chapter two

Foreboding

‘Words cannot describe the utterly smashed condition of the ground here. Unexploded shells, debris, equipment were everywhere among the shell craters and in the mouths of the dugouts were corpses.’

— Private Eric Moorhead’s diary

By midday on 19 July — the day after Gough had ordered Hooky to attack Pozières — Birdie and White had finally established their I Anzac Corps headquarters in a magnificent old château in the village of Contay. The opulent white-stone, two-storey building was surrounded by a high ornate fence and was guarded by two Anzacs. The Australian flags that hung from the front gate and the château’s highest window fluttered in the summer breeze, reminding everyone that the Anzacs had arrived on the Somme. A shanty of tents had quickly sprung up on the château’s immaculately maintained lawns, serving as temporary offices for staff who couldn’t be squeezed into its main rooms.1

From this day forward, White would have his office light burning into the small hours of the morning. Bent over his wooden desk while smoking a pipe, he would study battle plans, thumb through piles of memoranda, respond to correspondence, read intelligence reports, and draft orders.2 As soon as these orders were typed, numbered copies would be handed to waiting despatch riders, who would slip them into their leather satchels and motor away to hand-deliver them to one of over 20 formations participating in the coming attack. These orders sent soldiers such as Foxcroft into battle. They also focused on ensuring that all preparations for the coming attack were thorough: that assembly trenches and their approaches were carefully dug, bombardments and barrages were adequate, and the German wire entanglements were cut. Although White had previously orchestrated the evacuation from Gallipoli, the reorganisation of the Australian Imperial Force in Egypt, and the transfer of the corps south, it was the drafting of these orders for the coming battle that appeared to weigh most heavily on his mind. ‘I often wonder how long one can go on under the strain,’ he wrote in a letter to his wife, Ethel, in early 1916.3

His letters to Ethel throughout the war were disarmingly honest. He wrote about a range of subjects: his feelings of depression and loneliness, the stressful nature of his duties, his immense homesickness (‘I am longing so to be back with you and the little fellows’), and his hope that the war would end someday. ‘In the meantime it is cutting out some of the most precious years of our joint life and these I grudge,’ he wrote.

On other occasions, when watching the columns of fresh troops marching toward the front line, he would contemplate their small chances of coming out unharmed, compared with men in past wars. In one letter he lamented: ‘There will be such a lot of people at the end of this war who are not normal on account of the life here — and this is even more hateful a prospect than being blotted out.’

Birdie, unlike White, appeared to express no such misgivings. Despite the impending battle, he continued his daily routine. A dapper little man with a wispy moustache, Birdie always rose before 6.00 a.m. so that he had plenty of time to inspect his men. He took his responsibilities seriously: a few sandwiches for a breakfast on the run and no time for lunch — that way he could inspect even more troops, present more medals, and shake more hands. Not even the occasional shell could stop him. He promised his men that they would soon have a chance of open fighting, which he thought they would prefer to trench warfare.4

When Birdie had finished inspecting troops, he would arrange for his charger to meet him ten miles from headquarters so that he could gallop home across the fields and through the woods. Birdie meticulously recorded these daily gallops, which he rarely missed throughout the Pozières battle, in his diary.5 Back at Contay, he would pursue his love of letter writing, corresponding with governor-general Ronald Munro Ferguson; journalist Keith Murdoch; the minister for defence, Senator George Pearce; and the Australian high commissioner, Andrew Fisher. His letters, which could run from eight to 15 foolscap pages, constantly eulogised his value to the Anzacs. And therein lay one of Birdie’s key strengths: what he lacked in operational and organisational ability, he made up for with his finely honed political instincts and ability to promote himself. Iven Mackay thought he only ingratiated himself with the Australians to keep fresh the ‘Good old Birdie’ image.6

Birdie had commanded the Anzacs since November 1914. Some Australians believed that Major-General William Bridges, commander of the Australian Imperial Force, should have filled the post, but Birdie was undisputedly the right man for the job. He had all-important British connections: secretary of state for war Lord Horatio Kitchener was the godfather of his daughter; senior officers Ian Hamilton and Launcelot Kiggell were dear friends; and he knew Haig from his Clifton College and Sandhurst days. He also understood how the British army worked and, as an ‘English Christian gentleman’, formed part of its inner sanctum in a way that Bridges never could.7

Birdie’s most important leadership quality was that he was a man among men, a front-line commander of soldiers rather than an organiser who sweated over staff plans. Kitchener thought that this quality made him ideally suited to the individualistic Australians and New Zealanders. Australian brigade commander Brigadier-General John Monash agreed; in 1915, he recalled Birdie talking to privates, buglers, drivers, gunners, colonels, signallers, and generals, and felt that ‘every time he has left the men with a better knowledge of his business than he had before’.8 But Birdie wasn’t perfect. General Sir Ian Hamilton, commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, alluded to some of his limitations in a private letter to Winston Churchill: ‘[Birdie] has never commanded anything in peace except, for less than two years a brigade. For your business [Gallipoli] he will not quarrel with anyone, not at any price.’9

White had worked as Birdie’s chief-of-staff from October 1914. He had two qualities that were immensely valuable to Birdie. First, he had a prodigious appetite for administration and planning. Birdie could afford to delegate virtually everything to him and be confident that it would be well managed. Second, he didn’t compete for the limelight. Bean thought White, although ambitious, was too modest to promote himself. Despite this, his reputation quickly grew. Bean admitted to falling under White’s spell, ‘but who did not … everyone on this divisional staff knows his value.’10

While Birdie inspected, White worked. He seemed to wear the worries of the corps. In the coming weeks, the lives of thousands of men would rest on his decisions. He felt acutely that he would be responsible, even when tired and worn, for double-checking the intricacies of artillery plans that, properly executed, protected thousands of men; he would be responsible for drafting important orders in which one turn of phrase incorrectly interpreted by a field commander could have tragic consequences. With Gough hovering in the wings and goading the corps, his job would be even harder. In a letter to Ethel, he couldn’t help comparing his ‘tired’ state of mind with that of his ‘bright and happy’ general: ‘Without any fear of responsibility and with a sort of fatalism that what he does will go well, his mind never seems distressed with vague imaginings.’11

By contrast, White admitted to suffering from ‘appalling anxiety’. He confided to Ethel that in the days before the Gallipoli evacuation he had felt ‘nothing but the thump’ of his heart against his ribs. Years earlier, he had implored Ethel never to mention to anyone the frequent anxiety attacks and migraines he suffered during heavy bouts of work, fearing that his colleagues would consider him unreliable.

Why was such a capable officer plagued by bouts of anxiety? His biographer, Rosemary Derham, wrote that, when White was 15, drought and his father’s failed businesses left his once-prosperous family penniless. White, who at the time was attending the prestigious Eton Preparatory School in Brisbane, had dreamt of becoming a barrister, but was forced to leave school to take up a job as a clerk with the Australian Joint Stock Bank on a salary of one pound per week. The drudgery of the bank clerk’s work was as ‘bitter as gall to him’, wrote Bean in Two Men I Knew, ‘and the monotony and lack of intellectual interest, or of any promise of it in the future, lay heavily on his spirit’. The family’s changed circumstances deeply affected White. ‘Each day met me filled with fear and foreboding,’ he wrote to Ethel, recounting his youth, ‘each day instead of getting up to bless, one gets up with all sorts of anxieties.’

White’s life changed when he joined a friend, a volunteer soldier, on an outpost exercise one weekend. It whet his appetite for soldiering, and by 1897 he was commissioned as a junior officer in the militia regiment. Soon after, he was appointed to the Queensland Permanent Artillery.

After the Boer War, White was invited to study at the prestigious British Staff College at Camberley. He would not have fitted in immediately: he was of Irish descent, penniless, and uneducated, and there was no tradition of soldiering in his family. White felt compelled to spend much of his meagre allowance on keeping a horse and a part-time groom so he could participate in the college’s ritual fox hunts. He did so at the expense of much-needed home help for Ethel and the children.12 Slowly, White ingratiated himself to the college’s junior officers. They admired his strong work ethic and spirited, if unrefined, riding skills. Their acceptance must have been very important to him.

Although White bore more of the administrative load than Birdie, his hard work was well recognised. By 1916, he was considered the rising star of I Anzac Corps. He appeared to have shaken off the lingering insecurities that had plagued his early career, and his lack of education and humble beginnings no longer seemed to trouble him. He felt confident in the company of army commanders such as Gough and enjoyed their respect. Small things such as Gough asking after Ethel’s health meant a lot to him; it showed he was part of the fold. White was partly anxious for British approval because he firmly believed in the British Empire; he thought the maintenance of British ideals to be for the benefit of mankind.13 His imperialist views set him apart from other Australian officers, such as 2nd Division commander Major-General Gordon Legge, who were decidedly Australian nationalist in outlook. Despite White’s growing stature, he was uncomfortably conscious that the vast and crucial operations on the Western Front were new territory to him. His guiding principle of ‘never do anything by halves’ would be challenged by Gough, who seemingly favoured timeliness over exhaustive planning.

Arthur Foxcroft’s C Company, 4th Battalion, was part of Hooky Walker’s 1st Division, which would storm Pozières around midnight on 23 July. After making battle preparations in the staging town of Warloy on 19 July, Foxcroft’s platoon packed up and marched off for the firing line at 5.30 p.m. They arrived at Albert, which sat on the cusp of the front line, just on dusk. Many of its buildings were ruined; shards of glass littered the cobbled streets, and most windows were shuttered. Most of its 7000 pre-war inhabitants had fled. Those remaining hawked souvenirs or eggs to the passing troops at wildly inflated prices.

The platoons marched by the magnificent basilica Notre Dame de Brebières, which completely dominated the skyline. The sheer bulk of its brick foundations suggested it had been built to last a thousand years. But now, hundreds of shells pitted its arched neo-Byzantine-inspired ceiling and brick walls. Only a few shards of stained glass remained fixed in the windows. Its giant bell tower remained intact but, bizarrely, the golden statue of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus perched above it leant at a precarious angle. Some passing troops thought the leaning statue resembled Australian swimmer Fanny Durack diving into the Coogee Baths; others irreverently christened it ‘Annette Kellerman’, after the first woman to attempt to swim the English Channel. For Paul Maze, the statue conjured up a more haunting image: that of the Virgin Mary casting baby Jesus from her outstretched arms into the battle’s fires.14

The marching columns snaked their way from the cobbled streets onto the open, grassy fields, east of Albert, where battalions often bivouacked before marching the last leg to the front line. The sun receded behind the hills. The heavy bombardment of Pozières threw out flickering light that sporadically illuminated the darkness.

Foxcroft’s platoon halted about three miles past Albert and slept the night in old, broken trenches. Corporal Apcar de Vine, who ‘dossed’ down close by, complained that he got absolutely no sleep that night because of the deafening noise of shells and cannons.15

From his broken trench, Foxcroft could probably whiff the fetid air of Pozières. The next day, he would be sent to the front line and be close enough to see its ruins; the day after that, he and the other Anzacs would storm it and, he hoped, etch the division’s name into the history books.

By the time Foxcroft awoke from what must have been a fitful sleep at around dawn on Thursday 20 July, Hooky’s 1st Division had completed its relief of the British 2nd and 68th brigades, which had been holding the sector opposite Pozières. The next few days, courtesy of Gough’s decision to delay operations, provided Hooky’s division with much-needed time to prepare more thoroughly for the attack.16 His troops, such as Foxcroft, would have the chance to familiarise themselves with the battlefield; his staff officers, such as Thomas Blamey, would have the necessary time to develop and disseminate their battle plans; and his brigade commanders, such as Ewen Sinclair-MacLagan, would have a window of opportunity to improve their tactical position prior to the commencement of the main attack.

Hooky’s 12 infantry battalions were staggered between the new front-line trenches, which were approximately 300 to 400 yards from Pozières, and Albert. At dawn, those reserve battalions near Albert began their final, slow ascent toward Pozières, marching in formations of half-platoons spaced 50 yards apart. Foxcroft’s platoon passed by masses of British guns covered with camouflage netting, lined up wheel to wheel into the distance. These field batteries had bombarded the Germans for eight consecutive days prior to the 1 July attack, and were now pounding Pozières. ‘All sorts and sizes of British artillery around us. Over 1500 guns just here, covering a 400 yard front,’ noted Foxcroft.17As platoons passed by, the belching guns sent waves of warm, compressed air over them.

The platoons passed through the British old reserve and support lines and what had been no-man’s-land three weeks earlier. Upon reaching La Boisselle, a small village that straddled the Bapaume road, the tired troops threw down their haversacks and rested. The fortified village — now just a patch of rubble and pulverised brick strewn with corpses — had formed part of the Germans’ original front line.

Perhaps the Australians, after seeing La Boisselle’s mangled corpses, realised the terrible destruction that a battle could deliver. French liaison officer Paul Maze, who was working with the Australians at Gough’s request, recorded in his autobiography the macabre scene that La Boisselle presented: the hot sun had blackened and grilled the bodies of dead German and British soldiers, and human refuse was intermingled with rusty barbed wire. In the village’s cemetery, headstones had been uprooted, coffins shattered, and cypress trees splintered. A headless statue of Christ completed the scene.18 Foxcroft’s notes reflected this state of destruction: ‘Place in an awful state, gear, rifle, pieces of dead, rubbish all over the place,’ he wrote.19

Iven Mackay was similarly affected, recording in his diary that there was barely a square foot of soil that had not been torn about by high explosives.20 The destruction the soldiers witnessed at La Boisselle would become only too familiar in the coming weeks.

Later, rested and fed, some of the platoons marched from La Boisselle to the Chalk Pit. Just under a mile from Pozières, the Chalk Pit was a gateway between purgatory and hell; beyond it was the beginning of the front line. Its deep, chalky banks afforded some protection from shelling, but past them one’s life was perpetually in danger. Many men later recorded their relief upon returning to the Chalk Pit, or their anxiety upon leaving it again for the front line. It acted as a dump for ammunition, a medical-aid post, and the most forward point for the field kitchens.

On the night of 20 July, carrying parties ferried ammunition and supplies up to the front line. The constant shelling lit up the sky, making it possible to read newspapers and write letters. John Harris tried to settle his men, who sheltered in narrow ‘possies’ — little more than cavities gouged out of the trench walls. ‘The frequent explosions and the impossibility of lying down properly, made sleep at night almost out of the question,’ he recorded in his war memoirs.21 For many soldiers, it would be the second night without sleep, but certainly not the last.

Since 13 July, Hooky’s chief-of-staff, Thomas Blamey, had been circulating general staff memoranda and divisional orders, as well as conducting divisional conferences concerning the looming battle.22 (These memoranda and orders, which are archived at the Australian War Memorial, demonstrate that he was a careful and methodical planner who left little to chance.) Gough’s delay provided Blamey the critical time he needed to distribute these documents and organise the necessary conferences to discuss them prior to the attack.

On Friday 21 July, divisional, brigade, and battalion officers conferred to discuss the fine detail of Blamey’s battle plan. Second-Lieutenant Walter Claridge, a wool classer, attended one of these conferences. He furiously scribbled down page after page of instructions about lighting red flares as each objective was captured; the importance of those reinforcing rolling up their sleeves for easy identification; the need for all men to carry an extra 100 rounds of small-arms ammunition, two bombs, and two sandbags; and the necessity for at least four men to be posted at the entrance to every communication trench leading toward the enemy.23 Iven Mackay attended a divisional conference the same day and wrote 12 pages of notes, covering every possible contingency. ‘Battalion commanders were issued with so many maps that their bulging pockets had no room for anything else,’ recorded John Harris.24

By midnight on 23 July, the commanding officers would have the first wave of troops in the jumping-off trenches, dug roughly 150 yards from the Germans; the second wave in the front trench; and the remaining waves staggered evenly further back.

Gough’s postponement also provided Sinclair-MacLagan with the opportunity to capture the important German-held junction on the crest of the ridge, where Pozières Trench intersected with the OG lines. The British, who held the southern portion of the OG lines, had previously reached within 50 yards of the stronghold, but heavy machine-gun fire had pushed them back. Sinclair-MacLagan’s 9th Battalion would attack the junction in the early hours of Saturday 22 July. The plan was for trench mortars to bombard the strongpoint thoroughly until 2.30 a.m. on Saturday morning, followed by a light barrage of 18-pounder shells to prevent the Germans from manning their machine guns. Two groups of about 50 men, under lieutenants Charles Monteath and Frederick Biggs, would then attack it.25

Sergeant Philip Browne, a blond, beanstalk-thin geology student from Queensland, was among those who would participate in the night attack. Days earlier, the 20-year-old had written a letter home, predicting that his ‘lot’ would soon see some of the fighting. He finished by writing: ‘Please god we will come through safe.’26

By Friday evening, Monteath and Biggs’ troops had positioned themselves in forward posts in OG1 and OG2. Darkness gradually replaced sunshine, and then zero hour approached. Platoons readied themselves. In the minutes before they were to advance, Monteath and Biggs listened for the mortar shells, but they heard nothing. Unbeknown to them, the mortars had expended their pitiful 14 rounds by 2.10 a.m. — for the last 20 minutes before the 9th was to advance, there was no bombardment.

Just after 2.30 a.m., the troops advanced toward the stronghold. The dim light thrown out by the rising moon only helped the Germans to see them. They hurled egg bombs — about the size of cricket balls and much lighter than their British equivalent, Mills bombs — at the Australian attackers. Machine guns joined in; the rattled troops bunched together and fell in heaps.

Browne, in support, watched the debacle unfold. He handed over his platoon to his corporal and rushed forward, from shell hole to shell hole, delivering a load of bombs to the stranded men. He also volunteered to carry some of the wounded back. Then, as he climbed from a low trench, he crumpled in a heap. No one knew exactly what had happened, whether small-arms fire, a whiz-bang, or shell fragments had hit him. They did agree — as each witness recorded in their statement to the Red Cross, who investigated soldiers reported as missing and wounded — that he died instantly.

The raid was aborted. The critical strongpoint remained in German hands, meaning that deadly crossfire from the German positions on the crest of the ridge, where the OG lines intersected with Pozières Trench, could compromise the attack planned for the following night.

The next morning, some soldiers crawled out into no-man’s-land and dragged Browne’s stiffened body into a shallow shell hole. According to their Red Cross statements, they covered it with a few shovelfuls of dirt and placed a rough wooden cross at the head of the makeshift grave. In the confusion of the weeks that followed, its location would be forgotten. Browne’s body was never recovered; he was one of the first Australians among the Somme’s many missing.27

Some time later, 21-year-old Sergeant Freddie Barbour would sit down in a quiet place and write a letter to Browne’s parents, James and Jessie. The boys had studied together at Toowoomba Grammar School, the school of choice for the well-to-do graziers and farmers of the Darling Downs district. Both were outstanding students, winning university scholarships, but the Great War had lured them away. By the time they were at Pozières, these smart, energetic young men had been promoted to sergeants.

Barbour would try to explain the circumstances of his mate’s death as best he could and to offer some condolence. ‘Deeply as we all regretted his death,’ he would write, ‘there is not one of us but envies him so glorious a death in his country’s service, and I cannot say how proud I am to have been his friend. May we all do our duty as well and honourably.’28 The idealistic tone of Barbour’s letter varies remarkably little from the thousands of other letters sent by soldiers and officers to grieved parents.

Six months later, Barbour would die from wounds. Army protocol at the time dictated that his commanding officer send a letter of condolence to his parents. While there is no record of it, undoubtedly it would have been written in a similar style.

The only lingering reminder of Freddie and Philip is the inscription of their names on the bronzed honour boards at Toowoomba Grammar School. What the boards will never tell us is the snuffed-out potential of these young men. They don’t reveal the long and painful odyssey that Browne’s parents undertook to locate their son’s remains, writing heartfelt letters to the Base Records Office well into the 1920s, or the sense of complicity that they must have felt for having signed his consent forms.29 What James and Jessie would have found difficult to comprehend, along with thousands of other parents who would lose children in the coming months, was how their beloved could simply vanish from the Somme.