I thought I could not tell how important these hours or the first night might be – and I particularly wanted to know how the artillery was landing; so I got up again and sat down by D.H.Q. with some of the others. General Godley had been in there earlier in the evening as the guest of our general. Howse was standing outside, talking to Col. Giblin. Watson of the Signal Coy was there and clearly something was in the wind. In a minute or two I had what it was – some question as to whether we were to hold on or to embark at once. Col. Howse unquestionably thought it was likely that the casualty clearing hospital would have to move off at once …
It was two o’clock then. I couldn’t help looking at the sky to see if the dawn were breaking. One knew that it might have been possible to embark part of the force before daybreak if we had begun at night – but there were only two and a half hours of darkness left. It would have been sheer annihilation to attempt embarkation then – I was sure of that – the only possible way would be to hold on all next day, prepare all possible means of safeguarding the retirement and then embark next night without the enemy knowing what we were thinking of (if it were possible to deceive him). Even so the last part of the force covering the retirement would probably be sacrificed. I waited there sitting on the sand slope with some companion in the moonlight – with Howse and Col. Giblin talking in front of us. The General had gone somewhere – I don’t know where – but one understood that the decision would be brought back by him. At 2.30 either he, or some message, came back. There was a general stir in the small crowd which was in the know.
I heard a message being read out from the General’s dugout for sending to all the units out on the ridges: ‘Sir Ian Hamilton hopes they will dig … and that the morning will find them securely dug in where they are … The Australian sailors have just got a submarine through the Dardanelles and torpedoed a Turkish ship.’
Fleurbaix, 1916 – The Battle of Fromelles
W.H. Downing
W.H. ‘Jimmy’ Downing served in the 57th Battalion, part of the legendary Brigadier Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliott’s 15th Brigade – which meant Downing participated in most of the significant Australian actions of the war.
Downing was born in 1893 at Portland in Victoria, and was rejected by the army eight times on account of his height. He managed to stretch himself on the ninth occasion. He was accepted on September 30th, 1915, joining the 7th Battalion in Egypt, before transferring to the 57th in France. Sergeant Downing was awarded the Military Medal at Polygon Wood.
Fromelles is a village not far from Armentières and Fleurbaix in Northern France. On July 19th, 1916 it was the A.I.F.’s introduction to the slaughter of the Western Front, and was the worst 24 hours in Australian history. The 5th Division suffered 5533 casualties. Downing’s 57th Battalion, in support, was spared the worst of the frontal attack, but nevertheless lost 35 killed. The Australians (and the British 61st Division) were ordered (by British High Command) to charge across open boggy ground against entrenched German machine-guns. It was hopeless and brave – but a slaughter.
After the war Downing completed a law degree and eventually went into partnership with Pompey Elliott in the firm H.E. Elliott and Downing. Some of the material in To the Last Ridge was published by the Melbourne newspapers Argus and the Herald, before book publication in 1920. (A new edition was published in 1998.) Downing also published the wonderful dictionary Digger Dialects in 1919 (new edition, 1990). Walter Downing MM died in 1965.
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There is a holy place by a little stream, a marsh between the orchards near Fromelles. This is its story.
From 10th to 17th of July the Black and Purple Battalions held the line. On the night of the 12th there was an alarm – the S.O.S. (two red stars hovering in the night) – barrages, counter-barrages. There were raids and violent shelling. There was the frightful chaos of minenwerfers (trench mortars), shaking the ground into waves, trailing lines of sparks criss-crossed on the gloom, swerving just before they fell, confounding, dreadful, abhorred far more than shells, killing by their very concussion, destroying all within many yards. The enemy knew that a division fresh to the Western Front was in the line. He was bent on breaking its spirit. How little he succeeded, those battered breastworks and the little marsh bear witness.
No-man’s-land, on the front occupied by the 15th Brigade, was a double curve like the letter S. It was from five to seven hundred yards wide, narrowing on the left to two or three hundred, where the 8th and 14th Brigades were placed. At the wide end it was split lengthwise by a little stream, which wandered at last beneath our parapet by Pinney Avenue, where the tunnellers worked.
By the stream the ground was marshy but not impassable, for it was mid-summer. On either side, the British and the German lines fronted each other on low opposing slopes, rising in tiers – front-line, supports, close reserves, reserves. Owing to the wet, low-lying nature of the ground there were no trenches, but solid breastworks of beaten sandbags reveted with iron and timber, fortified with concrete slabs or ‘bursters’. These were from 20 to 30 feet thick, and seven to ten feet high. There was no parados (rear wall of a trench). A fire step was in every bay and a sandbag blockhouse used as a dugout.
Two miles behind our line was the village of Fleurbaix, occupied by civilians. Further back was the town of Sailly-sur-la-Lys. On the right, as one faced the front, was Laventie. Behind the German line was a large and lonely farm, and Fromelles, on a high ridge, where French and Indian cavalry fought in 1914. There was also that rising ground on the right named Sugarloaf. The graves of Englishmen lay everywhere; the dates on the little crosses had almost faded since ‘December, 1914’, ‘February’, ‘May’, ‘October, 1915’. Most of the graves were nameless.
For several days trench stores, materials for the attack, picks, shovels, light bridges for the creek and scaling ladders were carried through the saps.
Through Brompton, Exeter, V.C., Pinneys and Mine Avenues they were carried by day – and held high. One could look into the white German communication saps (connecting trenches) meandering over the hillside. The Germans could look into ours.
The attack was to be made on the 17th. The objective was the German second line. The strategic reason was provided by the presence of a number of Prussian Guard divisions about to entrain from Lille to the Somme, and by the imminence of the important battle of Pozières. The British Army was numerically much weaker than the German, and subterfuges and diversions were necessary.
All this was known to pseudo-refugees, to spies, in the villages behind. Enemy airmen observed the white and coloured cloths spread in order and in designs in fields, like washing left to dry, according to the custom of the blanchisseuses (washer-women) of Flanders. Fields were ploughed lengthwise, crosswise and diagonally. White horses were depastured in particular fields. Even the genuine inhabitants knew far more about the attack than we. The Germans were in possession of a copy of operation orders before our battalion commanders had received them. And in those days information was not freely communicated to junior officers and the rank and file, as was afterwards the custom.
On the 17th July, within five minutes of zero time, the attack was countermanded.
On the 18th, the 59th and 60th took over the sector. The 57th were withdrawn to sleep for the night. We lay in a mill on the outskirts of Sailly, on the Sailly road. Sleep was sweet – for thousands it was their second last. Nevertheless, we neither knew nor cared what the morrow might bring. One accepts the immediate present, in the army. We woke with the birds, reminded of friendly magpies in the morning back in Australia. Here were only twitterings under the eaves, but at least it was a cheerful sound, pleasant on a lazy summer morning when the ripening corn was splashed with poppies, and the clover was pink, and the cornflowers blue under the hedges.
In Sailly, in the morning, we listened to the chatter in the estaminets (cafés). At the mill, old women and very small girls were selling gingerbread and sweets with cognac in them, sitting on stools, gossiping among themse
lves.
At midday we were told.
Usual preliminaries were gone through. Operation orders (including some indifferent prophesying) were explained, or as much of them as was thought fit. Rations and ammunition were issued.
At a quarter to two we moved off. Shelling commenced. These were the days of long and casual bombardments. Labourers were hoeing in the mangold fields. Stooping men and women watched us pass, without ceasing their work. It may have been courage, or stolidity, or the numbness of the peasant bound to the soil, or else necessity, that held the sad tenacious people here in such an hour of portent. Their old faces were inscrutable. They tilled the fields on the edge of the flames, under the arching trajectory of shells.
Bees hummed in the clear and drowsy sunshine. There was little smoke about the cottages, where the creepers were green. The road curved between grass which was like two green waves poised on either side.
We battalions came to the four crossroads where there were trenches in the corn, by a crucifix of wood in a damaged brick shrine. There was much gun-fire. We waited.
Late in the afternoon we were ordered forward. From his crucifix the Man of Sorrows watched our going. One wondered if His mild look was bent especially on those marked for death that day. We left the road at an old orchard, and entered a sap. We passed V.C. House and wound down V.C. Avenue. Shells fell rapidly.
A bald man with a red moustache lay on a board, very still, his face to the wall. The sap was littered with rubbish, splintered wood and iron poking from the heaps of burnt earth. Here and there the sap was completely blown in. Then there were more dead. Further on, it was no sap, but a line of rubble heaps. We came to the Three-Hundred- Yard line. Then, issuing from a sally port, we dashed through the shrapnel barrage in artillery formation, and reached the front-line. Again we waited.
A sad-faced man, sitting beside a body, said, ‘Sniper – my brother – keep under the parapet.’ Here the line was enfiladed (shot at) from the left flank where it curved.
The 59th and 60th were in the line. They knew their orders by heart. They were to wave their bayonets and cheer, then remain quiet. Three times this would be done. It was a bluff. They would not go over.
When this had been done once, the order to attack ran from mouth to mouth. ‘Over the bags in five minutes – over the bags in five minutes’; so it passed along. Then, ‘Over you go.’
The 60th climbed on the parapet, heavily laden, dragging with them scaling ladders, light bridges, picks, shovels and bags of bombs. There was wire to go through, and sinking ground; a creek to cross, more marsh and wire; then the German line.
Scores of stammering German machine-guns spluttered violently, drowning the noise of the cannonade. The air was thick with bullets, swishing in a flat lattice of death. There were gaps in the lines of men – wide ones, small ones. The survivors spread across the front, keeping the line straight. There was no hesitation, no recoil, no dropping of the unwounded into shell holes. The bullets skimmed low, from knee to groin, riddling the tumbling bodies before they touched the ground. Still the line kept on.
Hundreds were mown down in the flicker of an eyelid, like great rows of teeth knocked from a comb, but still the line went on, thinning and stretching. Wounded wriggled into shell holes or were hit again.
Men were cut in two by streams of bullets. And still the line went on.
The 59th were watching from the breastwork. Here one man alone, there two or three, walked unhurrying, with the mien of kings, rifles at the high port and tipped with that foot of steel which carries the spirit of an army – heads high, that few, to meet the death they scorned. No fury of battle but a determined calm bore them forward. Theirs was an unquestioning self-sacrifice that held back nothing. They died, all but one or two who walked through the fire by a miracle. A few had fallen behind in the marsh, exhausted by the weight they carried. Some had fallen in the creek, and under their heavy equipment could not mount the slippery banks. There were also some slightly wounded.
Fifty-six remained of a full thousand. It was over in five minutes.
And then the 59th rose, vengeful, with a shout – a thousand as one man. The chattering, metallic staccato of the tempest of hell burst in nickelled gusts. Sheaves and streams of bullets swept like whirling knives. There were many corpses hung inert on our wire, but the 59th surged forward, now in silence, more steadily, more precise than on parade. A few yards and there were but two hundred marching on. The rest lay in heaps and bloody swathes. They began firing at the German line as they advanced. Lewis gunners dropped into shell holes and fired burst after burst, dashing from cover to cover.
A hundred men broke into a wild but futile charge, determined to strike, if possible, one blow, but enemies pressed their red-hot thumbpieces with blistered fingers, spraying death from the tortured muzzles. That hundred lay flat in the attitudes of sleep.
It grew quiet again. A few wounded crawled in the grass, sniped at by riflemen. Then there was silence. Eighty came back that night.
Two companies from the 58th rose from the breastwork – the remainder were elsewhere carrying ammunition – and advanced by rushes, with covering fire. In banks of battle reek the sun went down, as red as blood.
As darkness drew on, the 57th went forward, but most were recalled almost before they left, for there was nothing to be gained by further loss of life. A few reached the creek.
It was the Charge of the Light Brigade once more, but more terrible, more hopeless – magnificent, but not war – a valley of death filled by somebody’s blunder, or the horrid necessities of war.
The handful in our trenches stood to arms all night, because the line was now dangerously weak, for there were no supports and no reserves, and many enemy elite forces were in front.
The bays and traverses were jammed with dead and wounded lying head to foot for two miles, in a treble row, on the fire steps, beneath them, and behind the blockhouses. Wounded came crawling in, rolling over the parapet and sprawling to the bottom. A white-faced boy, naked to the waist, was being led along the trench, a hole in his side. He cracked some joke, then, ‘I think I’ll spell a minute; it’s all going dark.’ He sat down. An hour later someone shook him, but he was stiff and cold.
A barrage chopped and pounded on the crammed line. The blockhouses were packed with dying men. Men shot through the stomach screamed for water. In mercy it was denied them. Some pleaded to be shot. High explosive crumped in the line; shrapnel crashed in the air.
Out in front wounded were firing in a careless passion of rage, blazing at the inexorable parapet. This was stopped by a flurry of enemy fire. The interminable hours wore on. It was a night of horror and doubt.
Parties went forth to rescue the wounded and to find whether any Australians were in the German trenches. Many more were hit. Wounded were calling for their mates. There was a pause in the shelling. One in delirium was singing a marching song far out in front –
‘My mother told me
That she would buy me
A rubber dollie,
A rubber dollie,
But when I told her
I loved a – ’
On the left bombing was occurring. We heard the fragments wailing like Banshees in the air, and listened, thinking it was the cry of the wounded. A machine-gun rattled somewhere, and suddenly stopped –
‘But when I told her
I loved a soldier, – ’
The voice rose an octave –
‘She would not buy me
A rub – ’
There was another burst of fire and the singing ceased.
Someone cried continually, ‘Bill, Bill,’ all that night, but Bill did not answer. Between the salvos of shells we heard him again and again till dawn. Then that voice also was stilled.
A few of the 57th and 58th were engaged in rushing ammunition to the front-line. All the rest were bringing in wounded. By dawn, in spite of strenuous labours, only half the wounded and a few of the dead had been brought in. For five nigh
ts this work was unremitting. Parties went out under fire in broad daylight. Some of the wounded were never found. A few crawled in three weeks later, with shattered limbs and maggoty wounds. They had hidden from our parties, fearful lest they might be Huns, swooning often, uncertain which was our trench and which the German, drinking putrid shell-hole water, foraging by night for food among the dead, lying low by day.
All night the 8th and 14th Brigades were fighting for their lives, almost surrounded, up to their breasts in the water with which the enemy had flooded their trench. In the morning they extricated themselves with immense difficulty and heavy loss, and withdrew through saps rushed forward from our line by the Fifth Pioneers. The next night some, after wandering lost in enemy country, returned by immense good luck and after astounding adventures.
For three days hundreds of wounded lay uncomplaining in their torment, in our line. The survivors were few by comparison with the dead. It was an hour’s hard work for four men to carry one to safety. All joined in the task. The very safety of the line was imperilled by the number of men engaged in this merciful duty. We carried till the mind refused its task and limbs sagged, and always there were hundreds for whom each minute decreased the chances of life. Release came to very many of the stricken. We left the hopeless cases undisturbed for the sake of those whom the surgeons could save.
For days an officer, blind and demented, wandered near the German lines, never fired on, but used as a decoy to attract his friends to their death. These were shot while attempting to reach him. He wandered up and down the line till he died, avoiding friend and foe alike.
This charge received a recognition from the enemy which reasons of state denied from our own side. A noble act here lights up the murky record of the German Army. Two gallant enemies carried a wounded Australian to our parapet, stood at the salute, then turned and walked away. They unfortunately neglected to secure a safe conduct, and were shot, to the sincere regret of every Australian there, by someone in the next bay, who, owing to the shape of the line and the direction they had come, was in ignorance of their errand.
Eyewitness Page 4