Pozieres
Page 17
Birdie and White, prior to the meeting with Haig, had conferred with Legge to discuss their next move. Could the 2nd Division mount another attack? The 4th Division was not ready to take over the line and, according to the Official History, Legge wanted to give his division another chance to leave Pozières as heroes, like the 1st Division. White and Birdie carefully considered his offer. They decided to give him one more chance, but this time White would closely supervise the plan. Perhaps Birdie and White’s decision was influenced by the reports from Charteris’s intelligence team that explained that exhausted German divisions were withdrawing from the Somme at an alarming rate. Their morale was reportedly irreparably damaged.15 Perhaps the next defeat, like capturing the Pozières ridge, could bring this seemingly invincible foe to its knees.
Astonishingly, the follow-up attack on the OG lines was planned for the next day, Sunday 30 July. This date was chosen because the two neighbouring British corps would be attacking, which would hopefully tax the Germans’ defences more severely. The main commitment from the conference was that the jumping-off trenches would be dug within 200 yards of the German trenches.16
After the conference, White, keen to avoid the previous day’s mistakes, wrote out a detailed memorandum for Legge, describing what preparations had to be completed before launching the attack. White insisted that the whole operation had to be undertaken deliberately; the progress of the preparations would determine the actual attack date, he told Legge.17 This was fine in theory, but would the impetuous Gough be as accommodating of White’s advice as Haig had been? And with the Australians under a constant barrage, would they soon have too few men to mount a successful attack?
According to the Official History, on Saturday evening, 29 July, the planned attack for the next day was delayed because it became obvious that White’s prescribed preparations would not be completed before Sunday evening. It appeared that the 2nd Division’s initial attack date had been hastily selected in the vain hope of assaulting with the Fourth Army, rather than based on a realistic preparation time.
The Australians’ preparations for the rescheduled attack were marked by sober caution. Legge’s brigade commanders, perhaps sensing their troops’ plummeting morale, baulked at the proposition of another night attack because the darkness, coupled with exploding shells and flares, confused their men. In response, Legge proposed a twilight attack, at 9.15 p.m.; however, this required the digging of separate approach trenches for each brigade so the Germans couldn’t observe the attackers moving up to their jumping-off trenches. Legge believed these additional works would not be finished before 2 August.
The late arrival of orders for the digging of the jumping-off trenches, on Monday evening, threatened to delay the attack again. About 1200 yards of trenches had to be dug, which required 575 men to dig just over two yards each. An additional 450 men were allocated to digging the communication trenches that soldiers would use to reach the front line. Despite extensive efforts, several commanders were shocked the next morning when reports reached them that little progress had occurred the previous evening. Some officers reported that German shelling had prevented their men from digging. Legge’s chief-of-staff, Colonel Arthur Holroyd Bridges, believed the troops were ignorant of the urgency. He wrote to Brigadier-General Paton, whose 7th Brigade troops were responsible for the task, telling him ‘straight’ that if casualties resulted from the digging, so be it.18
Legge and Bridges did not fully appreciate the appalling conditions their men were working under. Alec Raws, unfortunate enough to be leading one of the digging parties, recorded the horrors that he and other men experienced that night. Raws was bombarded all the way up the communication trenches. Once in no-man’s-land, which was littered with stinking corpses, he could not find the appointed site and did not have the slightest idea where his or the German lines were. ‘I would have gladly shot myself,’ he wrote candidly in a letter to his sister. ‘It was awful, but we had to drive the men by every possible means. And dig ourselves. The wounded and killed had to be thrown to one side. I refused to let any sound man help a wounded man. The sound men had to dig. Many men went mad.’ Raws admitted that he threatened to shoot the broken men to shake them into activity.19 Private Alfred Stewart, who sheltered in a trench close to Raws, was driven to despair by the shelling that night, writing in his diary: ‘Thank God! our dear home folk, do not know what we have to go through here … I wonder why this fearful war is allowed to go on, in what we call civilized times are we really civilized?’20
On Monday 31 July, Bean had trudged up to Pozières to view things firsthand. It was the first time he had visited the village since the battle erupted. The state it was in shocked him: the powdered debris of houses, he wrote in his diary, was spread like ashes six feet deep; the ground was as featureless as the Sahara, and ‘level except for the shell craters which lay edge to edge’. In his 1917 book, Letters from France, he wrote that it reminded him of some ‘broken down creek bed’ in Outback Australia, ‘abandoned for generations to the goats’.21
Bean then followed a small exposed track, ducking for safety every time a shell burst overhead, searching for the 19th and 21st battalions. He finally discovered the remnants of a deserted trench. ‘There were only blackened dead and occasionally bits of men — torn bits of limbs unrecognisable — along it,’ he recorded. He eventually stumbled upon a few tired men of Gellibrand’s 6th Brigade, who would be expected to attack the OG lines in a few days’ time.
Bean had soon seen enough. ‘I know of nothing approaching that desolation … there is no sign of life at all.’22 With the help of a guide, he left the godforsaken village. That night, he camped near Bécourt Château, located between Pozières and Albert. The Germans’ sporadic shelling of the nearby wood and the tormented cries of wounded men coming from the darkness affected him. ‘I find this constant sort of shelling very trying when it’s on,’ he wrote in his diary.23 Bean’s biographer, Dudley McCarthy, believed his journey through the trenches that day left him deeply shaken.24 It’s quite plausible that he was experiencing the first signs of shell shock. ‘I don’t want to go through Pozières again,’ he admitted. ‘I have seen it now once — it was a quiet day. It was far worse than Fricourt and Boiselle.’25
As a steady stream of wounded passed by the château, Bean worked on his next despatch. He reflected on the tired troops he had observed that day: ‘Of the men whom you find there what can one say?’26 Surely Bean now realised that his romanticised image of the Anzacs at war was an illusion: they weren’t sleeping comfortably under the open stars, but cowering in trenches under terrible bombardments; weren’t using their bushman skills to cook meat or bake damper, but scavenging rations from their dead comrades; weren’t trekking across the country on wild brumbies, but crawling on their hands and knees along broken trenches.27 They were dying in droves due to this murderous industrialised war. There was nothing romantic about it.
Did Bean, having witnessed the horrors of Pozières, rethink the tenor of his most recent despatches, which had glorified the Anzacs’ exploits?28 It wasn’t a straightforward question — Bean knew that the censors forbade criticism.29 Furthermore, although committed to reporting truthfully, he refused to write anything that needlessly distressed soldiers’ families, questioned authority, or second-guessed strategy.30 We can only speculate why he chose to omit the hellish conditions at Pozières in his despatches: perhaps he reasoned that when fighting for civilization one had to expect a frightful toll; or that, if he described what he saw, the people at home might recoil at the war’s terrible cost. It is possible that he viewed his despatches as a means to fortify their resolve to support the conflict — after all, he did believe that the Teutonic Hun had to be crushed.
Bean now appeared to be recording two versions of the battle. His despatches remained positive, telling of heroic acts, victories, and advances; his personal diary became more melancholy, giving vent to his own doubts. The ‘
truth’ that Bean had vowed to record was becoming more difficult to grasp by the day.
While the Australians planned their next attack on the OG lines, concerns were intensifying in London about the Somme offensive. The War Council — a forum established by the British prime minister, Herbert Asquith, in January 1915 to decide wartime ‘high policy’ — wanted to understand the return that such large losses justified. General Headquarters despatches outlining advances were not enough. The offensive needed to shorten the war.
On Saturday 29 July, a nervous Field Marshal Sir William Robertson, chief of the Imperial General Staff, had written to Haig explaining that ‘the powers that be’ were beginning to get a little uneasy in regard to the situation — it seemed the field marshal had been unsettled by a damning critique penned and circulated to cabinet by Winston Churchill, in which he labelled the Somme offensive as ‘disastrous’. Robertson’s letter asked if the loss of 300,000 men would really lead to great results. If not, should they revise and limit their plans? Why did it seem that the British were bearing the brunt of the fighting, while the French seemed to be doing little? Had not the primary objective of relieving the pressure on Verdun been achieved, at least to some extent?31
On 1 August, after studying Robertson’s letter, Haig drafted a response.32 Typical of Haig, it was unrelenting and unequivocal: ‘Maintain the offensive!’ He also warned that there would be more Sommes to come. ‘It would not be justifiable to calculate on the Enemy’s resistance being completely broken without another campaign next year,’ he wrote.
Haig’s alleged bloody-mindedness and obsession with wearing battles that cost hundreds of thousands of lives resulted in him becoming one of the most controversial and possibly vilified figures of the Great War. The boom in war books in the late 1920s and early 1930s fuelled the enduring image of Haig as a woodenheaded, red-faced, moustachioed general who sat in his château headquarters, well behind the lines, as he ordered waves of infantry through barbed-wire trenches. These books typically consisted of two types: political memoirs, such as those by Winston Churchill and Lloyd George, that shifted blame for the bloodshed from themselves to the generals; and anti-war stories by soldiers — such as Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of George Sherston, Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, and Reich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front — that portrayed the war as utterly futile.33
On 1 August, as Haig drafted his response to the War Council, he would have sensed that his window for achieving measurable results on the Somme was closing. It was becoming more important that key strongholds such as the Pozières ridge, Mouquet Farm, and Thiepval be taken without delay so that he could launch his planned September offensive, which he hoped would bring the success he so desperately sought. All this depended on the Australians capturing the seemingly impregnable OG lines within the next few days.
On the evening of 1 August, the Anzacs cancelled their nightly artillery arrangements because troops complained that on previous evenings shells had dropped short and killed or injured those digging in no-man’s-land. Consequently, the 7th Brigade reported the next morning that its forward line was almost finished, and the 6th Brigade reported its digging practically complete. Nevertheless, according to the Official History, the 2nd Division staff delayed the attack again to 3 August; they were confident that all works would be completed by then.34
However, at corps headquarters on 2 August, White, somewhat apprehensive after his dressing-down from Haig, carefully studied aerial photographs of no-man’s-land to assess whether the freshly dug jumping-off trenches were satisfactory. He became alarmed by their poor state and rang Gough to express his concerns. Gough still wanted an early attack and said that he had been assured by Legge that preparations were adequate. ‘Well you can order them to do it if you like and of course they will do it,’ replied White; he then carefully explained to Gough why the attack should be delayed. Gough reluctantly left it to White to decide the issue. White, who suspected that Legge’s officers were too optimistic about the state of preparations, postponed the assault for another 24 hours. Colonel Bridges, possibly sensing White’s heavy hand in the division’s change of plans, wrote to the brigade commanders: ‘This gives us a bit more time for preparation, and more time to the Boche as well.’ 35
The following day, on 3 August — five days after the initial attack had been scheduled — Gough met with Haig and blamed the Australian corps for putting off the attack again. He told Haig he was so concerned with the delay that he had called for a written explanation. Haig wrote in his diary afterward that the delay was due ‘to the ignorance of the Australian 2nd Division staff and that the GOC [General Officer Commanding] Legge was not much good’.36
The constant delays frayed the soldiers’ nerves. ‘Each night we expected to go up and take the ridge, but they kept on postponing it,’ read Private Arthur Clifford’s diary.37 With each delay, rumours had circulated among the shaken soldiers: some believed the attack had been fixed for the following day, others claimed it had been further postponed, while most hoped it would be cancelled altogether.38
On 5 August, Field Marshal Willliam Robertson tabled Haig’s reply to his letter dated 29 July. In responding to the War Council’s concerns about the excessive loss of men, Haig reasoned: ‘Our losses in July’s fighting totalled about 120,000 more than they would have been, had we not attacked.’39 Undoubtedly crude reckoning such as this led Haig’s most fervent critic, future British prime minister Lloyd George, to conclude that he lacked those qualities which were essential in a great commander in the greatest war that was ever seen — ‘it was far beyond his mental equipment,’ he wrote.40 In War Memoirs, Lloyd George defined the necessary qualities: the commander saw the ground upon which he fought, adapted to the changing conditions of war, and fostered innovation in his subordinates.41
Lloyd George’s criticism of Haig might be seen as unfair — wasn’t such a war beyond anyone’s mental equipment? After all, by 1916, the greatest generals of the era had fallen on their swords. Russian general Alexander Samsonov had blown his brains out in a quiet wood after the annihilation of his army three weeks into the war. The nerve of German general Helmuth von Moltke gave way a few weeks later, after his armies were checked on the Marne. Haig’s predecessor, General Sir John French, whose moods swung dangerously between unrealistic optimism and utter pessimism, was summarily dismissed only one year into the war.42 All these men had struggled with the scope, scale, and complexity of the Great War.43 Haig was one of few prominent commanders to outlast the war.
Before condemning Haig as a butcher and bungler, it pays to understand the immense complexities he faced on the Somme. It fell to Haig to oversee the logistics of the offensive and, as Charteris pointed out, it is inconceivable to imagine what it took to feed, administer, move, and tend to the medical and spiritual requirements of one million men, even if they were not engaged in fighting in a foreign country. The aftermath of each battle resembled the devastation caused by an earthquake or tornado, with buildings smashed, communications severed, supply lines wrecked, and thousands killed. And the unrelenting office hours were far longer than those of a civilian officer in peacetime. ‘There are few if any officers who would not do a fourteen-hour day,’ Charteris noted. 44
Over the course of the war, Haig’s armies had expanded at a staggering rate. At the start of the war, the British Expeditionary Force consisted of about 70,000 soldiers in six divisions. By the time that fighting began on the Somme in July 1916, he controlled ten times that.45 Even Lloyd George conceded that Haig had the overwhelming task of commanding a force ‘five times as great as the largest army ever commanded by Napoleon’.46 Haig’s task was further exacerbated by the dearth of experienced officers available to command the divisions in his expanding armies.47 Rapid promotions resulted; Gough went from commanding a brigade of 4000 to an army of ‘half a million men’ in a couple of years.48 This pattern was repeated down through the ranks.
The gargantuan expansion of Haig’s forces, according to Ian Brown’s study British Logistics on the Western Front, placed enormous stress on the army’s archaic systems. The daily needs of a single division filled one half of a train. For the Somme, 63 packed trains were needed per week.49 Haig had to revolutionise the army’s transport systems to cope, calling in civilian experts to transform each mode of transport — roads, canals, and rail — into an integrated network.50
Haig’s rapidly expanding force also quickly outgrew its rudimentary communication systems. On the Somme, his armies communicated via a network of telephones linked by 7000 miles of buried cable and 48,000 miles of above-ground cable.51 Yet once a battle erupted, shellfire inevitably severed some of these cables, leaving commanders, from brigadiers up to Haig, cut off from their front-line troops.
Haig’s challenges were immense, and beyond the grasp of any mortal man. John Terraine, in Douglas Haig, noted that even the commander-in-chief himself conceeded this: ‘I feel that one’s best can go but a short way without help from above.’52
There was an air of nervous expectancy at I Anzac Corps headquarters on the muggy morning of Friday 4 August. After seven days of digging trenches, re-equipping soldiers, reinforcing platoons, and reorganising battalions, the day of the 2nd Division’s follow-up attack on the OG lines had finally arrived. Birdie, as on most other mornings, was up by sunrise.
After leaving the divisional headquarters at Albert, Birdie recognised a group of soldiers gathered by a wood. They were Australians just out of the line, busy boiling tea, making damper, cooking beef, and cleaning up. He walked among them, animated and full of nervous energy, drawing from one and then another stories of the fighting they had just experienced. He knew some of the boys, having most likely met them on Gallipoli and in Egypt, and addressed them by their Christian names. He listened to their yarns; he seemed genuinely interested in what they had to say. In turn, the men felt familiar enough to invite him to have a cup of tea with the ‘mob’.53 Afterward, Birdie, as always, had one piece of parting advice: ‘Write home and let your mothers know where you are, what you are doing and how you are,’ he advised. ‘If you don’t they will write to me.’ 54