Zero Hour
Page 7
The executions unsettled some of the troops. Lance Corporal William Anderson, who was in the same battalion as Private John Sweeney—another who was executed— thought he
should have been sent in with the others to the Somme and given a chance of survival. It is likely enough the Germans would have provided the firing squad.
One soldier who was on Field Punishment was handcuffed to a tree stump after refusing to take part in the preparations ‘to shoot a boy wearing the same uniform as himself’.
It wasn’t surprising that some men couldn’t cope. Lieutenant Mitchell recalled that there was
something in trench-holding that is particularly nerve straining. One knows that, come what may, we must stay and take it…at the back of the soldiers mind is always that lurking feeling that the enemy artillery will concentrate on their trenches and wipe them with their garrison out of existence.
For Lieutenant Charles Alexander, there was nothing worse than to
sit crouched day and night in a wet muddy trench and hear nothing but the scream of his shells…and to see your comrades…blown to pieces, dying of wounds in the mud and to realise that it may be your turn next.
Men ducked at the sound of shells, held their breath and tensed their bodies. Others found themselves shaking or twitching uncontrollably. Some deserted from the army, killed themselves, or shot themselves in their feet or hands so they could no longer fight. Those caught with wounds that appeared to be self-inflicted faced being disciplined.
Most had little choice but to continue—to not do so meant they’d let down their comrades and their own sense of honour. One New Zealand soldier, ‘Clarrie’, had insisted on going into battle with his company and was killed. He’d always been too terrified to fight so his commanding officer had given him jobs away from the front, for his own good and for those who had to share a trench with him. According to Second Lieutenant Ormond Burton, the
really brave man is he who knows fear and overcomes it. Clarence had known it very dreadfully and to make things harder had fallen to it time and time again. Now he had the victory.
Others couldn’t overcome the terrifying thoughts of death or injury. Private Victor Spencer, an 18-year-old who’d lied about his age when he’d enlisted, was the last New Zealander to be shot on the Western Front. After deserting with shell-shock, he was found living in a house with a French woman and two children. He said his nerves had ‘been completely destroyed’ and that he’d had to turn to drink. Out of 28 New Zealanders sentenced to death, five were executed. For generations, their families tried to clear their names; in September 2000, the New Zealand government pardoned them.
BLIGHTY
‘A chap said to me today as we marched,’ wrote Sergeant Evans, ‘“Kiss me Sergeant and make me sick, then I’ll get blighty.”’ Getting a blighty, meant the men could be away from the front for two weeks to six months. Some wounded soldiers grinned as they were carted out. After losing his toe, Sergeant Malthus called, ‘It’s a blighty, a good blighty, it’ll do me.’
At a casualty clearing station, Malthus waited with rows of wounded as doctors cleaned and dressed injuries. Those the doctors thought had a strong chance of recovery were loaded onto hospital trains, then onto ferries to England, where they went to overcrowded hospitals or to specialist units for their wounds. In one hospital, hundreds of men who had face wounds underwent experimental operations to clumsily reconstruct their noses and mouths. Many of the techniques were being used for the first time. In other hospitals, men who’d lost arms and legs had wooden, rubber and metal limbs fitted. Hospital wards stank of chloroform, pus and gangrene. Malthus almost died from blood poisoning when his wound became infected and gangrenous. After recovering, he, like others no longer fit to fight, sailed home.
Those that stayed were nursed back to health. Wealthy English aristocrats opened up their country homes for recovering soldiers, but with the welcome rest, memories of the front haunted them. Men woke sweating and screaming, babbling about their nightmares. Evans dreamed that he fell into a shell hole next to a wounded German, and they fought, but he didn’t have a gun or knife, so he had to strangle the German.
Some who had missing limbs and smashed bodies wished they were dead. They saw no future for themselves. When the more fortunate had healed, doctors declared them fit to fight. Australian Corporal John Allan went back to the front with no illusions:
No one who had actually gone through this war… witnessed its horrors is anxious to get back to it. I am going back. It is not from choice. It is my duty and that alone makes me go into it again.
A BLIGHTY VISIT
Every 15 to 18 months, the men were given clean, lice-free clothing and 10 to 14 days’ leave to go to London, or sometimes Paris. With their leave pass, they boarded trains jammed with British, Canadians and fellow Australians and New Zealanders, then, at the French coast, boarded ferries for England and the white cliffs of Dover. Onlookers cheered as the troop trains sped through towns, en route to London. At Victoria Station, the men pushed through crowds of returning British soldiers being hugged by loved ones. When Lieutenant Mitchell arrived in London, he was ‘vastly pleased with himself. Ten days of absolute freedom.’ He swaggered onto the streets of London with an air of ‘Make way for an Aussie on leave.’
It was an exciting time. There were no orders to follow, no fatigues, no flares or gun flashes; instead, the dimly lit streets were crowded with people. The Anzacs listened to the English accents around them and watched British soldiers having afternoon tea with their wives in tearooms. They slept in real beds between clean sheets on soft mattresses—‘a glorious feeling’ according to Second Lieutenant Burton.
They took guided tours or jumped on and off the tube and double-decker buses, visiting the famous London landmarks they had read or heard so much about: Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral, the British Museum, Hyde Park. One by one, they ticked them off. In his diary, Sergeant Evans described how he strolled down Pall Mall to Buckingham Palace, swapped buttons with a Scots Guard soldier, and at Trafalgar Square saw the Queen Mother pass by in a car—‘Though fairly old, she was still quite nice looking.’ ‘A simply ripping day, quite an Australian sunny day,’ he wrote, aware that he’d been fortunate with the weather on his leave. Others found the climate gloomy, and couldn’t understand why people would choose to live there when they could live in Australia or New Zealand. Many soldiers also visited family or the birthplace of their parents, once again concluding that their own countries were better.
The war was very evident in England. Food was rationed and men in khaki uniforms were everywhere. During air raids, the soldiers crowded into cellars with civilians until the all-clear signal was given. Private Melville ‘Melve’ King found it ‘a pitiful sight to see women and children rushing among the streets of London looking for shelter from bombs’.
With food shortages and so many British men in France, the Anzac soldiers, with their distinctive swagger and high pay packet, had no difficulty befriending young women. They took them out to restaurants, then to movies and shows. Other women, prostitutes, sidled up to the men, causing the army significant headaches. The soldiers—husbands and sons—had gone to fight for their country, but many ended up hospitalised with sexually transmitted infections. To stop infection, the Australian Army gave out condoms, but the New Zealand Army—reluctant to scandalise the public back home—preferred to give lectures. This approach led to the New Zealand troops having the highest rate of STIs out of all colonial countries fighting in the war. A New Zealand woman, Ettie Rout, who’d followed the troops to Europe against the government’s wishes, handed out free condoms and set up a New Zealand–only brothel in Paris, until the army took her advice and began issuing preventative kits.
OLD FAMILIAR FACES
At the end of their leave, the men returned to France on trains that were quiet and dull compared to those that had taken them away from the front-line. Some overstayed, only going back when th
eir money ran out. A few deserted for months; there were rumours that one soldier had joined the Irish Republican Army and that ‘most of the bus and tram drivers in Ireland were New Zealanders and Australians’.
Although Lieutenant Edgar Worrall didn’t fancy spending another winter in France, he returned to be back ‘among the old familiar faces—or what are left of them’. As the war dragged on, the men’s units and comrades became their family, and almost their reason to continue fighting. Soldiers returned to look for their mates to bury them, and gave up leave to visit their graves. Their friends died in their arms, and beside them during charges. Soon, they became friends with the next man they shared dugouts with or fought beside, until he too died or went missing. When shells fell heavily, the men talked to each other to ease the strain until the shelling had ended and they could return to sleep.
KILLED IN ACTION
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SERGEANT CECIL BALDWIN
Accountant. 2 March 1917
LIEUTENANT EDGAR WORRALL
Medical student. 4 October 1917
DIED OF WOUNDS
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LANCE CORPORAL ERNEST WILLIAMS
Lawyer. 29 December 1917
CORPORAL JOHN ALLAN
Dairy farmer. 3 October 1918
EXECUTED
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PRIVATE FRANK HUGHES
Labourer. 28 August 1916
PRIVATE JOHN SWEENEY
Labourer. 2 October 1916
PRIVATE JOHN BRAITHWAITE
Journalist. 29 October 1916
PRIVATE JOHN KING
Miner. 19 August 1917
PRIVATE VICTOR SPENCER
Engineer. 24 February 1918
CHAPTER SIX
VOTE NO, MUM
GLASSINGTON—Died of wounds in France, April 6, 1918, in his 24th year, Private J. P. Glassington, dear loved husband of Myra, and father of little Jack and Millie.
Our home is always lonely,
Our hearts are always sad;
I miss my loving husband,
The children miss their dad.
NEWSPAPER ‘IN MEMORIAM ’ NOTICE
BACK IN AUSTRALIA and New Zealand, friends and colleagues read the long casualty lists printed in newspapers or posted outside town halls, while families waited for the dreaded telegram that would inform them their loved ones were missing, wounded or dead. Later, a letter from a friend or officer would arrive from the front, explaining, where possible, how they had died or where they had last been seen. Often the families were told, the death had been heroic and quick.
From the beginning, those unable to fight had set up committees to collect bedding, clothing and money for the Belgian people and for the Red Cross. They contributed packages of cocoa, condensed milk and tobacco, home-baked cakes and hand-knitted socks, underwear and balaclavas to be sent to the troops. After finding out that a pair of socks lasted a soldier only two weeks, New Zealanders held a ‘sock day’. To provide the fighting troops with basic comforts, which the army considered luxuries, committees organised shows and galas, workers donated a percentage of their wages, and school children raised funds by selling rabbit skins, leeches, frogs and firewood. Some of this money was used to set up hot cocoa and soup stalls for the soldiers. One group, the Otago Patriotic League, used its funds to have meat pies made and distributed close to the front-line.
Some women wanted a more direct active role. Although the Australian and New Zealand governments prevented women from being stretcher-bearers or ambulance drivers, female nurses served in hospitals and casualty clearing stations close to the front-line. Ten New Zealand nurses drowned in 1915 when their ship was torpedoed en route to Europe. At the front, they faced the same perils and conditions as the soldiers, and their stations were often shelled. During major advances they were overwhelmed with casualties. ‘The Last Post is being played nearly all day at the cemetery next door to the hospital. So many deaths…’ Australian nurse Sister Alice Ross-King wrote in her diary. Once, when her station was bombed:
The noise was so terrific, and the concussion so great that I was thrown to the ground and had no idea where the damage was. I flew through the chest and abdo [abdomen] wards and called out: ‘are you alright boys?’ ‘Don’t bother about us,’ was the general cry.
With the hospital lights out, and under a night sky full of searchlights and the roar of artillery, Ross-King found one of the tents collapsed. When she eventually found a way in, she tried to lift a delirious patient:
I had my right arm under a leg which I thought was his but when I lifted I found to my horror that it was a loose leg with a boot and a puttee on it.
She was later awarded a Military Medal for her ‘great coolness and devotion to duty’.
HOME WAR
As well as bringing together people back home, the war also created divisions. People with German heritage living in New Zealand and Australia were abused and harassed. Some of them changed their surnames, while others had to quit their jobs. Anyone who had been born in Germany had to report to local police stations, and if they were considered a risk they were locked up in internment camps. The Australian government even changed town names—Germantown in New South Wales became Holbrook, named after a British Victoria Cross recipient.
As the war progressed, tensions grew. In January 1915, two Turkish sympathisers killed four and wounded seven people on a picnic train in Broken Hill, before being shot themselves in a 90-minute gun-battle with police and vigilantes. A mob, believing local Germans had agitated the two gunners, burned the local German club to the ground. In May 1915, a 5000-strong New Zealand crowd looted German-owned shops in Wanganui. In South Australia, Lutheran schools were shut down, and in New Zealand, Lutheran church bells were smashed and a church burned.
Eventually, the divisions broadened and new fractures arose; people even began to turn on those they believed weren’t doing enough to support the war.
THE WHITE FEATHER
The heavy Somme casualties of 1916 cast a dark shadow over homes and communities in Australia and New Zealand. The enthusiasm at the outbreak of the war was evaporating, and, with fewer men now volunteering to replace the fallen, both governments raised the question of conscription, through which it would be compulsory for selected men to go to war.
At home, the sight of seemingly ‘eligible men’ who hadn’t volunteered as soldiers angered many people, particularly those who had family at the front. Despite the initial rush to volunteer in 1914, most eligible men in New Zealand and Australia hadn’t enlisted. There were many reasons for this: some believed it was unacceptable to kill; others felt the war was about profit and trade, not justice; some of Irish descent objected to fighting for England while it still controlled Ireland; and increasingly there were men who feared being killed or badly maimed.
After the heavy losses of Gallipoli, these men were called ‘shirkers’ or ‘cowards’. Some were handed white feathers— symbols of cowardice—by women. The New Zealand Rugby Union banned anyone over 20 years of age from playing. A Bay of Plenty newspaper article suggested shirkers should be given the death penalty. People refused to work with eligible men, and some employers either sacked or refused to employ them.
After Britain introduced conscription in January 1916, many within New Zealand and Australia called for the same system, arguing that all able men had a responsibility to fight. Why should the shirker stay at home, they asked, while others died fighting for his freedom? Although both Australia and New Zealand had compulsory military training, it was for home defence only. Conscripting men to fight overseas was another matter.
THE BALLOT
In New Zealand the unions and the newly founded Labour Party opposed conscription, believing that more men would volunteer if soldiers’ pay was raised to the minimum wage. ‘War profiteering’ by businesses had also increased; since 1914 food prices had risen by 16 per cent, but wages hadn’t gone up. The Labour Party argued that if there was to be
conscription of manpower, then the government should also conscript wealth, take over major industries, raise taxes to pay for an increase in soldiers’ wages, and put an end to war profiteering.
Despite this opposition, the New Zealand government cautiously introduced conscription, telling the soldiers at the front and the British government that the New Zealand Division would be kept full ‘as long as men are available’. The first ballot was held in November 1916. Using numbered balls dispensed by a machine, female clerical workers selected cards with the names of unmarried New Zealand men aged from 20 to 46. Unless two or more members of that family had already been killed in the war, balloted men were automatically conscripted into the army.
Afterwards, the rate of volunteering quickly fell; men waited instead to be conscripted. By 1918 almost all reinforcements were conscripts, and by the end of the war over 30,000 soldiers had been conscripted: one-quarter of the troops sent by New Zealand.
NO BLOOD TO FLOW
Although Maori men were not included in the conscription ballot, their enlistment numbers had also dropped after Gallipoli. At the outbreak of war, several prominent Maori leaders, including the politician Sir Apirana Ngata, had encouraged Maori to volunteer to prove their equality with the Pakeha—Europeans. At first, with recruitment numbers high, Maori volunteers were rejected—Britain didn’t want ‘natives’ fighting Europeans—but as the war dragged on, this attitude changed. A Maori Native Contingent fought at Gallipoli, but on the Western Front, as the Pioneer Battalion, the Maori built roads and communication trenches. They wanted a combat role, not to be labourers, and this led to a fall in recruitment numbers. In February 1916, of the 314 ‘Maori’ recruits, 203 were from the Pacific Islands.