Collingwood by Daley Paul

Author:Daley, Paul
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2011-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

13

Twenty Rounds in Egypt

Percy Rowe may have won the girl, but he would go off to war alone. Six days after the 1915 VFL Grand Final, just as he and his best mate, Doc Seddon, were being readied to ship out to Egypt, Doc was suddenly transferred out of the 29th Battalion of the First Australian Imperial Force. While Doc’s move to the 5th Field Company Engineers was made official on 24 September, it would have been requested some weeks earlier—perhaps around the time of Percy and Louie’s wedding.

Doc, an experienced driver who also had some knowledge of vehicle maintenance and repair, certainly had skills that were in great demand by the engineering corps, whose job it was to build bridges and roads so that supplies could reach the troops, maintain trenches and bunkers, and also, if necessary, devise ways to destroy enemy structures. But while transfer protocols were usually rigid in the Australian armed forces during World War I, wherever possible mates were, like brothers, kept together for the good of morale. Doc’s relocation to the engineers would not have been forced upon him. It seems much more likely that he actively sought the transfer, despite having decided, just two and a half months earlier, that he would go to war with his mate.

Apart from the very brief period when Doc, again due to his skill as a driver, had been assigned to move the 29th Battalion from the flooded camp at Seymour to Broadmeadows, it was to be the first time that he and Percy, who had been inseparable since they had met in 1910, were truly apart.

Doc’s transfer would have come as a great blow to Percy, who had come to rely heavily on him during the years of their friendship. Together with the Collingwood Football Club, Doc had been the mainstay of Percy’s life in Melbourne. He had looked to his mate as he would to a brother, and Doc’s absence, especially in the face of such a great unknown as deployment to war, would have affected Percy acutely. But would Doc’s decision have come entirely as a shock to Percy? Probably not. Percy would have reflected—first, after his initial coupling with Louie, and certainly after she became pregnant and he married her—on how recent events would’ve affected his best friend. And he was canny enough to anticipate the answer, even if there had not been an outright argument between the two mates or an expression of anger and hurt on Doc’s part.

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