January - February 1917
“Well I am still pegging away but we are out for a spell, so wiz bangs, 9.2's etc, etc are forgotten for a time while we carry on independently, perhaps with a French tab (which are few and far between in this village) or anything that's going. We get a bit of drill to keep us out of mischief I suppose but not very much - it's generally a route march to keep our feet warm - the weather is cold enough at present to freeze a brass monkey, in fact it's just beginning to snow again but it may not be much.
We are camped in barns which is a king to what we have been used to - a dugout is “tres bon” if it's dry but we've had enough rain lately to start the Ark floating again.”
IN THE FIRST week of January 1917 two Companies, four hundred and sixty men in total, are marched out to the railway siding and entrain to Franvillers for a decent rest. I’m thrilled to be moving back away from the front line for a while, it’s been a difficult three months. Fritz is a minute to minute threat and the winter conditions have been appalling.
As we are marching out of camp, Fritz sends over a farewell shell that kills another two men standing fifty yards away from me. I’m very happy to climb onto that train.
A week later the remainder of the 1st Pioneer Battalion had handed over the Perth Camp to the 4th Division and joined us in Franvillers.
The village is very small, about fifteen miles or so west from the front line and hasn’t had a flogging. It appears that most of the villagers are still here.
The locals are heavily involved with support of our troops; running the baths, cleaning, and repairing clothing, helping with the food supplies and doing what they can to make our stay a little more pleasant. The baths are set up in a barn and can only cater for ten or twelve men at a time. It’s a bit breezy with the main door being opened every two minutes. Certainly not a relaxing experience, just a quick scrub, clean clothes and get out.
A community hall is set up as a writing room and I managed to find a seat in there on a couple of occasions.
A small café in the main cobble stoned street does an excellent trade in “Soupe à l’oignon” (onion soup), steak, eggs and chips but it cannot accommodate a thousand soldiers. Be blowed if I’m going to queue up outside in this weather for an hour or two to get a seat. Most of us will eat from the Battalion’s dedicated cook house. We can grab a bowl of soup or cup of tea there at any time of the day.
The village ran out of rum and plonk after the first day. A bit of a blow really, I’d set my mind on a bottle or two of their red.
We spend almost three weeks in Franvillers, “resting”. Our free time is sprinkled with route marches, church parades and cleaning of equipment. The best part is to put some warmth back into the body, it’s heaven on earth to put my bare feet close to a raging fire and feel the skin dry out. To pull back on warm, dry socks and boots is worth writing home about. A few cups of decent tea and I could almost forget the last three months… Well almost.
The mood amongst the men has mellowed considerably. The pressure of working along the front line was extremely stressful and when pulled back away from the threat you can clearly see men relax after a few days as if a weight has been slowly lifted off their backs. There are very few arguments as everyone makes the effort to catch up on the basics of life, which in Franvillers is about sleep, warmth, writing a few letters and with a bit of luck, receiving some.
I often walk up and down the village road to keep my legs warm and get some exercise. The village is only about three hundred yards long. The surrounding area is all flat farm land, it would look bonzer in spring.
A letter from home tells me of the Australian Government having held a National referendum last October seeking consensus to conscript men for overseas service. The attitude of the population towards the war has altered, many households have lost loved ones and thousands more have been injured. Not everyone believes we should be sending more men at this time. The referendum failed. A breakdown of the voting records showed that the Beech Forest electorate voted “No”.
One thing I’ve learnt about this soldiering business though is to never allow yourself to get too comfortable in one place. Before you know it, the order comes down the line to pack up, “We’re moving out”. Sure enough, on the 1st February, our Battalion gets the whistle up and it’s, “Bye-bye” to Franvillers and a twelve-mile motor lorry transport journey, east to Mametz Camp and back to war.
A few days were spent working on the construction of a supply railway, then “D” Company were moved further forward to the second line of defence and into work that I have become most accustomed too, trench repair, laying duckboards, digging deep dugouts, excavating new trenches and the building up of a couple of machine gun positions. All in the freezing, bitterly cold sleet, ice and snow.
Early one morning a German aeroplane made a raid on two of our ammunition dumps about a mile away from our trench. It was a very clear morning and I am sorry to say that he caught them well and the shells were exploding all day. Thousands of shells were stored there, what a waste, makes you want to swear.
Most of our ammunition dumps are in deep dugouts where they are relatively safe but with the sheer volume required along this front it’s not possible to store everything under ground. Fritz got lucky.
The following day, probably the same plane, flew low over Mametz Camp and dropped a couple of shells. The pilot must have four arms to fly the aeroplane, observe our position, reach over the side, unhook the bombs dangling from the side of the aeroplane, line them up and let them drop. No one was hurt that day. We got lucky.
I had been thinking that it might be about my turn to get some leave to Blighty (England) but as has happened on numerous occasions before, the thought is snuffed out quick smart. The word is passed around that “leave has been stopped and not likely to be reopened”.
Many men have had leave granted previously but, on most occasions, they are men who fought in Gallipoli or have been in the AIF for considerably longer than I have which is a fair call. They often return from England with magnificent stories of their exploits, new friends, places they visited and tabbies they have met.
The other way to get to England is on a Red Cross stretcher, being sent off to hospital. When a chap is injured, his first thought and usually the first thing he’ll ask the doctor or nurse is, “Is this a Blighty injury?” Meaning that he’ll be sent to England to recuperate and be out of harm’s way for a while. I prefer the “leave” option myself.
The enemy is extremely active along this sector and our infantry is very aggressive in reply. Numerous times the Pioneers are called upon to support an attack or “stand to”. On one occasion recently, we followed our infantry troops and went over the top and into no-man’s land. Our role was to “clean up” as we went. Checking on the dead and wounded, moving the wounded back, clearing away debris or obstructions, carrying light ammunition forward and guarding any prisoners that might have been captured.
No-man’s land is putrid with rotting bodies. Dead soldiers from both sides litter the area, some have been there, frozen for months. If this shattered earth ever becomes farmland again, I dread to think what the ploughs will uncover. Arms and legs stick up from a surface pitted like some massive giant has angrily rammed his fingers into the earth again and again. There are isolated, shattered tree stumps, leaden coloured, sticking up in some mad defiance of the carnage. But all of this is not done by a mythical giant. It’s done by our own and Fritz’s relentless shell fire. The ground turned a hundred times, a thousand times. Wire, wood, debris and corpses are everywhere.
We get as far as the enemy front line and our boys are busy taking prisoners. This is the first time I have seen Fritz trenches in any detail and they certainly are a work of art. Some of the deep dugouts are thirty feet deep below ground level and timbered to perfection. It must really hurt them to be kicked out and pushed right back and have to live in shell holes again after the real homes (dugouts) they have been living in here.
Our boys throw down smoke bombs, believing that quite a few Fritz were cut off and are still hiding below. Sure enough, they come scrambling out with their hands above their head screaming “Mercy Kamerad”. It’s a pitiful sight and I wonder if they would show the same mercy if they had the drop on us.
I could have picked up plenty of souvenirs from their trenches. I particularly like their helmets which are very impressive with the brass eagles and all on them but it’s too difficult to carry anything out. Getting anything back to Australia would be another issue and it would probably get snookered in the process anyway.
Getting out so far from our front line and into Fritz held territory gives me a better understanding of the deep tunnel work we have been doing along this front line and the purpose for it. If they ever get this territory back the explosives that are stacked up in our tunnels below their feet will sort them out.
We don’t hang around long as daylight starts to filter through and the German artillery has started to sing again. They are clearly not happy about being pushed back a mile or so on a thousand-yard front. No time to assist the dead, we make our way back past the broken bodies and clamber over the parapet. After helping escort the prisoners out behind the lines we return to our own dugouts and pretend to sleep.
I’m curled up in my dugout with my knees up around my chest, I cannot get warm, the weather is frighteningly cold and has been for months. The snow has stopped, it’s been raining all day instead. Non-stop freezing rain and the wind is roaring through this trench. I am on down time and should be getting some sleep, but I know that if I was to fall asleep I would surely freeze and die.
My feet have been wet for a week, I’ve taken my boots and socks off just now, rung the excess water out of the socks and tucked them between my coat lining and my body. Hopefully by the time I need to get out of the dugout my body heat will have dried them out somewhat. Probably wishful thinking on my behalf as there is no body heat anyway.
I bandicooted a newspaper a few days back which I have carried around against my chest to keep the wind and cold out and now I’ve stuffed it into my soaking boots, they won’t dry but the newspaper will soak up a lot of the excess water.
Taking my boots and socks off has only made the situation worse. My feet are painfully cold. I hardly have enough clothing to cover them. By pulling my knees up to my chest at least all the extremities are in the same area and they share the pain.
My dugout is not recessed very far, I know this area of trench quite well and it has been knocked a few times so where I am is probably the 2nd or maybe the 3rd rebuild. The mud in the trench floor would be knee deep if it wasn’t mostly frozen, the wooden duckboards are under there somewhere, probably a Fritz or two as well. Because the ground has been turned so often the trench walls are soggy, unsupported, and wet. The difference between standing out in the trench in the pouring rain or laying here curled up eighteen inches inside the dugout is that the dugout is less wet.
The war is still going on outside and I can hear the odd shell of ours going out and every now and again the distinct whistle of a Fritz shell coming in. The benefit of the heavy rain is that it deadens the whistle of Fritz’s shells and you lose that sense of how far it is from you, until it hits. Tonight, the shells landing and the percussion that follows indicates that the line a hundred yards or so away is getting a bit of a tidy up. It’s pitch black, so setting the range sights of either infantry would be guess work at best. There is a sense that both sides have had enough of the weather and have lost interest again, for tonight anyway. Maybe they just send one over every now and again to remind everyone we are still having a blue. Most of “D” Company are within forty or fifty yards of where I am, if we keep our heads down we’ll be okay.
It’s times like this when I’m curled up like a child, my back pushed into the dugout wall as hard as I can, the dark, the cold and the rain, that I long to be back home. I’m not dreaming because the cold forbids me sleep, I am thinking with my eyes closed.
Wishing and longing to walk through the front gate of Cloverdale farm. I can see the long line of pine trees that Dad and I planted years earlier running parallel to the road along the front of the property. I look to Mum, Dad, Frank & Wal standing on the front veranda. As I march on down the driveway, the cow bell’s tinkering and old “Jessie” the horse has mellowed since I last saw her (I hope) and she will walk over to the fence to greet me.
I think about a lot of things, some good, some not so good.
When I last saw Stan Tulloch a month or so back we had a good evening together. A decent laugh, talking about home, the farm, the people we both knew and lots of topics that made us both feel good. We spoke a bit about the war and where it is heading, but not too much on that subject.
I really liked Stan, a friendly chap with a big smile and a warm hand shake, big hands too, they could nearly wrap around mine. We have known each other from when we were young children. He was four or five years older than me, but we had gone through school together and our parents are quite close. Stan and his father have worked as carpenters in Beech Forest for years. I remember him being on the farm a few times with us. He got on well with Frank and Wal also.
When we last shook hands, standing in the remains of the main road running through camp, I looked him in the eye and thought, “I hope I see you again Stan”. The thought was as much about his future in this war as it was about mine. We can never know what the next day will bring for either of us. I’m sure he was thinking the same thing about me, but the words were not spoken, they just hang in your head.
And now he’s dead.
The message I received back down the line is short & cruel. “You’re mate Stan got knocked a couple of days back”. I don’t know where he’s buried or even if he is buried. The news sets me back a bit and I lose sleep worrying about how his family will handle their terrible loss. When I get home, I’ll visit his parents and tell them Stan was doing just fine when I last saw him.
I think about silly things. There was a cousin of mine that I berated at school once for upsetting Wal. I would have only been eleven or twelve years old at the time. It was only child’s play, not a serious blue. I’ll apologise to him one day for acting out of line.
Funny how such little details like that stick in your memory.
I need to clear up a couple of other things in my mind that are a bit closer to the heart. Issues that have bothered me for as long as I can remember.
When I left the farm and signed up, I was only 19 years old. There were things that happened around Cloverdale that were never discussed between my parents and me. When I return from this war, I won’t be a boy any more, I’ve aged a bit, I’ve matured a lot and I’ll walk back in the front door as a grown man. I’ve got it all worked out, I won’t rush into it as soon as I get back, I’ll wait a week or two for the dust to settle.
In my mind, I see Mother and I sitting on the front porch sharing a cup of tea. I need to ask her about the six children she lost, the twins and the other four girls. I don’t want to upset her. I want to know how she is, how she feels and most importantly to me is that I can offer to share her grief and hope in some way I can take some of it off her shoulders.
Starting the conversation off will be the difficult part, how do I say, “Mother, can we talk?”, what happens after that? “I’ve always felt sad about the babies you lost.” That’s a bit tough, I could be a bit more respectful than that. Maybe, “While I was away Mother, I often thought of home and our upbringing”. That sounds like a softer approach, I’ll work on that.
I’ve seen death, I’ve felt it, I’ve smelt it in this terrible war and its hard, harsh and evil at its best. The demise of my siblings is quiet, soft and thoughtful, it’s a different death. I wonder if mother would understand the difference? When she looked into their dear faces was she happy to have met them and loved them for those precious minutes, relaxed and calm that their life wasn’t to be? Or has she been tortured and full of resentment that God would take these beautiful children from her? How could our God be so cruel to one woman, one family? I really struggle with that.
The war I am in is not hers, the babies were. Are her feelings hard and hateful like a soldier or soft and controlled like a mother? Will she ever breathe properly again, move on, see light at the end of the tunnel, not think about it every day? If I were in her shoes, I’m not sure I could. I need to have that conversation with my mother.
The other piece of family business I must attend to is to walk to the north-west perimeter of Cloverdale farm with my father. Just the two of us. Down into the gully between the tree ferns where the water trickles through the forest floor on its way to the creek a thousand yards further downhill. We will walk up to the base of the largest Mountain Ash tree that looks back up through the valley towards the house.
“Father, please show me the Holy ground where my baby sisters are buried. I need to know”.
I become conscious of my surroundings again and clear away the tears from my cheeks. I realise I have drifted off enough in my thoughts for them to have taken the cold away for a while. I wasn’t asleep, I was just somewhere else more important.