Pozieres

by Scott Bennett

  Hundreds of troops on the slopes to the rear of Albert watched the spectacular bombardment, which was visible for nearly twenty miles around. The Official History described the skyline as alive with light: ‘Flashes like summer lightning were quite continuous, making one flickering band of light.’ Bean recorded in Letters from France that it was ‘the most fearful bombardment’ he had ever seen.16 Paul Maze remembered hundreds of shells shrieking overhead and bursting; he described ‘tongues of flame … rising, glaring on lines of waiting men memorised by this unprecedented burst of sound’.17

  The Germans retaliated with artillery and machine-gun fire. ‘As we lay out among the poppies in No-Man’s Land we could see the bullets cutting off the poppies almost against our heads,’ recounted Sergeant Harry Preston, 9th Battalion, in the returned soldiers’ magazine Reveille. ‘A man beside me was crying like a baby, and although I tried to reassure him he kept on saying that we would never get out of it.’18

  At exactly 12.30 a.m., the Australian artillery falling on Pozières Trench lifted to the second line. Foxcroft barely heard the order: ‘12.30 a.m. Fix bayonets and over you go lads.’ He could not hear the guns for excitement. ‘Sky one blaze from fire from guns. I had [my] helmet dented by shrapnel just as I jumped into No Man’s Land,’ he wrote in his diary.19 Maze heard the clash of steel as men around him fixed their bayonets, and Harry Preston saw men scrambling to their feet. ‘Taking this to be the signal for the charge I jumped up and dashed across,’ he recalled.20

  Troops stumbled forward over the rough ground, illuminated by rockets and star shells. Maze remembered bullets hissing past them. A man in front of him tottered and fell. ‘I could hardly control my legs as I leapt to avoid his body. The ground seemed to quake under me. Everything appeared to be moving along with me, figures were propping up and down on either side over the convulsing ground,’ he wrote. 21

  As Foxcroft advanced, a shell exploded close to his platoon commander, William Clemenger, partially burying him. The rest of the platoon continued on. ‘Lieutenant Clemenger funked it and pretended to be gassed,’ noted Foxcroft, somewhat harshly.22 In fact, Clemenger was evacuated in a state of shock. As evidence of the bombardment’s intensity, a week later, when he was examined at the 4th London General Hospital, Clemenger was still suffering from poor memory, insomnia, bad dreams, and slight tremors.23 Many Australians would experience similarly debilitating symptoms over the next few days.

  Almost 2000 troops advanced in dense formation — about one man to every yard — across a one-mile front, toward the German trenches.24 They didn’t march or slope arms as they had practised in parade-yard drills; it was simply a case of getting there as best they could. The sporadic machine-gun fire did not slow them.

  ‘Our artillery prevented the Huns from coming out of their burrows,’ wrote Foxcroft in his diary. ‘Met a few Huns in shell holes on the way over demoralised by the intensity of our bombardment, and settled them.’25

  Through the glare of German star shells and flares, Private Peter Smith of the 4th Battalion could see ghostly figures moving amid the smoke of battle. ‘Every now and then a shell landed, and created more casualties,’ he remembered.26

  Elsewhere, Horton glimpsed his first German: he had his rifle to his shoulder, a finger crooked on the trigger, standing in a trench but without making the slightest movement. Horton realised that a bursting shell had killed him, leaving him standing as he had been.27

  Iven Mackay described how surviving Germans emerged from their dugouts like drunken men, mumbling in a half-dazed way, ‘Mercy, Kamerad.’28 They were captured, bayoneted, or shot dead. Private Herbert Mobbs, from Murray Bridge, South Australia, had expected hand-to-hand fighting with the Germans, but said, ‘All we could see was their arms and legs sticking out of the ground where they had been buried by our shells.’ He recalled finding some dugouts and how he and the others he was with shouted to the soldiers within to come out: ‘They started yelling “Mercy Kamerade” and stayed there so we threw bombs down to them.’29

  Maze continued to advance with the Australians. At one point, he paused to scan the chaotic battlefield. He remembered seeing wounded men scattered everywhere, some crying in pain, others tearing open and applying their field dressings, and more screaming for stretcher-bearers.30

  As the battle raged, Charles Bean sat quietly in Sinclair-MacLagan’s crowded dugout, where he observed proceedings and occasionally took longhand notes of important conversations and orders. Hours earlier, he had set out alone from Fricourt in search of Sinclair-MacLagan’s headquarters. After leaving the village at about 9.00 p.m., Bean had become disorientated by the onset of darkness and the heavy and prolonged bombardment. He described in his diary how he was forced to fit his gas helmet quickly when some gas shells ‘plopped’ close by, and how he couldn’t breathe properly inside the helmet, which made him feel sick. However, with the help of some British signallers who kindly acted as guides for the last part of his journey, Bean located the thick beams of Sinclair-MacLagan’s dugout entrance at about 12.15 a.m. He recorded how he ripped off his helmet and then half-fell down the dark stairway and over some tired runners into the lower-chamber headquarters, his ‘awful series of adventures with gas shells and shrapnel’ finally over. From his quiet corner in the dugout, Bean recorded that gas, with its aromatic smell, wafted through the headquarters. Sinclair-MacLagan’s officers, seated around a candlelit table, worked with their gas helmets on. Outside, explosions — about three-and-a-half to the second — erupted continuously.

  ‘They ought to be in by now,’ speculated Sinclair-MacLagan, whose wire communication to the assaulting battalions had already been severed by shelling. As a result, he had only a vague grasp of how the battle was unfolding, and was almost solely reliant on the snippets of information his runners delivered to him. Gas, shelling, and severed communication wires weren’t the only difficulties Sinclair-MacLagan faced: his officers and orderlies were exhausted but they had to be kept awake at all costs to monitor the battle’s progress, draft orders, and scrutinise incoming messages from battalions and divisional headquarters. ‘Don’t let him sleep,’ Bean overheard some whispering. ‘Kick him, don’t let him sleep.’ 31

  Unbeknown to Sinclair-MacLagan, the first line of troops had captured Pozières Trench. ‘We immediately set to work to improve our position,’ said Preston. ‘The dead bodies which had to be thrown out were used in building up the parapet.’32 The first attacking line had to stay put at Pozières Trench while the second line leapfrogged through them onto the second objective, the shallow trench near the orchard. According to the Official History, an officer commanding the second line kept shouting ‘keep on moving’; some men of the first line abandoned their position and followed him. On reaching the orchard, the troops threw their bombs into the dugouts and chalked the battalion’s name on an abandoned 5.9-inch howitzer before moving on.33 No one could accurately distinguish the British barrage from the German counter-bombardment; it was simply one illumination of bursting shells and flares all round. Some soldiers advanced into their own barrage, which blew them to bits. About 140 men of the 11th and 12th battalions made it through the barrage and chased the fleeing Germans as far as the windmill on the crest of the Pozières ridge. Sergeant Wally Graham of the 11th Battalion remembered thinking: ‘Christ! The road’s open to Berlin!’34 However, officers persuaded the isolated men to return to their own lines. Only about 90 made it back through the barrage.

  Resistance from the critical OG lines intensified. Officers despatched additional troops to help out. Preston’s party bombed their way into the trench and barricaded their gains. The Germans, in an attempt to trick the Australians, put helmets and caps on their rifles and walked along the trench with them held above the parapet. ‘When our men put their heads up and attempted to shoot them, they were shot by other Germans further along the trench,’ recalled Preston.35

  The Bapaume road was the th
ird and most distant objective. About 2000 troops of the third attacking line were supposed to start their advance from the Chalk Pit at 1.00 a.m., but the three waves within the attacking line became entangled in the darkness. In some places, those carrying shovels led the attack; in others, the scouts lagged behind. The troops passed through Pozières Trench, which ‘was dotted with little groups of men, some cheering wildly, some singing, some groaning’, recorded the Official History.36

  The Germans’ intense shelling killed many officers of the third attacking line. Leaderless groups became confused. Some soldiers forgot the instruction to advance in the correct formation; others advanced obliquely across the battlefield. Harris tried to coerce the men to straighten up, but quickly found himself deserted by all except his batman. Harris continued forward, eventually stumbling across what he described as a ‘confused mass of men’ belonging to different battalions. 37

  Despite the chaos, Maze struggled on. Near the outskirts of the village, he came across the remains of a blown-up railway track. ‘It flashed through my mind that General Gough had asked me to look out for a light railway. This was it,’ he recorded.38 Most soldiers of the third line regrouped at the railway track, which was a designated rallying point, and started out again, feeling their way through the shell holes, splintered trees, building rubble, and tumbled framework of cottages. ‘Lashed by sprays of dust and broken brick, we stumbled over stones and shell holes,’ noted Maze, who was almost certainly advancing with the third line of troops. They reached the Bapaume road. ‘We ran into a hail of bullets as we struck some cobble stone, which must have been the main road,’ he remembered. ‘The men staggered across it, all lit up by the sudden glare of Verey lights.’

  With their three objectives captured, the Anzacs dug a new trench line with the few shovels they had, hoping to consolidate their position before daylight. By 2.30 a.m. the troops had successfully dug a trench running the length of the village, parallel to the Bapaume road, only bending back as it approached the uncaptured portion of the OG lines 600 yards in the distance.

  ‘From rifle flashes coming from the rising ground it seemed that the right [flank of the attack] hadn’t progressed far into the village,’ Maze speculated. He was right: the 9th and 10th battalions, responsible for capturing the OG lines, ended up about 600 yards short of their objective, leaving a dangerous gap in the defences.

  Hooky Walker responded quickly upon hearing the news: ‘The position on its [3rd Brigade] right flank became somewhat critical and I moved up the 7th Battalion from the reserve brigade to Black Watch Alley at 4.30 a.m.,’ he noted in the divisional diary.39

  The three German battalion commanders defending Pozières were in their dugouts when the fighting started and knew nothing of the battle’s progress. Finally, one runner got through at 3.40 a.m., reporting the critical situation of troops closing in on its forward headquarters. The German commanders called for reserves. Heavy British machine-gun fire and shelling repulsed the troops despatched from Courcelette to counterattack. 40

  The advancing Anzacs left in their wake a battlefield littered with dead and wounded. Nothing could be done for the dead, but ‘the wounded were collected and carried back to the dressing stations,’ recalled Captain Geoffrey Drake-Brockman. ‘It was horrible to watch the shells bursting among them where they lay in long lines awaiting removal to clearing stations and hospitals.’41

  However, being evacuated from Pozières did not guarantee safety. Private Frank Shoobridge, a stretcher-bearer who hailed from Tasmania, described in his diary how the wounded started coming in faster than the medical orderlies could get them safely into dugouts. ‘Being full we had to put them out in the open where many of them got wounded again after we had dressed them,’ he recorded.42 The regimental stretcher-bearers couldn’t cope with the immense workload. Hooky later admitted in his report on operations that the number of stretcher-bearers in the division was quite inadequate for the large number of casualties sustained. Subsequently, a great many were borrowed from other ambulances.43

  Due to the shortage, many of those with light wounds tried to make their own way back to the aid posts. ‘It is awful to see crippled men staggering back with the help of a shovel, stick or anything,’ wrote Lance-Corporal Roger Morgan of the 1st Field Ambulance, ‘just crawling along until at last they either reach help or fall exhausted on the road.’44 Private Peter Snodgrass, a 31-year-old shearer from Western Australia, recollected one particular man with a bandaged ankle, two bandaged knees, a gunshot wound to the shoulder, and his shattered and badly bleeding arm in a sling, refusing to be stretchered out because there were many more urgent cases than him.45

  ‘The scene is terrible,’ wrote Morgan of dead and dying men lying on top of the other. ‘Many of them were blown to pieces where they lay on the ground.’46 Morgan recorded that one of the dying soldiers kept repeating to the orderlies: ‘Stop the bleeding boys and I’ll get back to the Mrs. and Kids’.47

  Drake-Brockman remembered the excruciating wait for bearers while he sheltered in a shell hole with Major Leslie Mather, who had been shot through the neck. Mather became more and more yellow as time passed. ‘He vomited all over my tunic. I wiped off the vomit with a stick. I watched, waited and wondered: would they ever return with a stretcher?’ Drake-Brockman wrote.48 He didn’t realise the shocking conditions the bearers were working under — they had to traverse shell craters and work their way through clogged communication trenches to reach the aid stations, sometimes arriving exhausted or wounded. Many simply failed to return.

  A tired Frank Shoobridge was within 100 yards of an aid post on his fifth trip when shrapnel burst overhead. ‘Stredwick, who was carrying in front, was hit through the thigh and head and I got a bit in the knee and splinters in the face,’ he explained in his diary. Another man tried to find fresh stretcher-bearers, but the patient died before he reached the dressing station. Shoobridge carried Stredwick, who was bleeding profusely and almost unconscious, back to an aid post. ‘He went down on a stretcher and that was the last I ever saw of him.’49 Sydney Stredwick, a chemist from Kyneton, died from his wounds two days later.50

  Many of the wounded had to be attended to outside aid posts, under the German counter-barrage. Some aid posts in captured dugouts had their entrances facing the incoming German shells. On returning to the 11th Battalion’s aid post early in the morning, Albert Coates discovered that a shell had killed all the wounded. ‘What a sight. Mangled remains on the stretchers,’ he remembered.51

  Despite the casualties — which, by the Somme’s standards, were relatively light — the 1st Division’s attack was a resounding success. The British bombardment had completely destroyed the village, and the troops had captured their three objectives.

  Yet not everything had gone to plan. Sinclair-MacLagan’s 9th and 10th battalions hadn’t captured the 600-yard stretch of the OG lines, leaving a dangerous gap that a German battalion could advance through undetected. The shelling had destroyed thousands of yards of carefully laid telephone wire, forcing Smyth and Sinclair-MacLagan to rely on runners to get their messages through. Also, on the other side of the Bapaume road, the 48th British Division, which had been swept with intense machine-gun fire, had only captured a small section of their intended objective — the communication trenches leading to the village. This meant that the Australian and British troops were separated by pockets of Germans, who continued to fight stubbornly.52 Follow-up attacks would be required to dislodge them.

  Hooky had to secure his gains quickly; the Germans would soon retaliate with their own bombardment and counterattack. He also had to plan for the capture of northern Pozières and the OG lines. Correspondent John Masefield best described the pending challenge: ‘The tactical aim of the Australians was to drive the enemy off the high land. The tactical aim of the enemy was to shell the Australians off it.’53 Capturing southern Pozières was only the first phase in what would be a long and exhaust
ing battle for the Australians. In the coming days, Hubert Gough would harangue I Anzac Corps to capture northern Pozières and the Pozières ridge, and then swing around to the west and strike toward the formidable Mouquet Farm.

  chapter six

  Consolidation

  ‘The most dangerous moment comes with victory.’

  — Napoleon Bonaparte

  Despite the intense fighting of the previous few hours and the absolute exhaustion of many soldiers, the Australians had to set about consolidating their trenches before the German counterattack they feared was coming. As the first light of dawn came over the ridge at about 4.00 a.m., Paul Maze observed that the Australians were much further into the village than he had first thought. ‘In front of us earth was being rapidly shovelled out of a trench, and we could see the heads of a few men busily consolidating the position,’ he recorded.1

  Elsewhere, Vickers and Lewis gun crews rushed forward, engineers and pioneers dug support and communication trenches, guards escorted prisoners out of the village to holding cages, officers sorted stragglers and lost men back into their correct platoons, and reinforcements came forward from the brickworks, located near Albert, to replace those killed or wounded.2

  Just after daybreak, a British spotter aeroplane swooped low over the village. The pilot sounded his klaxon horn in sharp bursts, signalling to those below to light their green flares to show him where the new front line was. But the pilot couldn’t see any flares because the mist and smoke were too heavy; the location of the front line was unclear.3 As a result, wrote Arthur Foxcroft, ‘our artillery didn’t know how to “range” their guns so we got some of our own shells as well as Fritz’s’.4