Pozieres

by Scott Bennett

  Sergeant Dave Badger, a 20-year-old auburn-haired clerk from Peterborough, South Australia, didn’t fancy his chances in the coming attack. Promoted to sergeant a few weeks earlier, he knew that for a few extra shillings he had to lead his men into attack. And he would have realised that those leading the attacks — sergeants and lieutenants — had a life expectancy measured in hours. He wrote a letter to his parents, preparing them for the inevitable. ‘When you see this I’ll be dead; but don’t worry … try to think that I did the only possible thing, as I tell you I would do it again if I had the chance.’ Badger had reason to be melancholy: in the hour before the attack, the Germans’ retaliatory bombardment cut down 120 men of his 10th Battalion, about 20 per cent of its attacking strength.41

  Like Badger, 32-year-old Lieutenant Bert Crowle of the 10th Battalion had joined the Australian Imperial Force as a private in 1914 and worked his way up through the ranks, and would now lead troops into battle. Crowle stood only five-foot five, his slight stature akin to that of a jockey. It is hard to imagine him before the war, back in Adelaide, sawing timber, fixing joints, or laying foundations as a qualified builder.42 It is also hard to imagine a recruiting officer accepting him as Australian Imperial Force material in late 1914, when recruiting standards were still high. Perhaps Bert’s trade qualification got him across the line.

  Lieutenant Alfred Hearps of the 12th Battalion had enlisted enthusiastically in August 1914, perhaps confident that his experience as a cadet lieutenant had prepared him for anything that the war might throw up. But the Tasmanian quickly discovered that he had no stomach for war. His casualty form records that he was evacuated from Gallipoli diagnosed with ‘hysteria’, a vague term that referred to the loss of control due to fear. Perhaps this term was used because ‘shell shock’ had not yet come into parlance.43 The diagnosis was later changed to ‘breakdown’.44 When Hearps recovered, he was appointed company quartermaster sergeant, which kept him away from the front line. Unfortunately, the battalion’s infantry sergeants and lieutenants had all virtually been cut down in the first attack on Pozières. According to the battalion history, The Story of the Twelfth, an unprecedented nine promotions were required to replenish their threadbare ranks.45 There was no alternative but to promote Hearps to lieutenant and give him an infantry platoon to command.

  When the whistles sounded in broad daylight on 21 August for the attack toward Fabeck Graben Trench to start, Badger, Crowle, and Hearps shepherded their ‘shaken’ men into no-man’s-land.46 Badger and Crowle’s 10th Battalion troops advanced on the right flank. Shelling had obliterated their first objective, a newly dug German trench. Badger and two lieutenants led the troops through Fabeck Graben — which they mistook for their first objective — and into their own bombardment. Shellfire, machine-gun fire, and bombs killed or wounded half the battalion in about 30 minutes. According to the 3rd Brigade diary, only one 10th Battalion officer remained unwounded.47 At about this time, two machine-gun bullets struck Crowle in the upper thigh, with a third ricocheting off the periscope in his pocket. The Germans quickly worked their way behind the stranded troops, and their fire came from all directions. Some, such as 26-year-old Private Alfred Beck, a labourer from South Australia, had no option but to surrender. He got a little past the German front line when a German grenade hit him in the back. ‘I became unconscious and coming to found myself a prisoner,’ he explained in an interview after the war.48 Badger and about 30 survivors desperately tried to bayonet and bomb their way back through the German lines. By dusk, only a few had made it to their own lines.

  Hearps’s 12th Battalion advanced in the centre, directly toward the farm. Rather than stop at their assigned objective, which shellfire had obliterated, Hearps and Lieutenant Osmund Roper led their men 50 yards beyond the farm. Some Germans managed to manoeuvre behind them, cutting them off. About this time, a piece of shrapnel the size of a man’s fist slammed into Hearps’s neck; he collapsed. The shrapnel that struck him apparently came from a British gun.49

  Hearps’s Red Cross file tells us that his batman, Private Arthur Bean, remained by his side and tended to his gaping wound, while other survivors withdrew. Bean’s Red Cross statement indicates that Hearps was in a bad way: barely conscious, blood gushing from his neck, and paralysed — the shrapnel had severed his spinal cord. Bean, a house decorator by trade, didn’t know what to do. Hearps implored him, and then ordered him, to leave his side. Bean, understandably torn between his duty and the strong impulse to save his own skin, reluctantly complied. He promised Hearps that he would get help and return.

  Sometime after dusk, Bean reached the Australian lines. ‘How he had got back safely God only knew,’ remarked Lieutenant Roper. Bean pleaded with Roper to send some men out to rescue Hearps. Roper said it was futile, as Mouquet Farm was in German hands, and forbade Bean from returning.

  Hearps was recorded as missing at rollcall. His fate remained a mystery until a soldier found his body some time later, and returned his identity disc to a 10th Battalion officer.50

  The next morning, 22 August, aeroplanes swooped low over the battlefield; spotters reported that many Australians were still forward of the newly dug trench line in shell craters.51 Headquarters interpreted this as the advance still having some momentum, and they ordered fresh attacks. Yet there was no one to deliver them; by mid-afternoon, these isolated men had been rounded up and taken prisoner.

  That same day, Australian fatigue parties — typically assigned to labouring jobs, such as repairing roads or scavenging abandoned equipment — cleared the trenches of dead Germans, mostly Bavarians and Saxons. One soldier asked his officer what the inscription on their belt buckles said. The officer roughly translated, ‘God with us for King and Fatherland.’

  ‘Well, God doesn’t seem to have done much for these blokes,’ the soldier replied.52

  It seemed that God had no favourites — not even Dave Badger. According to the Red Cross’s enquiry into his disappearance, a sergeant came across a handful of bodies on the German side of no-man’s-land; it seemed a single burst shell had killed all of them. He collected up their identity discs and pay books. One belonged to Sergeant Dave Badger. Later, his body was recovered, along with a letter marked: ‘To be opened in the event of my death.’53

  Bert Crowle survived the machine-gun bullet wounds to his thigh. Stretcher-bearers walked four miles across open ground, one out in front with a white flag, to get him back through the lines to the 3rd Casualty Clearing Station. Yet, after three days of treatment, Bert realised things weren’t good. The Somme soil, laced with manure, had possibly infected the wound. Surgeons removed pounds of flesh from his buttocks in an effort to excise the gangrenous tissue, but it had already gone too far. ‘You must be prepared for the worst to happen any day,’ he warned his wife, Beatrice, in a letter.54 ‘I am very sorry, dear, but still you will be provided for as I am easy on that score.’

  Nurses placed salts in and around the wound in an effort to cleanse it, but Bert sensed it was all but futile. ‘It smells rotten,’ he wrote in the letter. He died the next day, on 23 August. His personal belongings were sent home; among them was a slightly damaged periscope.

  Despite the attack’s minor success — the Official History called it trifling — of capturing a small parcel of land to the right of the farm, it cost Sinclair-MacLagan’s 3rd Brigade a staggering 840 men. Over 200 simply vanished — either killed, taken prisoner, or left to die in no-man’s-land.55 The 11th Battalion history criticised the stunt: ‘Most of the boys felt … that good lives had been wantonly thrown away in an attack that had absolutely no hope from the first.’56 The lasting consequence of this piecemeal action would be felt over the coming weeks in Australia. Soon, Mrs Hearps would open an impersonal letter from Base Records informing her that her ‘beloved’ son, Alfred, was dead; soon, Mrs Beatrice Crowle would receive a handwritten letter that her husband, Herbert, had written while he lay dying in a casualty clear
ing station; and soon, Mr and Mrs Badger would receive an envelope marked, ‘To be opened in the event of my death’, which had been removed from their dead son’s tunic pocket and mailed to them by an unknown soldier.57 The letter contained two important messages. The first: ‘don’t grieve, be proud’; the second: ‘send someone in my place’.58 Badger’s personnel dossier indicates that his parents honoured his death wish, bundling his little brother Magnus, barely 18, off to war in early 1917 to take his place. The war, with its apparently insatiable appetite, had to be fed.

  For almost a month, Bean had meticulously recorded the battle’s progress. Although he had complete freedom to move about the battlefield, he realised it was impossible to record much more from his wanderings than the general condition of the fighting, the weather, the barrages, and the morale of the troops. The best way to capture the ebb and flow of the battle was to interview the officers and non-commissioned officers of a unit, but it had to be done within a week or two of their fighting. Otherwise, as Bean noted, memories dimmed and history was lost forever.59

  Most evenings, Bean sat at his desk and transcribed the shorthand notes he had taken that day, finding that he was rarely disturbed in the late evening and early hours of the morning. ‘Sometimes daylight would find me still at it,’ Bean wrote of the habit he had formed on Gallipoli, ‘occasionally by some strange process of mental effort, falling asleep at each full stop and then waking to write each successive sentence.’60

  Bean made his second trip to Pozières on 17 August. Upon reaching the village, he noted that for a mile the desolate battlefield had been flayed, lying open to the sky. ‘The whole flank of the ridge had been torn open,’ wrote Bean in Letters from France. ‘It lies there bleeding, gaping open to the callous skies with scarcely so much as a blade of grass or thistle to clothe its nakedness.’61 Bean met with battalion commanders Iven Mackay, who gave him details of the previous night’s counterattack, and Owen Howell-Price, who was crouched over a map and managing the sending up of flares to signal his position to a contact pilot; the pilot was circling his aeroplane above and hooting his horn. Bean noted that the officers worked away, seemingly oblivious to the shells that thumped close by.62

  Bean’s mood lifted on 22 August when he reunited with his cousin Leo Butler, who had thus far survived the fighting unharmed. ‘I was immensely relieved to see him,’ wrote Bean. ‘I dreaded him being hit for Uncle Ted’s sake.’63 His delight would be shortlived. A few days later, on 24 August, Bean was visited by his brother, Jack. He brought the shocking news that cousin Leo had died. ‘It was too sad and dreadful for words,’ wrote Bean.64

  Leo, a big, strapping man with blue eyes, a fresh complexion, and dark hair, was one of those men about whom Bean loved to write: a quintessential Australian. A handy sportsman and great cricketer, he had a sharp mind and was one of Hobart’s most successful barristers. Bean said he was the finest specimen of manhood in all of Hobart.65 To round it off, Leo had the egalitarian touch. Thirty-two and in a professional occupation, he didn’t have to enlist, but, according to Bean, he couldn’t bear the thought of shirking his responsibility to his country.

  A fitting finale for Leo would have been a hero’s death, mortally wounded while gloriously charging the German trenches or selflessly rescuing a fallen comrade. But the Great War had little respect for legend-making. According to Bean’s diary and letters within it, while Leo was in the support trenches near Mouquet Farm on 22 August, a shell exploded around dusk, taking off a lower leg and smashing the other. Leo lingered on, drifting in and out of consciousness, trying to be cheerful. He was carried back to a casualty clearing station. Leo knew he’d lost a lot of blood; he remarked how much of it covered the stretcher he’d been carried in on. Leo whispered to the friend who accompanied him that all day he had felt that something was going to happen to him. A surgeon immediately amputated his bloody stump high at the hip, and took the toes off on the other foot. After the operation, Leo’s voice was strong, but he had lost too much blood. He slipped into shock and died just before midnight on 23 August.66

  After hearing the news, Bean searched for Leo’s younger brother, Angus, in Amiens. He found him about midnight. ‘The boy had been crying his eyes out,’ wrote Bean, ‘I could see that.’ Angus said he was thinking of his father: ‘I’m afraid of how it will affect him when he hears it.’67

  Bean attended Leo’s funeral, along with a few friends, a French labourer, and a peasant woman. The cemetery sat well back from the front line, among the wheat fields and rolling hills. As Bean watched Leo’s rough, wooden coffin being lowered into a freshly dug grave, feelings of doubt plagued him. ‘I couldn’t help wondering whether it was worth it,’ he later wrote in his diary, ‘whether there is anything gained in this war that justifies such sacrifices. Leo would not have doubted it … nor for one moment would he have questioned it. But I don’t feel so sure of it.’ Bean wanted to create a monument for the Australian people built on the exploits of the Anzacs, but the corrosive war leeched away at its foundation stones.

  On 22 August, Legge’s 2nd Division had relieved Hooky’s 1st Division, which had suffered 2650 casualties in its second stunt. The Official History admitted that the task confronting the Australians had reached the stage where further progress was impossible.68 Officers such as Iven Mackay doubted whether further gains could be achieved through ‘tiddly-winking pushing and grabbing parts of trenches’.69 Gough’s ambitious plan of thrusting past the farm toward Thiepval now seemed doubtful.

  The worn-out 1st Division troops, no doubt indifferent to Gough’s grand plans, came out of the firing line in ‘dribs and drabs’, and after some rest marched to a railhead near Doullens.70 On 27 August, they began their long journey to Ypres in dirty but familiar cattle trucks labelled ‘40 hommes, 8 chevaux’.71 Donovan Joynt reflected on what his battalion had endured. Although proud that the Australian divisions were among the few to reach their objectives, he still felt that Haig and Gough had mishandled them and had repeated the mistakes of the Boer and Crimean wars. He then recalled the comments of British general Sir Ian Hamilton while inspecting Australian troops in 1912: ‘It would take three Australians to equal one continental soldier.’ Although undoubtedly filled with sadness, Joynt seemed proud that his comrades had forged an identity for the nation and, in doing so, had proved the general wrong.72

  After travelling through landscape that showed little evidence of conflict, the troops detrained at Poperinghe, a village about eight miles west of Ypres. The quietness of this sector, coupled with the crisp autumn mornings, was a wonderful tonic for the troops. Shattered battalions would be gradually replenished, although Iven Mackay warned that, with the merest trickle of reinforcements coming in, it would be a slow process that would consume the remaining months of 1916.73

  While the 1st Division troops rested, those of the 2nd Division would have justifiably wondered whether they would survive their second stunt — particularly as they had suffered a 50 per cent casualty rate in their first, and the task confronting them was deemed impossible.

  chapter fifteen

  Battering Ram

  ‘For Christ’s sake write a book on the life of an infantryman, and by doing so you will quickly prevent these shocking tragedies.’

  — Private Arthur Thomas’s diary

  Bean, who became more scathing in his diary with each failure, was unsurprised by the 1st Division’s lack of success on 18 and 21 August. How could a division in its second stunt be expected to perform as well as it did in its first, he argued, particularly as its depleted ranks had only been 30 per cent refilled, with the remaining 20 per cent still to be filled? A frustrated Bean believed that the Australian Imperial Force had ‘broken itself’ in repeated battering attacks on Pozières and now Mouquet Farm, but had received no credit for it from British officers and the censors because of petty jealousies. Bean confined his bleak assessment to his diary, while outwardly he fulfilled
his official obligations unstintingly.1

  The normally restrained Official History described the progress achieved in the 1st Division’s two attacks as ‘trifling’.2 The division’s lack of success was, perhaps, also due to the Germans reorganising their defences. ‘We know exactly what we have to do,’ wrote one of the farm’s defenders, Lieutenant Tschoeltsch. ‘We only have to hold our position and not be sent pillar to post.’3

  Tschoeltsch had directed his men to rest on their haunches and focus entirely on blunting the repeated attacks. The next day, 23 August, First German Army commander Fritz von Below formalised this local arrangement by abandoning his standing order that every inch of ground lost must be immediately recaptured. Von Below’s directive read:

  The battle that is now in progress consumes, in defence alone, so many troops that I am forced to issue orders that methodical counter-attacks, beyond minor ones of a purely local nature, are not to be carried except by my orders.4

  The 2nd Division, which would undoubtedly suffer the consequences of the Germans’ change in tactics, would now attempt to complete a task that the Official History admitted had reached the point of impossibility — the weakened battalions would grind through the mud into a narrowing salient while the German artillery inflicted maximum casualties. Gough would once again prod Legge for premature action on a battlefield that the War Committee in London conceded had come to a ‘temporary standstill’.5