Bearing Witness

by Peter Rees

  Amid growing misgivings at GHQ, both Monro and Haking gave assurances that all was well and said they opposed cancellation or postponement. Haking’s plan provided for a gas attack followed by an infantry attack to capture the Sugar Loaf salient—a German stronghold—and about 2000 metres of German trenches to the south. The plan for doing so did not materialise. Finally, at a conference on 13 July, alternative plans were put forward that to Brigadier General Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliott, commander of the AIF 15th Brigade, were ‘a wretched hybrid scheme, which even might have been termed an abortion.’

  As he would later make clear to Bean, Elliott was profoundly concerned. He thought the operation inadvisable because preparations would be rushed, the artillery was inexperienced, and No Man’s Land was too wide—up to 400 metres in places. Elliott’s men would also have to advance opposite the formidable Sugar Loaf. As well, Haking underestimated the artillery and munitions available for the attack. Elliott met Major H.C.L. Howard, a visiting staff officer from Haig’s headquarters, and took him forward to a post in No Man’s Land. Visibly moved, Howard said the attack would prove ‘a bloody holocaust.’ Elliott urged him to go back to Haig and say so. Howard promised he would. Whatever Howard may have said to Haig, the attack was delayed but not cancelled and the attack was fixed for 19 July.

  Despite the clear logistical shortcomings, an AIF artillery bombardment in preparation for the attack went ahead on the morning of the 19th. Because of inadequate equipment and insufficient time for the artillery to become familiar with the battlefield, the bombardment failed badly, and the German machine guns remained in place on the Sugar Loaf. The Australians would assault over open fields crisscrossed with drainage ditches and in the face of heavy machine-gun and artillery fire. As Bean would later write:

  Suggested first by Haking as a feint-attack; then by [General Herbert] Plumer as part of a victorious advance; rejected by Monro in favour of attack elsewhere; put forward again by GHQ as a ‘purely artillery’ demonstration; ordered as a demonstration but with an infantry operation added, according to Haking’s plan and through his emphatic advocacy; almost cancelled—through weather and the doubts of GHQ—and finally reinstated by Haig, apparently as an urgent demonstration—such were the changes of form through which the plans of this ill-fated operation had successively passed.

  The 5th Division was given the task of taking the German trenches, its orders being to link up with a depleted British territorial division, the 61st, which, although short of manpower and training, was responsible for the Sugar Loaf salient. The Australians’ senior Methodist chaplain, James Green, later commented that there was ‘no enthusiasm among the troops, for, although they were eager to fight, it was felt that we had not sufficient knowledge of the intricate system of saps and trenches.’ Three days of wire cutting with guns preceded the attack and, with the sun still high, and three and a half hours of daylight still ahead on the 19th, the first wave of Australian troops crossed the parapets at 5.45 p.m., the remaining two following on schedule.

  Having advanced through the German fire, the Australians were confronted with the difficulty of swampy ground, and the German second-line trenches indicated on their maps could not be properly identified as the Germans had flooded them. Because the Germans had pulled their men back from the front line, resistance became greater as the Australians advanced under heavy fire. Two parallel roads led to the front, but the Germans swept them with machine-gun fire. Men fell in droves under the murderous enfilading fire. The order to retire was given. According to Green, ‘When the fight was over men lay about in a battle stupor.’

  Today, the Sugar Loaf barely seems a blip in the distance when viewed from the fields lying in front of it. But when Bean reached 5th Division headquarters at Sailly at about 1.20 p.m. on 20 July, the fields at Fromelles were far from a rustic scene. When he inquired about the battle, an aide-de-camp told him, ‘It’s all over, you know, we’re back in our own trenches. We’ve had an awfully rough passage.’ That was an understatement. Bean began piecing the horrific story together a few hours after the slaughter ended. To him, the sight of the Australian trenches ‘packed with wounded and dying, was unexampled in the history of the AIF.’ As Bean put it: ‘In one night and the hours preceding it the 5th Division had lost 5533 men, of whom 400 were prisoners.’ Among these were 1917 men who were either killed outright or died from their wounds.

  Bean joined the stunned survivors in the mess, taking first-hand accounts of the debacle that had decimated the 5th Division. Among those he talked to was Brigadier General Edwin Tivey, commander of the 8th Infantry Brigade. ‘Poor old Tivey looked quite overdone—with eyes like boiled gooseberries,’ Bean thought. Tivey had been up for two nights and, just before meeting Bean, had been through his trenches where German shelling had killed or wounded ‘quite a fair number of men.’ Bean noted that the one thing of which Tivey seemed anxious to assure himself was that his brigade had tried as hard and had done as well as the brigades in Gallipoli. He told Bean: ‘Men who were at Anzac said that the shellfire in Gallipoli was child’s play to this.’ After talking to other Gallipoli veterans, Bean had no doubt it was, even at Lone Pine. ‘And Tivey said to me simply: “1700—that’s about as heavy as some of the brigades lost at the landing, isn’t it?” And so it was.’ Bean had no doubt that the 8th Brigade, though it had come back, ‘fought as well as most of the Anzac troops ever did.’

  Shocked to his core, Tivey was looking for anything positive at all to cling on to, and comparisons with Gallipoli provided the yardstick for his men’s performance. Tivey was not alone in looking wretched—Pompey Elliott did too when Bean saw him. ‘Old Elliott was dead asleep’ when Bean called, but Major General McCay had come in and woken him up. Elliott, who had predicted the debacle, was already grieving for his men. ‘When Elliott came out I felt almost as if I were in the presence of a man who had just lost his wife. He looked down and could hardly speak—he was clearly terribly depressed and overwrought,’ Bean wrote. Elliott, like White, had predicted that the attack would be a monumental folly.

  Bean thought that McCay was anxious about an order that he and Elliott had given to two companies of the 58th Battalion to provide support between the 14th Brigade and the British. McCay explained that the British had reported at 9 p.m. that they had captured the cap of the salient—and so Elliott, with his full approval, sent in two companies of the 58th to fill in the gap. As Bean noted of the explanation in his diary: ‘The men went through the long grass and low scrub and were going finely when machine-guns got them and laid most of them out. McCay explained to me they had to be put in to that gap as the 61st Division reported that it was in. As a matter of fact it never had the cap of the salient.’ The so-called ‘gap’ was never there.

  Bean returned to Contay that night after filing his story from headquarters at Amiens. ‘I believe the Censor passed it,’ he noted. However, the censor wouldn’t allow him to describe the bombardment as ‘intense’ because of First Army objections to such descriptions. Bean also noted: ‘They say that the official communiqué calls it an “important series of trench raids’’—what is the good of deliberate lying like that? The Germans know it was an attack—they have numbers of our wounded as prisoners.’ Bean would later comment in the Official History that the communiqué had shaken the faith of the troops in statements from GHQ whose policy was that the ‘severity of this reverse’ should be concealed from the British public. But at least—unlike other correspondents—Bean had detailed accounts from the men at the front, and this would be invaluable for his Official History in comprehending the magnitude of what happened at Fromelles.

  In his 420-word story, which appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald four days later, Bean was clearly hampered by what he could get past the censor. Certainly he could not damn the British as he had in his diary for lying about the battle. His story attempted to find some positives in the debacle. Bean, like other correspondents, knew he had to censor himself. His story provides an insight
into British military censorship in the Great War:

  AUSTRALIANS ATTACK TRENCHES.TEMPORARY SUCCESS. TAKE 200 PRISONERS.

  Yesterday evening, after a bombardment, an Australian force attacked the German trenches south of Armentières. The Australians on the left seized the German front line, and passed beyond it to the further trenches on the first system.

  In the centre the Australians carried the whole of the German first system, and reached more or less open country. On the right, the troops had to cross a much wider stretch between the trenches, where the Germans held a very strongly-fortified salient.

  The Germans were ready for the attack and had managed to save a number of machine-guns from the bombardment. In spite of very brave efforts, the troops on this flank were unable to cross the ground between the trenches, and only managed to reach the German trenches at isolated points. From these they were driven out.

  This enabled the Germans to concentrate the fire of all sorts of artillery on the portion of the trenches captured. The Germans battered down their own trenches where they were occupied by our men.

  They also turned water from a channel down the trench on the left flank, and the Australians there, shortly after reaching the trenches, found themselves standing in water which was rapidly rising and waist high.

  They endured a tremendous bombardment until early the following morning, when, after eleven hours in the captured position, such Australians as retained the small remaining portion of the German line were ordered to retire.

  By dint of very brave work, the engineers and infantry in the working parties had managed to get communication trenches dug completely through to the German trenches. Those trenches were dug under very heavy shell fire. This work enabled the troops to carry out their retirement with a loss which is slight when the extraordinary difficulty of the operation is considered.

  Among the last who returned to our trenches were eight men who said they got lost behind the German trenches, and had been wandering about till daylight in the country in the rear of the front line.

  Our troops, in this attack, had to face shell fire which was heavier and more continuous than was ever known in Gallipoli.

  Many of them had never previously been tried. The manner in which they carried the operation through seems to have been worthy of all the traditions of Anzac. At least 200 prisoners were captured and several machine-guns. Many Germans were killed. The losses amongst our troops engaged were severe.

  A journalist of Bean’s skill would have known that the lead to the story was in the final sentence, yet he had no option but to bury details about the Australians’ severe losses—and write it all in flat prose of the kind he would have abhorred during his Herald days.

  In most of the British press, the fight was described in a handful of lines, and was variously called ‘a lively skirmish,’ ‘a stirring attack’ or ‘a big raid.’ Bean alone among correspondents at least went to the scene of the action. Among those he talked to in the mess that day was Colonel Harold Pope, commander of the 14th Brigade. Bean knew Pope from Gallipoli—he had been chatting with him when a bomb blew off a dead Turk’s leg and spattered him with gore. Pope’s reputation after Gallipoli was strong; he was a respected senior officer who had given his name to the ridge at Gallipoli known as Pope’s Hill. The day before the attack, Pope wrote in his diary: ‘Have done everything possible that I know of for tomorrow.’ He directed his part of the attack until he received orders at 5.40 a.m. to withdraw his brigade, which was isolated and in a desperate situation. Pope knew that more than 2000 of his men were either dead or wounded. In the mess room, Bean thought Pope ‘had been refreshing himself after the strain’ when he asserted: ‘Well, we were the only brigade which didn’t come back till we were told to.’ This, Bean noted, was ‘said with meaning.’ Bean thought Pope ‘was rather contemptuous about Elliott and the 15th Brigade,’ and he ‘rather disgusted me by the boastful way he talked’—rather too scathing an assessment, given the trauma of the previous twenty-four hours.

  Bean’s meeting with Pope gave him a forestaste of tensions in the 5th Division and the AIF that were heightened in the aftermath of the battle. At 3 p.m., soon after talking to Bean and exhausted, Pope fell into a heavy sleep, from which McCay, his divisional commander, tried to wake him at 4.30 p.m. Failing to do so, McCay concluded that Pope was drunk. Next day he demoted and dismissed him—even though he acknowledged that Pope ‘had behaved with skill, courage and energy during the whole operation of 19/20 July.’ Pope protested his innocence and won the support of six other officers who, he said, were ‘all satisfied McCay is wrong.’ A doctor also told him his explanation was ‘entirely consistent with medical science.’ Pope went to General Birdwood with a request for a court-martial where he could produce witnesses to confirm his sobriety. Birdwood, anxious to avoid scandal, refused.

  Feeling ‘very rotten’, Pope accused McCay of intimidating unnamed others. He rebuffed overtures for a compromise unless McCay withdrew the imputation that he had been drunk. McCay refused and Pope was sent back to Australia, with his AIF appointment terminated—just as Birdwood was about to promote him to Brigadier General. However, he refused to give up the fight to clear his name, taking his case to the Australian Government. He also wrote to Bean, clearly wanting him to back his defence that he was not drunk. Pope, of course, could not have known that Bean had made a note to the contrary in his diary. Bean did not become involved. While Pope admitted having drunk some whisky with fellow officers immediately after the battlefield trauma of Fromelles, he vehemently maintained that he was not intoxicated.

  Few would criticise him for having a whisky in such trying circumstances. For Bean, however, the issue was more likely what he believed Pope’s ‘refreshing himself ’ gave rise to—boastfulness. This was his complaint with John Monash—self-promoters would never wash with him. Monash was surprised at Pope’s downfall, and intrigued when he heard that Pope suspected his anti-Australian brigade major, N.K. Charteris, had white-anted him to McCay over the incident. Monash concluded that McCay ‘must have changed greatly for the worse.’

  Years later, the Official History, Bean’s only comment about the incident involving Pope was to record that after Fromelles there were changes in several Australian commands, including that ‘Colonel Pope, on disciplinary grounds not affecting the control of his brigade during the action, was returned to Australia.’

  Pope’s determination to clear his name eventually paid off. In a letter to Defence Minister George Pearce, Birdwood noted that Pope had ‘done excellently while heavy fighting was actually going on, but he appears to have lamentably and completely broken down afterwards, which makes his continuing to carry on as a brigadier out of the question.’ However, he told the Minister that he backed Pope’s right to clear his name. When Pearce saw Pope, he agreed that doubt existed about the events of 20 July and gave him command of a troopship back to Britain, with an interview with Birdwood on arrival. On 16 February 1917, Pope accepted Birdwood’s offer to command the 52nd Battalion with his original rank of lieutenant colonel, and in late March he once more led men to the front line.

  On 21 July 1916 McCay published a special divisional order in which he wrote that he had ‘great pleasure’ in releasing complimentary remarks from General Haig and the commander of the 2nd Army, General Sir Hubert Plumer. McCay congratulated ‘all ranks in the Division who have so gallantly maintained the Anzac tradition.’ Haig wanted the men to ‘realise that their enterprise has not been by any means in vain and that the gallantry with which they carried out the attack is fully recognised.’ Those who survived knew the emptiness of these words. Many Australians could barely contain their anger at the debacle.

  Bean defended McCay over his performance at Fromelles—not least his decision to stop an armistice arranged with the Germans to collect the dead and wounded from the battlefield. Bean acknowledged that the wounded lay in No Man’s Land, ‘tortured and helpless’ among the dead, ‘within a stone’s throw of safe
ty but apparently without hope of it.’ For the men, he wrote, ‘knowing that a mate—his living body the prey of flies and ants—is being slowly done to death within two minutes of the succour’—was a horror. Efforts were made to secure formal ratification of an impromptu truce arranged with the Germans by two Australians of the 8th Brigade. McCay, however, disallowed it in accordance with Haig’s specific order forbidding such agreements, and Haking and Monro backed the decision. Bean wrote that upon McCay’s order reaching the front line, the stretcher bearers were stopped from going out. He commented that even if McCay disagreed with the settled policy of his chiefs, he could not disobey their orders. ‘A great part of both the nation and the army would probably have favoured a policy more rigidly consistent with the principles of chivalry and humanity, for which the Allies genuinely stood, but a divisional general can hardly be blamed for rigid adherence to the orders of the commander-in-chief.’ However, as Pompey Elliott’s biographer, Ross McMullin, has pointed out, under military law, McCay was entitled to authorise a local suspension of arms without his superiors’ ratification.

  Although Bean mentions McCay in a negative light at several points in his diaries—going so far as to say at one point that he was ‘wildly unpopular throughout the AIF’—he treated him carefully in the Official History. He cast him as a scapegoat and asserted that ‘the blame for the enterprise was thrown upon an unpopular but entirely innocent leader, General McCay,’ who was no more responsible ‘than the humblest private in his force.’ The troops saw it differently. After Fromelles, the men under McCay’s command despised him, not just for his failure to agree to the truce but also for orders during the fighting. McCay became the ‘Butcher of Fromelles’. Even his headquarters staff were unwilling to work for him.

  After the Official History was released, Bean received a letter from a Melbourne Herald reader about the ‘Fleur Baix blunder’: ‘In my battalion there were 67 (sixty-seven) answered the roll call out of 1000 (one thousand) men. General Sir J. McCay will never be pardoned by the men lucky enough to come through unless he can make a frank statement, and let us know who was responsible.’ The letter was signed ‘Ex Non-Com, 60th Battalion.’ Bean responded to the Herald, defending McCay and asserting it was clear that the ‘Ex Non-Com’ had not read the account of Fromelles in the History. If he did he would find that McCay ‘was never in a position to know “Who was to blame”—he never had access to the higher records.’