BURRANGONG, SEPTEMBER 1978
The water had definitely sunk, Arjun decided. His feet were wet, but no longer sloshed when he moved in the bin. The moon had fallen from the crest of the sky. Soon it would drop behind the mountains. Did that mean dawn was coming? He wished he had enough light to see his watch.
‘No idea about what?’ he asked.
‘The Germans had been preparing for this war for years. That’s why their dug-outs were so well built and well equipped, unlike ours. They’d been building them for years, with train lines all ready to bring in equipment and reinforcements.
‘And that’s exactly what they did.’
‘What do you mean?’ Arjun asked.
‘We had totally misunderstood. Me, Major Galbraith, the generals and field marshals. We had thought we were advancing because we were winning. But it wasn’t that at all.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Neither did I, not till months later. It seems we had been able to advance so far, and so quickly, because the German general in command, Ludendorff, had ordered a tactical retreat to lure us into an indefensible position. He knew what we didn’t — or rather what British Intelligence hadn’t worked out. The Germans had massive reinforcements about to arrive. The Russian Revolution meant that the Russian army had stopped fighting. The British knew that, of course, but British Intelligence had no idea the German troops would move so quickly. Intelligence? Total nincompoops, the lot of them.’
Mrs McLain gave a short laugh. ‘There were travel guides back then, called Bradshaw’s. All British Intelligence needed to do was to consult the railway timetables in a Bradshaw’s and they could have seen how long it would take to bring the German army that had been fighting the Russians to our position.
‘We had no hope of keeping the land we’d won unless we got reinforcements too.’
‘Did you get them?’
‘They were coming. The Americans had joined the war, of course, but the German troops came by train, getting fed and rested on the way. Our reinforcements had to march along the roads or across churned-up battlefields, and were being strafed by aircraft and gassed and shelled on the way. It took our men about fifteen hours just to get the five kilometres to the Front, and they were exhausted when they arrived. The Germans just had to get off their trains and march or be trucked into position.’
She shrugged. ‘At the time I knew nothing except that for some reason we were suddenly to stay dug in where we were. But Ludendorff had twenty divisions assembled. They sent a barrage of poison gas shells first, then the men followed — not a great line of men as in the previous battles, but in small groups again, and this time there were thousands of them, infiltrating where they could. The Germans retook five miles of territory in about two hours, but we knew nothing of that.
‘That’s when the shell hit us.’