In the Footsteps of Private Lynch

by Will Davies

  As we know from his personal record, Lynch did not experience first-hand the action he wrote about, but was already in England recovering from his wounds. It is fascinating to see how he skilfully translated the 45th Battalion history into Nulla's unique and characteristic voice. In the battalion history we read:

  Active patrolling was carried out and in one patrol ... all the members were wounded, but managed to get back to our lines. Three prisoners were captured by a patrol under Sgt Payne and another patrol ... captured two Germans ... 2

  In Somme Mud, we read:

  Suddenly rifles crash in front. An enemy machine-gun is spluttering savagely in the darkness. We grab our rifles and stand to anxiously. Gradually the racket quietens down. Our first patrol is out and back again. Word comes along that our patrol almost walked into an enemy post and were fired upon. The patrol had run for it and got back in, but every man was wounded ... [pp. 181–182]

  And soon after:

  Night drags slowly on. We hear that a patrol has captured three Fritz. An hour or so later word comes through that another patrol has landed two more prisoners. The boys are doing good work tonight. [p. 182]

  The attack by the 2nd Division on 9 October failed, so on 12 October the Australian 47th and 48th battalions, in conjunction with the 3rd Division, attacked the Germans in the village of Passchendaele, on top of the Passchendaele Ridge. Carrying parties were sent from the 45th Battalion to take up rifle ammunition for the attack. Readers of Somme Mud see the action from the point of view of Nulla, who is working as a runner, delivering messages between his frontline position and the battalion headquarters.

  The men involved in the attack faced heavy fire, and in 'Passing it on at Passchendaele', very soon we see the wounded streaming back, toppling into the shallow post where Nulla is awaiting further orders. These men carry smashed arms; they limp back with bloodshot eyes and, as Nulla says, 'tortured faces'. He joins with other able-bodied men to bind up the wounds, noting, 'Our teeth and lips are brown with iodine stains from biting through the tops of iodine bottles' [p. 185]. Word comes through that the first and then the second objective for the attack have been taken, as captured Germans stream back, forced to carry Australian wounded but glad to be out of the fight.

  With another runner, Nulla is sent to deliver a message to the rear, when they are caught in a terrific barrage. Blown off his feet by a shell burst, he finds himself in a trench, lying awkwardly on the hard wooden duckboards and in great pain. Given that Lynch himself sustained a serious gunshot wound to the foot, there is little doubt that his account of Nulla's experiences authentically reflects his personal experience. Indeed, what he describes is typical of many thousands of men wounded in the First World War.

  Nulla is quickly helped, given water and assisted by the stretcher-bearers who come to his aid. They find it hard, however, to cut his laces and get his boot off until they realise he has used insulated telephone wire for bootlaces. With his boot off, they dress the wound and bandage it up. A stretcher cannot be used in the narrow trench, so they put him on the back of a strong stretcher-bearer to take him to the rear.

  With shells exploding all around him, he is carried along, his mangled foot painfully banging against the side of the trench. At a relay station he is transferred to a stretcher and is subjected to a terrifying journey, held aloft, exposed as bullets whistle past. When the stretcher party is bombed by a German plane, Nulla manages to get off the stretcher and run for cover until the plane passes. The stretcher-bearers then carry him through the night and place him in a motor ambulance. Though it is a more comfortable ride with a mattress and blankets, the corrugations of the log roads increased wounded men's pain and suffering. And being in a clearly marked Red Cross vehicle did not guarantee protection. Ambulances came to grief, breaking through the corduroy roads or skidding into the mud and tipping over – or, as in Nulla's case, driving through enemy shelling.

  Nulla arrives at a large Casualty Clearing Station. The doctors at Regimental Aid Posts and battalion headquarters could only provide basic medical help, such as stopping bleeding and ensuring wounds were sterilised and bandaged. At the Casualty Clearing Centre, a man's wounds could finally be given more than cursory attention. Men were bathed and cleaned up before being operated on in a more sterile environment. Then they were each given one of the 'row upon row of beds, clean beds' that entice Nulla.

  Just the sight of a bed with snowy sheets seems to fly one into another world, a world removed from mud and slush, from bursting shells and tangled wire, from belching guns and circling flares. [p. 194]

  Here too was a comforting sight to the wounded: female Australian nurses, who had been with the soldiers overseas from the very beginning of Australia's involvement in the war. Nurses had been part of the first convoy that left in October 1914, had arrived in Marseilles and travelled in mid-April 1916 to base hospitals in Étaples, Le Havre, Rouen and other places in northern France. Nurses were paid seven shillings a day, a shilling more than a private soldier, and sisters were paid nine shillings and sixpence a day. A total of 2,139 served with the Australian Army Nursing Service during the course of the war. Australian nurses also served in England with the Queen Alexandra Imperial Military Nursing Service, while others served in Salonika, in present-day Greece, and India.

  Like all wounded men, Nulla is taken from the Casualty Clearing Station by slow train to the coast, in his case to Le Havre via Rouen, to be placed aboard a steamer for the short trip across the Channel to a large military hospital. Men with lesser wounds would have been sent to the hospitals at Étaples just south of Boulogne or to other rear areas to recover and convalesce.

  On the wharf in England, men were helped from the ships by conscientious objectors. Lynch does not recoil from showing the lack of respect Nulla and the men have for those who refused to serve:

  They are perhaps doing their bit on home service, but nevertheless we somehow despise them. Able-bodied men lurking at home when hundreds of army nurses and other women's units are often under shellfire across the Channel. [p. 197]

  For a time, the war was over for both Edward Lynch, and his character Nulla. Lynch's wounds were to keep him out of the war for nine months, between late August 1917 and May 1918, when his personal record says he returned to his unit. For the rest of his life he would carry not only the physical and mental scars of his injuries, but also four pieces of shrapnel that were left in his body because they were considered too difficult to extract. They were still there when the family buried him in 1980.

  Meanwhile, on the frontline at Passchendaele, in the face of heavy fire, the Australians could not hold the ground they had taken. The conditions remained bad, with men trying to fight through a morass of mud. Casualties climbed to an alarming level and eventually they had to fall back. Exhausted, their numbers severely depleted, they could do no more. Passchendaele would live on in Australia's memory as a deplorable, muddy nightmare, epitomised in row upon row of graves in the Tyne Cot cemetery.

  THIRTEEN

  Digging

  in at

  Dernancourt

  While Private Lynch convalesced in England, the Great War ground on. At Passchendaele, Canadian troops took over from the Australians and by mid-November 1917 they had taken the village, bringing to an end the Allied offensive General Haig had begun in July. In all of this time, the Allies had advanced only 8 kilometres yet had suffered 310,000 men killed, wounded or captured, while German casualties numbered a further 260,000 men. Haig had continued the offensive all those months, even when the rain had set in and turned the battlefield to bottomless mud, the Germans had assailed the troops with mustard gas, and any hope of a breakthrough to the coast had faded. This brought him widespread criticism and the loss of support within his army – in particular a loss in confidence from his stalwart Commander-in-Chief, Sir William Robertson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff.

  On other fronts, the Italians had suffered high casualties in a severe defeat at the battle
of Caporetto, north of Trieste, in what is now Slovenia, during October and November 1917. They were driven back by the German and Austro-Hungarian armies and had 300,000 men taken as prisoners of war; the rest retreated south, towards Venice.

  In Palestine, taking the city of Gaza, a major Turkish position, had long been the Allies' goal, but attacks in March and April 1917 had failed. Late in October, the Third Battle of Gaza was launched by the British commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, General Sir Edmund Allenby, and this attack utilised a new strategy. This time, Gaza was bombarded in order to trick the Turks into believing another attack was about to be launched, drawing Turkish forces to defend the city. Meanwhile, the Australian 4th Light Horse Brigade, in a famous charge at the Turkish guns, captured Beersheba, at the far eastern end of the Turkish defensive line. Once Beersheba had fallen, the Allies were able to overcome the Turks and take Gaza on 7 November. In December, Allenby entered Jerusalem and early the following year, Jericho fell to the Light Horse.

  In France, in October 1917 the mysterious exotic dancer Mata Hari was executed by firing squad for spying. It was claimed she had passed secrets to German officers, but today her guilt seems doubtful. Her style of dancing was provocative and she appeared on stage wearing little clothing. She had a scandalously erotic lifestyle, being separated from her husband but keeping many lovers, including military officers. A mystique surrounded her: she purported to be a Javanese princess whose name was the Indonesian word for 'sun', but her background had been entirely fabricated. She was really Gertrud Margarete Zelle, the daughter of a Dutch hatter. It was probably these factors that led not only to her great popularity with the public but also doomed her to a death sentence. In the context of French disasters on the battlefield and the fact that her accuser, Georges Ladoux, was himself later convicted as a double agent, it seems she was simply a scapegoat in a larger espionage war between the French and the Germans.

  On 27 October, American troops fired their opening shots in the war and in early November, the first Americans were killed. Later the same month, the American 'Rainbow Division', representing every state in the Union, arrived in France under Colonel Douglas MacArthur, someone we would hear a lot more about during the Second World War. It was the beginning of a massive American troop build-up and by the end of hostilities more than two million Americans would have joined the war in Europe, seriously tipping the balance in favour of the Allies in the last half of 1918.

  On 20 November 1917, the Allies launched an attack on the French town of Cambrai, about 80 kilometres northeast of Amiens. Up to that point, tanks had been used in limited numbers and with disappointing results, but the Allies hoped that a new strategy of tanks attacking en masse would finally prove their worth. A total of 476 tanks, accompanied by infantry, cavalry and gunners, advanced at dawn across a 10-kilometre front and for the first time in the war, the Allies breached all three defensive layers of the Hindenburg Line. But stubborn German resistance, mechanical failure of tanks and bad co-ordination between tanks and supporting infantry thwarted the advance. The Germans counter-attacked using short bombardments, low-flying aircraft and new shock troops known as storm-troopers and by 7 December they had regained all of the ground won by the British offensive. However, the battle had shown that tanks, when massed, could effectively break through the strongest of trench defences. The lessons from Cambrai would influence planning for the rest of the war.

  A bold new style of warfare had been introduced by the Germans in April of 1917, when they began bombing England during daylight hours. Utilising heavy bombers known as Gothas, they attacked from bases in Belgium, with London their main target; hundreds of civilians were killed. As anti-aircraft defences around the capital improved, the Germans reverted to night attacks and 19 raids were recorded between September 1917 and May 1918. The Germans also sent over Zeppelins and in a raid in October 1917, eight Zeppelins attacked London, four of which were shot down on their return over France. Paris too was bombed and in a raid in February 1918, 45 people were killed.

  In Russia, on 7 November 1917, the Bolsheviks under Lenin occupied strategic buildings in the capital, Petrograd, including the Winter Palace, which was the seat of the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks seized control and, soon after, Lenin offered Germany an armistice and peace talks began. But the Bolsheviks were slow to agree to peace terms and the Germans recommenced hostilities in February 1918. The next month, the Russians were forced to sign a humiliating treaty at Brest-Litovsk, giving up control of many areas including the Ukraine, which was a crucial acquisition for starved Germany, as it gave them access to the Ukrainians' grain harvest.

  In London, the government was already planning ahead and trying to decide the question of how the Ottoman Empire, which included Palestine, should be divided up following an Allied victory in the war. In November 1917, the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, supported a proposal by the Chairman of the British Zionist Federation, Lord Rothschild, for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It came to be known as the 'Balfour Declaration'. In England, as in Germany, rationing was biting. Meat, butter and margarine were rationed in London and the adjacent Home Counties. The German air raids and the February 1918 sinking of the British hospital ship Glenart Castle by a U-boat in the Bristol Channel kept the British people focused and fearful.

  In January 1918, US President Woodrow Wilson put forward a 14-point peace plan designed to prevent future war, settle international disputes and provide national self-determination and collective security. At the end of hostilities, those 14 points would become the basis for the Treaty of Versailles.

  In Australia, Billy Hughes, who had failed once with his conscription referendum, again ignited the debate and took it to the people. In late November 1917, he arrived in Warwick in southern Queensland as part of his campaign for the second conscription rally. While addressing the crowd, he was pelted with eggs and asked that the police arrest the egg-thrower, only to be informed by the policeman that he obeyed the laws of Queensland first and had no right to arrest the demonstrator. Aware he had neither protection nor a legal right to request it, Hughes established what became the Australian Federal Police – and all because someone threw an egg at him.

  In December 1917, Hughes held a second conscription plebiscite, which again failed to produce his hoped-for 'Yes' vote. He resigned as prime minister, only to be recommissioned by the governor-general. Meanwhile, Australians suspected of being pro- German were being rounded up. One man interned at this time was the Prussian-born Sydney brewer Edmund Resch, snatched from his home in Darling Point where, it was believed by the police, he had watched and reported on Allied shipping movements on Sydney Harbour. German nationals, even German descendants, were interned, as there remained a strong fear of spies and saboteurs continuing their work. German place names were changed, especially in South Australia, where a large German community lived in the Barossa Valley. In New South Wales, Germantown was renamed Holbrook and in central South Australia, Herrgott Springs became Marree.

  Since the expansion of the Australian and New Zealand forces in Egypt after the evacuation of Gallipoli, they had been fighting in two separate formations, known as I Anzac Corps and II Anzac Corps. Although their composition varied, particularly in 1917, the first comprised the 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th Australian divisions, under General Birdwood's command. The second was made up of the Australian 3rd Division plus the New Zealanders, and it came under General Sir Alexander Godley's command. Birdwood and Godley were both British, as were many of the other officers of I Anzac and II Anzac.

  From the beginning of the war there had been murmurings that Australians should fight as a national army and now the failure of the British command structure and the unreliability of British troops emphasised the urgency for a unified Australian corps in the minds of military and political leaders. The Australian soldiers had little time for the British army, had long distrusted the British High Command and held scant regard for the average Br
itish soldier, whom they viewed as generally weak, skinny, sallow and undernourished. When it came to a stoush, most dismissed the Tommies as unreliable, second-rate soldiers who could not be relied on to hold the line and fight. Some were compared unfavourably with the Chinese Labour Corps. General Monash confided his feelings about English troops in a letter dated 4 April 1918 to his wife in Melbourne: 'Some of these Tommy Divisions are the absolute limit, and not worth the money it costs to put them in uniform ... bad troops, bad staffs, bad commanders.'1

  Not that the Australians were particularly liked by the British Tommy. One is quoted as saying 'I hate the Aussies as do all British Tommies.' From the High Command down, the Australians were seen as ill-disciplined, boisterous, arrogant and conceited. They were famous for 'ratting' prisoners, lacked manners, were seen as looters and thieves and when they were on leave in England they were always up to mischief. There were ten times the number of Australians in military prisons compared to English soldiers, and the number of Absent Without Leave cases in the AIF far exceeded any other army.2 Fortunately for the Australians, they were not shot for this offence, which could easily be classed as desertion from the front but in Australian terms was seen as time-out to go to the pub.

  The absence of the death penalty for Australian troops, enshrined in the Defence Act, annoyed the British High Command. They saw serious discipline problems in the AIF and wished to make an example of the Australian men; they also found it difficult applying one set of rules to their troops and another to the Australians. Even the New Zealand Division allowed the death penalty, and executed five men during the course of the war. In Rawlinson's Fourth Army, of 182 cases of Absence Without Leave, 130 were Australians. In the Fifth Army, the police reported that of 43 prisoners who escaped from detention, 30 were Australians. The early threat of being sent home to Australia in disgrace no longer worked and men in many cases preferred gaol to the risks of the frontline.