Nicholas Tetoll was born in Kostroma in Central Russia. He came to Australia via the Russian Far East in 1909. He worked on railway construction and as miner in Queensland.
Enlisting in the AIF in Rockhampton, he served as a sapper in the 1st Tunneling Company in the Western Front. In September 1917 he was wounded in the leg and evacuated to Australia.
After the war he lived in Central Queensland, working as a labourer and occasionally being fined by the police for excessive drinking.
Samuel Bloom, a Jewish man from the Plock area in Poland, first emigrated to England and in 1913 moved to Sydney, where he worked as a hairdresser and chiropodist.
After a month in the AIF he was discharged as unfit for military service. Shipping records of his arrival to Australia suggest that he was over fifty, being six years older than he claimed when enlisting in the AIF.
After the war he lived in Sydney and died in 1926; he was obviously lonely as his estate was managed by a public trustee.
Matti Harsila, a Finnish seaman from Lapua, came to Adelaide in September 1915 and enlisted in the AIF two weeks later.
He served with the 48th Battalion on the Western Front. He was wounded in August 1916, but remained on duty. In April 1917, at the Bullecourt advance, he was wounded in the left wrist and taken as a prisoner of war by the Germans. When he recovered, they used him at steel works near Essen.
After the war he was freed and visited his family in Finland, but in 1922 he returned to Australia, settling in North Queensland where he worked as a labourer and a cane cutter until in 1944 he was severely injured by an overturned cane truck. The last years he spent in Brisbane.
Russian Anzacs