Following another interlude of regular duty in which we took our part in the attack on Pozières Ridge on July 30, I soon afterwards, with the rank of Captain, was transferred to the 22nd Battalion, which had lost so many of its regimental officers, and was given command of a company. The first day of importance had more risks than glory, the control of a carrying party taking ammunition from the reserves to the forward dumps. Day and night we passed through the German barrage, learned to appreciate the strength of their gunnery and the accuracy of their range. It was a terrible task accompanied with heavy casualties. Our artillery had fortunately increased. At Fleurbaix we had been able to hand back only one shell to every eight given us by the enemy; at Pozières we were giving them two shells for one. Our air scouting, too, had improved marvellously in daring and effect. The flyers often waved their arms to us in greeting as they dipped low to gun the Bosche in their trenches. Thick as wasps they were and as successful in spotting German gun emplacements as our counter battery fire was cleaning them out. German prisoners seemed more than ever pleased to be out of it. One day, as a party of them were taken past our lines, an officer waved his arm and shouted, ‘Cheerio, old birds! I’m off to Donington Hall to play tennis until the end of the war.You fellows carry on as usual.’11
Another batch of German prisoners brought in from Sausage Valley was not so cheerily indifferent; and little wonder, for they had an unholy fright. As they neared our kitchens out poured a detachment of cooks, each armed with a huge carving knife, and made a dash for their victims. The handsomest and most self-attentive man in the British Army looks something of a ruffian disfigured by a few days’ stubble upon his face and all the stain of the trenches, but a military cook, in all his panoply of grease and rags, is the very incarnation of ruffianism. The prisoners were limp with fright. Even I for a moment thought the cooks had suddenly gone mad and contemplated murder, but it was only a dash for souvenirs, and for every button that they slashed away they considerately handed the former owner of it a cigarette. Big, well-nourished men were these German prisoners, with never a sign of the spectacled savant or undeveloped boy by which the illustrated papers served up to us as the sign of German deterioration. If the Hun civilian was being starved, the soldier was well fed. Captured trenches gave sufficient proof of that. His biscuits were not as nourishing as ours, and easier to eat, he had still tinned meats in abundance, stacks of sausages which, if greasy, seemed palatable, and they habitually used bottled soda water for drink in the trenches.
Behind the lines one had a chance of again noting the patient heroism with which the French peasant went on his way in the very teeth of war, permitting nothing to disturb for a moment his ingrained thrift. Quiet, simple folk, trading profitably with our men, mainly through the convenient medium of pantomime, one had to get behind their skin of stolid indifference to realise a soul aflame with patriotism.
Just thereabout I had a subordinate share in a resolute bit of work standing the credit of Captain Maberly Smith of the 23rd Battalion. In an attack the battalion won its ground, but the flanking corps failed, leaving our right flank in the air and dangerously exposed, so he was told to retire. To give up ground because of the failure of others was not to the Captain’s taste. ‘Oh, be damned!’ he said. ‘The battalion doesn’t retire.’ Rudely ignoring the order, which may have been only a suggestion, he dug round on that side for flank protection and hung on grimly for several days until the debatable ground on our right was won and line restored.12
We located and fully accounted for a strong post which the enemy had formed across the Bapaume Road. Having carefully reconnoitred the position, we placed machine guns in position and, with the range carefully ascertained, opened up on them in daylight with the Stokes gun; a deadly bit of ordnance with fire so rapid that eight 12-pounder shells are in the air together. It was too hot for Carl, and as he rushed out the machine guns cut him down. Apparently we accounted for the lot, about sixty Huns being found dead, and searching them we got on the body of an officer the report which he was about to send in—‘To the House of the Brigadier, I have this night taken in front of the Australians a strong post across the Bapaume Road.’ On another of their dead were photographs and papers taken from one of our own sentries who had mysteriously disappeared. In this case Nemesis was prompt.
In this story it should be understood that there is no pretence of chronological order, just an impression of observations and incidents written as they are recalled, with a memory somewhat blurred since by the effect of a German bomb and after effects of German hate, but amongst them some vignettes of battle that can never become obscure, since with so much of the glory of battle is mixed up its ghastliness.
On the Somme we were twice ‘over the bags’ in something more imposing than trench fighting, with casualties for the division heavier, it was believed, than any regiment had endured since Mons. We were very tired of trench warfare then, though fighting in the open would have deprived us of an underground companionship of rats, mice and other inevitable creatures, to whom we act chiefly as hosts. Like a friendly dog the rat trots about your dugout by night, often treading trustfully upon your face. In the open above they are in swarms, sharing by daylight our watchfulness, though parapet and parados be honeycombed with their funk-holes. Almost a domestic animal was the French rat, with nothing of the ill-bred haste of our city dweller in drains and docks. They were wise rats in a way, with no love for shell-torn country.
Apart from the crowded hours of actual battle, nothing on the Somme was more impressive than the first sight of our guns in the open—an immense concentration, each type in line, first the 60 lb mortars, then field guns, and so on, in successive lines, receding further to the rear as range and power increased, a companionship of calibres in 6, 8, 9 and even 12-inch cannon.
On one occasion, with an English company attacking on our flank, it was our duty to keep the Huns’ heads down for them—in military language, to cover their attack with machine gun fire. The attack was knocked back and I was never more amazed in my life than when the officer commanding came to us with the astounding request:
‘Will you fellows take that trench for us?’
‘Oh, go to the devil!’ I retorted. ‘We have had a fair thing already.’
‘But your fellows like attacking,’ he protested. ‘You could do it easily enough.’
He persisted, even to the pretence that it was ordered, but without a written command we declined to oblige, though, when his company again attacked, quite a number of our Hotspurs hopped over with them.
If there were not two sides to that picture be sure that one side would never have been revealed. It seems to be a convention of war that even those familiar with it should never speak too freely of its emotional side, speak only of it in terms of broad and blazing glory, such as those favoured by very peaceful men obsessed of a duty in war orations, the flamboyant stuff used by a sick Kaiser to hearten up a beaten army.
There are phases of war, when the God of Battles is ‘sifting out the hearts of men before His judgement seat’ that are stranger than fiction, more impressive than slaughter. Judging from too hasty impulses, such an incident as that just related, one might fear at times that England was ‘losing its punch’ did he not notice that England never lowered its guard. It seemed incredible that an English officer should expect or ask Australians to undertake his job, but that very same regiment showed a silent, uncomplaining endurance in sitting under an eruption of German shell, with all its unimaginable horrors, that no soldiers whom I have ever seen in action could surpass. Let it be sufficient for our fame that, in the very crisis of the great enemy advance, three of our divisions before Amiens rolled back the German waves, started an ebb in the tide of war which never after changed to flood. Still we recognise that in some phases of war we have our limitations, and these happen to be just the particular phases in which Englishmen have no peers. I have seen our men sitting under a barrage, some of them reading their Bibles in anticipation of immediate death, others quite nerve-broken and tearful, some very near the verge of madness. It is all a question of temperament—the highly strung, impulsive Australian, with whom initiative has become a life habit, doing his best in one way, the less imaginative, enduring Briton doing it in another. It seems a little strange that springing from one stock two nations should in a few generations have so diverged.
The Briton, with long record of glorious achievement, needs but resolve to maintain and live up to those deeds which have made the name such a proud one, while we, as the cubs from a new land, with a consequent poverty of local traditions, were determined in our debut on the stage, where history is made and national characteristics are established, to prove worthy the great stock whence we sprang and, if possible, in our enthusiasm to excel.
Of course other and greater reasons contribute a more far-reaching cause of the difference. Ours was a wholly volunteer force and, consequently, the men were carefully chosen—the flower of our country—whereas conscription carried into the ranks of Great Britain’s armies a percentage of men who, though keen and devoted to their country, would not have been considered mentally or physically fit, according to our standard of enlistment. It also forced into the ranks the usual quota of those who had no inclination to risk their lives.
The psychology of war is made up of many moving human factors. Distorted by intense strain, its manifestations take forms generally unexpected, often almost humiliating. The best antidote to fear is that pride of race which forbids us to fail, and it shines better in fierce activities than in slow, solid endurance.
It had long been my desire to get my brother Cecil into my own company, but an incident of a night on the Somme changed that view. Relieved about two o’clock in the morning, and bivouacking anywhere, I had thrown myself down to sleep, when about five in the morning the waterproof sheet was gently pushed back from my face and I felt a hand upon my forehead. It was my brother, whom I believed to be still in hospital with an injured ankle. With brothers in the same corps and going over the top together, the thoughts and fears of each are too much with the other. They get dopey, can neither dodge danger nor do their duty so efficiently as when alone.
At Ypres we held Sanctuary Wood, the burial ground of so many great Canadians who stood up to the mystery and horror of the first chlorine gas attack. I had just sufficient gas on one occasion to realise something of their fate. It was three o’clock in the morning when the gas came over, and on a long frontage men were so scattered that it was only tear shells, but soon one was screaming with pain. In trying to get one man up I had to take off my helmet for an instant. Almost instantly there was a smothering, burning feeling, but a fortunate sudden sickness saved me from its worst consequences. The trenches themselves were a continuous horror—mud up to the knees, sometimes to the thighs, wounded men at times sinking into its deadly smother as though they were held in quicksands. I had a sector of six hundred yards of sheer sorrow on the Somme; a garrison of eighty men to risk body and soul in the keeping of it, for our orders were to hold it to the last man. A trench was considered passable or possible when it held no more than 3 feet 6 inches of water, and of our six hundred yards two hundred were considered ‘possible’. It was one night in this sink of desolation that I received a letter from my mother which recalled Bairnfather’s happy idea about ‘that blinkin’ moon’ for in the dim light I read, ‘How I would love to be with you now.’ It’s just as well that mothers don’t always know.
No really big game—and war is the supreme game— is without its omens, coincidences and superstitions. As November 5th approached, comrades warned me more than once to take care. ‘If you’re to go out, that’s your night,’ they said. It was on November 5th that I was wounded at Gallipoli. It was all ridiculous, of course, but thoughts for which there is no accounting, which would never stand the searchlight of reason in everyday life, come to you in war—and stay. So on November 5th I did not enter the dug-out all day. After dark I got out of the trench too, stayed out in the open while it snowed, and after midnight went back to sleep with some little feeling of shame, perhaps, but a certain satisfaction in having for the moment given Fate the slip. Many such presentiments have been realised in battle, because many men have them. I returned from leave in England with a full conviction that the next would be my last fight, and made every preparation for ‘the journey West.’ There was hard fighting, and I came through unscathed. On the other hand, I went into what proved to be my last fight with a firm conviction that, whoever might fall, I should not. Such are the presentiments which many soldiers know that sometimes happily go astray.
There was a disposition at that time to credit the Hun with exceptional skill and daring in espionage to magnify his cunning and minimise our own. When a certain unit took Bayonet Trench and lost it forty-eight hours later, we were given beforehand the exact time when the enemy would come over, and the intelligence was confirmed in the event.13 Similarly on taking over from a British regiment at Le Boeuf, we had smiled at the CO’s warning: ‘You’ll take over at midnight. In the early morning the Huns will endeavour to raid the trench held by the company on your left. Make your dispositions to meet it.’
It seemed a climax in absurdity. Did the Hun leave it to us to time his raids and elaborately prepare his programme? Later the disbelieving smile changed to wonder, because the enemy kept his appointment to the minute, and as good hosts we had a warm greeting waiting for him. One night we had a message in code giving us the exact hour at which the enemy would bring reliefs to his front line trenches, and guns were laid on to catch him in the confusion of change. Again it came off, as we found out from a badly rattled Bosche, one of the victims, who walked into our line by mistake in the early morning.
It was at Gueudecourt that we had our first experience of a northern winter. Snow storms were frequent, the cold, in spite of our sheepskin coats, often so keen as to be a pain, and one began to realise for the first time some of the meaning and miseries of polar exploration. Because we knew so much less than the Briton what frost-bite meant, trench feet became so common, casualties so high, that it was necessary to take drastic measures. It was the duty of a company commander to inspect his men’s feet every day, to see that they changed into dry socks when opportunity offered, soaked their feet in whale oil, and had at least one hot meal a day. Here the Tommy Cookers were invaluable. With each of them was issued a tin of solid alcohol that looked like jelly, and a tin of Maconochie rations serves four men, with hot tea in a Dixie. There was a soup kitchen close to the line, in charge of the padre, where one could get hot soup any hour of the day or night. One result of strict supervision was that the Australians, originally censured for having so many men put out of action for trench feet and frostbite, gradually worked to the stage where they were congratulated instead upon fewer casualties in that way than any other army on the Western Front. That happy result was only brought about by the cooperation of all ranks.
In another direction this all-round cooperation worked very happily. I had hit upon the idea of arranging for entertainments in winter billets, believing that it would help keep the men out of the villages and out of trouble.There was little sympathy for the idea at first. We sent gun limbers five miles to cart in a piano, and rigged up a barn as a concert hall. Out of the success of this movement grew the determination to have a company Christmas dinner at Flesselles, to which two hundred and eighty men sat down, on the clear understanding that crime was suspended for the evening. The Don Dinner was one of our proudest accomplishments, and it did not end with the dinner. Out of the finer esprit de corps established grew a higher standard of conduct.