PRIVATE CHARLES FREDERICK HODGES
26TH BTTN AUSTRALIAN INFANTRY
14TH NOVEMBER 1916 AGE 23
BURIED: WARLENCOURT BRITISH CEMETERY, FRANCE
It was nine months before Charles Hodges' parents discovered his fate, nine months in which the
Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau had tried to find witnesses who had seen what had happened to him. Eventually they tracked down Corporal L O'Neill who told them definitively:
"On 14th November at 5 am we were attacking; we failed in our objective and retired to our front line which we held. I saw Hodges after we had got back to our lines about 9 am go outside our trench; there were wounded men inside the trench and he had to go outside to get passed them. A sniper hit him in the head and he died about two minutes after. I was right alongside of him."
Mr and Mrs Hodges therefore did eventually find out what had happened to this son, but they never found out about his elder brother, Albert Henry. He went missing in Gallipoli on 22 August 1915 in the unsuccessful Australian assault on Hill 60. His body was never found and curiously there is no record of his parents instituting a Red Cross search for him. Albert Hodges is commemorated on the Lone Pine memorial in Gallipoli and on his brother's grave in France.