by Will Davies
In response to the air-bursting shrapnel, Nulla and his mates change tactics. They run an erratic, zigzag course and spread out to make the gunners' task more difficult and head towards some old trenches. By doing this, only one life is risked with each shell, rather than three. The Germans target first one man, then another. At the sound of an incoming shell, the targeted man flings himself to the ground, hoping the explosion will not kill him outright and that he can get low enough to the ground to avoid the flying shrapnel balls and shards of metal from the exploding shell. The other two slacken their pace until they know the man is not wounded and can get up and run on. These small acts of bravery in very dangerous conditions were common among the men in the line. A fellow Australian rarely left a wounded man behind, even if his own life was endangered.
Stories like this abound, such as that of Corporal Fred Nicholson, a Gallipoli veteran and an orchardist from Hobart. He was one of a party of 14 men of the 12th Battalion bringing forward rations when his group crossed their own frontline and found themselves on the enemy parapet. Dropping the rations, they ran back, but two men were killed and two fell wounded. Corporal Nicholson went back for one of the wounded, but was killed himself in his selfless attempt to save a mate. His grave is at Bulls Road Military Cemetery, Flers.
Nulla and his mates, though, are lucky. They find their way to the shelter of the old trenches and, from there, back to their battalion on the support line. The purpose of the support line was to provide reinforcements if a German attack on the Australian frontline trenches broke through. The frontline was connected to the support trenches with communications trenches, which zigzagged to make it harder for enemy infantry to fire on them or for enemy aircraft to strafe a line of troops in them. Troops used angles and bends in trenches to build 'blocks', barricades where men could defend the trench while still being afforded some protection.
Reaching the support line, Nulla and his mates' minds are on food and at the end of the trench the cooks have prepared plenty of hot Maconochie rations – a soup-like stew made from canned meat, gravy and small pieces of vegetables such as carrots.
Hot food was very important during the terrible winter of 1916–17, both for the strength of the men and for their morale. Battalion cookhouses were set up as close to the frontline as possible, so hot food could be taken forward in insulated containers to men occupying even the most forward positions, but in many cases the food was cold by the time it got to the men.
It was very difficult to carry containers of food over terrain churned up by shelling or covered in mud, snow or ice and then along narrow, clogged and broken-down muddy trenches. Sometimes it was impossible, in which case the men had to make do with their cold rations. These consisted of canned meat known as 'bully beef ', hard biscuits and possibly cheese or jam. When they could get bacon, it was popular on bread or a biscuit. The Maconochie rations were famous for their tendency to induce severe flatulence and for their disgusting taste, especially when cold.
To wash down these indigestible meals, the men drank tea from a mess tin or dixie. Hot tea was sent to the front in drums, but often it was cold by the time it got there and tasted like the petrol the drum had once held. The tainted brew forced a difficult choice on men: refuse the tea and freeze, or drink the tea and vomit. Bean mentions tea that so reeked of petrol the men dared not light a cigarette for fear of it exploding, so bad was the taste. To compound this, cooks collected ice from shell-holes and boiled it for making tea and for cooking, probably believing that boiling the water would kill any germs, but these shell-holes often contained dead horses and men and other detritus of war, so it was an unhealthy practice that led to disease and infection.
After their breakfast, Nulla and his mates seek a dugout or 'funk hole', an alcove cut in the side of the trench as somewhere to sleep. After a week on the line with virtually no sleep, their respite is a cold, wet, muddy hole only 1.5 metres square. They do their best to make it comfortable – 'arranging the interior decorations' – and even see themselves as fortunate compared to the others because they at least have clean, new blankets. Crude shelters such as this gave men not far from the frontline some protection from the wind and snow and a chance to dry their wet, muddy clothes and sleep.
Before settling down, Dark and Nulla turn their underpants inside out in a futile effort to 'trick the chats', or lice. In his char- acteristic style, Nulla makes light of the lice problem: 'They've had a pretty fair run now, a whole week of undisturbed freedom in which to play and eat us.' [p. 51] But Lynch, like all the men on the Western Front, must have found them nearly intolerable. Lice caused severe itching, which created welts and lacerations, which in turn became infected and sore. Worse, lice caused trench fever, a debilitating flu-like illness contracted when louse faeces entered the bloodstream through a cut in the skin or a louse bite.
With lice a major concern for officers and medical authorities, soon after their arrival in France, the AIF had established divisional baths where men returning from the line could have a hot bath or shower and hand in their clothes and underwear to be disinfected. They were then issued with clean, vermin-free clothing. But visits to the divisional baths were few and far between. The efforts of the men to search for and kill lice in their clothing were a waste of time, but provided amusement during long spells of boredom and inactivity.
Another problem was rats. They grew fat on the bodies of the dead and then ran around through the trenches, over sleeping men, in their endless search for food. Rats spread disease, but there was little the men could do to curb their numbers, for they multiplied quickly and had an endless supply of rubbish and corpses to feed on. A favourite pastime for many men, and something that Nulla does mention, was to skewer a piece of food on the end of a bayonet and wait for a rat. Then, once they were blissfully enjoying their meal, to pull the trigger and send the splattered rat off into no-man's-land.
So the war was not only fought against the Germans. There were many other enemies to consider: the weather, disease, fatigue, poor living conditions, vermin and parasites, poor sanitation and, of course, the terrible Somme mud.
FIVE
In Support
The Germans held much of the high ground on the Somme. This was a major advantage, because it allowed them to more easily observe the Allies' positions. To counter this, the British regularly sent up observation planes and balloons to photograph and map the opposing lines and used the information to plot German artillery positions and subject them to accurate counter-battery fire. Many German guns were put out of action this way. The Germans were well aware of the value of this intelligence, and so were equally active in trying to destroy Allied observation planes and balloons. The British therefore massed fighter aircraft to protect the observers and continue the flow of vital information to Allied High Command. German aircraft, although more numerous, seldom flew deep behind the British front, restricting their activity to strafing the infantry in frontline and support trenches rather than seeking out and directing counter-battery fire onto the Allied gun emplacements.
This is what Nulla and his mates observe from their position in the support line – a British fighter plane protecting an observation plane from a German Taube. It is a kind of frightening entertainment that momentarily shifts their attention away from the messy, muddy ground war onto a different, yet just as deadly, kind of fighting. There is no talking, no joking, amongst the men as they watch the struggle, and as readers we can feel their relief when the Allied pilot sees off the enemy. He sweeps past and waves at the men on the ground, who are calling up and waving to congratulate and perhaps thank him for his efforts – a brief moment of contact between these two diverse but integral fighting forces.
And then, for the men, it is back to their war, a war of long days and nights in the cold mud. Though the winter had slowed down the fighting, there was still plenty of work for soldiers on the Western Front, as there was much infrastructure that needed to be built or repaired before the recommencement o
f hostilities in the northern spring. The lull in active fighting meant High Command could put the men to the urgent tasks of road building, repair and extension of light rail lines, and rebuilding trenches, underground shelters and lines of communication.
Ammunition had to be brought to the line, as did duckboards, to be laid on trench floors or muddy tracks. Nissen bow huts – prefabricated semi-circular steel structures that were designed as an alternative to tents – had to be erected in rear areas. By the end of the war, over 100,000 bow huts and 10,000 hospital huts had been built and these were seen as the leading hut technology.
Brigade camps, where men would rest and train when they were out of the line, also needed to be completed. Engineering units and labour battalions did some of this work, but 'fatigues', parties of men from the fighting battalions who were now in the support lines or rest areas, were also given this kind of work.
Nulla mentions that his platoon is sent out on a fatigue, a 'dangerous trip to Gueudecourt to gather up old iron'. The iron is no doubt to be recycled for use in the war effort: as the conflict drags into its third year, every resource the Allies can get their hands on is valuable. The reason Nulla describes this seemingly innocuous fatigue of picking up scrap metal as 'dangerous' is that the village of Gueudecourt was no more than a kilometre behind the frontline at this time and was being shelled by the Germans at a rate of one shell per minute, day and night. Later in Somme Mud, Nulla surmises that the reason for this intense shelling is that when the Germans retreated north, they left behind a large dump of shells in Gueudecourt and were trying to destroy them before the Allies got them. This may have been one of the many 'furphies' or rumours Lynch heard on the front, but the real aim was to prevent the town being used by the Allies as a billeting or staging area from which operations could be launched.
Nulla and his platoon make it back from their fatigue to the support line, and as the morning breaks they see a small party of men coming along the duckboard track from Delville Wood. When fired upon with shells, the men instinctively run for the shelter of a disabled tank nearby, not knowing what Nulla and his mates know: that the Germans, realising men will do the obvious thing and seek shelter beside it, have the range of this tank accurately. As they hold the high ground south of Bapaume, it is also likely that the Germans can see men moving in this area.
Lynch vividly captures the randomness of the battlefield in a scene where several of the men are killed even though they run from the tank to the support trench, while one man who 'moves slowly, without a duck or a flinch' survives. Rather than rush to the relative safety of the trench like the rest, he stops to bend over one of his fallen mates to remove his personal belongings, no doubt to send home to his family. As shells burst around him, he slowly walks on, unscathed. 'The luck of the game,' Nulla concludes.
So much of the world Nulla finds himself in is random, devoid of reason. All the old certainties of life seem to have gone. One of the men injured on his way from the abandoned tank, who has serious wounds to his head and body, and a smashed arm, somehow survives, while another, with a single finger shot off, dies of shock on his stretcher. Nulla supposes it must all come down to a 'matter of constitution'.
In many instances, men were buried where they fell. Though their grave would have been crudely marked and a record possibly kept of its location, bodies were often turned over in the subsequent shelling of the area, blown apart and lost forever. Others might appear in a trench wall, such as the hand in the previous chapter and the top of a skull as described by Nulla in this chapter. Polished like a billiard ball, someone had written 'The Dome of St Paul's' and beneath it 'drawn a fine fat spider'. The spider, we are told, is 'to keep the flies away'. Typical trench humour, though it did of course disgust some men.
Today, all along the frontline are cemeteries; literally hundreds of them. The condition in which they are kept is remarkable thanks to the meticulous care of the staff of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The row upon row of standard white headstones are such a powerful and sad reminder of the war.
Back in Switch Trench, Nulla has just enough time for some warm bully beef stew when German shells crash along the frontline. Switch Trench had been part of a long German line that was now held by the Allies. Its western end intersected the Albert–Bapaume road above Pozières, just near the windmill, and the eastern end was near Péronne. Although smashed by shellfire, it provided a rear rest area with cookhouses, stores dumps, aid posts and company headquarters. And it was also a favoured target for the German artillery, who knew exactly where the trench-line ran – given they had built it – and had their guns ranged on it to the metre.
Under enemy shelling, the cosy, once protective hollows in the sides of trenches, not a metre below the surface, became a death trap for the Australians. Long sections of trench-line would be blown away and walls would collapse. Men were regularly buried, if not killed outright, by the explosions, flying fragments of metal, or concussion. The desperate calls for shovels or stretcher-bearers or, as Nulla recounts, of 'Dugout blown in!' were a chilling reality for men in this part of the support line. With shells landing randomly, remaining to dig to save a man's life must have taken exceptional courage.
Amidst the terrible shelling, in this chapter Lynch tells one of the most moving stories of mateship in all of Somme Mud. Scotty and Blue, both terribly wounded in the same part of the trench, think not of themselves but of each other. Blue, sodden with blood and 'dragging his shattered legs after him', tries to refuse help, telling the uninjured men to find Scotty. When they find Scotty, he has horrific injuries to his face – 'his top lip is slit clean back from his teeth' and 'blood is pouring from his face and filling his gas respirator bag'– yet he manages to ask after Blue. Throughout Somme Mud we are constantly reminded of the compassion and unselfishness of the diggers. Nulla, understanding these mates' bond, gently reassures Scotty about Blue's condition. '"Yes, got a Blighty. Coupla leg wounds," I lie to him ...' The phrase 'got a Blighty' was widely used at the time, meaning that a man had received a wound not bad enough to kill him but to get him evacuated to Britain.
And indeed, it turns out that despite the horrific appearance of his injuries, the doctors believe Blue will live, though he will lose his left foot. It is a terrible price to pay, but seven of his fellow men have lost their lives. Carnage has now become so commonplace that Nulla and his mates crawl back into their dugout and shiver themselves to sleep.
SIX
Fallen
Comrades
Once again in the support line, probably in Switch and Gap trenches, Nulla is confronted with the violence of war when he is sent out to salvage anything useful that can be recovered from former battlefields now well behind the Allied lines. This war matériel comprised weapons, ammunition, barbed wire, picks and shovels that littered the ground after the extensive fighting in 1916. Places such as Delville Wood, High Wood and the villages of Fricourt and Mametz had been viciously contested, won by the Allies, lost and then re-won.
Nulla's scavenging journey takes him via the Pozières chalk pit. This lay about 1.5 kilometres southeast of Pozières and was behind the German lines before the Somme offensive of July 1916. Once captured by the Allies, the chalk pit became an important storage and depot area, and was where the Australian medium and heavy trench mortars were located. The chalk pit and the road that ran through it were regularly shelled and men passing along it did so as fast as possible. Today the chalk pit is the site of the town's rubbish tip.
Nulla enters 'the back part' of Delville Wood, presumably the southern side, somewhere near where the South African National Memorial is today. The area had been the scene of savage fighting by British troops in early July 1916 and was a killing ground for the South Africans from 15 to 20 July 1916. It would have been a churned-up wasteland of shattered trees and abandoned military equipment as far as the eye could see, as in the typical black-and-white battlefield photographs we all know from the First World War. From the outskirts
of Albert nearly to Bapaume, a distance of 19 kilometres, the landscape was totally devastated from the fighting that had raged for five months.
In the wood, Nulla comes upon a scene of slaughter and death, the undisturbed aftermath of a battle fought months before. He describes the slaughter of the men from both sides in what is a very detailed and rare depiction of the aftermath of battle and tells a frightful story of the life and death struggle that went on.
Just outside the wood, we come to a well-constructed trench. In it there's a British soldier to every yard, killed on the parapet in trying to hop-off. Twenty yards in front, a row of dead Tommies in perfect line as if on parade; NCOs in position and a half-dozen paces ahead, their platoon officer, a rusty revolver in one outstretched hand, his whistle still clasped in the other, mowed down by machine-guns. [p. 61]
The violence of trench warfare is captured graphically, but Nulla recollects with a clarity and observation unique in the writings of the First World War:
In a wide part of the trench we find a big Tommy sergeant. Across him are sprawled two Fritz and their bayonets are driven through his body. No less than seven Fritz lie nearby with their necks horribly gashed, whilst one has been opened from his shoulder halfway down his chest. Between the sergeant and the side of the trench is an enemy officer whose steel helmet, head and face are cleft by a Fritz trench-spade, the blade of which is still in the opened head, whilst the broken handle lies near the British sergeant. [p. 62]