War, as the greatest game in the world, has a psychology all its own, and in its tense phases, the great crises, its emotions are mainly primitive. Much has been written upon the heroics of battle, very little of its depths, of the strange and wholly unexpected things that happen when men are tried to the breaking point. Civilisation seems to slip away very easily under that searching fire-test, the original man is revealed apart from all that culture may have done for him, and the revelation is often disconcerting. One’s impressions on this subject are necessarily personal, but I have discussed it with comrades and found, in their impressions and experiences, unanimity so remarkable that one is able to speak broadly of emotions as the rule of battle. If the reader unfamiliar with war is occasionally shocked, the conventions upon which he has been nourished are to blame. War has its heroic side in sacrifice, but in the main it is brutal. No one with experience of it may honestly pretend otherwise. Amongst its mixed emotions are some that are almost degrading.
No better battle ground for the analysis of emotion can be chosen than the long, bitter struggles for the Ridge of Pozières, where about Gibraltar our white crosses now stand, arm to arm, in line and square, and where a fit memorial has been raised to Australian valour and sacrifice. It is a spot sacred to Australians, especially so to the soldiers who fought there. I am told that, in the last great German advance, the one resolve that fired our troops to iron resolution was: ‘They must never get Pozières.’ It was the crosses and the men and the memories lying beneath that appealed. ‘Who, being dead, yet speaketh.’ Its battle tests were supreme, presented the two great phases in effort, the rush against positions that bristled with death and difficulty, the long tenacity of hanging on under such a torrent and torment of shell fire as Australian fighters had never previously visualised or experienced.
In going up for our first innings at Pozières we were aware that the First Division had been in action and had lost heavily. For many days there had been foreknowledge of something very big just ahead. It was indicated in the many letters written home which I had to censor, and they showed where thoughts centred in that supreme hour of suspense. The keynote was ever the same, and I make no apology for breach of trust in revealing it. ‘My dear mother, this is the eleventh hour.’ To so many of those, whose thoughts flew far, there was no dawn to follow the midnight. My personal feeling at the moment was one of unshaken faith in the unit, doubt only as to myself. Self-introspection brought always the same question: ‘Will I prove worthy of the Battalion?’
In front of us was the heavy Bosche barrage, varying in depth from 200 to 400 yards, bursts of white from the shell and, piercing up through the centre of it, the black earth spurts. To pass through it without annihilation seemed impossible. We saw a shattered British battalion come back, noted how its units had shrunk almost to nothing. In face of such evidence there could be little comfort and no indifference. Here again was the personal conviction that, although the enemy must lose heavily, I was certain to pass unscathed, and in conversation afterwards with other officers I found that they had exactly the same feeling. Men were very serious then, though many tried to bluff it through with forced jokes, and, with a big thing ahead, it takes a big bluff to cover it. Everyone who has had a fair share of trench fighting knows the great anomaly. Heavy and continuous shell fire, whatever the casualties, is demoralising, nerve shattering. The chattering of machine guns are by far the greater peril, yet men go up light-heartedly in face of one and wilt despondently under the lesser but more awesome danger.
At one point of the advance we passed a shell hole eruption from the piled earth of which a dead shrunken blackened arm was thrust out gruesomely, with the stiffened fingers extended. One laughing devil as we passed placed a tin of bully beef in the extended hand, with the remark, ‘Get up you loafer—we’re doing your work!’ It was the big bluff, in normal circumstances would have been instantly resented as something too gross even for war. But under such a strain men both do and say things which would revolt them in ordinary life, and the man who can be coarsely light-hearted, either in assault or endurance, is at that moment a greater moral asset than the quiet thinkers of finer fibre. Never was that conviction so fully realised as in the tense period of waiting for a big German counter attack, where the word has passed that in no circumstances must there be retirement. On such an occasion I had passed down the line and put the position briefly, you will say perhaps brutally, but this was not a school for the cultivation of the graces and refinements. It was war, imperiously direct in its demands, and with success dominating every other consideration.
‘We expect a big counter attack at any moment,’ I said, ‘and no man must go back, no one yield a yard of this trench. If we beat them back with the machine guns, no one must hop out of this trench to follow them up. We don’t quite know each other yet. I don’t know myself. If I want to leave this trench, kill me. One thing, however, I promise you. The command to retire can only be given in this sector by me, and I tell you, by all that I hold sacred, the word shall never be spoken. If you hear it, ignore it. It won’t come from me.’
In the strain of waiting that trench was a medley of mixed emotions. Where thoughts flew backwards one saw quiet tears trickling down drawn, trench-stained faces. It is a bad time for the fighting man, a bad time for his mission. Through the mass of humanity that leaven of loving softness spreads far too easily. It is one of the reasons why ‘Home, sweet home’ and other tender melodies are banned as battle songs, why one should never take photographs into the front line, or look at them when he is there. Far better at such a time to get home and the home folk out of the mind, if one is to concentrate every thought, every energy upon the big absorbing job in hand. I say, with considerable experience, that in such a crisis the presence of men here and there who let themselves go without shame or reserve, curse the enemy loudly, continuously, brutally, are a greater asset, a finer stiffener to a smitten, sniffering line than thirty per cent of reinforcements. You find and hear them in unexpected places, and without social distinction. It may be a navvy or a bank clerk; the one at the moment is neither better nor worse than the other; there is, save in the continuance of authority, no distinction between the officer and the man. The cultivated graces have been shed away, the primitive man is uppermost. Civilisation has lost hold for the moment, savagery is almost supreme. It seems shocking that a man may be hurried to judgement with an oath scarce cold upon his lips. To those who may and will be shocked, who have nursed themselves afar with the fake little illusions of life, I can only suggest that the creator and controller of men knows the nature of his handiwork, its strength and its deficiencies, and, in the great eruption which has laid both bare, his judgement may be merciful.
And he who toss’d thee down into the Field
He knows about it all. He knows! He knows!
I hurry, for comforting contrast, to that other extreme, the magnificent brotherhood of battle. It warms and grows and glows into being very slowly and always under long continued strain, ever impending calamity. It is a brotherhood finer, I think, than anything else in the whole human world. The roughest become gentle under its influence, all selfishness disappears. You have an overpowering impulse to put your arm around your next man’s neck, to say something decent, human and gentle. It is the love of suffering man for his fellows in suffering, the last and greatest phase of battle emotions surviving all the earlier, dangerous impulses of which I have spoken. It is the time when the officer who understands rises to the occasion and is idolized. At such a time would Brigadier General Gellibrand pass along the trench, and his quiet, ‘Box on, boys! Stick it out!’ was in similes which they understood as an inspiration. At such a time the true leader is at once a commander and a comforter, in very truth the trusted father of his boys.
Going in for the first big test, one naturally meets the troops coming out who have been through the trial. The first impression is that every man has been doped and drugged with rum. Men stagger about drunkenly; they seem to lose all sense of direction. If spoken to they answer curtly, confusedly, in monosyllables. They are really drugged with battle, but there is nothing either exalting or ludicrous in such intoxication: it is something seen in others rather than self-comprehended. You in your turn will, after many days in the front line, come out in exactly the same mentally muddled state, yet personally unconscious of it. The further exhausted troops are removed from the battle line, the more quickly they recover their mental poise. That state of drugged drunkenness lasts generally from twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Their only wish, then, is to be left alone.
All things are taken from us and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful past;
Let us alone! What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the heaving wave?
All things have rest and ripen towards the grave,
In silence ripen, fall, and cease
Give us long rest or death, dark death or dreamful ease.
Just here comes the irony of custom, a usage which at first sight seems to be nothing short of thoughtless barbarity. Next day these tired troops are marched to a parade ground to be put through the simpler elements of a drill with which they are absolutely familiar. Men are naturally intolerant and angry, and as they rarely pass the blame for any injustice beyond their immediate commander, he becomes for a time the best hated man in the battalion, in their estimation a merciless, exacting tyrant. Here again is considered method, the lessons learned in the long sequence of Great Britain’s great and little wars, the applied wisdom of men who have made soldier mentality a life study. Both from a mental and military point of view, it is desirable that men should be doing something, be lifted out of themselves, and the ABC of the drill ground serves the purpose as well as anything else.
In war as in most other energies, the strength of the chain is the weakest link, and the breaking of the weak link is the constant apprehension of the commander, for with the mettle and the spirit broken, all sense of shame and decency disappears. False commands will be passed on and panic, that strange thing which spreads like a fire even amongst the bravest, may be on the verge of ignition. Such instances are very rare, while they continue very dangerous, for men are not mentally fit to consider the possibilities or probabilities of an order. As a rule the offenders are men of imagination who have broken under strain, are to be pitied than blamed, though in a war trench pity has, for the moment, no footing. As a company officer I have heard the command, which I had never given, passed along until in reaching men communications were broken, and the fault corrected. In such a state few men, and a few only, began to see things that have no existence, that are the fantasy of a bloodshot eye and tottering mind.
There were such instances as we say under the fiercest barrage I ever experienced in that unforgettable K Trench, looking up the slope to the blazing enemy crest of the Ridge of Pozières. It was the greatest concentration of artillery, and we sat under it. The noise of passing and bursting shells, of guns of all calibres, made one continuous appalling roar, until as a trench humorist said, ‘One more shell as a keystone, and the whole lot will interlock and make an iron roof overhead.’ Shells, which burst close at hand, were seen, a pillar of flame by night, a black earth tower by day, but not heard as something apart from the tumult of sound. One very general hallucination of the moment was that all these guns were German. I had to point out again and again that we were giving them two shells for one, to remind them of the great array of guns we had seen as we passed through the shelter of Sausage Valley, to point out the spires that darted up by hundreds and disappeared again in the grey haze shrouding the Hun positions.
‘Send up the S.O.S. flare!’ was a false command more than once given. One man could see waves of German stormers advancing to the assault, where not a human being was visible. He had no desire to run, even when forward over the parapet to fire on them. The S.O.S. flares, only to be used in a last emergency with the enemy visible in such strength that we had no mortal hope of holding them, were fortunately in my possession. The flare would have brought down a barrage of bursting iron between us and the enemy, but there must be no call for it without the most urgent reason: to seek it without sufficient cause would have been to disgrace the battalion.
As suddenly as if by mutual consent of both sides the great bombardment, with its torrent of iron, its tumult of noise, died away, and for a while the silence was even more nerve-racking than the sound. Everyone had the sense of something great and mysterious impending; some new deviltry just about to burst.
Reinforcements, which reach the front line for their baptism of fire just when a great battle is in progress, are facing perhaps the greatest trial to which a human being may be subjected. It seems to be the rule of the ranks to offer them cold comfort and a speedy release from all earthly concerns. I remember as vividly as anything our own experiences as novices at Gallipoli. Our first real battle thrill came as sudden as a revelation at Heliopolis in Egypt when the band of the grand old 5th Brigade struck up its marching air on the first step to Anzac. It seemed as if some hidden electric mechanism of the body were all at once athrill and aflame. Again it came as we in our turn got the word for war, took a thoughtful turn when approaching Lemnos officers were served out ball cartridges for revolvers. The wounded, whom we met by the way, were so candid in divining fate. ‘Good luck! It won’t last long, boys. You’ll be dead or knocked out in a few days.’
Next the tense suppression as, clustered upon the barges, we stole in by light for Anzac Cove, with the sniper bullets cutting the water about us, zipping, and tearing upon the barge. When they came very close, everyone had the conviction that this particular bullet just missed him. With almost equal suddenness we realised the battle smell, that hanging vapour which in still weather is a pall about a war front, the haze with acrid odours of explosives mingles with the staleness of man-packed trenches. The guide who waited for us on the beach gave us the new chum’s welcome. ‘This gully is swarming with snipers on both sides,’ said the malignant wretch. ‘Make haste and make no noise.’ He was flying light in the brief shorts of Gallipoli, and led a weary column, in heavy accoutrements and packs, a nice dance through the night to keep up with the Will o’ the Wisp. Perspiration streamed from us, the moment we halted every man dropped from exhaustion, yet that gully was perhaps the safest path on Gallipoli. Then again came sense of imminent touch with it when Colonel Knox began his first conference with the cheering assurance. ‘Gentlemen, we’re in the consommé; but you’ve just got to stick it and play the game.’ Personally I smiled, because of the beginner’s supreme confidence that he at least is immune. So when the bomb marked for me came in due course the first quick thought was, ‘It isn’t impossible after all.’ The first fitting of gas masks as we approached a later war zone brought another sudden flash of realism.
The over-strained, over-wrought man in battle generally has a feeling that every hate and offense is directed against him, personally and particularly. In one way it is a good thing, because it gives him a personal grievance, generates a fierce resentment, but it has its dangers. On one such occasion, with a great assault momentarily threatened, I heard the repeated order to ‘Pass machine guns to the right’ and hurrying down to ascertain the reason for it, found half-a-dozen quick-firers massed at a particular point and other parts of the trench stripped bare. Someone, ‘with the wind up’, had seen hordes of imaginary Huns threatening his own particular corner and, being wholly unstrung, had passed the word on his own impulse. As a matter of fact that great enemy assault never materialised. In observation we had at the moment absolute command of the situation. Overhead our planes had established their mastery. Now and again the enemy tried to send aloft an observation balloon, but the moment it rose our flyers dashed for it, like eagles for their game, and it was pulled hurriedly down or burst into flames. In a depression behind their line the Germans had massed for the great assault, but a shower of bombs from our trench mortars fell upon them, smashed up their formation, and suddenly relaxed their fighting face.
How different is the attitude to an ever present danger, the dash upon an enemy position bristling with the dominant machine gun. Almost everyone has that comforting conviction that his, at any rate, is a return ticket. The persiflage may spin out a little thin at times, but with the warp of solemnity is ever interwoven the woof of wit. ‘If you don’t happen to want them anymore, can I have your new boots?’ Then a note of mock complaint in: ‘Ain’t you got nothing to bequeath to me, Bill?’ Men are actually betting on casualties.
‘Are you there, Scotty?’
‘Yes, what do you want?’
‘Only askin’ you not to take too much care of yourself. You’re the skinter in my book.’
The worst trial of battle is not always in the battle. At the second battle of Pozières, I had control of a carrying party to serve the line with ammunition and supplies, and ever between us and our objective was the enemy barrage, that hell-broth of bursting rending metal, half-veiled in earth and smoke. Men heavily laden ran that gauntlet as often as six times a day, men who worked to the last minim of their energy, until they fell exhausted and slept actually in the curtain of death. So, in a few days of heroic effort, our numbers were considerably lessened.
There is little time for mourning in or after battle; the time for long, sad thoughts come much later when memory counts over her hallowed recollections. What a gallery of lost heroes in the cost and casualties of such a fight at Pozières: men who went out before their time; the picked prey of fate and circumstance. Amongst the unforgettable ones, with whom to have campaigned for even a little time was a life’s privilege, were Major Eric Brind, who led the attack of the 23rd Battalion, Major Murdoch McKay and Captain Herbert Curnow of the 22nd Battalion, grand spirits with much of that fine chivalry, that exalted courage in their nature, which we are too apt to associate only with great worthies of their past. Major Brind with seen lying wounded in the battle zone, and in an obliterating burst of shell passed out of being and one of sight forever. Bracketed with them in fondest recollection are others like Captain Arthur Kennedy, who fell wounded near the German lines, was taken prisoner and died afterwards in Germany. In his case the Hun seemed to have acted decently, for they sent all particulars of his end to his wife, with a photograph of his grave.15
The distinction as between courage and unconsciousness of fear is a hackneyed topic. The man of high courage in its moral meaning is generally the man of vivid imagination and a full realisation of fear. The one suffers acutely and only his pride, his moral courage, carries him successfully through the strain. The other, much more rare, is the man who is unconscious of physical fear, and he is usually a man of dulled imagination. One takes risks for a definite end, drives himself to do the big thing, because it will be a gain to his side; the other takes risks which have no military value after all.
Another of the queer contradictions of battle strain is that men who had survived all the earlier terrors of assault and bombardment, reached the state of hanging on doggedly day after day, go to pieces as soon as relief is promised them. It may be because of the ever changing exigencies of battle, or for some purpose which personally I am unable to appreciate, but relief seldom came when it was first promised, postponement became known in trench language as ‘the relieving stunt.’ With the prospect of early relief men become intensely careful; their disappointment over delay finds angry and impatient expression. When relief comes, however tired men may be, there is an immediate rush for safety, with sometimes bitterly ironical happenings before the succour and rest of the far back billets are reached. The whole ‘ordeal of battle’ is a text of strange sermons that have rarely been preached, a phrase of profound and mysterious meaning.