Pozieres

by Scott Bennett

  The platoons passed through the British old reserve and support lines and what had been no-man’s-land three weeks earlier. Upon reaching La Boisselle, a small village that straddled the Bapaume road, the tired troops threw down their haversacks and rested. The fortified village — now just a patch of rubble and pulverised brick strewn with corpses — had formed part of the Germans’ original front line.

  Perhaps the Australians, after seeing La Boisselle’s mangled corpses, realised the terrible destruction that a battle could deliver. French liaison officer Paul Maze, who was working with the Australians at Gough’s request, recorded in his autobiography the macabre scene that La Boisselle presented: the hot sun had blackened and grilled the bodies of dead German and British soldiers, and human refuse was intermingled with rusty barbed wire. In the village’s cemetery, headstones had been uprooted, coffins shattered, and cypress trees splintered. A headless statue of Christ completed the scene.18 Foxcroft’s notes reflected this state of destruction: ‘Place in an awful state, gear, rifle, pieces of dead, rubbish all over the place,’ he wrote.19

  Iven Mackay was similarly affected, recording in his diary that there was barely a square foot of soil that had not been torn about by high explosives.20 The destruction the soldiers witnessed at La Boisselle would become only too familiar in the coming weeks.

  Later, rested and fed, some of the platoons marched from La Boisselle to the Chalk Pit. Just under a mile from Pozières, the Chalk Pit was a gateway between purgatory and hell; beyond it was the beginning of the front line. Its deep, chalky banks afforded some protection from shelling, but past them one’s life was perpetually in danger. Many men later recorded their relief upon returning to the Chalk Pit, or their anxiety upon leaving it again for the front line. It acted as a dump for ammunition, a medical-aid post, and the most forward point for the field kitchens.

  On the night of 20 July, carrying parties ferried ammunition and supplies up to the front line. The constant shelling lit up the sky, making it possible to read newspapers and write letters. John Harris tried to settle his men, who sheltered in narrow ‘possies’ — little more than cavities gouged out of the trench walls. ‘The frequent explosions and the impossibility of lying down properly, made sleep at night almost out of the question,’ he recorded in his war memoirs.21 For many soldiers, it would be the second night without sleep, but certainly not the last.

  Since 13 July, Hooky’s chief-of-staff, Thomas Blamey, had been circulating general staff memoranda and divisional orders, as well as conducting divisional conferences concerning the looming battle.22 (These memoranda and orders, which are archived at the Australian War Memorial, demonstrate that he was a careful and methodical planner who left little to chance.) Gough’s delay provided Blamey the critical time he needed to distribute these documents and organise the necessary conferences to discuss them prior to the attack.

  On Friday 21 July, divisional, brigade, and battalion officers conferred to discuss the fine detail of Blamey’s battle plan. Second-Lieutenant Walter Claridge, a wool classer, attended one of these conferences. He furiously scribbled down page after page of instructions about lighting red flares as each objective was captured; the importance of those reinforcing rolling up their sleeves for easy identification; the need for all men to carry an extra 100 rounds of small-arms ammunition, two bombs, and two sandbags; and the necessity for at least four men to be posted at the entrance to every communication trench leading toward the enemy.23 Iven Mackay attended a divisional conference the same day and wrote 12 pages of notes, covering every possible contingency. ‘Battalion commanders were issued with so many maps that their bulging pockets had no room for anything else,’ recorded John Harris.24

  By midnight on 23 July, the commanding officers would have the first wave of troops in the jumping-off trenches, dug roughly 150 yards from the Germans; the second wave in the front trench; and the remaining waves staggered evenly further back.

  Gough’s postponement also provided Sinclair-MacLagan with the opportunity to capture the important German-held junction on the crest of the ridge, where Pozières Trench intersected with the OG lines. The British, who held the southern portion of the OG lines, had previously reached within 50 yards of the stronghold, but heavy machine-gun fire had pushed them back. Sinclair-MacLagan’s 9th Battalion would attack the junction in the early hours of Saturday 22 July. The plan was for trench mortars to bombard the strongpoint thoroughly until 2.30 a.m. on Saturday morning, followed by a light barrage of 18-pounder shells to prevent the Germans from manning their machine guns. Two groups of about 50 men, under lieutenants Charles Monteath and Frederick Biggs, would then attack it.25

  Sergeant Philip Browne, a blond, beanstalk-thin geology student from Queensland, was among those who would participate in the night attack. Days earlier, the 20-year-old had written a letter home, predicting that his ‘lot’ would soon see some of the fighting. He finished by writing: ‘Please god we will come through safe.’26

  By Friday evening, Monteath and Biggs’ troops had positioned themselves in forward posts in OG1 and OG2. Darkness gradually replaced sunshine, and then zero hour approached. Platoons readied themselves. In the minutes before they were to advance, Monteath and Biggs listened for the mortar shells, but they heard nothing. Unbeknown to them, the mortars had expended their pitiful 14 rounds by 2.10 a.m. — for the last 20 minutes before the 9th was to advance, there was no bombardment.

  Just after 2.30 a.m., the troops advanced toward the stronghold. The dim light thrown out by the rising moon only helped the Germans to see them. They hurled egg bombs — about the size of cricket balls and much lighter than their British equivalent, Mills bombs — at the Australian attackers. Machine guns joined in; the rattled troops bunched together and fell in heaps.

  Browne, in support, watched the debacle unfold. He handed over his platoon to his corporal and rushed forward, from shell hole to shell hole, delivering a load of bombs to the stranded men. He also volunteered to carry some of the wounded back. Then, as he climbed from a low trench, he crumpled in a heap. No one knew exactly what had happened, whether small-arms fire, a whiz-bang, or shell fragments had hit him. They did agree — as each witness recorded in their statement to the Red Cross, who investigated soldiers reported as missing and wounded — that he died instantly.

  The raid was aborted. The critical strongpoint remained in German hands, meaning that deadly crossfire from the German positions on the crest of the ridge, where the OG lines intersected with Pozières Trench, could compromise the attack planned for the following night.

  The next morning, some soldiers crawled out into no-man’s-land and dragged Browne’s stiffened body into a shallow shell hole. According to their Red Cross statements, they covered it with a few shovelfuls of dirt and placed a rough wooden cross at the head of the makeshift grave. In the confusion of the weeks that followed, its location would be forgotten. Browne’s body was never recovered; he was one of the first Australians among the Somme’s many missing.27

  Some time later, 21-year-old Sergeant Freddie Barbour would sit down in a quiet place and write a letter to Browne’s parents, James and Jessie. The boys had studied together at Toowoomba Grammar School, the school of choice for the well-to-do graziers and farmers of the Darling Downs district. Both were outstanding students, winning university scholarships, but the Great War had lured them away. By the time they were at Pozières, these smart, energetic young men had been promoted to sergeants.

  Barbour would try to explain the circumstances of his mate’s death as best he could and to offer some condolence. ‘Deeply as we all regretted his death,’ he would write, ‘there is not one of us but envies him so glorious a death in his country’s service, and I cannot say how proud I am to have been his friend. May we all do our duty as well and honourably.’28 The idealistic tone of Barbour’s letter varies remarkably little from the thousands of other letters sent by soldiers and officers
to grieved parents.

  Six months later, Barbour would die from wounds. Army protocol at the time dictated that his commanding officer send a letter of condolence to his parents. While there is no record of it, undoubtedly it would have been written in a similar style.

  The only lingering reminder of Freddie and Philip is the inscription of their names on the bronzed honour boards at Toowoomba Grammar School. What the boards will never tell us is the snuffed-out potential of these young men. They don’t reveal the long and painful odyssey that Browne’s parents undertook to locate their son’s remains, writing heartfelt letters to the Base Records Office well into the 1920s, or the sense of complicity that they must have felt for having signed his consent forms.29 What James and Jessie would have found difficult to comprehend, along with thousands of other parents who would lose children in the coming months, was how their beloved could simply vanish from the Somme.

  chapter three

  Fromelles

  ‘O dauntless heart of youth!

  Against grim bastions hurled

  Your name shall keep the house we build

  Secure against the world.’

  — Vance Palmer, ‘The Signal’

  While the Australians completed their preparations for the 23 July attack, Haig most likely contemplated their chances. He must have realised that the inexperienced Australians, teamed with the talented but impetuous Gough — who had been promoted to army commander only three weeks earlier — was a volatile combination.

  Haig rarely interfered with his generals’ plans. He set the broad strategy and left the finer detail for them to work through. However, on 20 July he had departed from his modus operandi — he had visited Gough’s headquarters in the small farming hamlet of Toutencourt to discuss the coming attack. He warned Gough that he had to go over all detail carefully, as the 1st Australian Division had not been engaged in France before and had possibly overlooked some of the preparations needed for this type of combat.

  On 22 July, Haig visited Gough again to make sure that the Australians were given a simple task, reminding him that this was the first time they would take part in a serious, large-scale offensive against the German forces. The trouble was that there were no simple tasks on the Somme to give to the Australians.

  Why was Haig so persistent in voicing his concerns about the Australians to Gough? On 20 July, he had received news that the 5th Australian Division — attached to the First British Army — had attacked near the village of Fromelles the previous evening, as Hooky’s 1st Australian Division was marching through Albert toward the firing line. First Army reports indicated that the attack was ‘only partially successful’, a euphemism that would have worried Haig.1 What did the puzzling term ‘only partially successful’ mean? What was the purpose of the 5th Division’s attack and what impact would it have upon the I Anzac Corps’ planned operations at Pozières?

  In the early days of the Somme offensive, Haig had hoped that his armies would break through the German lines. His intention, upon breaching their line at one weak point, was to strike hard at other points where there were few reserves, and ultimately turn a local retreat into a withdrawal. Accordingly, on 5 July he had ordered the British armies along the Western Front to select points at which they would attempt to rupture the German line. XI Corps commander Lieutenant-General Sir Richard Haking suggested that, in his sector, a prominent German salient near Fromelles, the ‘Sugarloaf’, offered a favourable chance of capture.

  Already, only two weeks into the Somme offensive, any thought of an easy breakthrough had vanished, but the attack that Haking had proposed weeks earlier was still being considered. It was planned as a feint to make the Germans think that they were being threatened so they might stop transferring troops to the Somme.

  Haig was lukewarm about the idea, believing it should only continue if its architect, Haking, was absolutely assured that the artillery and ammunition in the north were sufficient to cover the attack. Haking’s superior, First British Army commander General Sir Charles Munro, also had concerns. He sought assurances from Haking that he could fulfil Haig’s requirements. Haking believed that he could.

  Haking decided that the 5th Australian Division — which had recently relieved the 4th Division when it transferred to the Somme — would lead the attack, along with the British 61st Division. According to Ross McMullin’s account of the Fromelles battle in the biography Pompey Elliott, the proposition of the pending attack excited the 5th Division commander, Major-General James ‘Big Jim’ McCay. Although his division had been the last to land in France, he hoped it would be the first to make a name for itself in battle. His subordinate, Brigadier-General Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliott — who commanded the all-Victorian 15th Brigade, one of three Australian brigades participating in the feint — apparently didn’t share his commander’s enthusiasm, later claiming that he would have protested about having to attack such a position. ‘Not that it would have done much good,’ he wrote in a letter afterward. ‘McCay was terribly anxious that it shouldn’t be stopped and made no mention of the difficulties facing us.’2

  Those ‘difficulties’ included the need to rush the registration of the heavy guns, insufficient artillery to subdue machine-gun emplacements and blockhouses, lack of communication trenches for troops to get to the front line, the requirement for troops to cover up to 400 yards of exposed and cratered ground, and the overambitious objective of capturing three lines of trenches.3 In addition, the 5th Division had been in the front-line trenches only a week and had little combat experience.

  In the days before the planned feint, dark rainclouds replaced the sunshine. Then the weather broke; sheets of rain lashed Fromelles, filling the trenches with mud and bogging down the troops. Haking postponed the attack, and his superior, General Munro, had the option of cancelling altogether. But Haig, now sold on the idea, wished for the operation to be carried out as soon as possible, weather permitting, and provided that Munro was satisfied that the available artillery and ammunition were ‘adequate both for the preparation and the execution of the enterprise’.4

  On 19 July, at about 6.00 p.m., the 5th Division troops — laden with haversacks, picks, shovels, bags of bombs, and other equipment, each soldier’s kit weighing about 70 pounds — began their deadly journey across no-man’s-land. Many were fatalistic. The Germans had already hoisted a noticeboard that taunted them, ‘Advance Australia — if you can!’5

  As the troops began to advance over the flat sweep of meadow, Germans shells fell heavily among them — unbeknown to the Australians, the German artillery observers stationed a mile back in the trees and roofs along Aubers Ridge and atop the Fromelles church tower could easily make out the commencement of the attack. ‘The enemy bombardment was hellish, and it seemed as if they knew accurately the time set [for the attack],’ recorded Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Toll, 31st Battalion.6

  The whole front erupted in noise. Whining shells, shouting men, stuttering machine guns, and the deafening crash of bombs all combined to create a terrific din. ‘You could see machine guns knocking bits off the trees in front of the reserve line and sparking off the wire,’ remembered one soldier.7

  Elliott noticed at about 6.15 p.m. that the sound of the Germans’ heavy artillery and musketry had died away. He assessed this as a positive sign. At 6.30 p.m. he reported that the attack had succeeded.8

  His mood must have plummeted when the first detailed situation report, handwritten and with ‘urgent’ scrawled upon it, arrived just after midnight at his headquarters, a few hundred yards behind the front line. It stated that the attack had failed completely, with those reaching the enemy’s trench killed or captured: ‘Very many officers are casualties … it seems impossible to reorganise … Reports seem to be unanimous.’9 Apparently, the German fire at 6.15 p.m. ‘had only ceased because the attack had been shot to earth’.10

  The inexperienced and demoralised Australian
s, according to one observer, retired in what appeared to be a panic, ‘like a crowd running across a field at the end of a football match’; the retreat resembled a shambles. 11

  On the morning of 20 July, Charles Bean overheard that ‘the 5th had their little show last night’. He commandeered White’s car and sped north to see what had happened, arriving at 5th Division headquarters just after 1.00 p.m. to be told: ‘It’s all over, you know. We’re back in our own trenches.’12

  Bean then visited, at their respective headquarters, the three Australian brigade commanders who had been involved in the attack. He wrote that the 8th Brigade commander, Brigadier-General Edwin Tivey, ‘looked quite overdone, his eyes like boiled gooseberries’, after two nights without sleep. Tivey was anxious to reassure himself that his brigade had tried hard and done as well as those brigades on Gallipoli: ‘1700 — that’s about as heavy as some of the brigades lost on the [Gallipoli] Landing, isn’t it?’ he queried Bean. When Bean visited Elliott, he described feeling almost as if he was in the presence of a man who had just lost his wife: ‘[Elliott] looked down and could hardly speak — he was clearly terribly depressed and overwrought.’ Brigadier-General Harold Pope, 14th Brigade, ‘rather disgusted’ Bean by ‘the boastful way he talked’: ‘Well — we were the only brigade that didn’t come back till we were told to,’ Pope crowed. Bean suspected that Pope had been ‘refreshing’ himself after the strain of the attack. Indeed, later that afternoon Major-General McCay found Pope in a drunken stupor, unable to comprehend an order or perform any part of his duties. He immediately called for his discharge and return to Australia.13 Pope had unravelled after one day of battle.