Pozieres
Page 14
By the time Brigadier-General Sinclair-MacLagan was finally relieved, he had been without sleep for five nights and six days. He climbed over the sleeping and tired runners that choked the dugout’s passageway, and then trudged through broken trenches, toward Sausage Valley, while a bombardment fell around him. He eventually climbed from the confusing network of trenches and worked his way back across the open ground. An even heavier bombardment blocked his way forward. Exhausted and frustrated, Sinclair-MacLagan collapsed into a shell hole. ‘I’m damned if I’m going through that,’ he said to himself. Meanwhile, runners and stretcher-bearers, focused on their tasks, hurried by the shell hole, oblivious to the brigadier-general sheltering there. An hour later, Sinclair-MacLagan picked himself up and continued on.4
In the early hours of 27 July, Iven Mackay’s 4th Battalion troops prepared for their relief. ‘Wake those men up and tell them to get ready,’ ordered one of his lieutenants, George Pugh. But it soon became clear that the men he referred to would never leave Pozières — a thick film of dust obscured their faces, suggesting that they had died days earlier, and churned-up dirt from the bombardment had subsequently settled upon them.5
An exhausted Mackay led the last remnants of his battalion out of Pozières just before daybreak. At about the same time, the relieving 5th Brigade reported to Legge that all was ‘quiet in Pozières’.6 At sunrise, Charles Bean watched as Mackay’s troops, in twos and threes, straggled in and gathered around the cookers. He walked among the ‘overstrained’ men — dirty, unshaven, with their clothes torn and mud-stained — as they got some food and coffee from the stoves; he compared their animated conversations to the wild chatter of schoolboys. Bean wrote in his diary that their stories seemed unbelievable; he doubted whether they could be taken literally on account of the men’s high-strung condition.7 Some soldiers, like Peter Smith of the 2nd Battalion, avoided the chatter and sat quietly, savouring the pleasure of a cup of hot cocoa — the first drop of anything warm for three days — from one of the cherished coffee stalls. Chaplain Walter Dexter, with the support of the Australian Comforts Fund, had established the stalls near the front line to provide soldiers with hot drinks and biscuits.8 For many of Mackay’s troops, the desire for rest outweighed their need for food: ‘We all feel completely knocked and glad of the opportunity to take our boots off and get some sleep,’ wrote Apcar de Vine, ‘neither of which I have had since the 22nd’.9
A tired Douglas Horton remembered throwing his overcoat down and then himself upon it and within a few minutes being dead to everything: ‘The dew was thick but that did not matter. We have drawn on our stock of endurance to the last ounce.’10
The 1st Division rollcalls after breakfast were a sobering reminder of the terrible price that had been paid to capture and hold Pozières. Smith recorded that only 203 men answered the 2nd Battalion rollcall; three days earlier, it had been 1000-strong. Out of 181 men in Frederick Callaway’s company, only 39 answered. Arthur Foxcroft’s platoon had been cut to pieces: ‘14 answered the roll in our platoon out of 60 men. One officer, one corporal, 12 privates,’ he recorded in his diary.11
With rollcalls complete, the adjutants tallied the casualty lists. The 1st Division had suffered a staggering 5285 casualties — almost 50 per cent of its strength — in capturing the impregnable fortress of Pozières and unsuccessfully attacking the Pozières ridge.12 It seemed that Hooky’s premonition of his division being ‘knocked out’ in the attack had been realised. Although the 1st Division’s casualties were heavy in the two night attacks, it was the four days of the continuous bombardment that had obliterated its ranks.13
How did the soldiers, junior officers, and commanders feel about their experience at Pozières? The boyish enthusiasm of the soldiers, a week earlier so strong for war, ribbons, and glory, had disappeared. ‘I can tell you I should never have got out alive,’ recalled one soldier. ‘I had a terrible shaking up … Some of the men went mad … I hope the war is over very soon.’14 Another soldier, caught under the German bombardment, declared: ‘This war is a disgrace to Christianity.’15
An embittered Eric Moorhead claimed that the Australian officer leading the botched attack on the ridge-top trenches was ‘filled to the neck with rum’.16 The battalion history, written in 1921, supported his views, admitting that ‘a liberal issue of rum had infused some of the officers and men with more than their habitual recklessness’.17 The Official History mentioned it, but only as a footnote. Although it conceded that even the Germans’ official historian had stated that the Australians were ‘inflamed with alcohol’, it rebutted the accusation, claiming that after careful investigation the allegation proved false.18 In 1934, White criticised the draft British Official History for documenting the incident, claiming he doubted it had happened, and that even if it did, mentioning it served ‘no good purpose’.19 The issue of consuming alcohol during battle was a sensitive one at the time, particularly as The Sydney Morning Herald had recently published an article accusing the Germans of abhorrent battle tactics, such as attacking with Apache weapons (long sticks studded with nails), while stimulated with ether (a British officer had said they reeked of alcohol).20
The 1st Division soldiers leaving Pozières were different men from those who had stormed it five days earlier. Sergeant Ted Rule of the 4th Division, who watched the beleaguered troops march through Warloy, said he would never forget the sight. ‘Almost without exception each man looked drawn and haggard, and so dazed that they appeared to be walking in a trance, and their eyes looked glassy and starry,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘In all my experience I had never seen men quite so shaken up as these.’21
Bean was also shocked by the state of the troops, noting that when they reached bivouac in Vadencourt Wood and had washed, shaved, and rested, ‘they were strangely quiet … far different from the Australian soldiers of tradition’. Bean wrote in the Official History that they were like ‘boys emerging from a long illness’. 22
Despite the catatonic state of the troops, their commanders drew some satisfaction from the expensive victory. ‘Pozières is ours, captured alone by our division,’ wrote Thomas Blamey in a letter home. ‘We are all very proud of the feat. Our plan, which was chiefly mine, led to a brilliant success …’23 Birdie sent a note to Hooky saying he was chuffed with the division’s magnificent efforts, and thanked them for taking Pozières:
I well know how grateful the Chief and everyone else are at the work done by the division. I only wish that I could thank everyone individually and wish, too, that there were a sufficient number of V.C.s [Victoria Crosses] to go round for the very large number of officers and men, who I am sure have deserved them.24
Birdie’s jaunty note suggests he was more concerned with medals won than men lost. Bean noted in his diary that even Birdie’s fellow British officers suspected he was climbing on the shoulders of the Australians simply to further his career.25
Junior officers were less than enamoured with their costly victory. There seemed, according to one officer, an utter lack of any skill behind the attacks, which had wasted thousands of men. Battalion histories written after the war often voiced the junior officers’ malcontent. The 11th Battalion history, Legs-eleven, summed up what seemed to be the prevailing opinion, writing of the horrific casualties that ‘it was a terrible penalty to pay for the small advance made, much as it was lauded at the time’. 26
What no one questioned — whether soldier, junior officer, or commander — was that two Australian divisions had been mauled in less than a week. Casualties topped 10,000: the 5th Division had suffered 5533 casualties at Fromelles; the 1st Division, 5285 at Pozières.27 The 1st Division endured arguably one of the heaviest barrages experienced by the Australians throughout the war — according to the Official History, ‘better or worse than Pozières’ became the standard by which shellfire was measured by the Australian Imperial Force.28
While the battle seemed to have weakened the
bond between soldier and staff officer, it appeared that the relationship between soldiers was strengthened. A man’s ‘only real support is the comfort of his mates’, reasoned Geoffrey Drake-Brockman.29 Frederic Manning, an Australian enlisted in the British army who fought on the Somme, described the bond in his semi-autobiographical book, The Middle Parts of Fortune. He wrote that at one moment a particular man may be nothing at all to someone, and the next minute that person will go through hell for him. ‘It’s not friendship. The man doesn’t matter so much; it’s a kind of impersonal emotion, a kind of enthusiasm, in the old sense of the word.’30 The shared experience of battle apparently strengthened this bond: ‘We help each other. What is one man’s fate today may be another’s tomorrow. We are all in it up to the neck together, and we know it.’
The 2nd Division troops almost certainly sensed they were in it up to their necks as they marched toward Pozières. ‘Oh don’t worry you will all be skittled,’ one soldier warned 19-year-old Melbourne clerk Private Fred Hocking of the 23rd Battalion. ‘In an attack up there the first wave gets cut down to the last man.’31 Private Vic Graham, a 19-year-old mechanic from Moonee Ponds, Victoria, noticed the stink in the air near Pozières. He now understood what the French peasants meant when they whispered ‘Bo coo Australie, fini Pozières’ (as Graham wrote it in his diary). It translated roughly to ‘a lot of Australians finished at Pozières’.32
The troops were appalled by the state in which they found the village. ‘It was just a heap of rubble and dust, shredded tree trunks, deep shell holes, and upturned earth,’ explained the 17th Battalion history. All that remained of the orchard were ‘tree stumps that appeared grotesque in the half light, bearing a weird resemblance to human shapes’.33 Private William Clayton of the 6th Machine-gun Company wrote in a letter home that the only indication that Pozières was ever inhabited was the thousands of bricks scattered and broken over the ground. ‘The main track through Pozières was recognisable only by the large number of dead men and horses that were there,’ he commented.34
The relieving troops busied themselves with fixing their battered trenches before the bombardment recommenced. The 24th Battalion deepened its trench, which, in several places, was only 18 inches deep. ‘We worked like niggers, and by daylight had it down to about 3-feet, 6-inches,’ Private Arthur Clifford recorded in his diary.35
Brothers Alec and Goldy Raws were among the relieving troops of the 2nd Division. Margaret Young and Bill Gammage documented their war years in Hail and Farewell. They recorded that Robert Goldthorpe — ‘Goldy’ for short — was the younger of the two, half a head taller than his brother and much fitter, after months of working in sugarcane plantations up north. He enlisted in Melbourne in January 1915 and completed his training locally, in Broadmeadows. Before sailing to Egypt, he visited his family in Adelaide. His father, John, a Baptist preacher, remembered the all-too-brief stay and the painful parting: ‘We said goodbye to him near the Buckingham Arms, where he took a tram into the city and caught the Melbourne express.’
Alec was nicknamed ‘Little Raws’ as a child because of his slight build and poor health. Although he suffered from bouts of ‘the shivers’ and fainting, it appeared that no doctor accurately diagnosed his condition. No doubt the mild winters spent at his grandparents’ house improved his frail health. After finishing school at Prince Alfred College in Kent Town, South Australia, Alec became a journalist and later secured a job with The Argus in Melbourne. Upon fronting up at a recruiting station in July 1915, he was surprised, on account of his occasional fainting spells, to be passed fit for service — he thought the reduction in recruiting standards must have helped to get him through.
Why did Alec feel compelled to enlist, even though a doctor had warned him to avoid excessive strain? Although Alec had a close relationship with his brother, this didn’t appear to be the influencing factor. Alec was imbued with strong principles, which seemingly guided his decision to enlist: ‘I am prepared to abandon all my comforts, all my life, all of everything, to fight for principles which, I hold, mean everything to the modern world,’ he wrote.36
John seemed downcast upon hearing that Alec had enlisted. ‘We felt it a good deal,’ he wrote in his autobiography. Alec, aware of his father’s concerns, tried to justify his decision in a letter, explaining his belief that the salvation of the world depended upon a speedy victory for the Allies: ‘Holding such views, how can a man, judged to be physically fit for the purpose, reasonably hold back? I think that, looking at the facts in this light, you will agree with me.’
By March 1916, the brothers were in France and had both achieved the rank of lieutenant. Alec was the more outspoken of the two; being a political journalist, he was unusually articulate. He had strong political convictions, leaning toward the left side of politics; he had been active in the formation of the Australian Journalists’ Association. With this unique background, it is unsurprising that Alec’s expansive letters to his family and friends throughout July and August — to become possibly the most quoted in popular histories of the Somme and Pozières — were vivid and controversial. He cast a light on many uncomfortable themes that official histories largely avoided: incompetent leadership, cowardice, officers threatening to shoot their soldiers, and accusations of murder.
On 27 July, Alec and Goldy’s 23rd Battalion shifted closer to the reserve trenches.37 Although in the same battalion, the brothers hadn’t yet seen each other. ‘Though I believe he passed through the base where I camped the other night,’ explained Alec in a letter to his mother, ‘he [Goldy] has moved, whence and to where I am not permitted to tell.’ Although neither brother realised it, their battalion would soon shift up to the front line to lead the attack upon the OG lines; it was quite possible they would never meet again.38
Major-General Gordon Legge’s 2nd Division consisted of Brigadier-General William Holmes’s New South Wales 5th Brigade, Brigadier-General John ‘Jack’ Gellibrand’s Victorian 6th Brigade, and Brigadier-General John Paton’s 7th Brigade. Legge was the only Australian divisional commander on the Somme.39 Although Legge had served as Australia’s representative on the Imperial General Staff in Great Britain before the war, he hadn’t formed strong relationships with British officers, as White had during his tenure there. Therefore, Legge seemed to be excluded from the tight circle of British-trained officers into which White and Birdie fitted in comfortably.
Legge’s inexperienced 2nd Division had served on Gallipoli, but had never fought a major battle before. His divisional staff had no experience in managing large-scale attacks, and his troops lacked training in trench warfare. The objective that Gough had set for Legge’s division was daunting: to capture the trenches rimming the Pozières ridge and then strike out north toward the ruins of Mouquet Farm, the last obstacle that stood between the British and the impregnable fortress of Thiepval.
Legge received Order Number 16 from Birdie on Thursday 27 July, which instructed his division to attack the OG trenches. The attack had to be at night, but Legge could decide its timing.40 In theory, he could take time to prepare thoroughly, but in reality time pressures demanded that he attack immediately. Gough had previously goaded Birdie, demanding action, but now he pressured Legge — who, understandably, ‘tried to fall in’ with his directives.41 Gough most likely exerted pressure on Legge via Birdie, whom he met with almost daily, but also directly, when the two met every few days.42
For Legge, selecting the attack date was a balancing act: wait too long, and the German bombardment would leave him no soldiers with whom to attack; rush, and he risked compromising critical preparations. He eventually decided to attack on Friday 28 July — a bold decision considering that his headquarters had only arrived at Albert on 26 July and assumed command from the 1st Division at 9.00 a.m. on 27 July.
Holmes’s 5th and Gellibrand’s 6th brigades entered the line on 25 and 26 July, while Legge held Paton’s 7th in reserve. Holmes’s brigade immediatel
y became involved in contesting a portion of the OG1 Trench. Over 24 hours of vicious fighting, conducted almost exclusively with bombs, the Australians failed to gain a single yard of ground, but suffered heavy casualties that Legge could ill afford — of 54 bombers of the 18th Battalion, only seven came out unwounded, and the Official History recorded that all of the 5th Brigade’s bombers had been killed, maimed, or exhausted in the fighting.43
In 1914, Legge was considered someone to watch. His résumé read well: he had completed a Bachelor of Arts, a masters degree, and a Bachelor of Laws; he was admitted to the Bar in New South Wales in 1891; and he had gained valuable war experience in 1899, commanding an infantry company in the Boer War. He was an architect of many reforms in the Australian army, such as compulsory military service, which Lord Kitchener, on his visit to Australia in 1910, had recommended. But with reform came conflict; Legge seemed to revel in it. His ‘style and ideas’ undoubtedly alienated his ‘orthodox and plodding’ British superior, Brigadier-General Launcelot Kiggell, when he served as Australia’s representative on the Imperial General Staff between 1912 and 1914. His role in London was reduced to being little more than an observer.44 For Legge, whose big frame, thick moustache, and closely cropped hair accentuated his imposing nature, getting the job done seemed more important than making friends.
Legge discovered on Gallipoli that his forceful approach had consequences beyond sacrificing the odd friendship. Although he missed the early months of the campaign, Legge was later appointed 1st Australian Division commander after the original commander, Major-General William Bridges, died. Legge’s subordinates, such as brigade commanders John Monash and James McCay, argued against the appointment, feeling he was now junior in rank to them and without experience in the campaign; it seemed that McCay could ‘hardly stand the idea’ of reporting to him. Legge then clashed with Birdie over proposed tactics for the 1st Division’s planned assault on Lone Pine.45 What also irked Birdie was Legge’s tendency to communicate directly with the Australian government — it is likely that Birdie, the consummate politician, and sensitive to criticism, believed that this should be his sole domain.46 Legge, however, perhaps reasoned that the Australian government should hear about the welfare of its troops from an Australian officer. His fate at Gallipoli was soon sealed: Birdie, apparently realising that the peninsula wasn’t big enough for both men, pushed him sideways into the role of forming the 2nd Division in Egypt.47 Legge must have felt slighted by the arrangement and would likely have wanted to repair the damage done to his reputation.