This is a story of two soldiers, not one, Frederick Johnson and his brother Ralph. They were the children of Hubert Thomas Coster Johnson and his wife, Alice Maud Mary Ivey. A third child, Alice, born 1893, died at the age of eight. The eldest child, Constance, born 1891, died in 1972. Frederick Johnson was born in 1897 and his younger brother, Ralph, in 1898. Both grew up in Brighton and had Cadet Training at school. Ralph enlisted on 6 July, 1915, claiming he was eighteen, though in fact he was seventeen. He was followed a week later by Frederick, who enlisted on 13 July, 1915, aged eighteen ant two months. He may have done this surreptiously, because he gave his birthplace as being Jolimont, whereas his birth certificate says it was Healseville, Victoria. In fact, he ahd no known connection with East Melbourne. In Ralph's application he mentions his school, Brighton Grammar; on Frederick's, there is no school name. Was his birth date correct? He may have altered the actual date, but not the year. The strong impresssion is that he was following his younger brother and between them they coaxed his parents to sign a permission slip, though the usual age of enlistment was 21.

Ralph was placed in C Company, 31st Battalion and sailed for France, arriving at Marseille on 15 June, 1916. He died, killed in action at Fromelles on 21 July, 1916, one of 572 men from his battalion, and 5,500 Australian in the same battle. He was buried as a prisoner of war at Beauchamps Communal Cemetery in the German Extension. In the post-war period, in spite of a map provided by those German soldiers burying the dead, his grave could not be found. A document related to his burial says 'This Australian Soldier who died as a Prisoner of War in 1916 and is believed to have been buried at the time in Beauchamps Communal Cemetery .... whose grave is now lost'.

Frederick Johnson began training at Seymour, Victoria, from 23 July to 10 August, ten days after he had enlisted. From there he was sent to Bendigo and placed in the 6th Reinforcements, 21st Battalion. On 24 February, 1916, following the transfer of troops to Egypt, he was transferred to the 7th Battalion at Serapeum. On 25 March, he left Egypt from Alexandria, joining the British Expeditionary Force at Marseilles and then moving on to the battlefields of the Somme. 

Somewhere between the 23rd and 26th July, he was wounded, with a gunshot wound in his right  fore-arm at the battle of Pozieres, less than a week after Ralph was killed. On 26 July, he was admitted to the 6th General Hospital at Rouen. From there, he was taken on the hospital ship St Patrick to England and admitted to Graylingwell Hospital in Chichester. 

From hospital, Frederick Johnson was sent to convalesce, first at No 1 Command Deport Perham Downs, then to the No. 2 Command Depot, Weymouth, to await his return to Australia. He embarked on the H.T. Ulysses form Devonport, England, landing in Melbourne on 12 April, 1917. After that, he is impossible to track: in 1921, he may have been at 194 Timor St, Warrnambool, working at his old job as clerk or he may have been at Guildford, Fremantle, working as a clerk. His lack of a second name makes following him through the electoral rolls impossible. However, he was almost certainly the  Frederick Johnson who died at Heidelberg, where the Repatriation Hospital was, in 1979.