Many others weren’t found, and they died in no-man’s-land. Private Algernon Bell wrote in his diary that he was wounded ‘in arm and leg. Going to try and crawl back to trenches tonight’. He made it, but died four days later.
The first battle that the Australians fought on the Western Front was a complete failure. Over 5500 had been killed or wounded and 400 taken prisoner. In one day, the Australians suffered one-fifth of the casualties sustained during their eight months at Gallipoli. As his men returned, Elliot cried. In the 60th Battalion alone, only one officer and 106 men out of 887 made it to the morning roll call. Almost nothing had been gained. And the Germans had been distracted from the Somme for just a moment.
In his report, Haking said that the artillery barrage was strong and that the attack had failed because the British lacked fighting spirit and the Australians ‘were not sufficiently trained to consolidate the ground gained’. This ignored the fact that the ultimate objective—the German support lines—had turned out to be water-filled ditches. They ‘lost heavily’, he wrote, but he felt that, despite the failure, the battle had done both the Australian and the British division ‘a great deal of good’.
The British headquarters dressed up the failure as a successful raid. In Australia, the newspapers followed the British communiqué:
Yesterday evening, south of Armentières, we carried out some important raids on a front of two miles in which Australian troops took part. About 140 German prisoners were captured.
In reality, the 5th Division had been wiped out and the survivors were demoralised. They were learning what war on the Western Front was like. Lieutenant Ronald McInnis wrote that ‘We thought we knew something of the horrors of war but we were mere recruits and have had our full education in one day.’ The men of I Anzac Corps were about to find out for themselves. As the Germans buried the Australian dead in mass graves, the three divisions of the corps— the 1st, 2nd and 4th Australian Divisions—moved from Messines down to the Somme.
KILLED IN ACTION
____________________
LANCE CORPORAL GEORGE BLAKE
Carpenter. 19 July 1916
SECOND LIEUTENANT WALTER CARRUTHERS
Bank clerk. 29 September 1918
DIED OF WOUNDS
____________________
PRIVATE ALGERNON BELL
Fireman. 24 July 1916
CHAPTER THREE
THE SOMME, POZIÈRES, 1916
NOCTURNE (EXTRACT)
Silent I sit and gaze into the gloom
Of No Man’s Land, and see the shattered trees,
Set like a row of ghostly sentinels,
There where the stakes and
tangled bard-wire cease.
Now to my staring eyes
they seem to move:
Have they advanced or
were they there before?
Skyward a star-shell soars
with silver ray—
I flout my fears and think
of them no more.
PRIVATE TUNU PARAU
IN THE HOT sun on 20 July, the 1st Australian Division waited in a hastily dug trench that faced the tree-lined streets of the German-occupied hamlet of Pozières and the two formidable trenches of the second German line (known as Old German Lines) on a ridge 450 metres behind it. Whoever held Pozières had control of the highest point of the battlefield. General Sir Henry Rawlinson considered it the key to the area, and General Haig wanted it captured. British troops had tried to take the hamlet on the first day of the Somme offensive, nearly three weeks earlier. But the Germans had held on through that attack and four others, and the bodies of British dead hung in the wire.
On 19 July, the men of the 1st Division had left their billets and marched 15 kilometres, leaving behind the green countryside as they got closer to the front-line. Just before the town of Albert, the men put on their tin hats, and officers discarded their ‘Sam Browne’ revolver belts so snipers couldn’t easily distinguish their rank. They passed under a golden statue of the Virgin Mary and child hanging from a shelled cathedral in Albert. The Australians nicknamed her ‘Fanny Durack’ after the 1912 Olympic swimming and diving champion. The statue was by now famous and symbolic—both sides believed its fall would signify the end of the war. Then the Australians crossed a shell-holed land and barely recognisable German trenches. In the dark, they moved through a gas attack into the trench facing Pozières— the gas smelled sweet, like hyacinths.
The I Anzac Corps was now under the command of General Sir Hubert Gough of the Reserve Army (soon to become the 5th Army), a relatively inexperienced British general who wanted immediate results. On 18 July, Gough had told the 1st Division commander, Lieutenant General Sir Harold Walker, ‘I want you to go into the line and attack Pozières tomorrow night.’ Walker, feeling that he might be rushed into an action that was ‘hasty or ill-considered’ argued for a postponement. The date was set for 23 July, when Haig’s third great effort on the Somme would begin. Six divisions, stretched from Pozières to Guillemont, would advance—the Australians were to attack Pozières; the British, Guillemont. After proper artillery preparations, the Australians were to overrun Pozières trench, which surrounded the hamlet, and go on to capture a main road running through its centre.
HAIL STORM
As zero hour approached, the men’s fears grew. It was the worst time, the waiting. According to Lieutenant Ben Champion, ‘The tension affected the men in different ways. I couldn’t stop urinating, and we were all anxious for the barrage to begin.’ Men re-read letters, looked at photos they carried in their breast pocket, wrote farewell letters, prayed silently or chain-smoked to calm their nerves. Some vomited; others told jokes. No one wanted to let themselves or their comrades down.
Three hours after sunset on 22 July, the first waves went ‘over the bags’ and, keeping low, moved up close to the enemy line, where they waited for zero hour. The Germans waited inside their dugouts; one soldier wrote to his wife and children that he was in ‘Hell’s trenches’, and had ‘given up hope of life’ and would think of them to his last moment. Then the artillery struck. German flares floated downwards as the British bombarded them with such intensity that the shell bursts could be seen 30 kilometres away. The gunners loaded and fired shells as fast as they could. This was the bombardment the Australians had needed at Fromelles.
At 12.30 a.m., as the artillery lifted off Pozières trench and back to the orchards on the hamlet’s outskirts, officers blew their whistles and the first wave charged. They quickly overcame the shell-shocked Germans holding Pozières trench. Following waves passed over the trench, stumbling over shell holes, through dark hedges and the remains of gardens and houses, to reach what was left of the main street. A three-metre-high reinforced concrete blockhouse was the only structure still standing; out of a slit poked a machine-gun muzzle. The Australians charged from the side, surprising the 25 Germans inside. Down in the lower chamber, Private Jack Bourke found parcels and several letters addressed to soldiers in children’s handwriting. Nearby was a German trench coat with a blood-stained shrapnel hole.
The Australians gained the only notable success that day; the British troops had failed to secure Guillemont.
During the day, the Australians shot down three German attempts to recapture the hamlet, then rested or searched the nearby ruins, dugouts and German dead for souvenirs. As they waited for night, the two colonels in charge of the next advance received an ‘urgent and secret’ message that insisted the Australians had to be more disciplined and must salute all British officers, even those driving past in cars. That night the 1st Division captured the rest of Pozières, but from seven o’clock the next morning, the German artillery responded, and for the next three days their shells fell like hail. At times, 15 to 20 shells a minute were bursting in the same spot. The Germans had abandoned the idea of recapturing Pozières, so their gunners set out to make it unliveable. Trenches disappeared and the debris from one exploding shell would simply fill in the crater ne
xt to it. Men were blown to pieces, or killed by the concussion waves from the blasts. Others were buried alive. If they were lucky, their comrades dug them out in time and they gasped for breath as the air about them shrieked and whistled with incoming shells. On 25 July, Sergeant Leonard Elvin wrote:
Heavy firing all morning—simply murder. Men falling everywhere…expecting death every second. 23 men smothered in one trench. Dead and dying everywhere. Some simply blown to pieces.
Many men couldn’t cope. One runner, unable to face the barrage again, handed over his last message and shot himself. Others delivered their messages then fell dead from wounds.
With the shelling making it difficult to remove the wounded, Private Edward Jenkins, a bushman from New South Wales, worked with others to carry as many as they could to safer areas. Jenkins set up shelters for them and gave out the last of his water. His officers considered him a larrikin and a troublemaker, but at Pozières he worked tirelessly and without orders until a shell killed him as he was carrying his dixie of tea to give to the wounded.
The bombardment was as severe as any experienced at the Somme or Verdun, and when it died down, on 26 July, over 5000 Australians had been killed or wounded in their seven days in the front-line. When the 1st Division was relieved by the 2nd Australian Division during the night of 27 July, the men marched out, dazed and staring into space, some wearing souvenired German spike helmets and belts inscribed with the motto ‘Gott mit uns’—God with us.
POZIÈRES HEIGHTS
The 2nd Division was confronted with a land littered with blackened, bloated, fly-ridden bodies and limbs. German shells continued to pulverise Pozières to dust and ash. With the trenches levelled, supply parties had to walk over tracks in the open. There was no safe place to rest. Men expected death or to be buried, ‘dug out and buried again’. One group tried to distract themselves by playing cards. When their sergeant was killed, they threw his body out of the trench, then kept playing until an exploding shell killed them all.
Even though the Germans were clearly expecting an attack, General Gough insisted that the Australians seize the Old German Lines on the heights behind Pozières. The 2nd Division commander, Major General Gordon Legge, did not ask for a postponement despite a report from an artillery commander that the dust and haze meant he couldn’t be certain that the wire had been cut. Legge, commanding a battle of this scale for the first time, was certain that the entanglements would be cut in time. Just after midnight on 29 July, the Australians advanced. It took them eight long minutes to cross no-man’s-land, and, as flares turned night to day, the German machine guns opened fire. The bombardment hadn’t pierced the wire and the men that made it through the gunfire used wire-cutters, their rifle butts and their bare hands to try to get through. Men fell dead or wounded into the wire, which tightened around the living as they struggled.
In half an hour, 2000 men had been killed or wounded. As the 2nd Division withdrew, the sky was lit with red and green German flares of success. General Haig reminded the Australian commanders that they weren’t fighting Turks any more but the ‘most scientific and most military nation in Europe’. Legge insisted his men be given another go, but this time the attack would begin only when everything was properly prepared—a one-metre-deep jumping-off trench would be dug closer to the German trenches.
DOING IT PROPERLY
On the night of 31 July, 500 soldiers moved into no-man’s-land to dig the trench. Melbourne journalist Lieutenant John Raws, unaware that his brother had been killed in the previous attack and was lying in no-man’s-land, reached the jumping-off point to find soldiers and officers alike losing their nerve through the constant shelling. After one officer was killed and, according to Raws, ‘the strain had sent two other officers mad’, Raws and a fellow officer took over and insisted that the digging be finished. The dead and wounded were no longer to be buried or carried out. The soldiers’ only task was to dig. Another officer, driven to the edge, ordered the men to retire, but Raws threatened to shoot anyone who left.
For five nights, the men dug the jumping-off line under shellfire. Some fled into the dark to escape the noise and fear. Raws wrote: As Raws left, he and three others helped a wounded man, using Raws’ puttee to tie the man’s severed leg to his pack.
I have had much luck and kept my nerve so far. The awful difficulty is to keep it. The bravest of all often lose it—courage does not count here. It is all nerve—once that goes one becomes a gibbering maniac…
And forests! There are not even tree trunks left, not a leaf or a twig. All is buried, and churned up again, and buried again. The sad part is that one can see no end of this. If we live to-night, we have to go through to-morrow night, and next week, and next month. Poor wounded devils you meet on the stretchers are laughing with glee. One cannot blame them—they are getting out of this…
…We are lousy, stinking, ragged, unshaven, sleepless…I have one puttee, a dead man’s helmet, another dead man’s gas protector, a dead man’s bayonet. My tunic is rotten with other men’s blood, and partly spattered with a comrade’s brains.
On 4 August, the 2nd Division lay in the newly completed jumping-off line. The moment their artillery shells stopped hitting the German trenches, they rushed across the shortened no-man’s-land and quickly captured the two almost flattened trenches of the Old German Lines on the ridge behind Pozières. In the 10 days that the 2nd Division had been in the line, 6800 had been killed or wounded.
A GERMAN REPLY
With only two days’ experience in trenches at Armentières, on 6 August the 4th Australian Division relieved the 2nd Division. Several attempts to recapture the heights had already been shot down, but the Germans were determined. General Falkenhayn, the German commander, had insisted from the start of the war that no land was to be relinquished without a fight and that lost land was to be recaptured at the first opportunity. But with German commanders rushing counterattacks, the Germans were now being as mauled as the Allies.
At dawn on 7 August, as the 4th Division sheltered in captured dugouts from a systematic bombardment, the Germans attacked again. The heights were lightly held by the Australians to prevent loss of life during heavy shelling, and three battalions of German troops swept over the battered trenches, stopping only to roll bombs into the dugouts and to leave sentries at the exits before the rest moved down the slope towards Pozières.
In one dugout, Lieutenant Albert Jacka, who had won a Victoria Cross for his actions at Gallipoli, fired his revolver up the stairs over two wounded soldiers, killing the German stationed at the top. Jacka and seven others prepared to dash back through the Germans to Pozières, but when they saw 40 Australian prisoners under a guard of the same number being led back towards the new German lines, Jacka lined up his men and charged.
The German guards opened fire, hitting every man— Jacka was hit seven times—but they reached the guards and a savage bayonet and fist-fight erupted, with the prisoners also attacking their guards. More raced over to join in, until
Huns and Aussies were scattered in ones and twos all along the side of the hill…Each Aussie seemed as if he was having a war all on his own.
The Germans, now outnumbered, surrendered. When Jacka was carried out, few gave him any chance of survival, but he recovered and returned to the Western Front, serving until he was poisoned by gas in 1918.
A GRINDING ADVANCE— 8 AUGUST TO 5 SEPTEMBER
With Pozières heights now secured, General Haig ordered the commanders in the area to organise their own attacks while he built up new divisions and ammunition for a September advance. Under General Gough, the Australians were to advance towards Mouquet Farm—a German strong point—to get in behind Thiepval, another bastion of the German line. Over the next 28 days, the 1st, 2nd and 4th Australian Divisions were all used as Gough ordered attack after attack to drive a narrow salient two kilometres to the farm. The Germans made them fight for every metre, shelling their salient from the front and both sides. Fresh battalions were sen
t to the front via different routes to prevent them seeing the dead bodies from the previous attacks. When the ground was ‘spongy’ underfoot, the men realised they were stepping on corpses.
Twenty-year-old Sergeant David Badger wrote to his parents in South Australia, saying:
When you see this I’ll be dead; don’t worry…Try to think I did the only possible thing, as I tell you I would do it again if I had the chance.
He died in the next attack.
The Australians hated the shallow advances on narrow fronts—now reduced to one or two battalions—and many felt they were just being sent to kill Germans. In one Australian’s opinion, ‘All we are doing is using up German Reserves, and, at a faster rate, our own.’ Even the New Zealand commander, Major General Sir Andrew Russell, believed the Australians were being wasted.
The tactics created bitterness towards the commanders, and a feeling that no one knew what they, the soldiers, were going through. In their view, the newspapers reported only the official line about successful attacks, with no mention of the human cost. Corporal Arthur Thomas wrote that a ‘book on the life of an infantryman’ needed to be written to ‘quickly prevent these shocking tragedies’. Captain Gordon Maxfield felt that
Nothing published in the papers is worth a damn… There are some astounding tales to be told about the war which will make your hair stand on end when the facts are made public.
Zero Hour Page 4