Stanley Beament, in the 20th Battalion ofJack’s own regiment, had joined up, on reaching military age, a year after Jack himself, and, as the 20th Battalion of The King’s Royal Rifle Corps was a Pioneer Battalion, might have been expected to be immune from wounding by rifle fire. But, twenty-four hours before Jack had been wounded at High Wood, Stanley’s company had been attached to the 8th Brigade of the Third Division where they stood in the line ready to launch the dawn attack in the early hours of 14 July. It was while they were consolidating the line between High Wood and Delville Wood, while the Pioneers were digging a new communication trench, that Stanley had been wounded. On his way back to the dressing station, he must have passed within yards of his brother Jack as the Church Lads, in their turn, marched up towards the line. Now, in the hospital at Rouen, the two brothers compared wounds, swapped experiences, gloated over their luck, and, in between painful dressings, thoroughly enjoyed being petted and fussed over and treated as minor celebrities. On 22 July they were bundled aboard a hospital ship and travelled home together.
On the same day, the most illustrious casualty of Bloody July met his death on the Somme. It was Major-General Ingouville-Williams, in command of the 34th Division. He died at Mametz Wood, killed by the explosion of an unlucky shell, as he moved up to reconnoitre the ground for the next stage of the hoped-for advance. It was a severe blow to the Army, for the Somme fighting had taken a heavy toll of colonels and brigadiers who had gone into the line with their troops and had been killed or wounded, and even a colonel or a brigadier was more easily replaced than an experienced major-general in command of a Division. The General’s body was brought back and he was buried at Warloy with full military honours. Transport columns and gun batteries were scoured for black horses to draw the gun carriage bearing his coffin and two matching pairs were eventually found in ‘C’ Battery of the 152nd Brigade.
Sergeant Frank Spencer, No. 1113, ‘C’ Bty., 152nd Brigade, Royal Field Artillery
23 July: Good progress reported as a result of the strafe and batches of prisoners are continuously marched back to the rear but no definite news is obtainable. We now suffer a great loss by the death of our Officer Commanding our 34th Division – General Williams killed by a shell bursting last night. Our No. 2 black team is used for removal of the body. (Fritz leaves us alone, being evidently too preoccupied in dealing with infantry as great progress is made during the day.)
There had been another night attack on High Wood, and this time by the 51st Division.
Lance-Corporal David Watson, No. 3721, 9th Btn., Royal Scots, 51st Division
We were marched up through Fricourt, which was badly battered. That was the first real sign of war we had come through and, when we reached Mametz Wood, we cut through the wood across the valley and went into a trench behind the Bazentin le Petit wood. That was the assembly point for the ‘do’. And the battle order was that, if the attack failed, we had to come back to this trench. When we reached the road at Bazentin village we turned left and moved up the road. We were in extended order right up that road and, oh, the German guns were knocking us down wholesale and the same with these machine-guns. We took up position along the wall and, at two minutes past twelve, we jumped the wall and ran down the hill to take, according to orders, a few minutes’ rest in a valley. To me it was like a dried-up water course. A dip. Water would be there in the winter. And then we were to form up about fifty yards from High Wood to rush it. The Corporal and three of us, three privates, we reached the fifty yards spot but no order came to charge the wood. The Corporal decided to go and see what had happened but we saw him knocked down about fifty yards away from us. And he had given us an order, ‘Don’t move from where ye are until I get back.’ But we couldn’t move because we were pinned down with machine-gun fire. Bullets were flying all roads and men were dropping on each side. In fact, I saw Sergeant Thomson who was badly wounded being helped by a Lance-Corporal who had gone down on one knee and had the Sergeant sitting up against him, and a big shell splinter came across and sliced the Sergeant’s head off. That poor Corporal, he was nearly demented. He was inches away from him.
We took up position ready to get into the wood. Nothing happened and our guns didn’t seem to hit the wood at all because they should have been able to knock out these machine-gunners. They kept firing for a long time and there were only three of us left. One lad lost patience with the strain of waiting, just got up on to his feet and ran away and he went down. He was hit. You saw the flashes coming out of the machine-guns, pointing directly at us. They knew where we were but they hit everything bar the two of us. We could hear the bullets going into the ground in front, behind and at the side. Just never seemed to get us. We decided the best way was just to lie still because it was level ground and the bullets were whizzing over and hitting the earth all round about us. And it took us two hours before we got back to the assembly trench. After, it seemed to quieten down a bit, and it was obvious the thing had failed completely, and we gradually – just one at a time – moved back a little – we took just turn-about moving because, if one movement had been spotted, we would both get it. And we got down into this dip that was at the foot of this steep hill. There was a crucifix at the crossroads – and we got back down to the crucifix, down the road from Mametz Wood and then we climbed the hill behind the Bazentin Wood to get back into the trench. There were only eleven of us left. We were no good to anybody.
Sergeant Bill Hay, No. 1459, 9th Btn., Royal Scots, 51st Division
That was a stupid action, because we had to make a frontal attack on bristling German guns and there was no shelter at all. We were at the back, but C Company really got wiped out. We had a lot of casualties but they lost all their officers, all the NCOs, the lot – cleaned out! We knew it was pointless, even before we went over – crossing open ground like that. But, you had to go. You were between the devil and the deep blue sea. If you go forward, you’ll likely be shot. If you go back, you’ll be court-martialled and shot. So what the hell do you do? What can you do? You just go forward, because the only bloke you can get your knife into is the bloke you’re facing.
There were dead bodies all over the place where previous battalions and regiments had taken part in previous attacks. What a bashing we got. There were heaps of men, everywhere – not one or two men, but heaps of men, all dead. Even before we went over, we knew this was death. We just couldn’t take High Wood against machine-guns. It was ridiculous. There was no need for it. It was just absolute slaughter.
When it marched out of the line, the Battalion was a shadow of its former self. They passed through Fricourt in a straggling column, pathetically few in number, and a piper marched at their head. He belonged to the Battalion. He knew the terrible toll that High Wood had taken and, doubtless, his mind was on the bodies of the comrades they had left behind. Since the days of Culloden The Flowers of the Forest had been the traditional Highland lament. He chose to play it now. It seemed appropriate to the occasion.
As the Royal Scots marched away from the battle, the Australians were preparing to go into the attack. Their orders were, at all costs, to take Pozières.
Chapter 14
Although the first contingent had arrived only at the end of March, the Australians were already a familiar sight in Northern France – tall men, most of them, broad of physique, hard of muscle, with lean, brown faces tanned to leather by the blistering suns and winds of two seasons on the Gallipoli Peninsula and by their scorching sojourn in Egypt after the evacuation.
True to the British tradition of turning defeat of a kind into victory of a kind, the evacuation of British and Colonial troops from the peninsula had already passed into legend. So carefully had it been planned, so thoroughly had the Turkish enemy been duped, that it had been accomplished without the loss of a single man.
Silence was the essence of the plan. The armada of ships was already moored in the straits and around them bobbed a fleet of lighters ready to creep towards the coast after dark to p
ick up the men from the narrow beaches at the foot of the cliffs. In places, the tracks that led down to them from the gullies above were steep and so narrow that some thousands of men would have to scramble down them in single file, boots wrapped in sandbags to muffle the sound of their feet, moving slowly, carefully, so that the inadvertent clink or jingle of rifles and accoutrements, multiplied a thousand times, might not give them away.
But it was equally obvious that, if silence fell too suddenly in the trenches above, the Turks would be alerted, might guess what was happening and might open up their guns and bombard the beaches and the rescue fleet beyond. With infinite cunning the Allies planned a great deception. For some hours after the last of the men had filed out of the trenches, it must appear to the Turks that it was still ‘business as usual’. Over the last few weeks, they had changed the pattern of activity to accustom the enemy to long periods of silence, alternated with busy periods of fire. At Sari Bair, where the Royal Engineers had been tunnelling for months towards the Turkish lines, preparing a mine beneath the enemy trenches to be blown in conjunction with a big attack which would now not take place, the possibilities of an explosive farewell were not lost on the minds of those who planned the evacuation. The mine could still be fired at the very last minute, as the last man left the trenches. From the deck of a cruiser in the bay, General Birdwood had the satisfaction of seeing ‘an eruption that seemed to rival Vesuvius’ and to hear, for hours afterwards, a fusillade of fire as the Turks wasted considerable amounts of ammunition firing at the now-empty Allied trenches.
It was a long time before the enemy woke up to the fact that the opposition had melted away, for the troops had exercised considerable ingenuity in order to deceive him. All along the trenches, up and down the length of the peninsula, ready loaded rifles had been left in position with strings of varying lengths attached to the triggers and lighted candles, so positioned that the rifles would fire automatically when the flames burnt through the strings. Similar devices would shoot flares into the sky, carefully timed to reproduce ‘normal night-time activity’, so carefully established over the past weeks.
As the last troopship bearing the rearguard of the Gallipoli force slid silently down the straits, and the sheer cliffs to starboard began to loom grey in the first light of dawn, the ‘Jokes Department’ could still plainly be heard drawing enemy fire. With an enormous effort, the troops restrained themselves from spoiling the effect by raising a triumphant cheer. It was a glorious end to an inglorious episode and the story of the sangfroid and cool-headedness of the departing warriors had improved in the telling.
Tall stories about the Australians were circulating in France long before they arrived there themselves in the late spring. Most of them could be traced to the Pals Battalions of the 31st Division who had been soldiering alongside them in Egypt. They had every reason to feel slightly resentful of their Anzac comrades. On their arrival in Egypt, the local traders had been quick to notice that the Anzacs, with their six shillings a day, were more affluent than the British troops whose cost of living had immediately rocketed. Oranges, previously obtainable at fifteen for one piastre, soon cost one piastre per orange. The Anzacs, flush with back pay accumulated during service in Gallipoli, rode in taxis while Tommies slogged back to camp on foot or clung precariously to the last tram-car. Prices at the Café Egyptien increased twenty-fold overnight and, within days of the arrival of the Australians, it was rumoured that the sawdust on the floor was swept up by the grasping Egyptians in the small hours of every morning and squeezed between sheets to recover the beer that had soaked into it during the evening’s carousal. Souvenir sellers made clear their disdain of customers unadorned by slouch hats and upped their prices accordingly. Touts roamed the streets and cafés to inveigle the well-breeched Australians into dives and dens in sleazy back streets where the charms of women of a dozen different hues and nationalities were available, if not for the asking, at least for the price of one day’s Colonial pay.
The Australians were mostly country boys, many of them from the far outback, and it was the first time that they had had the opportunity of indulging in such dubious pleasures. Many had cause to regret it. Within weeks, a huge barbed wire compound was built outside the Mena Camp containing some hundreds of disconsolate Anzacs, mooching about – between doses of unpleasant remedial treatment – as they waited to be shipped home ‘in disgrace’. Later the Army took a more realistic view of human frailty and turned its mind towards prophylaxis as well as supplying remedial treatment for venereal disease. But in 1916, ‘sin’ was supposed not to exist among the upright, adulated troops of Great Britain and her Empire.
The ‘sin’ which did exist, in the view of the Army, and which must be stamped on hard, was the unforgivable assumption on the part of the Australian soldier that he was the equal of any man whether he wore the desert-stained uniform of a private or the immaculate turnout of a superior being endowed with the King’s Commission. Horrified officers indulging in a civilized aperitif in the palatial bar of Shepheard’s Hotel, who had been chummily invited to ‘Have one with me, mate’ by a slouch-hatted, none-too-clean Australian ranker, had speedily had the hotel put out of bounds to other ranks and, when a whole series of British officers found themselves unable to dine almost anywhere because all the tables had been reserved for convivial parties of noisy Australian troops, other hotels followed suit and were henceforth reserved for ‘Officers Only’. There was not much else but ‘dives’ of dubious reputation where Anzacs and Tommies alike were unmercifully fleeced.
The Australians were nobody’s fools and it did not escape their attention that the Egyptians were only too willing to take advantage of their open-handed bonhomie and to defraud them at every opportunity. But they seldom got away with it. There were well-authenticated stories of Australians – justifiably enraged by blatant profiteering – overturning market stalls, forcing some unfortunate over-optimistic orange vendor to distribute his entire stock free and administering such corporal punishment to impertinent taxi drivers as their inflated demands deserved.
Real retribution had been reserved for sellers of liquor who had evolved the ingenious ploy of boring a hole in the bottom of a full whisky bottle, draining the contents, filling it with amber-coloured liquid – often urine – and replugging the hole with a ball of molten glass. Few Egyptians tried this ploy more than once if an Aussie caught up with him. He was a lucky man if he escaped with no more punishment than having the bottle broken over his head. The Aussies looked on it as ‘safeguarding the interests of future tourists’.
Soon every Egyptian, venturing on a commercial transaction with an Anzac, was demanding, ‘Gibbit money first!’ Among the Anzacs this expression became a catch-phrase and a huge joke. Months later in France, the veterans of Gallipoli and Egypt were still bandying it in estaminets whenever money changed hands, to the accompaniment of roars of laughter and total incomprehension on the part of the various ‘Mamzelles’ who served them with the cheap white wine or thin beer which, while it still fell a very long way short of Australian standards, was at least better than the unmentionable liquid which had passed under the name of beer in Egypt.
The Anzacs liked ‘Mamzelles’. They prided themselves on their success with the fair sex and fostered the rumour that their turned-up hats were so designed to allow a feminine head to rest comfortably on a broad Australian shoulder and to facilitate kissing, without discommoding the object of admiration by disarranging an elaborate coiffure with the broad brim of an Australian hat. The Aussies also prided themselves on their toughness as fighters and now that they had arrived in France they intended to prove it.
It was unfortunate that their first blooding should have been at Fromelles in an attack that turned out to be a catastrophe. Fromelles was not on the Somme at all; it was across the Aubers Ridge in front of Neuve Chapelle and Laventie. The Anzacs were occupying the trenches facing Aubers in what, since the autumn of the previous year, had been a quiet sector and they had been
sent here on their arrival from the East to harden them to the harsher climate, and to accustom them to the trenches and trench warfare on the Western Front. Even before the Allies had attacked on the Somme, it had been decided that a subsidiary attack would be useful and that it should be delivered by the 5th Australian Division and by the 61st Division, standing on either side of the Sugar Loaf Salient, both newly arrived in France.
The real tragedy was that it need never have happened at all, for General Monro had been authorized by the Commander-in-Chief to cancel the attack if he saw fit.
From the beginning, Fromelles had been an on-off affair, planned initially to take place on 8 July to pierce the German line towards Lille in one demoralizing blow that would exploit the advances on the Somme. That idea had long gone by the board, but it was the very failure to make a significant advance on the Somme Front which now made a diversionary attack even more desirable. This time it would have quite a different objective. If it were a success, if the preliminary bombardment were strong and powerful enough to induce the Germans to believe that it was the prelude to a major attack, it would have the beneficial effect of preventing the enemy from moving reserves from his line at Aubers Ridge to reinforce his troops facing the hard-pressed British on the Somme Front. But the scale of the attack itself was reduced. There was no possibility of a breakthrough to Lille. Even if the small number of available troops had succeeded in the impossible task of breaking the German line, there were no reserves available to follow up and exploit their success, for every man, every gun, and every available resource to back up the infantry was needed on the Somme where the urgent necessity was to relieve tired divisions and replace them with fresh troops and reinforcements from other parts of the line. The objective must now be limited to the capture of the first three German lines that faced the troops at the foot of the Aubers Ridge.
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