Eyewitness

by Garrie Hutchinson

  The remnants of the 57th and 58th held the front-line system for a further 50 days, making 59 in all, without relief.

  And the sandbags were splashed with red, and red were the fire steps, the duckboards, the bays. And the stench of stagnant pools of the blood of heroes is in our nostrils even now.

  With Jacka’s Mob at Bullecourt

  E.J. Rule

  Captain Edgar Rule served with the 14th Battalion – Jacka’s Mob – through the war. He was awarded the Military Medal in 1916 at Mouquet Farm, not far from the Windmill at Pozières – where Australia’s popular hero of the war, Albert Jacka, won a Military Cross. Rule was also awarded the MC in 1917.

  Jacka had won Australia’s first Victoria Cross at Gallipoli, where he performed ‘the most dramatic and effective act of individual audacity in the history of the A.I.F.’, according to Charles Bean. Bean thought the Windmill stunt, and one at Bullecourt in 1917, should also have earned him the VC.

  There were two costly battles at Bullecourt. At dawn of April 11th, 1917, after a night lying in the snow, the Australians were ordered to attack the Hindenburg Line without the aid of promised tanks. The 4th Brigade suffered 2339 casualties from 3000 men sent into battle; the 12th Brigade 950 from 2000. The battle was later used by the British staff as a model of failed planning.

  The second battle, on May 3rd–17th, 1917, was slightly better organised. The 2nd Division was to take the German positions in the village of Bullecourt, but even with better planning, casualties were heavy, totalling over 10,000 for the two engagements. Edgar Rule was there, quietly observing and recording.

  He was born in Cobar in 1886, was orphaned early in life and spent time working at a variety of occupations around the world, including the construction of the Panama Canal. He later became an orchardist near Shepparton, and enlisted as a private in June 1915.

  He was sent as a reinforcement in the 14th Battalion at Gallipoli, and saw action and promotion through the battles at Armentières, Pozières, Mouquet Farm, Bullecourt, Messines and Amiens.

  Captain Rule MM MC died in 1958. Jacka’s Mob was published in 1933, with a new edition in 1999.

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  We went straight out along the road in the direction of Vaulx- Vraucourt, and after about an hour’s good tramping we came to a lot of tents beside the road. Here we learnt that the whole brigade had moved very recently, and these people were the thirty-three and a third per cent who were now always left out when a battalion went into battle, so as to help reform it when it came out. Captain Macdermid was in charge of the 14th Battalion’s section in that camp, and on my reporting to him he told me to attach myself to him for the time being. There were four lines of tents in all, each line representing one battalion in the brigade. C.Q.M.S. Granigan was at the wagon-lines, and as soon as he saw me he called me all the silly — he could think of for coming back just then, in face of a killing-off. Stunt or no stunt, I was so pleased to get back that it never worried me at all. We spent the night in the tents, and next day put up some shelters to make more room. That evening, 9 April, before we crawled in, we received orders to leave at 2 a.m. next morning for the line. The 14th Battalion’s section was the only one concerned – the other three battalions never called for their men, though why we were called and not they, I’ve never heard. At 2 a.m. we got moving along the road and settled down to a couple of hours’ steady march. All packs were being sent forward also; this looked as if we were preparing to drive the Huns for miles. The reason for all this was that in the south General Nivelle, the French Commander-in-Chief, was about to attack the Huns near Soissons and at Rheims and finish the war; as a matter of fact, after bitter fighting in which he captured 20,000 prisoners, he came a great crash. But anyway, the part of the British in the whole show was to make a big attack in the north to draw off the enemy’s reserve troops from the French. This big British attack began on 9 April, and, a little to the northward of us, Vimy Ridge had been taken by the Canadians, and the British had made a big advance from Arras. Although we were so close to all this fighting, we were in no position to help, as the Hun had only just reached his Hindenburg Line, which was strongly wired, and we were not nearly ready to tackle such formidable defences. Our railway was miles behind us, and our artillery was very feeble. All main roads were mined at awkward places, and these conditions held up the bringing forward of the artillery and ammunition. At this particular time our newspapers were making a great song about our advance from the Somme battlefield and the enemy’s ‘discomfiture’ but they gave people a totally false impression. True, he had given up ground, but the way he made us pay for it put him on the credit side of the account. In spite of the difficulties, however, we had suddenly been ordered to attack on 10 April with the object: first, of breaking the Hindenburg Line at Bullecourt and Riencourt; second, of allowing the cavalry to sweep up behind the Hindenburg Line to meet the British farther north and capture all the German artillery and stores. A couple of miles south of Riencourt was the town of Queant, and it was at this place that the Hindenburg Line joined with the Wotan Line, the second German defence, lying behind the Hindenburg Line. We were to attack near the junction of the two. As a rule, nearly all schemes of military operations look nice on paper, no matter how rotten they are, but this one was an exception; at any rate, all our Australian chiefs were opposed to it. Maybe it looked all right to General Gough, of whose army we formed part, but he took no notice of General Birdwood and the rest of the Aussie generals when they implored him to change the scheme and give the men a chance. Later, out at Mametz camp, I heard both General Birdwood and General Brand apologise to the men who were left, and with tears in their eyes tell them how they had done everything in their power to have the plan altered, but without success. The plan to which our generals objected was that of attacking the Hindenburg Line. Our artillery was so weak that it could not be relied on to give much support but General Gough’s plan was to make up for the absence of artillery by giving us about a dozen tanks. We had never acted with tanks before, nor had the tanks ever been used in the manner proposed. They were to advance ahead of the infantry and crush flat belts of wire; that is to say, they would take the place of the artillery barrage, and the infantry were to follow in their track and gain the enemy trenches without a shot being fired on those trenches by our artillery. All the artillery was told off to fire on the German batteries, or cover us in the objective we were ultimately intended to reach, away beyond Riencourt.

  Needless to say, none of our party knew all this at the time. After passing through the village of Vaulx, where we saw a few heavy guns occasionally firing, we took a track that had once been a railroad, and this led us straight down Death Valley to Noreuil. Along the gully were scattered batteries of eighteen-pounders. By this time it was just peeping day, and we were surprised to see three or four tanks waddling about. Our office received orders to halt and wait for further orders, and when broad daylight came men began to stream back from the front-line through Noreuil and into the gully. We had very hazy ideas as to what was going on, but later we found out. This was the famous ‘buckshee’ stunt of Bullecourt. The troops had been lying out ready to attack, and the reason for the retirement, which we were watching, was that the tanks, on which so much depended, had not arrived on the tape, and the stunt had to be cancelled. The zero time was just a little before daylight, and when it came, it found the whole force in sunken roads and bits of trenches in which at daylight they would be in full view of the Hun. We were a little too far away for him to hurt us much with small arms fire. Just after daybreak word came for all the attacking force to retire to the reserve line to await further orders. There being no communication trenches, the only thing to do was to go over the open. Snow was falling heavily at that moment, but the Germans from some part of their lines cannot have failed to observe the movement – thousands of men getting up out of trenches and sunken roads, and walking off leisurely towards the rear. To them it must have looked like the children of Israel going over
the desert. The Hun artillery opened, but, more by good luck than good management on our part, did very little damage. Anyway, through the tanks’ failure, our hand was exposed, and it seemed to us as simple as ABC for the enemy to detect what we were up to. He had only to notice the flanks of that migration and he would discover the precise front of our attack; and it would be a simple matter to estimate the number of men employed. All during the day the Hun remained quite normal, doubtless to pull the wool over our eyes. But under cover of this he must have crammed his trenches full of men and machine-guns and laid in wait for our next move. During the day my party worked on a dugout, and in the afternoon managed to get a bit of a nap. C Company of the 14th were holding the line, so that did not see any of the boys who had been in the stunt. In the afternoon we (the thirty-three and a third per cent who were not to be in the fight) received orders to go on different fatigues as soon as it was dark. Mine was to take up the food and rations to the front-lines. During the day more tanks came in, and were covered over with canvas.

  As soon as dusk came on, we started off on our fatigues. I took my party and went up through Noreuil into a sunken road where battalion headquarters and our cookers were. Here we loaded up, and with the help of a guide set off for the line. It was a miserable night – it seemed as if it were trying to snow, rain and hail all at once and the walking underfoot was not good. On the way up we had a couple of rows; some of the bigger men were going far too quickly for the little fellows, and it was only after me calling them a windy lot that they steadied down a bit. Halfway I saw a trench running across a road and one solitary figure of an officer standing on the parapet gazing away out in front towards the Hun country. He appeared to be wrapped in thought, and I’ve often wondered if he had received a warning that this was to be his last night on earth. There was no mistaking that figure – anybody in the 14th would have picked him anywhere. I left my party and went over towards him asking, ‘Is that you, Captain Williamson?’ He seemed to shake himself and appeared pleased to see me. I asked him if he wanted me, and he told me to report to him prior to going over, and myself to stay by him. Then he told me what the plans were, and that – after the breakthrough, and when the cavalry were going through – C Company was to be the advance-guard for the 4th Brigade. When I left him he relapsed into his previous line of thought. What can I place on these pages as a record of him? Practically nothing in the way of official recognition. He wore no decorations, his name had never even appeared as ‘mentioned in despatches’. His manly dignity prevented any undesirable results of familiarity, but as Lofty he was known far and wide in the brigade. He stood six feet in his socks and was as handsome as a Greek god. He was the men’s ideal of what a man should be, and to know him was to love him. Our old padre, in referring to Lofty and Fred Stanton – two of our grand company commanders – at a memorial service later on, used these words: ‘Such boys to be such men!’ After I’d taken the rations to the line, where I saw many of my old pals and had a word with them, took the party back to wait on the cooks for the final lot of cocoa that was to be given out just prior to going over. Before I left, Lieutenant McQuiggan told me to inform Colonel Peck that one of our guns was firing short and was endangering the men’s lives in one of his posts. When I crawled into the little place where the C.O. was, I found him having a conference with his four company commanders. They were all huddled together in this little space, and he was having his final talk with them. In his short, sharp manner he was giving orders, and when he asked for my message he paid very little attention to it, passing it on to someone else to attend to. Before or since, we’ve never had such a combination of company commanders. It was impossible to get better anywhere – Bob Orr, Fred Stanton, Lofty Williamson and Wadsworth. At this time our battalion had reached one of the high-water marks in its history, and there may have been some battalions as good, but there were none better.

  Having an hour or so to wait before taking up our next lot of food, we hung about killing time. I had a yarn with ‘Sarto’ Anderson and a few old bombers, and from them I learnt that the bombers had been broken up, the pick of the men being put into the intelligence staff under Captain Jacka. Their duty this night was to guide up to the tape all the tanks that were going over, and to see that they understood where to go when once the show opened. As the tanks are notorious ‘crab drawers’ (centres of attraction for shell-fire), these boys were not in love with the job altogether, though they were too good to think of growling about it. The tanks were thus given the very best men in our battalion to assist them.

  Earlier in the night, as Jacka and Bradley (16th) were out in no-man’s- land attending to their duty of laying the jumping-off tapes, they were surprised to see a couple of Huns approaching. Jacka and his partner sneaked around to the rear of them, and before the Huns knew what had happened Jacka was covering them with his revolver. One of the Huns started to squeal and kick up a fuss. Jacka walked up to him and, pushing the revolver into his face, soon quietened him. Jacka hit him over the head with it and the fellow calmed down and the pair of them were taken to our C.O. Here the Hun officer complained very bitterly of his treatment, but, when our colonel told him he was a b— lucky man to be alive, he shut up. What information was gained from them, I don’t know. Jacka made a thorough examination of the Hun line. I’ve heard that he crawled through the Hun wire and saw for himself the density of machine-guns and men in their trenches. I afterwards heard him say that he told all the heads that it was pure murder to attempt the operation, and Jacka’s ideas about military affairs were well worth careful consideration. After the show was over he told me that he couldn’t help feeling a sort of satisfaction at seeing it pan out as it did, though for the men’s sake he was very sorry. For the good work he did at this stunt he received a bar to his M.C.

  Most of us considered that it should have been a bar to his V.C. He himself said afterwards that he spent some time crawling about in front of the German trenches, and, when he was about to enter the narrow lane through their barbed-wire, he saw an enemy patrol enter the other end. Lying close to the ground, he watched them flit by. ‘How they failed to see me was a puzzle – they almost trod on me.’ When a friend asked if he hadn’t the wind up, he said: ‘Oh, no, I was quite calm, because I knew what to do. I was watching them, and if they had discovered me, I was going to get in among them and shoot the lot before they knew what had happened. I would have got away easily enough.’ But to come back to the night before the battle. I walked down the road a little way to where a couple of tanks were waiting to move up. The crews were outside them, and I was having a yarn to some of them when two officers came up and asked a few questions. Not getting much satisfaction, they moved away a little, and one of the tank men said: ‘What do they want to know all that for?’ This set me thinking, and I walked over to the officers, and they asked me the way to Bullecourt and which way the tanks were going. I went closer to them and peered into their faces, and this seemed to upset them a little. The taller said: ‘It’s all right, sergeant’ and, on asking them who they were, he said Lieutenant So-and-so of some trench-mortar battery. My suspicions were rising, and I kept debating with myself whether I ought to rope them in and take them to headquarters. But fear of making a fool of myself kept me from acting, and before I knew what to do they turned, and went back down towards Death Gully. I followed them, and on the outskirts of Noreuil we met a man who asked us where he could get some water for the cooks. As I was talking to him one of these fellows said in a very agitated sort of way: ‘Oh, leave it until daylight,’ and went on. Before I knew what had happened, they were out of sight in the darkness. All at once I woke up and, from their actions, questions and manner, became fully convinced that they were spies. With my mind fully made up to halt them and if not obeyed instantly to kill the two of them, I ran after them, but they seemed to be wise to me by this time, for although I tore along the gully, they must have run along it faster. Several times I passed men who had seen them go by, but I could not
catch up with them, and must have spent an hour in hunting for them before I gave it up, I always felt guilty about this, and it taught me a lesson. Whatever may be said to the contrary, I still have no doubt that they were Huns left behind in villages during the retirement, and were in communication by some means or other with their own people. (We knew that we had agents behind the Hun lines at this time also. A few days previously our battalion had been warned to look out for ‘gold beater’ balloons coming from the Hun lines. They were to shoot them down and take them immediately to headquarters.)

  When I got back, it was time to load up and get going. When we reached the line we found everyone beginning to get their things ready for the attack. Captain Williamson was walking about among the men cheering them, and when I reported to him he told me to stay by him during the stunt. One remark he passed I never forgot, and it was a very great satisfaction to me to think he thought of me in that way. When it came out that I was not supposed to be with him but with the thirty-three and a third per cent carrying bombs and other supplies, he said: ‘You’re too good a man to be on a job like that.’

  A little while after this – at 1 a.m. on the 11th – our mortars pelted gas bombs into Bullecourt. As soon as they started, the Hun lit up the sky with Very lights, and we could plainly see our gas bombs bursting and giving off dense clouds of gas which were slowly drifting over the village, and it was so thick that it must have caught a few Huns. Strange to relate, no special retaliation came back, although odd shells were bursting here and there. Two nine-inch shells from the enemy batteries that were rich in their results arrived about this time. One landed on two trench-mortar crews and blotted them right out; between 30 and 40 men were killed or wounded. The other almost robbed us of Jacka. He was thrown down and Lieutenant McKinley, his assistant intelligence officer, was mortally wounded. This morning, there was less trouble about the arrival of the tanks; they began to come into the line soon after the gas was let go. C Company lay on a railway embankment, and it was here that about half the tanks came to await the onslaught. Under the shelter of the bank they tightened up their nuts and had a final overhaul. Having no men to look after, I poked about among the crews of the tanks, and from the first I noticed that they were highly nervous about the job. For a while all I could hear was: ‘I wonder if the Huns heard us coming in?’ Those of us who had watched them crawling one by one down to our bank felt that it was impossible for the Huns to have yet heard the low muffled chug-chug- chug, but all the assurances in the world could not convince the crews. (I have since heard that the Germans did detect this noise before the attack.) The only thing that I feared was their exhaust pipe, which came out through the top of their buses and from which I noticed tiny sparks flying at times. Of course I never mentioned this to them, thinking that just as soon as they got going they would lose all nervousness and box on. When C Company lined up and were preparing to move out onto the tape, Captain Williamson ordered me to take charge of the bomb dump, and see that ammunition was sent up to him during the action. He said his reason for changing his mind was that most of the men were new to me, also most of the officers. I was to go up to him, with the last lot of ammunition. To say that I was disappointed would put it mildly. I never felt so optimistic about a stunt in my life, and in fact, all hands did. I’ve never before or since seen troops go into action with so much heart; it was remarkable. Captain Williamson had intended Sergeant-Major Garcia to mind the bomb dump, but at the last minute had changed his mind and taken Garcia instead of me. As the boys filed out I recognised many more old pals, among them Sergeant Jack McRae. I saw him for the last time. After they had gone the tanks started up and commenced climbing right up the bank. My bomb dump was on the edge of it, and one of the tanks made straight for it. I had visions of bombs, tank and men all mingled in one grand explosion, and I danced and yelled right in front of the tank. Even then the officer inside only just steered a few feet away. When he was almost on the dump, I left and cleared to the rear for protection against the coming rumpus, but, strange to say, the tank merely squashed a couple of boxes down into the earth and nothing happened. When the tank had passed I started to sort out the bombs, and I noticed that one or two had no detonators in them. This made me suspicious, and in going through the lot I found about 20 out of about 60 boxes undetonated. To think that these were the things that men would have to fight for their lives with made me furious at the negligence of someone in not detonating them. As I was picking the undetonated bombs out and putting them on one side, Captain Stanton came along and asked me if I’d seen any of his company; evidently he had lost some of them. As the bank was deserted, I soon convinced him – I was the only one there. Just before zero, 4.45 a.m., I had a bit of a spell and tried to take an impartial view of the show, and the only thing that I did not like was the unearthly quietness and absence of Very lights from Riencourt. Not a light was to be seen, whereas over Bullecourt the Hun was making his usual display. North-east of Bullecourt, on the left, was the objective of the 12th Brigade, and ours was Riencourt, farther to the right. Riencourt was perched away along a spur, and to get to it our boys had to go up a slight slope. Bullecourt, on our left, was much lower. In getting to Riencourt our boys would be subjected to enfilade fire from the 12th Brigade front. Apart from these little difficulties or signs of them, I still had the greatest confidence. Just about zero time a company of the 12th Brigade came in along the railway bank, and went over the top making towards the left.