by Will Davies
The pages screamed a graphic, brutal yet unexpectedly humorous Australian story to me. The book was a lost treasure: a soldier's story that only one who had been through the trenches – seen the mud and misery and smelt the gas and the stench of death – could write. In places I found it nearly too frightening to read, too horrendous and graphic – then, just as quickly, it would become a tale of larrikinism and mateship, inspirational bravery and typical Australian humour.
From the moment you take up the story of Nulla and his mates as they prepare to embark for Europe, you are thrust into the adventure, into their larrikin pranks and juvenile behaviour – and then, when they reach the frontline, into their fear and their sadness and the horror of their war. There is no letting up and you are often forced to put the book down, take a deep breath and consider the moment, even pinch yourself to end what seems like a bad dream but is, in fact, historically accurate.
For the next 30 months, the violence of the trenches swirls about Nulla and his diminishing band of mates. He tells of the carnage and death, the mud and the suffering, as the 'butcher's picnic' grinds his unit into the slime and mud of war.
Nulla's war continues until the armistice, in November 1918. He is wounded a number of times and sees his mates cut from the ranks, but is rarely away from the dangers of the front. He spends much of his time in the perilous role of a runner, his duty to find the very frontlines in the black of night, under shellfire or during enemy raids, to deliver messages or lead new troops in for their stint in the line.
Private Lynch returned to Australia in 1919, trained to become a teacher and worked in remote country schools in southern New South Wales. He married in 1922 and, in the late 1920s and into the 1930s, as the worst of the Depression bit, he wrote Somme Mud, hoping that he could have it published to boost his income.
There is no evidence Lynch kept a diary during the war and no one in the family recalls him referring to one when he was writing the manuscript. But he almost certainly would have had a copy of the battalion history at hand during his writing in order to get the precise details he might not have known or to jog his memory on dates, places and casualties. Each battalion was required to keep an official war diary during active service. Entries were made daily at battalion headquarters, noting the unit's location, the events of the day, casualties, intelligence summaries, orders, reports and messages; and these were often accompanied by photographs, sketches and maps. After the war, these diaries were used to compile the official battalion history, which was then sold to the men as a reminder of their war service. The history of Lynch's 45th Battalion (The Chronicle of the 45th Battalion AIF ) was written by Major Lee and published first in late 1924. It would have been beside Lynch when writing the first draft of his book.
Though Lynch claimed that the narrator, Nulla, was based on a friend of his, it is easy to imagine that Somme Mud could be a memoir, or at least close to it. I have spent a considerable amount of time comparing the events in Somme Mud with the battalion history and the army's personal records of Private Lynch, and from there comparing Edward Lynch's life with that of Nulla's. There is very little to tell them apart.
As the battalion diaries focused on a unit's overall operations, they rarely mentioned individual soldiers by name and a soldier's personal records did not include day-to-day activities, so it is impossible to know for sure how closely Nulla's experiences follow Lynch's own. Yet I have found a few places in the book where it is clear that Lynch chose a divergent path for his character Nulla, perhaps to try to convince himself and the reader he was not in fact Nulla or perhaps to include in his story, battles and incidents that he knew about but was not involved in. These mostly had to do with the type and timing of wounds sustained in battle. When it came to recounting his battalion's military operations and movements, though, he stuck faithfully to historical fact.
He completed the chapters in pencil in 20 school exercise books, hoping to get the manuscript published, but the public did not want to be reminded of the Great War and he could not find a publisher. While some excerpts were printed in the RSL's magazine, Reveille, the book would not be published in his lifetime.
When Lynch's account of the war finally made its way onto bookshelves after nearly 70 years, it became an instant success, telling as it does the very personal story of the men of the First AIF in France and Belgium. Many readers craved to know more of the background to Nulla's story and his small place in a complex war, so I embarked on this contextual history for the lay reader to explain the battles, the ebb and flow of the war. In the process, I have tried to join the dots and explain what was going on: the campaigns and offensives, the weapons and equipment, the food, the diseases and the minutiae of war.
For all of us, the First World War is today represented in stark black and white photos, so I thought it would be interesting for the reader to see these same places as they are today – and in colour. My travels took me to many of the places Private Lynch would have been: to battlefields and trench lines, to rest areas and camps, to the roads he trod and the sights he may well have seen. For the battlefield visitor today, these are an interesting diversion.
In writing this book, I have tried to pay my respects to that Unknown Soldier who pricked my conscience all those years ago and inspired me to find out about the Australian men who sacrificed their youth to the First World War. Little did I know then that my journey would lead me to Private Edward Lynch and one of this country's great and historically significant books. That I played a part in giving Lynch a voice so many years after his death is one of the proudest achievements of my career.
I am just sorry I never had the chance to shake his hand.
ONE
Goodbye
Sydney Town,
Goodbye
On 5 April 1916, Edward Lynch presented himself to the Recruiting Officer at the Depot Camp, Bathurst, New South Wales. Because he was under 21, he needed a parent's permission to join up, so he came bearing an Application to Enlist signed by his father.
Lynch was born in 1897 at Bourke, a remote town in far northwestern New South Wales, but at the time of his enlistment he was living with his family in Perthville, which was then a village just out of Bathurst but today is a suburb of that large regional city. Family meant his father, Edward, his mother, Laura, and five siblings. Edward was the eldest of the six Lynch children and was followed by William, Kevin, Ella, Veronica and Joan. Neither of his brothers joined him in the AIF, but they served in the Second World War. His three sisters all became nuns.
We know from his army personal service records that Lynch was a small man, 5 feet 4 inches in the old scale (1.6 metres) and weighing 9 stone 9 pounds (61 kilograms). His complexion was fair, his eyes hazel and his hair brown. A Roman Catholic, he attended mass regularly. His 'trade or calling' was given as 'student', a rare listing amidst the scores of farmers, labourers, dairymen and station hands signing up at Bathurst. He was 18 years and 8 months old – some would say still a child. Like so many young Australians at the time, called to the colours in defence of the Empire, he had led a sheltered life in rural Australia, had travelled little and never ventured out of his country.
After enlisting at Bathurst, Lynch went to Sydney by train and was sent to the Liverpool training camp. There, he received basic weapons training and instruction in military procedure. At Liverpool, he was allocated to the fourth reinforcement to the 45th Battalion, made up of 150 men and two officers. All the battalions were state-based and were often competitive with each other.
Training was traditional and tough: parade-ground drill, route marches and poor-quality, basic army food. But life in Australia was tough in those years and a young recruit would usually have been strong and physically fit for the training ahead. This would especially have been the case for country boys, for whom riding, heavy manual work and shooting would have been the norm. Edward Lynch, coming from rural New South Wales, would have been a typical strong young recruit.
It was now 20
months since war had been declared and the first men had swarmed around the recruiting tables of Australia. Then, army regulations required a soldier to be at least 5 feet 6 inches (168 centimetres) tall, have a 34-inch (86-centimetre) chest, and be aged between 18 and 35. With so many men offering to enlist, the army could be very selective and rejected men even for having bad teeth. In the first year, they turned away about a third of all men who volunteered for service.
However, by mid-1916 and before Edward Lynch signed up, the minimum height requirement had dropped to 5 feet 2 inches (157 centimetres) and men up to the age of 45 could enlist. Lynch made it into the army by 2 inches in height; and a quick glance at the records of men in his reinforcement shows that he was not alone in falling short of the original 5 feet 6 inches standard. In April 1917, the army would so desperately need men to fill the ranks that they would lower the height restriction again, to 5 feet (152 centimetres).
While at Liverpool training camp, Edward Lynch was issued with his uniform, basic equipment and webbing. The woollen khaki AIF battledress was drab and baggy, designed to be functional and serviceable in war. There was no colour – except the small identifying unit colour patches worn on each shoulder – and there were no shiny buttons and braid. Four large pockets on the front of the tunic distinguished the Australian battledress from all others, as did the rising sun badges on the collar and the brass badges reading 'Australia' on the shoulders. Over their breeches and good-quality Australian-made leather boots they wore puttees – long strips of cloth wound around their legs from ankle to knee.
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the AIF uniform was the slouch hat, turned up on the left side, on which it bore the rising sun. It too was designed for fighting, not parade-ground smartness and, as a result, the AIF's battledress appeared to other Allied troops as untidy, even slovenly, further adding to the Australian soldiers' reputation for being undisciplined and sloppy. Officers in the British army provided much work for the tailors of Savile Row but, in contrast, Australian officers drew their uniforms from the same Q-stores as the men, thus eliminating any obvious difference in appearance and apparent smartness between the ranks.
Another thing that differentiated the Australian troops from the British was their rate of pay. A soldier in the AIF was paid five shillings a day for active service, plus one shilling a day deferred pay he would be entitled to on discharge. This was based on the average worker's pay at the time of six shillings a day, minus something for rations and lodging, and was the highest pay for any army at the time. Even a citizen soldier in the militia in Australia was paid four shillings a day. But a British soldier on active service received one shilling a day, which increased later in the war, though only to three shillings a day. For officers, the situation was reversed. Australian officers were paid less than their equivalents in the British army, and the higher the rank, the greater the disparity.
By the time Lynch enlisted in April 1916, well into the war, the army was able to train, equip, inoculate and ship new men to the front in only three months. This required capable officers who understood the special challenges of handling men in a peculiarly Australian way, as most recruits had never been ordered around or strictly disciplined. Perhaps understandably, the British feared at the outbreak of the war that Australian troops would be so lacking in discipline and organisation that they would be ineffective and at best form reserve units or be kept to the rear of the fighting. But the landing and subsequent battles at Gallipoli in 1915, which ended in a successful evacuation but dismal withdrawal, put paid to any concerns they had. In the eight months of the Dardanelles campaign, the Australian Imperial Force, now known as the Anzacs, fought valiantly and suffered nearly 27,000 casualties, of which 8,709 died and another 18,000 were wounded or captured. Afterwards, the British General Sir Ian Hamilton, commander-in-chief at Gallipoli, wrote, 'Before the war, who had ever heard of Anzac? Hereafter, who shall ever forget it?'1
Despite this recently forged reputation of heroism in Gallipoli, many Australians went into the army thinking it was much like any other job and viewed their officer as simply a boss who, rather than issuing orders, should respectfully and politely ask that something be done. Soldiers had even conducted major strikes and marches in early 1916, much as they would in a normal job, to secure better camp conditions.
The relatively casualty-free period for the AIF as they regrouped in Egypt came to a devastating end with their introduction to the Western Front in July 1916, the month before Lynch was shipped over. On the front, the AIF were to endure horrific conditions and sustain casualties on an unprecedented scale. The war for Australia would never be the same again.
On 22 August 1916, Lynch and the other men rose early, were inspected and marched to Liverpool station, from which they went by train to Central station. Few knew that so many of them would never see these streets and their people again.
The tragedy of this chapter is that we know how the story will unfold for these young men, but they are not fearful, not concerned with the future. What Lynch portrays is a soaring euphoria, jubilant crowds lining the streets, laughter, a jumble of happy faces, halfpennies showering down from above, bearing the addresses of adoring young girls. Even then, though, reality does its best to intrude. Pricking Nulla's consciousness are the few 'silent women in black, mute testimony to what has befallen others who have marched before' and then, at the wharf, the mothers and wives who 'couldn't stand the pretence any longer' and have to be taken away to the back of the crowd. The men are a 'happy-go-lucky, carefree lot', oblivious to these omens of how their lives are about to change.
Unlike the wives and mothers of the first men to sail in October 1914, these women knew of the weekly casualty lists, the official telegrams and ominous names such as Lone Pine, Quinn's Post, Fromelles and Pozières. In the dark days of July and August 1916, when the AIF was in a desperate fight to take Mouquet Farm, the Australians suffered 23,000 casualties in just six weeks. When the slaughter of the 5th Division at Fromelles is included, the total is 28,000.
In Somme Mud, Nulla's reinforcement is made up of 250 men and two officers, but in reality Lynch's reinforcement as taken from the Embarkation Roll comprised 150 men plus two officers. Nevertheless, Lynch's experience would have been like Nulla's, on a rowdy ship crowded not only with men from their own reinforcement, but those going to bolster other battalions at the front. Their ship, the HMAT Wiltshire, designated throughout her service during the war as ship number A18, departed from Dalgety's Wharf at the old shipping hub of Millers Point, whose jetties and warehouses have in recent years given way to a new development of shops and businesses. The Wiltshire was a steamship that had been contracted by the government for transporting soldiers, and had been part of the original Anzac convoy that assembled at Albany, Western Australia, to take the first troops to Egypt in October–November 1914. Since then, the ship had been on the Australia–UK run, transporting fresh reinforcements and bringing back the wounded, maimed, those dishonourably discharged and the venereal disease patients. The Wiltshire was to remain in service until December 1917.
To run your finger down the list of men who embarked from Sydney with Edward Lynch makes for interesting reading. Most of the men were young, 18 to 30 years old, though some who gave their age as 18 may well have been even younger, a common occurrence during the First World War. From the Embarkation Roll we know that the oldest man was 45 but there were only eight men over 40. They were mostly single – just 22 out of 150 men were married, and there was one widower. Only three men had what we would today term a profession: a sugar chemist, a schoolteacher and an engineer. Most were either unskilled or worked at a trade, though some of their trades no longer exist today, such as coach driver, horse breaker, carter and coal lumper, blacksmith, trapper and wheelwright.
Their shared ancestry was the British Empire, with their next of kin hailing, if not from Australia, then from England, Scotland, South Africa, New Zealand, Norfolk Island or Guernsey in the Channel Isla
nds. Most were Church of England; about one-third were, like Lynch, Roman Catholic; plus there was a smattering of Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists, one Congregationalist and one Church of Scotland. Everyone listed a religion – no one declared themselves agnostic or atheist. At that time it would have been considered inappropriate for a soldier – fighting for God, King and flag – to do so. But if the irreverent attitudes that Lynch describes in Somme Mud are anything to go by, it seems that some of the men of the 45th were religious more in name than in practice. Twenty-two men had, like Lynch, been in the Citizen Forces and so had some previous military experience before they trained together at Liverpool. Eight other men in the reinforcement came from the 41st Infantry, which Lynch had served in.
The 45th Battalion that Private Lynch and his mates were going over to join had been formed only six months before, on 2 March 1916, as part of the expansion and reorganisation of the AIF taking place at their old base camps in Egypt. With tens of thousands of reinforcements on their way to bolster the war effort, there were not enough battalions to absorb all the new recruits, and so 16 battalions that had seen action at Gallipoli were each split, forming an additional 16 battalions. Recruits from Australia would bring these split battalions up to a full complement of men. Creating new battalions this way ensured there would be a mix of experienced men, in this case from the Dardanelles campaign, and new recruits.