Field Marshal Foch, wanting to prevent the Germans prolonging the war, ordered a succession of attacks along the Western Front. At dawn on 8 October, the 4th Army, and the New Zealanders with the 3rd Army, attacked and broke the Beaurevoir Line in their sector, then chased the crumbling German Army for three days, giving them no time to establish a new line of defence.
When not fighting, the New Zealanders ate boiled swedes from the villagers’ gardens to supplement their rations. In the frosty mornings, they stamped their feet to warm themselves, then followed creeping barrages across largely abandoned land. In some places, the Germans stood their ground and fought. Private J. Ward’s rifle was shot away, so he picked up a shovel and rejoined the advance, killing three with it. The New Zealanders took pot shots at the fleeing troops, and in front of Fontaine village they watched a single German machine-gunner in the church spire shoot down a British cavalry charge.
On 17 October, as the British in Flanders forced the Germans back from the Belgian coast and the French and Americans attacked again in the Verdun sector, the New Zealanders and British fought across the heavily defended River Selle. The New Zealanders pursued the Germans until, on 31 October, the ramparts of the ancient and famous Le Quesnoy fortress lay in front of them, hidden by trees. In two weeks, the New Zealanders, with British divisions on either side of them, had advanced 18 kilometres.
THE FORTRESS OF LE QUESNOY
Over the next four days, the New Zealanders moved closer to the town, taking prisoners and burying the dead. The British carted in wagonloads of corpses, each one sewn in a blanket, then laid them in two rows, side by side, in a mass grave. They covered them with a layer of earth, then laid another row on top. The German dead were dragged by their heels and thrown into the nearest trench, then covered with dirt.
Everything was collapsing around the Germans. Bulgaria and Turkey had conceded defeat on 20 October. When Austria–Hungary sought peace on 28 October, German civilians called for peace at any price, and sailors mutinied when ordered to set out to fight the British again.
At dawn on 4 November, in the final Allied offensive, the New Zealanders set out to capture the 11th-century fortress town of Le Quesnoy. The Germans had machine guns on top of the nine-metre-high inner rampart, as well as among the trees on man-made ‘islands’ that divided the outer moat. The town was filled with civilians and historic buildings, so it was decided that the artillery would carefully explode oil drums and smoke shells on the ramparts to give the infantry cover. The New Zealanders moved up on either side of the town, overrunning machine-gunners. While several battalions tried to break through the fortress, others advanced kilometres past it, effectively cutting off the Germans inside. As they advanced, villagers gave them gifts of coffee and fruit and large numbers of Germans surrendered.
The attempt to capture the fortress itself had been frustrated. German machine-gunners had pinned down the New Zealanders. Second Lieutenant Francis Evans and four others managed to scale an ‘island’ rampart, then raced through the trees towards the dry inner moat and inner rampart wall, until they were spotted. Taking cover in a shallow hole, they waited for the gunfire to cease. When it did, Evans scrambled out, but the machine-gunner was waiting, and after a short burst of bullets Evans rolled back into the hole, shot in the head. Another of the soldiers tried to fire his Lewis gun, but was also killed, leaving the remaining three to wait in the hole with their dead comrades for the next six hours.
With the town surrounded, the New Zealand commander sent German prisoners across to explain the hopelessness of the situation. Only one group returned, saying the troops were willing to surrender but the officers wouldn’t let them. In the early afternoon, an aeroplane dropped a message requesting the Germans surrender, but their machine-gunners kept firing. While the New Zealand Lewis gunners and mortar teams forced the Germans to take cover, Second Lieutenants Leslie Averill and Harold Kerr got to the inner rampart, leaned a scaling ladder against it and scrambled up. At the top, Averill fired at two Germans running away in panic, then he and Kerr strode down the grass slope into the town, shooting at a crowd of soldiers who rushed for cover. Over 700 Germans surrendered peacefully. When the New Zealanders marched through the open gates, the locals embraced them and gave them flowers and cakes. Fifty New Zealanders had been killed and another 238 had been wounded.
The following night, the second of the offensive, another 20 New Zealanders were killed as they fought from tree to tree through a dense forest with heavy rain falling. It was the New Zealanders’ last battle. The Germans were now broken and in forced retreat, leaving behind vast quantities of material and abandoned trains. British aeroplanes flew over an empty land; there was no one left to shoot at.
In Germany, revolution had broken out. Workers took to the streets and demanded that the Kaiser step down, and when German soldiers refused to shoot the workers, the Kaiser was replaced. The new leader immediately accepted the harsh armistice terms—the terms that General Ludendorff had earlier hoped would inspire the German people to fight on.
A QUIET END
The armistice to end the Great War was signed in a railway carriage on 11 November, coming into effect at 11 a.m. The 1st and 4th Australian Divisions returned to the Western Front after their long rest to find it eerily quiet; not one gun was firing. The war to end all wars was over. Nearly 10 million people had been killed.
It was a foggy, sunless day. On hearing the news, the soldiers at the front didn’t cheer. For Gunner Bert Stokes, ‘it was just a relief, we didn’t celebrate at all.’ According to New Zealander Private James Weir, ‘everyone was so dog tired. We had gone beyond hope. It wouldn’t sink in. We couldn’t care less.’ ‘Fancy no more shells,’ wrote Private James McKenzie, ‘no more bullets, no more sleeping in dirty wet trenches etc. I was on the verge of tears thinking of putting in another winter on the line…’ For Lieutenant George Mitchell ‘it all seemed unreal…Our known world had slipped from us.’ In military camps and towns away from the front the mood was more celebratory. Sergeant Eric Evans wrote in his diary:
The fighting is finished. Hurrah! My letters which I wrote to be posted after my death will now be of no use. Thank God. The war has finished and we have won. Hurrah!
KILLED IN ACTION
____________________
SERGEANT JOSEPH HOLT
Railway employee. 18 September 1918
SERGEANT MAJOR GEORGE CUMMING
Cellarman. 5 October 1918
PRIVATE CHARLIE LINFORD
Blacksmith. 5 October 1918
SECOND LIEUTENANT FRANCIS EVANS
Clerk. 4 November 1918
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE WAR TO END ALL WARS
FERN SEED (extract)
From Hébuterne to Havrincourt
The map is wet with tears —
And women proudly, blindly turn
To face the barren years.
BY D. H. L., 8 NOVEMBER 1918
WHEN THE NEWS reached New Zealand and Australia, church, factory and ship bells tolled and people poured into the streets to celebrate. The troops were eager to return home but they had a long wait. On 28 November, the New Zealanders marched through French and Belgian villages, which were draped in welcome banners and strewn with flowers, en route to Germany and occupation. As they crossed the River Rhine, the German crowds were silent and grim. It didn’t take long for the men to befriend the locals, and the more they came to know them, the more they realised the waste of war. Diggers sat with German veterans in cafes and spoke of the mud of Passchendaele.
Slowly, the soldiers were shipped back to New Zealand. Those who’d served the longest and married men were sent first. By 25 March 1919, the last of the New Zealand troops were demobilised.
The Australians, shipped to England, underwent civilian training as they waited to be sent back on a ‘first to come, first to go’ basis. With transports hard to find, the slowness frustrated them—they caused so much disturbance in London that the British prime
minister wanted them sent home as quickly as possible, but, even so, the last Australian troops didn’t return until September 1919.
HOMEWARD BOUND
The Australians and New Zealanders trickled back to countries that were battling the ravages of Spanish flu—a deadly virus that in three days killed soldiers who’d survived the whole war. Several ships arriving home were not allowed to dock immediately for fear of spreading the illness; the men were kept in quarantine, much to their anger. Some homecomings were major affairs, others less so; people were preoccupied with the flu.
For many, returning home was harder than expected. Gunner Bert Stokes felt he ‘was just a soldier who’d come back from war’. Everything he’d done, everything he’d known and been part of were finished, and he would have to start again. The governments tried to help: injured soldiers were given war pensions, while other veterans were given money to set up businesses or less desirable land to farm. In the North Island of New Zealand, some of the land was so isolated and rugged that the soldier-farmers walked off it. The bridge that led to this land is now called ‘the Bridge to Nowhere’. The Australian system worked much better than the New Zealand system, which ended in 1922.
Over 400,000 Australians and 103,000 New Zealanders went to war; 58,961 Australians and 18,500 New Zealanders were killed. Over 64 per cent of all Australians involved and 58.6 per cent of New Zealanders were either wounded or killed. This was 6.8 per cent of Australia’s population and 8.9 per cent of New Zealand’s. It was a devastating blow to families and to the small populations of both countries. Memorials and monuments were erected in towns and cities. Many family members never recovered from the grief of losing their son, brother, father or husband, and others had to live with the changed or broken men who returned.
With little understanding of what the Diggers had gone through—few talked about their experiences—many civilians expected the returned soldiers to fit back in perfectly, hold down jobs and lead steady lives. Over 80,000 Australians who returned had to cope with ongoing sicknesses, while 1020 New Zealanders had lost limbs. One-armed men were taught shorthand; legless men learned to ‘repair boots, class wool, and other tasks’. Those who’d experienced gas poisoning continued to suffer, and many were forced to give up office jobs to work in the outdoors. Even so, many died from the effects 10 or 20 years later.
REMEMBERING
The Diggers were haunted by memories. Some of the men lay awake night after night, thinking over things they should have done, or things they shouldn’t have. Again, in their minds, they saw mates killed and maimed and listened to wounded comrades calling to them in agony from no-man’s-land. They relived the sight of helpless prisoners being lined up and shot, men curling up to die or having their heads battered in with rifle butts. They remembered picking up pieces of human beings and putting them in sandbags, or burning corpses close to trenches to get rid of the smell.
Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence Blyth had enlisted after one of his brothers wrote from Egypt telling him that every man would be needed. That brother died one month before the end of the war. Another brother
came back, having lost an arm, and he had this claustrophobia. He couldn’t stay in a confined place or anything like that. He couldn’t go into the lift, he couldn’t go in the car. He couldn’t do anything like that and he couldn’t get any relief, so what did he do? He met up with his old cobbers and he went on the drink. He got drink, it carried him through. It helped him through.
There was little understanding of, or support for, shell-shock victims, who were generally considered to be lazy or faking their symptoms to get a war pension. When money ran out, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s, veterans, some limbless, sang for a living on the streets, or begged with signs hung around their necks listing the battles they’d fought in. One Australian veteran wrote a song that became popular with others who’d experienced the war. It ended: ‘Civvie life’s a bleedin’ failure, I was happy yesterday.’ Some sought out the company of other veterans; some drank to dull the memories; others buried themselves in their families and work and never spoke about the war again.
But the pain was too much for some, and they ended their lives. Brigadier General ‘Pompey’ Elliott, the Australian commander who had helped recapture Villers-Bretonneux and had wept at the sight of his men after the Battle of Fromelles, committed suicide in 1931.
Queenslander Private Douglas Grant struggled to fit in on his return. He was one of 400 to 500 Indigenous Australians who’d served in the Great War, even though, at the time, they were not classed as Australian citizens and volunteering was no easy feat—government regulations meant Aborigines had to seek permission to leave the country. He’d tried to enlist twice before being accepted, was captured at Bullecourt in 1917 and spent the rest of the war as a POW. Fellow prisoners put him in charge of handing out the relief parcels because, according to a German, he was honest, had a quick mind, and ‘was so aggressively Australian’. But if he or other Aboriginal soldiers hoped their sacrifice would earn them greater respect and equality back home, they were disappointed. Grant experienced continued racism and exclusion, and, after trying to participate in ex-servicemen’s organisations, he became frustrated and disillusioned and turned to drink.
NEVER FORGET
In Belgium and France, the locals faced another harsh winter, living in ruins or shacks made from war scrap. Their fields were strewn with barbed wire and pockmarked with craters filled with stagnant, gas-poisoned water. There were many dead bodies, and unexploded shells that killed and maimed many of those who painstakingly returned the land to farming. Even today, shells ploughed up during the ‘iron harvest’ are left at the side of the road for collection. Remains of bodies, too, are still found.
Large memorials were erected—the memorial at Menin Gate, Ypres, records the names of 54,900 of the ‘missing’, while the Thiepval Memorial is inscribed with the names of 72,000 soldiers who have no known grave, mainly those killed between July and November 1916. The buried were dug up and moved to large cemeteries. Australian families were given the opportunity to write an inscription for their loved one’s headstone. They ranged from ‘I gave my son, he gave his life for Australia and Empire’ and ‘It is men, of my age and single, who are expected to do their duty’ to ‘Beloved only son’ and ‘Rest here in peace, your parents’ hearts are broken, mum and dad’. The New Zealand headstones, like the British, gave the soldier’s name and battalion, or, if unknown, simply the words ‘A soldier of the Great War. Known unto God.’
The French and Belgian people promised to remember the Australians and New Zealanders who’d died on their soil. They erected plaques and renamed streets in Villers-Bretonneux with names like Melbourne Street, and streets in Le Quesnoy with names like Aotearoa Avenue and Place de All Blacks. School classrooms in Villers-Bretonneux still display signs with the words ‘Never forget Australia.’
A NEW BEGINNING
The terms of the armistice were harsh. The Ottoman Empire was broken up, and France and Britain gained control of oil-rich countries like Iraq. The continuing wars and conflicts in the Middle East can be linked back to the splitting up of the Ottoman Empire after the war to end all wars.
Germany was forced to pay reparations to the Allies for the cost of their war effort and the ongoing expenses of their veterans and war widows. It was also occupied; vast quantities of war materials were given to the victors; and the naval blockade that had starved the German people continued. For many ordinary Germans, life after the war remained a daily struggle against hunger and poverty.
Many soldiers and politicians believed that Germany was treated too harshly—the British prime minister commented that the treaty was ‘all a great pity. We shall have to do the same thing all over again in 25 years.’ The Germans felt they were being unfairly punished and humiliated. As they struggled to pay back the heavy reparations to the British and French, a German veteran of the Great War who had been at Fromelles on 19 July 1916 rose to p
ower on a wave of bitterness and nationalism. The Germans, under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party, would once more march against the Russians, through the old Ottoman Empire and France, all the way to the coast that they had been unable to reach in the Great War. When Britain, France, New Zealand and Australia declared war on Germany again, on 3 September 1939, veterans of the Great War had no illusions about what the next generation of young men would face. Ormond Burton, a veteran-turned-pacifist, was jailed for speaking out against the Second World War as transports sailed again to Egypt in January 1940.
TIMELINE
1914
JUNE 28 Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassinated
JULY 28 Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia
Russia begins mobilising its army
AUGUST 1-3 Germany declares war on Russia and France
AUGUST 4 Germany invades Belgium Britain declares war on Germany
AUGUST 5 New Zealand and Australia declare war on Germany
AUGUST 7 First British troops land in France
AUGUST 23 Battle of Mons
SEPTEMBER 5-12 First Battle of Marne
OCTOBER 14 - NOVEMBER 22 First Battle of Ypres
OCTOBER 16 New Zealanders leave for war
OCTOBER 29 Ottoman Empire (Turkey) sides with Germany
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