Despite the rain, the Australians continued preparations for their 29 August attack. At 11.00 p.m. on 29 August, the 13th and 16th battalions would advance on a 1200-yard frontage in the hope of capturing the farm and the dugouts and strongpoints surrounding it. On the morning of the attack, the 13th Battalion history described the scene confronting the troops: ‘Never has anyone seen a more miserable dawn … From our trenches the outlook was even more foreboding; nothing but twisted, heaped and churned mud.’37
All day, German shells pounded the front line. Ration parties couldn’t get forward, leaving the men with only their wet biscuits and rhubarb jam to eat. Soldiers crawled out of their waterlogged trenches and into muddy craters to avoid the shelling. By dusk, shelling had killed or wounded 90 13th Battalion soldiers. Those wounded had to be dragged through the sucking mud to aid stations.
Some men believed the rain would make the attack impossible. ‘I thought our attack might be countermanded, but at 11.00 o’clock we heard the guns behind us open,’ recorded an observer.38 The attack would proceed, even though many rifles were clogged with mud and wouldn’t fire.
At 11.00 p.m. on 29 August, the troops left their sodden trenches and shell holes with their tunics soaked, boots waterlogged, and weapons plastered with mud. The bombardment crept forward at its usual pace of 50 yards a minute, but the men, caught in the mud, couldn’t keep pace. Guiding lights laid out earlier to direct them toward their objectives had been blown away or buried. Rattling machine-gun fire raked them. Some reached Fabeck Graben, but couldn’t fire their rifles and Lewis guns because of the viscous mud coating them. Mud-encrusted bombs were impossible to throw accurately.39
Major Percy Black, a 38-year-old miner from the Southern Cross goldfields of Western Australia, was among those assigned the impossible task of capturing Mouquet Farm. Somehow, Black and his men managed to break into the farm. They quickly silenced the machine guns, throwing bombs down the entrances of the dugouts to clear them. The Germans responded by hurling the bombs back up the shaft, wounding the Australians who had thrown them down, or shooting at their attackers’ legs. Meanwhile, Captain Ross Harwood of the 16th Battalion had seized Fabeck Graben, east of the farm. His 120-man company fought off repeated counterattacks.40 A report despatched to headquarters prematurely declared that Mouquet Farm had fallen; despite the horrid conditions, the Australians seemed on the cusp of victory. They now had to link up their isolated positions.
Then, a German machine gun opened up from the northern end of the farm. The 50 prisoners that the Australians had captured in the farm had to be released. The battalion history, The Old Sixteenth, said that Germans suddenly swarmed from some dugouts missed in the advance, as well as from the farm’s underground cellars. The besieged Australians fought their way through the Germans and back to their own trenches. One retiring soldier said he tried ‘14 bloody times to scramble out of a crater’ but fell back on his end every time. Afterward, a muddied Ross Harwood fronted the 13th Brigade commander, Bill Glasgow. ‘You went over pretty thin didn’t you,’ Glasgow asked, referring to the weight of troops employed in the attack. ‘Thin as tissue paper,’ replied Harwood.41 The two battalions had lost 459 soldiers in the fight.
The next morning, on 30 August, an aeroplane observer reported to headquarters that the bright-red fizzing flares laid out by the Australians to show the limit of their advance were barely forward of the jumping-off trenches. Another gruelling attack upon the farm had failed.
The 16th Battalion history, keen to protect its reputation, referred to the stunt as a ‘non success’. They attributed this to the fact that the communication trenches were three feet deep in soupy water, and a large proportion of the rifles and Lewis guns were clogged with mud. The 13th Battalion history concluded that such a position should never have been attacked in ‘nibbles’ of a few exhausted men.42
Brand’s 4th Brigade operations report told a similar story, indicating that only 5 per cent of available rifles and light machine guns could be fired during the attack. Furthermore, the supporting artillery shelled up to 200 yards to the rear of the jumping-off trenches, rooting up all vital telephone wires, demolishing communication trenches, and inflicting untold casualties. By the time the heavies redirected their fire, they had expended their allocation of shells.
Ted Rule, two miles back from the front line, remembered one officer seconded to Brand’s 16th Battalion returning the morning after the attack without his helmet and puttees, and covered in mud.43 It seemed a fitting metaphor for the failed attack.
White mulled over the results of the attack. Irrespective of the rain, he thought too much had been asked of the battalions, which attacked on a frontage that a month earlier a whole division would have covered. Referring to his earlier conversation with Cox about the optimal deployment of forces, White confided to Bean: ‘I wish I had been strong and asked for it to be done by a whole brigade.’44 Bean concurred, writing that the army, which suffered from ‘a poverty of brains’, continually wasted opportunities to seize objectives like Mouquet Farm or Courcelette because of its insistence on attacking with too few troops. Bean maintained that to take a position that the Germans considered as important as the farm, one needed men to be ‘swarming over it after the attack, like flies’. Bean’s next diary entry revealed his disdain for Gough’s tactics: ‘It is all very well for army generals to sit with their maps and talk about attacking with patrols.’ He believed Gough’s theory was flawed and had never been proved against tough troops.
The battered battalions were relieved the next day. Mouquet Farm would not fall. ‘A very wet, cold, muddy and weary lot were the 13th,’ observed the battalion history, as its soldiers quietly trudged to the rear in the drizzle. The three miles to battalion headquarters took them over five hours to cover.
The consequences of the battle radiated out from Mouquet Farm to Australian homes. On 29 August — the day that Cox’s 4th Division bogged itself in the mud trying to seize the farm — Reverend John Raws, the father of Goldy and Alec, celebrated his 39th wedding anniversary. In the evening, he received a telegram explaining that Goldy had been missing since 28 July. It seemed that Alec’s letters explaining his brother’s disappearance hadn’t yet reached the Raws family. John telephoned Lennon with the news and then visited the Red Cross to see if they had any information on Goldy. John surely felt the sinking dread that every parent must feel upon hearing the news that their child’s whereabouts are unknown. His treasured memories of Goldy, such as summer holidays at Port Elliot, his son’s first days at Prince Alfred College, and their final parting near the Buckingham Arms, must have flooded back to him. Would he ever discover Goldy’s fate?
Lennon Raws expected further bad news. ‘When we received word about Goldy I felt that Alec had gone too, otherwise he would have been sure to have sent a cable to his parents,’ read his diary notes.
Almost a month later, while John Raws prepared for a Baptist Union meeting, his phone rang: ‘I had a telephone message from the military that Alec was killed in action, August 23rd.’ The news shocked John. He cancelled his meeting and immediately notified family and friends. According to his diary, letters of sympathy poured in all of that day and the next.
Lennon was in his office when a visibly upset colleague came in: ‘I have some bad news. Your brother’s gone.’ Stunned, Lennon remembered asking him to leave the room. ‘The thought of what it meant to mother and father and a great love and pity for the two boys, swallowed up so suddenly in the black gulf of war, overwhelmed me and I burst into tears,’ he confessed in his diary.
Lennon immediately travelled to Adelaide to comfort his parents. His father met him at the station. He noted: ‘He was still under shock, but wonderfully brave although occasionally he would break down. Mother had to keep calm to help him, but we sorrowed even more for her because she could not find relief in tears.’ Lennon stayed until Tuesday. ‘It was one of those beautifully s
acred times which come through sorrow,’ he recorded. ‘Helen [Goldy’s, Alec’s, and Lennon’s sister] was over as well and we were united for the time being by a common bond which is too often broken by the friction of ordinary life.’ 45
The family’s despair over Alec’s death would deepen after his grave, marked at the foot of a trench near the Pozières cemetery, was lost in the heavy fighting in 1918. His body, if later recovered, was never identified. If his remains were reburied in a grave, it would have had the simple inscription of ‘A soldier known unto God’. His story was one of thousands similar, as many families had no site at which to mourn their loved ones, who had become lost amid the soil and mud of the Somme.
The 4th Division troops would attack the ruins of Mouquet Farm one last time on 3 September 1916. Over the last few weeks, I Anzac Corps had expended thousands of men to advance a few hundred yards toward the ruined farm. Whatever the outcome of the last battle, the farm had already seared itself indelibly upon the psyche of many soldiers. Equally, the ubiquitous sight and sickly stench of the dead would never leave them. They could not avoid fixing their eyes on the dead, as they seemed to rest in every shell hole, trench, crater, and sap; they were churned through every square yard of earth. Each shapeless body was someone’s brother, son, husband, or father. It seemed an impossible task to recover and identify the remains scattered about the battlefield.
In the midst of battle, very little could be done about the dead. In early August, Foxcroft had written in a letter to his parents that those killed were left where they fell, and their pockets were not even checked nor discs even looked at. He wrote:
You are known as dead by being missing at the assembly after coming out of the trenches … If they are buried they are only to be rotted up by shells again and there is no time to do it until they got the Huns back and the cleaning up party buries the dead and picks up all the material off the field.46
Bean also observed that little could be done when he visited 10th Battalion headquarters in mid-August. He shuddered when he observed the living sleeping just near the waxen dead. ‘One is apt to think it is callous of the battalion to leave these men lying about,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘but the living are worn out [and] the dead are dead.’47
The corps’ main priority in the battle area was clearing the dead away from the vital communication trenches so that the flow of troops was unimpeded.48 ‘Armed with shovels we used to follow up the communication trenches,’ remembered Walter Elkington. ‘Whenever we saw a body lying close to the parapets we would jump out of the trench and poke the body, crawling with maggots, into a shell hole and then pile the earth on top.’49 The corps adopted the pragmatic approach that winning battles was the priority, whereas the dead could be properly attended to later.
As the Australians pushed the Germans back in late July and August, burial parties under the direction of a chaplain buried the dead quickly, usually in a disused trench or shell crater. It was a vile job: some corpses were bloated with blackened faces; some were skeletons picked clean by fattened rats; others were merely bits and pieces of burnt gristle scattered about the battlefield.50 The smell of decaying flesh would have permeated the men’s clothes and skin. Naturally, the soldiers’ effort to identify corpses and mark their graves clearly was probably secondary to the need to complete their task expediently. Charles Bean observed one fatigue party burying 24 men along Chalk Pit Road. They simply tossed them into the nearest shell hole and covered them up. ‘No time to get identity discs — they are generally rotted away. So the poor chaps go down as “missing”,’ he observed in his diary. 51
Often, the burial parties bound the corpse’s hands with signal wire, as if in prayer; wrapped them tightly in blankets; and then lowered them into the burial pits. After filling the pit, the fatigue party bowed their heads and pressed their hats against their chest while the padre said a quick prayer. Then it was on to the next batch.52
From August, the corps assigned 400 men to regular fatigues to bury the dead, but it made little impact upon the massive problem. When reports reached General Gough that the dead lay thickly about the approaches to Pozières, he implored that more resources be devoted to burying them so that the morale of the men would not be affected. Birdie despatched his chief medical officer, Colonel Courtenay Manifold, to investigate. Manifold, apparently shocked by what he saw, could see no easy solution. He reported that it was simply a question of military expediency as to whether the dead should be allowed to lie unburied or more lives should be risked by attempting to bury them.53
Away from the dangers of the front line, soldiers had more time to collect dead men’s personal effects. ‘Had a look over the field and got a few pay books from the dead,’ explained Rollie Touzel, ‘Handed them in so they could tell what happened to the owners.’54 Sometimes, soldiers, such as Private Harold Hinckfuss of the 26th Battalion, went beyond this perfunctory duty. Hinckfuss came across a dead British soldier lying on his back; he knelt down to have a look at the prayer book protruding from the pocket. ‘Inside was a name and address. I decided to take it and send it to the person,’ Hinckfuss recorded in his autobiography. He posted it to England and later received a letter of thanks from a grateful relative.55
Ted Rule vividly recalled burying three men from his section in mid-August, including his good mate Jack Pearce, a labourer from Trawalla, Victoria. Before burying Pearce, Ted opened his tunic at the throat to get his identity disc, but it wasn’t there. Instead of being on a piece of string about his neck, it was in his pocket. ‘The thought of putting my hand into his pocket was repulsive,’ wrote Rule in his memoirs. ‘He was my pal, and somehow it was different; his half opened mouth and dulled eyes seemed to mock me.’56
Rule made sure his mate received a decent burial. ‘One of the lads made a cross and put it over the grave … Lieutenant Dean took a photograph of it and intended sending it to their mothers,’ he recalled. Tragically, Lieutenant Archibald Dean died days later, and the photographs and condolence letters were never sent. ‘I know Jack Pearce’s mother never knew what happened to him,’ noted Rule, ‘for I afterwards saw a letter that General Birdwood wrote to our C.O. inquiring to his fate.’ It is not recorded how Mrs Helen Elliott, the widowed mother of Sergeant Jack Pearce, found out about his death. What is known is that Jack’s grave was lost in the fighting over the next two years. Helen’s ensuing years would have been a struggle without Jack, who was her sole support.57
While Anzacs such as Rule would endeavour to provide a decent burial to a mate, German corpses received little attention. Private Richard Walmsley of the 7th Battalion wrote in his diary that to avoid the smell of the dead Germans, they simply covered them over with a few shovel loads of soil.58 After the war, some French farmers apparently preferred once again to shovel dirt over unearthed German bodies — easily identified by their grey uniforms — rather than complete the onerous paperwork that accompanied such discoveries.
While soldiers and their families grappled with the Somme’s tragic outcomes, troops of the 4th Division prepared to play out the last act in the fight for Mouquet Farm. How many more men would be expended in the next few days to capture the ruined farm? Sergeant Leslie Parsons of the 51st Battalion captured the prevailing mood of those Australians soldiers preparing for the assault, writing in a letter home: ‘I would sooner be on Gallipoli for another six months than spend a week more … in the Big Push.’59
Map 6. 4th Division’s Advance on Mouquet Farm
chapter sixteen
Graveyard or Glory
‘There is only one decisive victory: the last.’
— Carl von Clausewitz, military theorist
There was time for one last Australian offensive at Mouquet Farm before the Canadian Corps relieved the Australians and they were transferred north to Ypres. Canadian engineers were already busy erecting huts at Contay Château in anticipation of the changeover. John Treloar ob
served the ‘happy’ Canadians playing drums and blowing bugles as they marched toward the reserve areas, writing in his diary: ‘I wonder what they will think after a few days around Pozières.’1 Like the Australians before them, little did the Canadians, who were entering the Somme battle for the first time, know what horror lay in store for them.
It was planned that on 3 September Brigadier-General Bill Glasgow’s 13th Brigade would attack the farm at dawn with three ‘strong’ battalions: the 51st (Western Australia), 52nd (Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia), and 49th (Queensland). Although the attack was less than brigade-strength (four battalions), as White had previously sought, the facts that the frontage was limited to 1250 yards and the battalions’ assembly trenches would be dug by other troops meant that the proposed force should prove adequate to break into and secure the farm.2 The battalions’ first objective was to storm and capture Fabeck Graben Trench — which, it was hoped, would block German reinforcements sweeping down into the farm — and then peel off to secure the farm.
On the same day the Australians attacked Mouquet Farm, Gough’s Reserve Army would storm Thiepval from three directions. Further south, Rawlinson’s Fourth Army and the French Sixth Army would attack Guillemont and Combles at noon.
Opinion was divided on the looming attack. Some soldiers felt that capturing the farm’s ruins would be of poor consolation for the awful losses they had already suffered. Others believed that too much had been sacrificed to leave the battle for the farm undecided. General Cox, the last remaining Anzac divisional commander on the Somme, was desperate for the attack to be successful. He sent a message to his troops urging them to firmly hold any ground captured: ‘The importance of holding on … cannot be underestimated,’ read Cox’s circular.3 One of his officers, Captain Charles Dawkins of the 51st Battalion, was as focused on surviving the attack, writing: ‘God, I hope it’s a success and I come through all right.’4 Lieutenant Len Wadsley of the 52nd Battalion simply wrote of the fighting: ‘We are all thoroughly sick of it.’5 Wadsley possibly wondered why, after six failed attempts upon Mouquet Farm, the seventh attempt would be any different. Some time earlier, Wadsley had written a letter home explaining that he was preparing to fight in a fairly large offensive which ‘may be the end of a good many of us and I may be one of the number … I leave myself in the hands of the Almighty and trust him absolutely’. Wadsley had handed the letter to a mate. His instructions were, ‘Post it for me if I do not come back.’
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