SOMME

by Lyn Macdonald

  It was a sad and desolate piece of territory, battered and bruised by the fighting more than a year before, when the troops had tried in vain to capture the low ridge, crowned by the villages of Aubers and Fromelles, and to gain the high ground that guarded the city of Lille. They had failed, but the scars of the fighting, only slightly camouflaged by the sparse green growth of irrepressible summer, still lay like pockmarks on the flat land that separated the British line from the Germans. It was not only flat but muddy. This country had little in common with the dry, chalky landscape of the Somme some thirty miles to the south. It was Flanders, and Flanders meant mud – a deep solid stratum of heavy earth that was the devil to dig in, quick to absorb water, slow to drain. And the weather had broken.

  Even on the Somme the deep, dry trenches now had two or three uncomfortable inches of liquid mud at the bottom and the ground above them, churned up by the passage of troops and supply wagons, was now slippery and treacherous. At Fromelles the effect of the rain of the last few days was even more devastating. There were no trenches, dug deep with high head-cover, such as the Aussies had known in Gallipoli. Crouching behind breastworks of mud-filled sandbags, in weather that, even in Flanders, was unseasonable for mid-July, concealed by the mist, the troops took cautious glances across the four hundred yards that lay between their own breastworks and the Germans’. The steady drizzle was seeping into the earth, trickling into every old shell-hole, swelling the brook that meandered across part of the front, and turning every crumbling, ancient trench and ditch into a water course. Remembering the deep, dry entrenchments on the Gallipoli Front this time last year, the damp and dreary Australians felt that they would willingly put up with the clouds of mosquitoes, the legions of bugs that made their lives accursed misery, if they could exchange them for the miserable ditches they now inhabited as they waited to ‘have a go at the Fritzes’.

  The attack had already been postponed twice while the Command dithered as to whether it should take place at all. Now, with the break in the weather, it was postponed again. The drifting rain and mist hanging over the line had blinded the artillery. Even experienced gunners would have found it impossible in such conditions to register the guns so that the bombardment would fall accurately on the German lines and cut the wire in front of it so that the infantry could get through – and these gunners were far from experienced. Few of them had ever fired a gun in France.

  The bombardment was the keystone of the plan. Cunningly applying the bitter lesson that had been learned on the First of July, assuming that the Germans had not failed to notice the rigidly timed ‘lifts’ when the guns lengthened range with each stage of the attack, the architects of the action hoped to dupe the Germans into thinking that they were using the same technique. But there would be an all-important difference. Giving the Germans five minutes to man the parapets of their front-line trenches against the coming attack, the guns would be brought back to tumble shells among them and, it was hoped, ‘to reduce the defenders to a state of collapse before the assault’. As an added refinement, at the moment when the Germans might have expected them to leave their trenches, the troops in the front line were to hoist dummies above the parapet to simulate the vanguard of the attack.

  If the Germans had been occupying the line that the gunners were so confidently bombarding, it might have worked. But they were not. They had long abandoned the rain-swept flatlands and, apart from keeping a few fortifications and outposts, had wisely climbed back to the drier ground on the slope of the Aubers Ridge behind. Even if the Australian and the 61st Division succeeded in capturing the line which, according to the trench maps, was still the German Front, they would hardly have improved their position. Their advance would simply bring the line nearer to the foot of the ridge where the Germans, with the advantage of observation, would be able to pick them off as easily as a boy with a catapult. The fact was that the objective of the attack was so limited that the advantage in gaining it would be nil.

  General Haig had taken the trouble to make sure that General Monro clearly understood that the operation was no longer urgently needed, and also that he had absolute discretion to cancel or postpone it because of the adverse weather or for any other reason. As the rain continued to fall, as reports brought the disturbing news that not all the Australian gun batteries were yet in position, General Monro began to have serious doubts. Unaccountably, he failed to avail himself of his permission to cancel the attack on his own authority and, on the morning of 17 July, reported to GHQ that he proposed to postpone the attack because of the bad weather and that, unless it cleared up soon, he would have to postpone it again. All things considered, he thought it best to cancel the operation. Was he authorized to do so? He was passing the buck. In an ambiguous message, the Commander-in-Chief promptly passed it back again.

  The Commander-in-Chief wishes the special operation… to be carried out as soon as possible, weather permitting, provided always that Sir Charles Monro is satisfied that the conditions are favourable and that the resources at his disposal, including ammunition, are adequate both for the preparation and the execution of the enterprise.

  It squarely placed on General Monro’s shoulders the responsibility of deciding whether or not the attack should go ahead and also hinted that, if he cancelled it, his reasons for doing so would not pass unquestioned. Either way, it must have seemed to General Monro that he could not win. He decided to proceed with the operation.

  It was a fatal decision and one that left a legacy of bitterness that the passage of time would never expunge. Bitterness in the mind of General Monro, removed from command of Eleven Corps, as he brooded far away in India over the disaster of Fromelles. Bitterness in the minds of the Australians directed, perhaps fairly, against the Staff and unfairly against the ‘Pommy bastards’ of the 61st Division, in the unshakeable conviction that they had been let down.

  Unlike the Australians who threw themselves over the parapets in a wild enthusiastic rush for the supposed German line, the 61st had been forced to emerge from their wire by sallyports, so few, so narrow, presenting such a target to German machine-gunners, that, in some places, half the men were killed or wounded within yards of their trenches. Unlike the Australians, bronzed, fit and up to strength, the men of the 61st Division could hardly be described as the pick of the bunch. The Division was less than five months old. It had been formed in January 1916 from Reserve Battalions of the second line whose manpower, ever since their formation, had been bled for reinforcements needed by their first-line battalions in France, and their numbers had been made up at frequent intervals by drafts of raw recruits. Their training had been long-delayed by lack of equipment, and was, at best, sketchy. With sixty-plus divisions to supply, against Australia’s five, it could hardly have been otherwise.

  Half the Australian force had seen service in Gallipoli and were toughened to trench warfare, while hardly a man in the 61st had even seen a trench a month earlier. For the last few days of that month half its strength in men and energy had been expended, in nights of slogging labour, in carrying out from the trenches to a safe distance behind the line fifteen hundred heavy gas cylinders which, days before, they had laboured to carry in. Only two companies of each battalion were fit to go into the attack.

  On the extreme flanks of the attack both British and Australians had forged across in fine style. It was in the middle, where they were supposed to meet in the Sugar Loaf Salient, that the real disaster happened. All but a handful of the British failed to get there.

  Away on the left flank the Australians were unable to recognize, in any of the tumbled ditches, the German line which had been so clearly marked on the trench maps but, determined to capture something, they had pressed on, in spite of awful casualties, to ‘capture’ and to hold anything that resembled a trench, a sap, or an outpost. Away on the right, the British had swept across the shattered wire of the line which, according to the maps, had been bombarded by the artillery, but they had ground to a halt against the uncut wire
of the actual German line. Before nine o’clock, on that dull evening, dusk had fallen. Long before it did, it had been shatteringly apparent that, apart from ragged fighting by scattered groups of Australians, who were literally choosing to die rather than go back, the attack had fizzled into failure.

  There was one ray of hope. The Australians were still fighting in the Sugar Loaf Salient and, if this strongpoint could be captured, some advantage at least might be gained from what was otherwise a débâcle. Late in the evening it was decided to renew the attack on Sugar Loaf, and, in conjunction with one battalion of Australians advancing on their left, to send the depleted Reserves of the 61st Division across to the Sugar Loaf to ‘help the Australians’. In a final demonstration of the dithering that had characterized the action since its inception, the attack was cancelled – and cancelled so late that word did not reach the Australians until after their 59th Battalion had advanced, alone and unsupported, to share the fate of their few remaining comrades, still battling at this strongest point of the German line.

  It was a terrible repetition of what had happened to the 13th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade at Contalmaison nine days earlier and it created a breach between the Australian fighting troops and their British comrades, which would never be completely closed. It was a sad outcome of the first engagement in which British and Australian troops had fought side by side in France.

  For months, for years, for successive decades, the feeling of the Aussies that they had been ‘let down’ was constantly reinforced by citing the casualty figures as indisputable proof of their own sacrifice and of the British failure.

  On the face of it, they looked stark enough. Australian, five thousand three hundred and fifty-five. British, one thousand five hundred and forty-seven. But it was not a comparison of like with like. The 61st Division had gone into the assault at half-strength, and, with fewer than half the number of men engaged, their casualties were proportionately almost as many.

  But, for the Australians fighting in France, it was a terrible beginning and no one was more aware of this than the Commander-in-Chief. He kept to himself his thoughts on Fromelles, but, three days later, on 22 July, Haig took the trouble to visit General Gough at his Headquarters ‘to make sure that the Australians had only been given a simple task’. He left presumably less than reassured. The following day, the First Australian Division would be attacking on the Somme. Their ‘simple task’ was to capture Pozières.

  Chapter 15

  The thronging of troops and supplies into the battlefields reached astounding proportions and the Pioneer troops were slaving night and day to keep the battered roads from disintegrating altogether under the strain of the constant trundling of wheels, the incessant tramping of feet, the pounding of shells that the enemy sent over in unremitting nerve-racking salvoes. Wherever they fell along the roads, they were sure of finding some target.

  The road through Fricourt was the single route towards High Wood, Delville Wood, and Guillemont, which, for most of the way, was not overlooked by the enemy. By branching off through Bécourt and going by way of Sausage Valley to the right of la Boisselle, the troops could reach the line in front of Pozières in comparative safety. During the twenty-four hours when the Anzacs were moving into the line, between nine-fifteen on the morning of 21 July to nine o’clock on the morning of the 22nd, the traffic control post at Fricourt Cemetery took a census of the troops and vehicles that passed. The night was dark. The enemy soaked the road with tear-gas and, for a six-hour stretch, the census-takers were forced to wear goggles. This, they explained, accounted for the incompleteness of their returns. But, in spite of this handicap, they had managed to count two thousand four hundred and twenty-three motor vehicles in a steady stream of lorries, motor cars, buses, motor bikes and ambulances, throwing up clouds of white dust that blinded the horses and irritated the eyes and throats of almost four thousand drivers of horse-drawn wagons that rumbled slowly along the road. Five thousand four hundred and four mounted officers and one thousand and forty-three men riding bicycles, stumbled or dodged as best they could through the long column of transport. The Control Post unfortunately did not manage to make a complete count of the infantry moving to and from the line. The nearest approximate figure which could be arrived at was twenty-six thousand five hundred and thirty-six.

  These troops, who passed through Fricourt in a single span of twenty-four hours, outnumbered by some hundreds the total force of British troops engaged in the Crimean War. One of them was George Middle.

  George Middle was a temporary Anzac. He was also very much a ‘temporary gentleman’. Despite his First Class Degree in Mathematics and Physics, obtained in 1914 at the tender age of twenty, he had been a humble lance-corporal until a few months ago, and he had only attained that rank because Army protocol frowned on a humble Sapper lecturing to officers, no matter how much of an expert he might be. George was decidedly an expert, not so much in Maths and Physics, but in the infant science of wireless which he had taken as a subsidiary subject. But his youthful looks had worked against him. Early in the war, the pundits who had interviewed him in the august surroundings of Room 417 at the War Office itself had not been inclined to offer him a commission, but they had been sufficiently impressed by his qualifications to send him as an Instructor to the Wireless Section of the Royal Engineers Training School at Worcester.

  Less than a year later, attitudes had changed. In three short months, Middle had risen from lance-corporal (unpaid) first to the dizzy heights of second lieutenant, Royal Engineers and then, with startling rapidity, to the sole command of his own unit of sixty-four men. No one was more surprised than George himself. He had been in France for less than a month and, within days of his arrival, he was ordered to report to Bailleul as Wireless Officer of the First Anzac Wireless Section. It was a daunting task, because the First Anzac Wireless Section did not exist. What did exist was a nucleus of sixty-four burly Australian volunteers without an NCO among them and with precious little in the way of qualifications and experience. Furthermore, the orders of the ‘Wireless Section’ were that it was to move to the Somme Front on 10 July, which gave Second Lieutenant Middle just forty-eight hours before its departure. He spent most of it interviewing the men, informing himself as to their all-too-scanty experience and, in desperation, winkling out which of them, if any, had done any kind of job in civilian life that would make him useful now. The results were discouraging but among the assorted bunch of sun-toughened warriors, among the one-time jackaroos and salesmen, clerks and sheep shearers, was Harper, who had at least been an electrician at a Melbourne theatre, and whom Middle promptly promoted to temporary acting-sergeant, and there was a handful of army signallers who could act as lance-corporals. It was little enough, but it was a start.

  Equipment was another matter. Having disposed his ‘command’ into sections, having moved them down to the hinterland of the Somme and seen them installed in billets, having instigated some kind of rudimentary training to occupy the waiting time, Middle’s real work began. There was plenty to be done, because the ‘First Anzac Wireless Section’ possessed hardly a single piece of apparatus and Middle himself had to travel mile after weary mile on a far from reliable motor bike, collecting apparatus, conferring with his superiors, checking the equipment and, finally, going into the zone of the battle itself to set up wireless stations in preparation for the coming attack. He had some hair-raising journeys. It was hardly surprising that all was not complete before the Australians went into their first fight on 23 July.

  There was an avalanche of paper work to be dealt with, lists of stores to be checked, men to be apportioned to sections, orders to be read, noted, and initialled. In the middle of July, he received a memorandum with disquieting implications.

  DIRECTOR OF ARMY SIGNALS

  CIRCULAR MEMORANDUM NO. 114

  Issued From:

  General Head Quarters,

  11th July 1916

  A memorandum has been issued by the General Staff
calling attention to the very serious consequences which have undoubtedly resulted from the enemy overhearing buzzer or telephone messages, and directing severe punishment to be inflicted on anyone communicating in clear by these means information which will be of use to the enemy.

  These instructions apply equally to the Signal Service. Signal Service Officers will ensure that all operators including wireless operators are aware of the strict orders against conversation over the wire.

  The telephone, or buzzer, or wireless, is not to be used for sending any Service Messages which give in clear the names of Units, their formation, or where they are located. A great deal may depend on the strict observance of these orders and every effort must be taken to detect and punish any disobedience.

  (Signed) J. S. Fowler

  Brigadier-General

  Director of Army Signals

  (Noted 17/7/16 by Officer I/C Wireless, 1st Anzacs)

  It was not surprising that the Army was edgy about signals. In the last few days it had had several unpleasant revelations and the most unpleasant of all had been at Ovillers where troops who had gained the first foothold in the village had established themselves in a deep dugout, once the German Command Post. In it they had found a complete, verbatim copy of the operation order for the First of July attack at Ovillers, with a German translation appended. A similar unpleasant discovery had been found in similar circumstances at la Boisselle, where the British Corps Commander’s ‘Good Luck’ message to the troops had been read ‘in clear’ over the telephone to the front line on the eve of the battle. Taken together they explained why the Germans had been ready and waiting, why enemy shells had bombarded the assembly trenches before the attack and why so many of the men, whose bodies were still lying unburied on the battlefield, had met their deaths. It was terrible confirmation of a suspicion which had been growing in the minds of Intelligence Officers for many months. The Germans, with superior equipment, had been listening in on British communications.