As the sun rose, the exhausted men congratulated each other on their success. ‘We were surprised by how few casualties had been sustained,’ wrote Douglas Horton. ‘Satisfied with ourselves, we lay on the parados of the trench basking in the sun.’5
Another satisfied soldier pencilled a letter home. ‘Mum, I don’t think I will ever forget the fighting last night,’ he wrote. ‘Don’t ask me how we took Pozières. But, Mum, we did it. That’s all I know … and that’s all that matters.’6
Maze, after the heavy fighting of the previous night, welcomed the morning solitude. ‘Strangely enough, precarious as our position was, we felt protected,’ he recorded.7 The Official History attributed the morning lull — the artillery of both sides was almost silent — to the gunners being tired and the respective staff ‘as yet uncertain where their own or the opposing infantry were situated’.8 Australian soldiers felt safe enough to venture out into the open to gather up ammunition that lay scattered all over the ground; it was now desperately needed for the inevitable German counterattacks. The 3rd Battalion history compared the strange lull to the windless centre of a cyclone, with the front line taking on ‘almost the semblance of the peaceful Fleurbaix-Armentières “nursery”… ’.9
The quiet period provided some men the opportunity to snatch sleep for the first time in two or three days. The 3rd Battalion history observed that the silence allowed many Australians, fatigued by the strenuous digging and brutal fighting, to drop in their tracks and fall asleep.10 ‘Huddled up in strange and contorted attitudes in the trenches, or stretched out in shell holes in the rear,’ wrote John Harris, ‘they slept as soundly in all the discomfort and danger as if they had been in feather beds.’11
Suddenly, around daybreak, the peace was shattered by rifle shots from across the road. ‘As we were standing-to a sniper got busy and “pipped” a few of our men off,’ Peter Smith recalled.12 Some soldiers darted across the road and hunted for the snipers, while others, according to Bean, ‘ratted’ for Germans in dugouts and cellars, chasing, shooting, and bayoneting those who got away. After Foxcroft finished improving his new trench he joined the soldiers in ‘chasing huns and smoking them out of their cellars’.13
‘We lost a number of men to snipers that day,’ Lieutenant Elmer Laing wrote in a letter to his parents. ‘I wanted to take a party out and clear them but was not allowed to.’14
The outbreak of German sniping permanently ended the fleeting peacefulness experienced that morning at Pozières.
At about the same time Foxcroft was ‘ferreting’ Germans from their dugouts, Douglas Haig awoke at Val Vion Château to reports that the Australians had captured most of Pozières. It was the only success of the British ‘double-fisted’ attack that had been delivered by Haig’s Fourth and Reserve armies; as the Official History observed, ‘no inch of ground was gained’ on the whole front east of Pozières. Despite Haig having carefully planned the manner and timing of the attacks with his army commanders the previous days, it appeared that the Germans, strengthened by fresh reserves, had successfully repelled most of the assaults.15
The weight of expectation upon Haig during the Somme offensive must have been suffocating. The Allies, both on the field and off, looked to Haig to break the deadlock on the Western Front.16 Haig appeared to cope with the immense pressures imposed on him by the Allies, British politicians, and his enemies by maintaining the same routine, irrespective of the highs and lows of battle. Charteris closely observed Haig’s daily schedule. He documented in Field Marshal Earl Haig that his bedroom door opened punctually at 8.25 a.m. and he would go for a short walk. At precisely 8.30 a.m., he would come into the mess for breakfast. At 9.00 a.m., he would go into his study and work. Any matter brought to him was dealt with immediately. He seldom used the telephone, as he believed conversations on it were inaccurate and liable to distortion, no doubt favouring the candour of face-to-face meetings. He preferred that a staff member use the telephone on his behalf, reasoning that his staff were better placed to verify information provided by subordinates.
At 11.30 a.m., he would see his army commanders or department heads for their scheduled daily meetings. Haig’s personal staff noted these officers’ symptoms of anxiety as they waited to be ushered into his study for their rigidly timetabled interviews. Undoubtedly, Haig — with his direct questions, insistence that officers refrain from using notebooks, and reputation for ruthlessly removing incompetent officers — had the capacity to intimidate his army commanders and department heads. Although he occasionally berated an officer, most walked from his study with their nervousness replaced by marked signs of restored confidence. Haig never took notes and rarely had a paper on his desk.
At 1.00 p.m., he would have lunch. He would then motor out to the headquarters of an army, corps, or division. On the return trip, he would arrange for his horse to meet the car and ride with his escort to within three miles of his headquarters. From there, he would walk. He would then have a bath and do some physical exercise. Haig would work in his office until exactly 8.00 p.m., when he would have dinner, usually with a visiting guest, such as French commander General Joseph Joffre, King George V, British prime minister Herbert Asquith, secretary of state for war David Lloyd George (Kitchener’s death in 1916 had resulted in Lloyd George taking on the war ministry), newspaper proprietor Lord Alfred Northcliffe, or war correspondent John Masefield. After dinner, he would work until 10.45 p.m., and then retire to bed at 11.00 p.m. He rarely varied from this routine, except during major battles. Distinguished guests conformed to it. So many hours for work, exercise, and sleep; he focused his whole mind and life on the Somme offensive.
Haig’s immersion in the war meant that he dealt with people in a clinical and dispassionate manner. He was a composed rationalist who preferred to make decisions based on facts; opinions weighed little with him. Once he made a decision, the meeting ended. ‘Though completely courteous,’ remembered Charteris, he ‘was cold and formal. He appeared to treat those with him rather as a doctor would a patient.’17
Why was Haig, as Tim Travers observed in The Killing Ground, so obsessive about order and the need to rigidly adhere to the same schedule? Why did he deal with people so clinically? Perhaps he derived some comfort from maintaining the routine and keeping an emotional distance from the officers who reported to him. Perhaps it gave him a sense of control, a feeling that he was on top of things.18 After all, the four walls within his château were possibly the only things he controlled completely. The war had its own trajectory; no man could command it any more than a man could hope to direct an earthquake.
Despite the setbacks of 23 July, Haig seemed to draw some satisfaction from the Anzacs’ efforts. They had broken one of the two buttresses, Pozières and Thiepval, on the enemy’s northern flank of the battlefield. He wrote in his diary: ‘The capture of Pozières by the Australians will live in history.’19
While Haig pondered how the 23 July setback would reshape his Somme strategy, Australian prime minister William Morris ‘Billy’ Hughes was returning to Australia, sailing on the Euripides, after four exhilarating months in Britain.20 Welsh-born Hughes, judged by today’s standards, was a man of extreme opinions: he advocated the White Australia policy, compulsory military training, and racial purity, and he viewed war as a natural Darwinist phenomenon to re-establish the world order at the expense of weak and corrupt races. The Labor leader held contradictory views: he was a fervent Australian nationalist but, unlike many in his party, also had a passionate belief in the British Empire. John Charteris aptly summed Hughes up as a queer combination of socialist and imperialist.21
Hughes had visited Britain on the basis of an informal invitation, issued to all colonial prime ministers by the British government, to discuss the war effort. Once there, he immediately struck a chord with the public. Although 53-year-old Hughes was small, nearly deaf, and had a squeaky voice, his frail body housed a magnetic personality and a sharp min
d that could comprehend the most complex information and convert it into simple, emotive messages that the average person could understand.22 In a series of bellicose speeches, he questioned the British government’s lack of vigour in executing the war, and its lack of any discernible plan for winning it. ‘You cannot have a great nation when the basis is rotten,’ he lectured one audience in Cardiff, Wales. ‘You must face these facts. You cannot shut your eyes and say, like the pacifist, that we should have no war …’23 For all his preaching Hughes was right: Britain hadn’t yet established a war economy that could adequately supply the front line, as the munitions shortage of 1915 had demonstrated. Furthermore, no central body was responsible for coordinating the Allies’ war strategy, and Britain had no unified council devoted to managing its efforts.24 Hughes, unencumbered by party loyalties and with no fear of upsetting the current British prime minister, Herbert Asquith, let rip, saying whatever he liked. The more his message seemed to resonate with the British people, the more extreme his speeches became. The rewards of his ‘fiery crusade’ included several honorary doctorates, the regard of King George V, and the applause of the British press, who, according to his biographer, W. Farmer Whyte, declared: ‘An ounce of Hughes is worth a pound of Asquith.’ Bean described the visit ‘as a personal triumph for Mr Hughes’.25
Australia’s war contribution gave Hughes’s voice credibility — Australia had about 300,000 men in uniform by June 1916. As evidence of Hughes’s growing stature, he was invited to attend a British cabinet meeting on 9 March, and in June, due to popular insistence of the public and the press, the inter-Allied conference on economic issues, in Paris.26 Before the war, it would have been inconceivable that a dominion prime minister would be afforded such prominence.
The British admired Australia’s efforts on Gallipoli, and appreciated its growing role on the Western Front. Haig desperately needed its four divisions in France to wage the later part of his Somme offensive, and Hughes had promised even more troops.27 A shrewd political tactician like Hughes would likely have recognised that he had to convert his increasing popularity into political clout. Despite his visit to Britain being hailed as a triumph, Hughes must have realised that he only attended the British cabinet meeting as an observer rather than as a representative of Australia. At the inter-Allied conference he represented Britain, not Australia. Australia did not have the status of allies such as Japan, China, Belgium, and Portugal. No doubt, Hughes was still irked by Britain’s decision to deploy its Anzac troops on Gallipoli without prior consultation with the Australian government.
On 1 June 1916, Hughes had tried to exercise his clout when dining at Haig’s General Headquarters in France. He insisted that the Australian divisions should fight as an army rather than being scattered across different corps, and that this army should be placed under one commander, preferably Birdie, who would be responsible to the Australian government.28 Haig politely refused the request, writing to Hughes some time later: ‘I cannot form an Australian Army now, nor can I place all the Australian Forces in France under General Birdwood’s command.’29 Haig needed his forces to remain fluid; he didn’t want the whims of a colonial government to restrict him. An emboldened Hughes wasn’t deterred; he would persist with his agenda.
Battalion commanders, including 26-year-old Lieutenant-Colonel Owen Howell-Price of the 3rd Battalion and 34-year-old Lieutenant-Colonel Iven Mackay of the 4th Battalion, continued to meet with their officers throughout the morning to discuss their position, sort their soldiers into the correct units, inspect the freshly dug trenches, and thin the line of surplus troops — who were now overcrowding the trenches. Within hours, the two commanders would receive operational orders from divisional headquarters outlining their next objective.
Howell-Price and Mackay each commanded a battalion of about 1000 men. In the pre–Great War army, which traditionally made appointments based on seniority rather than performance, there had been only a handful of men who led such large numbers of troops, and they’d been groomed for it all their soldiering careers. (Just over a year earlier, the 3rd and 4th battalions had been commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Astley Thompson and Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Bennett, who were both 50 years old.) Howell-Price and Mackay’s early promotions were due, in part, to the transformation that the Australian Imperial Force had undergone in Egypt in early 1916 in response to a flood of new recruits. Birdie, who oversaw the transformation, was adamant that this was a young man’s war, and Howell-Price and Mackay’s promotions reflected his thinking.30
Were these two men too young and inexperienced to hold such important commands? Bean seemed to think that opting for an energetic commander such as Howell-Price, who had a Military Cross and strong organisational skills, was a much better proposition than handing out commands to soldiers based on seniority. He believed the latter approach had already saddled units with commanders who were entirely lacking in the right spirit to discipline troops, select quality subordinates, and foster morale.31
Howell-Price and Mackay had much in common: mixed with their youthfulness was a streak of cold determination of which Haig would have approved. Each had strict self-discipline and determination — perhaps inherited from their fathers, who were both in the clergy. Each seemed also to have absorbed and assimilated the lessons of the new, industrialised form of warfare, which was fought with artillery and machine guns rather than muskets or swords; coordinated at army and corps level rather than regiment and battalion level; and contested across trench networks spanning multiple countries, rather than over open plains. They placed emphasis on careful planning and the crisp execution of battle plans, not on the military routines often valued by older officers, such as marching smartly, rolling up a greatcoat correctly, or conducting parade-ground drills. And they shared a love for their men: the commanders’ thoughtful acts — Mackay, for example, organised half a pound of fruit cake for each man in his battalion on the anniversary of the Gallipoli landing — demonstrated this affection (and no doubt contributed to one soldier declaring that Mackay was the fairest man he had ever known).32 But it was a tough love: both men had already demonstrated on Gallipoli and now at Pozières that they were capable of throwing their soldiers into battle, possibly toward certain death, without a moment’s hesitation.
Mackay, the son of a Scottish preacher and raised in the Calvinist tradition, was strict with his troops, earning him the nickname ‘Iven the Terrible’. One officer remembered Mackay, armed with a rifle and a pistol, and Mills bombs bulging from his pockets, continually inspecting the battalion’s defences. ‘I don’t know how the Old Man kept going. Nothing showy about him. You knew that everything was under control once he arrived,’ observed one soldier.33
Howell-Price left the safety of his headquarters to personally direct affairs in the village that morning, as did Mackay. Howell-Price, the son of a Welsh clergyman, was one of five brothers to enlist in the Australian Imperial Force. On Gallipoli, he revealed himself as a talented trainer and organiser of men. Howell-Price’s troops considered him strict and resented his four-hour drills aimed at improving discipline — perhaps because of his youth, the commander took his responsibilities too seriously to be popular with his officers and men. Despite this, the 3rd Battalion history conceded that underlying his sternness and austerity was a deep and single-minded loyalty to his men.34
Both men’s company and platoon commanders, who, on this morning, were busy organising their units, were often young men, only 21 or 22 years old. Military experience, some higher education, a modicum of common sense, and a little time in the trenches on Gallipoli seemed the main qualifications needed to command a company or platoon. They would be the ones to execute Howell-Price and Mackay’s orders in the coming days, to cajole one more effort out of their exhausted troops — like Foxcroft, who hadn’t slept since Friday — even if they didn’t have one to give.
At about 5.30 a.m., as Howell-Price and Mackay organised their troops, several
hundred Germans were seen massing at the OG lines. The Lewis gun crews — about 16 of these guns had reached the village with the first attacking troops the previous evening — would be vital in defending the Anzacs’ newly captured position. The crews braced themselves for the attack. The Lewis gunner, who fired the weapon, had to be careful because an ammunition pannier could be fired off in six seconds flat. He had to be sure of his targets and fire in short bursts, otherwise his valuable supply of ammunition would be expended quickly.
The Germans pinpointed the gap between the OG lines and the village. They advanced in tight formation, offering themselves as easy targets. Harry Preston recalled: ‘They came towards us like swarms of ants rushing from shell hole to shell hole.’ The Lewis guns hammered away. In Preston’s trench, the men, full of confidence, lined the parapet and emptied magazine after magazine into the attackers.35
‘It was almost a shame to shoot,’ recounted one soldier. ‘Our machine guns mowed them away.’36
Some Germans tried to surrender. ‘Although their hands were upraised, they met a volley from our trench,’ Maze recalled. ‘Those who got through squatted at our feet, happy to be prisoners and out of the war.’37 Others caught in the open and exposed to Lewis gunfire hid in shell holes; a few minutes later, still under heavy fire, they scurried back across the Bapaume road and sought cover in the hedges near the village.38
The purpose of the German attack was most likely to probe the line and try to establish the size of the gap. The German doctrine of recapturing all forfeited ground meant that more counterattacks would follow. One thing became clear from this attack: the Lewis gun — the Germans called it the ‘Belgian rattlesnake’ — would be a critical weapon in blunting those counterattacks to come. It was relatively light, weighing only 27 pounds, and had great firepower; however, the slightest amount of dirt in its breech jammed it.39 The Official History reasoned that, with Lewis guns positioned along the front, the well-entrenched Australians were more than capable of shattering any future counterattacks; their main risk would be being crushed by German artillery fire.40
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