadvertiser.com.au