chapter twelve

La Ferme du Mouquet

‘The earth grew nothing, although watered with a rain more precious than any other it had known.’

— Captain E. Gorman, With the Twenty-second

On the misty morning of 5 August, I Anzac Corps staff turned their attention to Gough’s order requiring them, at the earliest moment, to advance northward to Mouquet Farm and Thiepval. Cox’s 4th Division would be responsible for pushing past the farm and on to Thiepval. John Masefield wrote that the Australians’ push through the markless mud toward Thiepval marked the third sombre stage of their Somme battle.1

Mouquet Farm — known as ‘Moo Cow Farm’, ‘Mucky Farm’, or ‘Muckety Farm’ to those who struggled with the subtleties of the French language — was about 2000 yards from Pozières. In better times, if you had stood in the main street of Pozières and walked away from the village in a north-westerly direction, you would have passed some cottages, an orchard, a light-rail track, and a cemetery, and then dipped into a shallow valley. You would have crossed the Ovillers–Courcelette road that Gellibrand’s 23rd fought so hard to secure, on to an 800-yard dirt track that would take you through a second valley and up a gentle rise to the doorstep of Mouquet Farm. Gough believed that the farm had to be captured before Thiepval — 1500 yards away — could be threatened. Once the farm was captured, he would thrust his five divisions to the rear of Thiepval, and silence it once and for all.

After the momentous events at Pozières, capturing a ruined farm should have been a mere formality, but this was not the case. As the Australians advanced toward the farm, the Pozières ridge on the right and a dominating spur on the left hemmed them in. The German-held ridges either side gradually closed in on Mouquet Farm, funnelling the Australians into a narrow front. The restricted area meant the Australians could only attack with one or two battalions, while the Germans could respond with a concentrated bombardment from three directions.2

I Anzac Corps Intelligence didn’t know much about la ferme du Mouquet, other than that it had once been a large brick farmstead owned by a wealthy farmer, with a dairy and stables attached. As a result of the previous six weeks of fighting, only smashed brickwork, twisted wrought-iron gates, caved-in cellars, and broken roof beams remained. When the Germans swept through the Somme Valley in 1914, Monsieur Vandendriessche, the farm’s tenant, had probably shared the concerns of other French residents, but must have felt sure that his isolated farm would escape their interest. Yet the Germans started poking around the farm in early 1916 and immediately earmarked the farm as an important stronghold. For Major Hans von Fabeck, who was responsible for converting the neighbouring Thiepval into an impregnable fortress in April 1916, Mouquet Farm’s deep cellars and elevated location meant that it was ideally suited, along with the nearby Goat and Stuff redoubts, to protect the village. He carefully engineered the Thiepval sector into an integrated defensive zone.3

The Australians, according to the Official History, had first to capture three lines of trenches before taking Mouquet Farm. The first, Park Lane, sat on the rise north of Pozières. The second, Skyline Trench, ran from a high spur, past a chalk quarry and into a shallow gully. The third and most important, Fabeck Graben, snaked along the second rise. The Australians assumed Park Lane and Skyline Trench, which appeared rough and disconnected from other trenches, to be only weakly held by German troops. The Australians expected a prompt advance and then greater resistance from Mouquet Farm, which lay beyond the second rise and would only be seen in the last 100 yards of their advance.4 The Germans were determined to hold the farm no matter the cost, understanding that if it fell, so too would Thiepval.

Shell craters carpeted the path to Mouquet Farm. Some soldiers thought its approaches resembled a rough sea as seen from the beach.5 The odd shattered tree stump and a lone upturned wagon broke up the brown expanse. It would have been impossible for those soldiers stumbling over the cratered ground to make out their objectives. Trenches were, in most cases, only a series of linked shell craters or shallow furrows. The loose dirt had been so churned up that a trench couldn’t be dug without its walls caving in. Maps became useless because trenches were obliterated and then reconstructed elsewhere within hours.6

I Anzac Corps encountered significant logistical problems in its efforts to capture the farm. It was becoming increasingly difficult to keep the supply lines open so that the front-line soldiers could receive ammunition, water, food rations, and medical help.7 As the Australians punched deeper into the German lines, they created a dangerous salient that allowed the Germans to observe their vulnerable supply routes from three vantage points.

As a result, rations parties stopped carrying food up from the field kitchens to the trenches in broad daylight, rather bringing breakfast, lunch, and dinner up together before daylight. Ration carriers, sometimes with hot boxes strapped to their backs, worked their way through crowded communication trenches in the early morning to ensure the soldiers received their rations. The soldiers typically blasphemed the cooks for the meagre rations, probably unaware that the carriers had spilt most of it on the way up.8 A reserve of 250 tins of water and a canteen selling tinned fruit, cakes, tobacco, and biscuits had also been set up close to the front line. Unfortunately, the tins, previously used for petrol, were often tainted with a faint residue of the fuel, prompting one soldier to comment that after taking a drink he ‘was afraid if I put a cigarette in my mouth I should blow up’. 9

The Germans typically shelled at meal times in order to interrupt the delivery of rations, and heavy casualties resulted. Captain Allan Leane’s company of 55 men was responsible for feeding the 48th Battalion troops.10 When Leane’s company came out of the line, he only had 30 men left. ‘We certainly got our share of it, maybe I put my cookers too close … The casualties were very heavy but the regiment was looked after,’ Leane explained in a letter. 11

The front line lurched forward continuously, stretching medical arrangements to breaking point. The battalion stretcher-bearers struggled to cope with the flood of casualties, the ‘lengthy and formidable’ transports, and the constant shelling. In response, the number of regimental stretcher-bearers was increased, sometimes supplemented by bandsmen, who were adept at entertaining the troops out of the line; pioneers; and field-ambulance bearers. Field-ambulance bearers also remained behind to continue helping after their division was relieved, and relays were organised to ease the stretcher-bearers’ workload.

With the front line fitfully moving forward, aid posts were soon too far back from the trenches, delaying the treatment of the wounded and exhausting the stretcher-bearers. In response, medical staff set up forward posts that shortened the carry distance. It sped up treatment, but exposed the wounded to shelling; in some cases, these aid posts were even set up in old German dugouts, with their entrances facing the German guns. Shells sometimes exploded in the dugout’s mouth, killing or trapping those inside.12 In an incident that Sergeant John Edey recorded in his diary, a doctor and his army medical sergeant were entombed in a dugout. Sensing that their chance of rescue was slim, they were considering taking an overdose of morphine when, at the last moment, they were dug out.13

From 8 August, the Australians would extend their advance northward from the Pozières summit into the shallow valley in front of the farm. This advance would result in the Australians losing visual communication with their brigade headquarters and artillery, which, in some cases, was over 2000 yards away in Mash Valley.14 Signallers such as Private Harold Hinckfuss would have to adapt quickly to this new situation. Despite the difficulties, he understood that his duty was to ‘get the message through at all costs’. According to Hinckfuss, most commanders had a magneto telephone. Shellfire constantly severed connections to these telephones, forcing signallers to spend hours listening in to conversations over a wire; that way, they knew when a connection was cut and could immediately repair it. Multiple trunk cables with numerous test points were also buried in trenches in an attempt to restore uninterrupted communication. Surface lines were laid when and where needed, then duplicated and laddered, which created a network of alternative electrical paths.15 Despite these improvements, the wires rarely survived a heavy bombardment. In response, some signallers used large French electric lamps, which could send up to 30 messages a day, although they had the unfortunate side-effect of attracting German fire at night.16 Others reverted to using carrier pigeons; signallers attached a small cylinder to the pigeon’s leg, and filled it with messages written on custom lightweight paper. Pigeons were surprisingly reliable, but could only be released in daylight hours and calm weather. If mistakenly released into a westerly wind, they were sometimes blown over into the German lines. Soldiers often came across dead pigeons that shellfire had shredded.17

Despite these measures, commanders still relied on runners to relay messages. Unfortunately, runners’ lives were sometimes risked to deliver trivial information. Iven Mackay recalled, when crouched over a map amid dozens of corpses and moaning wounded, a panting runner arriving with an envelope marked ‘urgent and secret’. The note from Gough, presumably forwarded by brigade or divisional staff, said that a number of men had recently failed to salute his car, despite the general’s flag being prominently displayed on the bonnet.18

This new phase of fighting along an exceedingly narrow salient was also characterised by German barrages that repeatedly destroyed freshly dug trenches. It would cause massive confusion: orders referred to trenches that ceased to exist or were not recorded on maps.19 New maps were needed almost daily to cope with the ever-changing situation. The most reliable and important source of information for maps came from aerial photographs taken by the 7 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps, which were attached to the Anzac Corps.20 Photographs taken in the early morning were developed and printed at the aerodrome, and then rushed by motorcycle to reach the corps, and later, the divisional headquarters, by late afternoon. The maps clearly showed new trenches, and helped officers set their objectives and accurately measure their troops’ advances.

White and Cox would have hoped that these revised arrangements would keep the vital supply routes open and soldiers adequately supplied long enough for them to execute their next attack upon the farm. Time would tell whether the arrangements would hold.

On Tuesday 8 August, Birdie and White met with Cox to devise a strategy for the capture of the farm. In plans drawn up on 6 August, White had suggested the first two trenches as successive targets, but Cox now favoured only one, as he didn’t want to end his first thrust at the bottom of the gully. The officers agreed that the attack’s objective for that evening would be Park Lane Trench.

Although agreeing on the plan, White still harboured grave concerns that the isolated attacks across the entire line were uncoordinated and, in the case of the Australians, conducted on a much narrower front.21 The value of decisive and coordinated attacks seemed to have been forgotten: Rawlinson’s Fourth Army, Gough’s Reserve Army, and General Marie Émile Fayolle’s French Sixth Army were each doing their own thing. ‘They seem content to let each little lot plan its own attacks,’ White remarked.22 White’s opinion was accurate: the Reserve and Fourth armies seemed incapable of launching coordinated attacks and despite the best-laid plans, the French and British had to postpone joint attacks on 7 and 11 August.23 On 11 August, Haig’s ally, General Joffre, vented his displeasure with the situation, stating that he wanted to move away from small-scale battles to broad-front, multi-division affairs.24

White also realised that he had to act quickly, as Gough wanted to launch his five-division attack on Thiepval by the end of the month. Railway timetables — of all things — dictated this timeline. The Official History noted that the generals speculated as to the exact date that a division would be worn out, and railway timetables were developed accordingly. The dates for transporting the Australian divisions from the Somme had already been decided. The Australian commanders had to speculate which vital points would be captured prior to their division’s relief. Based on their forecasts, high command had expected the Australians to capture Mouquet Farm by mid-month.25 Unfortunately, the chaos thrown up by battle rarely conforms to railway timetables.

White and Cox decided to capture Park Lane Trench using Digger Brand’s 15th Battalion, supported by the 7th British Suffolk Battalion. They hoped that Park Lane would be lightly held. ‘We go over the parapet and then our fate is sealed,’ an officer wrote to his wife, upon learning that his battalion would lead the attack. ‘I’ll try for your sake to do well and come through … God be with you Love for all Time.’26

Just on dusk on 8 August, the 15th Battalion left its shallow trenches, traversed 200 yards of no-man’s-land, and secured a section of Park Lane Trench. The 7th Suffolk Battalion on its left failed to capture a knot of trenches known as points 78 and 96.27 Casualties were relatively light, thanks to inexperienced German soldiers initially mistaking the attackers for their own troops. Some Australians, unable to make out the shallow trench, settled 50 yards beyond it.

Charles Bean, who sheltered in Brand’s 4th Brigade headquarters — a dugout in Sausage Valley — during the attack, was less enthusiastic about its supposed success. ‘And so ends another expensive petty operation,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘With all the will in the world one cannot see a spark of the genius or imagination which one would like to see in the British plans. Have they a plan? At present it looks as [they] leave each division to think out its petty “stunt” and act on its own as it likes.’28 At a tactical level, Bean’s criticism of seemingly valueless advances was understandable. However, at a strategic level, Haig’s plan was comprehensible: to secure favourable positions, such as Mouquet Farm and Thiepval, prior to the September general assault. Historian Peter Simkins recognised the differing perspectives of soldiers and generals on this matter, noting that ‘the broader tactical benefits were not always instantly apparent to the officers and men who saw the strength of their battalions eroded by minor yet costly “line straightening” operations’.29

Cox ordered further minor raids over the next few days to capture additional sections and offshoots of the trench warren. The battalions, supported by accurate bombardments, gradually edged their way forward, inch by inch, through a combination of bombing raids and barricading. ‘Everywhere successful; joined up with 15th Battalion on right; Suffocks on left,’ wrote Lieutenant-Colonel Edmund Drake-Brockman, commanding officer of the 16th Battalion, in a message to divisional headquarters at 3.45 a.m. on 10 August.30

Birdie, Cox, and Gough ‘heartily’ congratulated Brand on his success. ‘I was sure you would succeed fully,’ wrote Birdie. It seemed a solid blow had been delivered upon the wedge that would drive the Allies toward Thiepval. Gough’s ambitious timetable of capturing the farm mid-month and Thiepval toward the end of the month might just be met, although no one was under any illusions: the next two trenches would be the most difficult and costly to capture.

As Bean and White feared, isolated attacks along a narrow front had become the Reserve Army’s modus operandi. Resentment grew toward its supposed architect, the prickly and impatient Gough, who White considered dangerously impulsive.31 White, like many Australians, couldn’t understand why Anzacs were still being sacrificed to capture a seemingly insignificant farm.32 No doubt White and Bean wondered whether it would be better and quicker for the British to launch one massive, full-blooded frontal attack upon Thiepval. As the Official History pointed out, attacking Thiepval’s back door only resulted in difficult and expensive fighting.33 Why had Gough chosen this course of action?

After capturing the OG lines, Gough’s intent had been clear. From 5 August, he had ordered repeated attacks, with moderate numbers, toward Thiepval (although the first moderate thrust northward did not occur until 8 August, due to the exhaustion of the 2nd Division troops).34 He wanted as few breaks as possible so that the Germans would be kept off balance. ‘Once we allow him to get his breath back,’ he told Birdie, ‘we shall have to make another of these gigantic assaults by which time all the German defences will have been repaired and strengthened.’ And his approach, although contrary to White’s view, had some merit; the terrible losses of 1 July were still fresh in everyone’s minds. ‘I think our way keeps down casualties and brings the best results,’ reasoned Gough.35

Gough believed that Thiepval stood in the way of achieving a breach. The futility of assaulting this stronghold frontally was there for everyone to see: the twisted and contorted bodies of the 36th (Ulster) Division troops, who had attacked the fortress on 1 July, still littered Thiepval’s steep approaches. Gough was right: Thiepval was the most powerful German bastion on the Somme, and Mouquet Farm was the best point for sapping toward it.36 And according to Gough, it was working: ‘We are breaking in bit by bit and must not stop until we have made the gap.’37

Just as important, Gough’s ‘penny packet’ assaults complied in principle with Haig’s directive that his generals attack with as little expenditure of fresh troops and munitions as possible (although the toll on those troops who were thrust forward repeatedly into the attacks was high).38 Even if Gough wanted to chance another massive frontal attack, he didn’t have the materials required to pull it off. Therefore, Gough’s strategy was a logical response to the circumstances confronting him. Yet this provided little consolation for the Australians, who would have realised that they were simply one small cog in a gigantic enterprise and that, like those blackened corpses of the Ulster Division that lay on Thiepval’s approaches, they too would be ground to dust. And all for some seemingly insignificant coordinates on a map — it seemed that minor successes on the Somme always came at a shocking price.

Even though Gough’s strategy seemed well reasoned, albeit expensive, there were no guarantees that it was right or would be successful. Gut instinct, hunches, and time pressures had shaped it, along with the interpretation of uncertain battlefield data and questionable intelligence reports. Gough perhaps felt that his chosen path was vindicated by Charteris’s intelligence reports, which suggested that the Germans’ morale was irreparably damaged, and Haig’s opinion that the Germans had used up 30 of their divisions in one month on the Somme, compared to 35 at Verdun in five months.39 No doubt he also read captured German letters describing scenes, such as soldiers openly sobbing in their trenches, that suggested his enemy was under considerable distress.40

Gough favoured repeated attacks with moderate numbers, while White sought a coordinated effort across broader frontages — whose approach was right? Unfortunately, there was limited opportunity to mull over these options, as time remained the mortal enemy of strategy. It was a case of a plan vigorously executed today being better than a perfect one enacted tomorrow. No one was certain there would be a tomorrow; the only certainty was that the prospects for the Australians were bleak.

As it turned out, White had good reason to be worried.

While the Anzacs slogged their way over a brown-cratered wilderness toward the ruins of Mouquet Farm in early August, 10,000 miles away in Australia the public closely followed their fortunes in the newspapers. The reporting of the exploits was anything but bleak. Ever since 3 July, when the Melbourne Herald had first announced that ‘Britain’s Greatest Battle’ had begun, crowds had milled around newsstands, hankering for news. The Herald reported how the British public rejoiced upon hearing that the much-anticipated offensive had started, explaining that when the news was read aloud in theatres and music halls, audiences rose to their feet and cheered. The first sketchy reports, often received from The Times or Reuters, brimmed with confidence. One article declared that the ‘opening moves of the terrific drama were played with strategic skill confusing the enemy’.41

Over the next three weeks of July, the newspapers reported a string of smashing British victories — on every front the news was good. The Herald reported that Lloyd George expected to snatch victory in the next few months and that German experts had admitted their victory was near impossible.42 The war’s end seemed imminent, with some experts predicting it would end in November 1916 or early 1917.43 Only Australian correspondent Keith Murdoch expressed some concern, cautioning that the gains of the offensive weren’t commensurate with the losses.44

On Monday 24 July, news had come that Australia’s own Anzacs had captured the stronghold of Pozières. The Melbourne Herald reported that, even though the Germans had resisted fiercely, Australian casualties were light.45 More detailed reports filtered through over the next few days. The paper told its readers on 26 July of heavy fighting, with soldiers describing Gallipoli as child’s play compared to Pozières.46 Hobart Mercury readers learnt on the same day that in hand-to-hand fighting the Germans were no match for the Australians, ‘who simply love it’.47 Melburnians would have lapped up Bean’s despatch the following morning, under the giddy headline, ‘Men Cross Zone of Death as if Going Home for Tea’.48 The French, delighted with the capture of Pozières, applauded the Anzacs, who were described as ‘hard as nails’.49 In another article, a German prisoner of war was reported to have said that the Australians were brave men who seemed to have no fear of death.50 The Herald told its readers on 7 August that the Anzacs, ‘full of life and gaiety … were always anxious to get back to the firing line to show the Germans that if they were looking for more trouble they could have it’.51

The public drank willingly from the Anzac chalice. The praise was gratifying, particularly as it came at a time, as Joan Beaumont noted in Australia’s War, 1914–18, when Australians were searching for a sense of what it was to be a nation, rather than a collection of colonies. Many Australians believed the struggle of war was the greatest test of a nation and found the newspaper reports of the Anzacs’ exploits appealing. The correspondents, who embellished the soldiers’ successes and omitted much of the devastation blighting the Somme, were laying the foundations of the Anzac legend.52 According to historians Manning Clark and Ken Inglis, Australia was gradually acquiring its own secular religion (partly cultivated by overoptimistic reporting) that, after the war, would have all the symbolism of Christianity — a baptism of fire, selfless sacrifice, and sacred sites of worship.53

War correspondents faced many challenges in reporting the truth. The first was the Australian government’s censorship laws. Australia’s War Precautions Act was enacted in August 1914. Ernest Scott noted in Australia During the War that the far-reaching provisions of Section 4 of the act enabled the governor-general to make regulations to secure public safety and the defence of the Commonwealth, which empowered the censor to perform its function. Put simply, the act prevented any agency or person from eliciting any information that might be directly or indirectly useful to the enemy. It therefore prevented correspondents from mentioning the location of troops, the unit they belonged to, numbers of casualties, or anything else that could be seen as helpful to the Germans.54 Under the strict interpretation of these vague laws, anything written about the rolls of honour or even the weather conditions risked censure. Rather than openly challenge the act, most willingly abided by it. Bean wrote in his book Letters from France: ‘The war correspondent does not wish to give to the enemy for a penny what he would gladly give a regiment to get.’55

All correspondents’ reports passed through the censors. Although the Act intimated that legitimate criticism would not be suppressed, publication of anything prejudicing recruitment efforts or discipline of the forces was censored. Emotive phrases, gruesome photographs, or exaggeration of successes or failures would not make it through.56 The censors even dictated which British newspapers and what edition the reports were published in. On the Somme, a press officer located at Amiens carefully scrutinised Bean’s articles. Bean noted in his diary that on 31 July 1916, the officer, Colonel Hutton Wilson, warned him that his recent articles contained ‘too many exact particulars’, such as attack times. Bean, although incredulous — he said to Hutton, ‘surely the Germans know’ — complied with the request.57 Bean also relied heavily upon communiqués from General Headquarters, which, according to the Official History, were prepared more for the enemy’s consumption than for the public, meaning that events were often represented through rose-coloured glasses.58

Since the beginning of the war, the military had controlled war correspondents tightly, including Bean. In 1914, the War Office banned them from the front line. By 1916, these restrictions were relaxed. Only a handful of correspondents were accredited to cover the Somme battle. (‘We cannot conveniently control more than six correspondents,’ was John Charteris’s reason for accrediting so few journalists.)

Yet having accredited journalists on the front line didn’t guarantee realistic reporting. As Martin Farrar explained in News from the Front, the army’s accreditation system could vet correspondents and refuse access to anyone they felt might not share their view. Once accredited, the army assigned a liaison officer to parties of correspondents, who closely monitored their movements.59 Bean, as Australia’s official war correspondent, had more freedom than most to visit the front line, but at the same time he censored himself, electing not to publish anything that might upset his hosts and threaten his access to the front. And Bean had good reason to be compliant: in July 1916, the censors had stopped his early Somme despatches from reaching the British newspapers for a short period after a fellow correspondent allegedly objected to Bean’s name appearing in them. Bean thought the complaining correspondent was jealous of his growing reputation. He later wrote in his diary that petty measures such as this, which seemed directed at controlling the amount of kudos the Australians received on the Somme, resulted in the public not having ‘the least idea of the battle we are fighting’.60

As the battle ground on through August, the newspaper reports lost their euphoric tone. On 16 August, The Herald admitted that the Australians and British had suffered under ‘appalling fire’ for the previous nine days.61 The reports now wrote of consolidating and straightening the line, rather than of breakthroughs. Readers sensed that the task confronting the Allies was much greater than first imagined. ‘What one feels is that after all, our progress is insignificant, we have thrust back our foes a distance of one or two miles upon a front of 8 miles,’ wrote one reader in his diary. ‘What is this compared with the front line which is measured in hundreds of miles?’62 In late August, The Times in London predicted that the war could last until 1918. John Treloar, at I Anzac Corps headquarters, got quite a shock upon reading it: ‘The thought rather terrifies.’63

The newspapers repeatedly assured the Australian public that casualties at Pozières were light and many wounds slight, sometimes only scratches.64 But the casualty lists published in the newspapers every second or third day grew at an alarming rate. Some families accused the government of reporting casualties inaccurately, claiming they had received word through unofficial sources, such as letters and cables, before they received official notification. On 12 August, the minister for defence, Senator George Pearce, publicly disputed the claims. Although he admitted that casualties had been ‘fairly heavy’, he advised relatives ‘not to spend their money on cabling on the basis of the rumours’. Then, in an about-face, the government admitted on 29 August that there had been delays in reporting casualties, saying that the ‘great loss of officers’ had slowed the compilation of authentic information.65

Australians began to realise that the initial newspaper reports had been overly optimistic and misleading. Then, in late August, the massive casualty lists from the month before finally appeared in the papers, spilling over many pages. ‘The casualty lists in the papers made it all clear to us. Every day we saw men and women wearing bits of black, and we knew others wearing no sign at all,’ remembered one man. ‘The pattern of the war was set.’66 Between 2 August and 23 September, The Herald reported a staggering 21,000 casualties.

Yet it was often friends and comrades of those soldiers killed or wounded, and even medical staff, who provided next-of-kin with the first news of their loved ones’ fate. The parents of Private Robert ‘Roy’ Smith received a letter from Sister Cunningham, who, sometime on 30 July, in Block A of Wharncliffe War Hospital in Sheffield, had sat by Roy’s bedside and written on a Red Cross notepad, ‘I am writing to let you know that your son Pte Smith arrived at our hospital two days ago, he is quite badly wounded in both legs and one arm and chest.’ She then wrote, ‘he is much better today than when he came in’.67 These carefully crafted words suggest that Sister Cunningham wanted to offer some hope to Smith’s parents, without creating false optimism.

Smith was one of Gellibrand’s hapless 22nd Battalion soldiers who had sheltered in broken trenches between the orchard and the cemetery at Pozières for ‘hour after hour’ on 27 July under the German bombardment.68 He was fortunate in one respect only: according to his diary, the shell that wounded him had killed the men either side of him. He was evacuated in a critical condition. He remembered lying on a hard stretcher and his badly smashed leg getting shaken about.

After a series of operations and some rest, Smith felt well enough to write a letter home to his mother, Mrs Annie Bennison of Prahran, Victoria: ‘I have some bad news for you. I have been under four operations with my leg and at the last they had to cut it off above the knee. It was either lose my leg or go under myself.’69

Unlike Annie Bennison, Hester Allen, the mother of Robert and Stephen, did not receive any unofficial notification of her sons’ fate when they disappeared on 14 August. Robert and Stephen Allen had decided to enlist together in July 1915. There wasn’t much to keep them at home in the beachside suburb of Manly: neither had married, and they probably wouldn’t miss their labouring jobs. It may have worried them to leave their widowed mother, who had struggled to care for them since they were boys, but their younger sisters, Florrie and Minnie, could be depended on to help out. Allocated to the 13th Battalion, the brothers sailed together on HMAT Ballarat in September 1915, arriving in France via Egypt.

Robert and Stephen had not answered the 13th Battalion’s rollcall after the 14 August attack. It took another month before Hester received this tragic news through the official source, the Base Records Office. Hester and her daughters patiently waited for further information, but none came. Three months after their disappearance, Florrie sent a letter to Base Records, asking if they had any more news. A printed letter replied that ‘no further report had come to hand’.70 Florrie, no doubt desperate for more details, sent a letter to the brothers’ company commander, Captain Theodore Wells. He didn’t reply.

Hester Allen’s search for news about her two missing sons mirrored that of thousands of Australian families in late 1916. Letters and cables from their loved ones’ friends and comrades, no matter how painful they were to read, provided more texture to the circumstances of their disappearance than bland official sources.

Charles Bean believed strongly in the Allies’ cause. Yet he was not merely an objective outsider looking in; he was part of the army machinery. Bean held the honorary rank of captain, wore an army uniform, and was recommended for gallantry awards. He prided himself on working obediently within the constraints of the army system, boasting that he’d never yet ‘written one word that has given the staffs a seconds anxiety, although I have seen and known more of the war — and lived far more in the thick of it — than any other writer for the paper’.71 John Charteris observed that the press censorship on the Somme worked very smoothly owing to the ‘loyalty of the correspondents’.72 The complicity between correspondents and the army became apparent after the war, when five British correspondents were knighted in recognition of their war efforts.73

Bean, along with most journalists, lacked the language to adequately convey the true horrors of the war. In News from the Front, Martin Farrar noted that ‘high’ diction terms such as ‘to perish’, ‘the fallen’, and ‘the red wine of youth’ appeared throughout despatches, making them read more like romance novels than news.74 Jaunty headlines in Australian newspapers in July 1916 — ‘Thrilling Episodes Described’, ‘Dazzling Courage of the Australians’, and ‘Coo-ee Frightens the Germans’ — misrepresented to readers the nature of the fierce fighting at Pozières.75 Even the Anzacs resented these simplistic reports. ‘You can’t imagine how fed up we all are with some of the English newspapers,’ wrote one. ‘Padded up with such rot as “the giant athletes leaping their trenches” makes one sick.’76 Despite the soldiers’ disgust, many, including Albert Coates, were reluctant to describe the horrors of the Somme in letters home ‘for fear of The Censors’.77 Bean would later reflect in the Official History that readers yearned so much for success, were so expectant of victory, that they sometimes wrongly interpreted intermittent advances on the Somme for much more than their worth.78 Perhaps their unquenchable thirst for victory clouded their interpretation of Bean’s despatches.

Politicians naturally feared that unrestricted and graphic reporting of battles like that on the Somme could erode the public’s resolve to wage war. ‘If the people really knew,’ reflected Lloyd George in 1917, ‘the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t and can’t know. The correspondents don’t write and the censorship would not pass the truth.’79

In 1916, the Australian public and its soldiers were fiercely committed to the war. Often this commitment was expressed in opinions tinged with almost religious zeal. For example, the Melbourne Herald preached to its readers in early August that they fought the Germans ‘so that the whole course of life may move upward, instead of downward’.80 Private William Clayton’s papers contained these fortifying words: ‘Man has had to wade through a sea of blood to reach a higher plane in its slow ascent towards the goal of noblest aspirations.’81

Captain Stanley Cocking expressed his commitment to the war with similar fervour: ‘I am here to kill a vile principle that, in the nature of things, necessitates the taking of human life.’82 The reporting of the unadulterated truth risked draining away this incredible reservoir of support; politicians like Lloyd George no doubt wouldn’t risk it. In addition, it would give the Germans an unfair advantage. Their propaganda machine would soon claim that the British high command had fed three inexperienced and untrained Australians divisions into Pozières, while the British divisions sat idle.83 Perhaps fire had to be fought with fire.

The problem was that the gap between ‘what was fought and what was talked’ was so glaringly wide due to inaccurate reporting and censorship that it prevented Australians from fully understanding the war or having an informed debate about its merits.84 Censorship, according to Eric Andrews in The Anzac Illusion, lessened the political awareness of Australians.85 In 1917, Mr Justice Ferguson openly expressed his concerns about inadequate reporting: ‘We do not know what brigade, what division or what battalion was at Pozières,’ he told guests of the Institute of Journalists of New South Wales. ‘The indifference to the war among so many people in Australia is largely due to the ignorance of what takes place.’86

In early August 1916, in the midst of the Somme battle, there was still the opportunity for Bean to rethink the tenor of his despatches. In the coming days, the battle would touch him in the most personal way. Would this trigger him to tell the truth about Pozières without fear or favour?