by Peter Rees
The 2nd Division’s first attack failed to breach the O.G. Lines. The fire from the German machine guns was lethal. The 5th Brigade was pinned to the ground. In the 7th Brigade the 28th Battalion, just north of the main road, came up against wire entanglements. Some men tried to cut the wire, others wrenched at the stakes, and many were killed, the division losing some 3500 men. Haig was disparaging, telling Birdwood, ‘You’re not fighting Bashi-Bazouks now.’ The comparison with undisciplined Ottoman mercenaries stung; Legge and I Anzac Corps staff resolved to do the job properly.
As they prepared for a new assault six days later, Bean drove through the ash heap that was Pozières and around the Australian front line. For about half the journey he passed through deserted trenches along which the dead lay in batches of up to a dozen. Soon there was not a soul in sight, only the powdered grey earth of the craters with a wooden pathway through. He turned back and followed the goat track to the right. The sight horrified him:
There were only blackened dead—and occasionally bits of men—torn bits of limbs unrecognisable along it. I walked on for 5 minutes without seeing a sign of anyone till I came to a gradually improving trench—quite deserted—peopled only by dead men half buried—some sitting upright with bandaged heads—apparently little hurt except for the bandaged wound—others lying half covered in the little holes they had scratched in the trench side.
He went on over battered trenches and into intact trenches, hurrying to avoid machine guns, which could have caught him any time. Wherever he left the trenches there were dead men. The feeling was eerie, with no sign of life. ‘Everywhere were blackened men—torn and whole—dead for days,’ he wrote in his diary.
A day later Bean happened upon a chaplain and a sergeant hastily burying twenty-four men. The bodies had to be out of the way of the troops going in. ‘It does not encourage new troops to see a sight like that,’ Bean commented. ‘They simply turn them into the nearest shell hole and cover them up. No time to get identity disk . . . so these poor chaps go down as “missing” unless someone has their disk already.’ With the new 2nd Division attack imminent, Bean understood the military logic behind the burial party; he knew more men would die that night when the 2nd Division went in.
All day on 4 August Bean observed the ‘terrible sight’ that Pozières had become, smoke from shell blasts blotting out the landscape. Pozières was an ‘insatiable factory’ of hideous wounds, an abattoir. ‘The men are simply turned in there as into some ghastly giant mincing machine.’ They had to stay there while shell after huge shell descended with a shriek close beside them, each one an acute mental torture. Each shrieking, tearing crash brought a threat of instantaneous ‘ghastly wounds’, as if saying, ‘I will rend your flesh and pulp an arm or a leg—fling you, half a gaping quivering man like these that you see smashed around you, one by one, to lie there rotting and blackening like all the things you saw by the awful roadside, or in that sickening dusty crater.’ Every few seconds men in the trenches felt the instant fear, ‘with a crash that is a physical pain and a strain to withstand.’ Bean understood the trauma of such an experience, and why it would leave men quivering wrecks no matter how brave they were.
That night, the 2nd Division’s careful planning and preparation paid off. Bean wrote that there was enough dim moonlight to make out the landscape. The same troops from the previous week’s failure made the attack, he noted, ‘because there was a determination that they, and they alone, should reach that line.’
The troops captured both O.G. Lines. South of and astride the Albert–Bapaume road, the O.G. Lines had been so thoroughly obliterated by prolonged shelling that the Australians ended up advancing beyond their objectives. Bean saw that the shelling crushed or blocked the deep dugouts where the Germans had tried to take cover in the trenches. Such was the pounding that some of the German companies had lost half their men.
When day broke Bean saw before the Australians a wide, flat stretch of hilltop with a line of hills in the distance. Far down the slope there were Germans moving. ‘And in the distant landscape they saw the German gun teams limber up and hurry away with the field guns which for a fortnight had been firing upon our men,’ Bean wrote. From their vantage in the O.G. Lines on the eastern edge of the Pozières ridge, the Australians now looked over green countryside.
With the 2nd Division relieved on 6 August, the 4th Division was next into the line at Pozières as the Germans planned their counterattack. The incessant artillery bombardment continued before they attacked at dawn on 7 August. The fighting was brutal but the Germans failed to regain the lost territory and, importantly, Hill 160. It would prove to be the last German attempt to retake Pozières.
As Bean had witnessed, the destructive power of artillery now dominated the battlefield: shrapnel tore men to pieces, high explosives blew them to bits and destroyed trenches. In the fighting around Pozières the AIF suffered 23,000 casualties, more than 6700 of whom died. Pozières was a costly battle for the Australians, but in the face of murderous shelling and fire, the gains were significant. They had pressured the Germans for the first time and forged a salient into German territory and could look at the back of the German lines—something that neither the British nor French armies had accomplished. But as Bean later put it, the Pozières ridge was ‘more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth.’
26
The war gets personal
‘Jack is in France! Heard from him today,’ Bean noted excitedly in his diary. In late July 1916, Jack had recovered sufficiently from his Gallipoli wounds to be posted back to battlefield duty and was working at a hospital just 20 kilometres away from Pozières, at Warloy-Baillon. Finding time to catch up was the problem. They would do so within the month, but under circumstances neither would have preferred.
As the battle of the Somme rolled on into August, the Australians fought their way north towards the German-held Mouquet Farm, about 2 kilometres north-west of the high ground near Pozières. The aim was to gain control of Pozières ridge so as to force a gap in the German lines, behind the salient that had developed around the German-held fortress of Thiepval. Again, the AIF’s 1st, 2nd and 4th Divisions were involved in the attack. Bean found himself at breakfast in Sausage Gully when Captain Hubert Brettingham-Moore, of the 15th Battalion, came in:
. . . his face covered with dust but his bright eyes gleaming under it—dirty, with his equipment hanging towselled round his neck and waist and his revolver stuck loosely in his pocket. Wounded in the thigh (he didn’t know this) and in the back and in the hand, sufficiently to make it difficult for him to sit and slow to walk. Tired, over-wrought, excited, but still with a winning smile under all the brown dust, [he] kept on saying, ‘Oh, they ran, they ran. Look sir, if I’d had twice the number of men I could have held the place against anybody.’
Brettingham-Moore, a gallant young Tasmanian, described to Bean how, behind Mouquet Farm, he had killed ten Germans after jumping into a trench. He was in a state of frenzied excitement, clumsily overturning his porridge as he talked about his exploits. ‘What he wanted was tea. He asked eagerly for a second cup and pushed aside half a very tasty sausage. He couldn’t sleep when we gave him the chance to lie down before breakfast.’
Bean made a camp in the old trenches at Bécourt Wood, on the edge of Sausage Valley, and though by mid-August he knew every inch of that devastated sector, he continued to make, as his batman Arthur Bazley would later say, ‘just one more trip’ to the front line to see how the Australians were faring. As the fight for Mouquet Farm wore on, Bean walked up the Bapaume road one morning. Rain had made the chalk surface slippery and he climbed into a trench. As he inched his way along, a German sniper shot at him, the bullets snapping past just over his head. He climbed into a shallow ditch that branched off the trench and was pounded by shell after shell, unprepared for what he had stumbled upon:
Dead men’s legs, a shoulder, now a half buried body stick out of the tumbled red soil—bodies in all s
orts of decay, some eaten away to the skull; blackened with the dried black skin drawn back from the teeth, eyelids dried thick and flattened like those of a mummy. There was a German—perhaps more in the bottom of the trench so that it cannot have been used of late unless he were a prisoner killed by a shell burst.
The sniper was one thing; as these mangled bodies testified, shellfire was another. Bean had little cover from shrapnel. One gun was throwing small high-explosive shells close by to the left. ‘I really began to think again that I was in a bit of a quandary.’ Bean managed to keep low and crawl about 20 metres along the trench. He waited a minute and made a run for it. ‘It is not nice to think of getting hit in those sort of places when you are quite alone because unless you can crawl to safety the chances are no-one will find you at all—especially if a shell half buries you.’ Horror was becoming routine. A few days later he came across some signallers as they fixed up broken wire along a trench:
And there lying in the bottom of the trench, just as they had fallen the night before, were three men of the 10th Battalion. One poor chap had his tunic and shirt torn bare by some piece of shell and you looked down past the bare white skin of the chest almost to his backbone—his whole body had been ripped open. He was bent back almost double . . . I can’t bear to think of these things. Another had his skull broken in just like an eggshell. A third lay peacefully there like a wax figure on which the dust had long settled—waxen, drawn, thin white lips slightly opened and eyes shut—almost as if he were lying leaning against the wall of the trench with both arms thrown out listlessly. Others that we came across you could hardly tell for dead—they might have been living men sleeping on the floor of the trench—and indeed the living were sleeping just near to them . . . One is apt to think that it is callous of the battalion to leave these men lying about. But the living are worn out by the morning—the dead are dead.
•
Bean felt anew the heavy burden of responsibility as observer and reporter of the extraordinary events that now involved the Australians. He had a story to tell, but once again he ran into the dead hand of British military censorship. At the start of August his cables to London were suddenly stopped. A fortnight went by with no change. What Bean read in the British newspapers left him frustrated, as the Australians were receiving little recognition for what they had achieved. From his diary, it is also clear that Bean operated much more at the front line than the British war correspondents—and that some resented this, for it clearly showed them up:
Reading the English papers you would imagine that the Australians had been assisting the strong territorial divisions, between whom they were squeezed, to move forward and steal a portion of German front. The other war correspondents none of them come within shellfire—much less rifle fire—and they simply don’t know, I suppose. With all the fuss that the Daily Mail makes over the Eyewitness accounts of its representative, the first occasion when he got within shell range in this battle was when I took him to Fricourt and we didn’t stay there long. Every one of them is free to come where I do if they want—and goodness knows I’m careful and nervous enough; but they don’t, and the consequence is I suppose that they don’t actually know what we have been doing.
Bean was quick to point out that in the previous three weeks the British had recaptured Delville Wood and had got into the edge of Gillemont Farm, near Cambrai. Except for those two moves, the only place where they had advanced was where the Australians ‘practically dragged a small portion of them on our flanks incidentally to our advance.’ The British saw Pozières ‘as the hardest nut to crack,’ but in three weeks the Australians had ‘utterly cracked that nut.’ But the Australians could not advance much further until the British did something. ‘We have fought the greatest battle in our history and one of the greatest in theirs—but not a suspicion of it would you get from the English papers.’
Bean met with the chief press censor, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Hutton Wilson, in Amiens. On one level, he learned, his articles had ‘been a little too full lately—too many exact particulars,’ such as ‘we attacked at 6 o’clock.’ Bean responded that surely the Germans knew such details, but was prepared to concede that perhaps Hutton Wilson was right, and that useful conclusions could be drawn from his exactness. But the issues went deeper. Bean learned that Hutton Wilson was aware that he was the ‘official’ correspondent with the AIF; the problem was that the British would not allow any news other than information from GHQ to be called official. Bean told him this could be easily and quickly fixed.
He was wrong. When no despatches appeared, he re-affirmed to Hutton Wilson his position as‘the Australian Government’s Eyewitness.’ He also wrote to Captain Henry Smart, the newly appointed controller of the Australian Military Office in London, who secured War Office approval for Bean’s despatches to be released—but only on condition that the his name did not appear. The War Office attributed this to ‘jealousy of the other war correspondents.’ In Amiens, Bean learned that the Reuters correspondent Herbert Russell had complained that he [Bean] supposedly had more ‘privileges’ than the others. ‘Little Hutton Wilson must have seized on this to bolster up his nervousness about my despatches,’ Bean concluded. ‘The result of it all has been to stir up Hutton Wilson to get onto me about my status. He has definitely decided that I am not a captain—which merely meant that I have all sorts of small advantages which went with the title.’
Bean believed there was also another reason—that GHQ wanted to downplay Australian achievements, preferring to talk of success by British forces. He dismissed this as ‘a miserably foolish decision,’ and asserted: ‘They put us in to fight the brunt of this battle and the AIF has done it—broken itself and broken the kernel of the fight opposite to it.’ Bean was convinced that in future dealings, it would be best for Australia ‘to be independent of these British people; and allies rather than dependents.’ Australia was the stronger race, with better morale, and ‘we should get more respect out of them.’ At present, the British did ‘not realise how much we do for them.’
There was more to it than Bean realised. Until 1917, Dominion forces were generally given credit in British press reports. But when German propaganda started to pick up on these reports, alleging that Britain was getting the Dominions to fight its battles, the British censors—on government orders—stopped distinguishing between Dominion and British troops by calling them all ‘British’. Australian resentment at being denied credit would only grow.
Whatever hold his British connection may have had on Bean, it was eroding. He was frustrated and disillusioned with the way he and the story of the AIF were being repressed by the British military hierarchy. Bean’s commitment to ‘the truth’ was also being compromised—and, indeed, undermined by correspondents who, rather than joining the troops at the front line as he did, relied on the dubiously accurate official communiqués. To Bean, this was poor journalism.
Bean’s style of journalism meant committting the facts to his diary as each battle unfolded before him. He daily recorded events on the battlefield as well as his own personal interactions not just with the men but also with the senior command. Such discipline meant facts were less likely to be lost. It also allowed him to ‘debrief ’ himself daily, providing an outlet for emotions and frustrations that could easily remain bottled up. He was witness to so much horror; writing down his reactions undoubtedly helped in dealing with it. Thus, while sympathetic to the men in the trenches when he went among them and shared their experiences, he was also able to maintain the professional discipline needed to do his job.
There were times, however, when this protective shell was challenged. He knew many of those who died; some were casual acquaintances whom he’d met over the years in Sydney and elsewhere, but others were closer, which made the diary entries much more personal. Such was the case on 7 August when Bean heard that his friend Charlie Manning had been killed along with three other officers the night before as they came out of the line. Charlie was an Anzac vetera
n and barrister Bean had known in Sydney. He and his comrades from the 24th Battalion were killed when a shell burst on the dugout in which the battalion staff sheltered. Bean was deeply affected. ‘It is horrible. He was Owen’s associate before me and I knew him well.’
Amid this trauma Bean was happy to run across his cousin Lieutenant Leo Butler, of the 12th Battalion. Leo had grown up in Hobart and entered the Butler family’s legal firm as a lawyer. They had become close on the school holidays that Bean had spent at the home of his mother’s family. Leo had always been there on the wharf to welcome the Beans when the ship arrived, and again to farewell them. To Bean, big, genial and generous Leo had always been ‘a man of the open air, the tennis court, the cricket field’ who was never quite suited to the family office. But as a soldier he was a born leader. He was ‘a very perfect gentleman, from the crown of his curly head to the soles of his great boots.’
Leo was a relatively old recruit when he enlisted at the age of thirty-two. He arrived in Egypt in April 1916 and a month later sailed for France with the 12th Battalion. From Pozières on 26 July, he wrote to Bean and arranged to meet a few weeks later. ‘He was the same big Leo of the tennis court or the camps on Sandy Bay Beach,’ Bean wrote after their reunion. Leo said his battalion would be attacking Mouquet Farm the next day, 21 August. Early on the 22nd, with mist still hovering over the landscape, Bean went to the lines and found the trenches had been blown to pieces by shelling. At battalion headquarters he heard a voice say, ‘Hallo Charlie!’