CONCLUSION

‘Something unique in the fighting line’

On 21 March 1918 the war took a radical shift when the Germans launched their great offensive. In March and April the Australian infantry entered the fighting line knowing the seriousness of the strategic situation; they expected the Germans to attempt further offensives, and faced the prospect with the collective thought that ‘If we can hang on … the tide may turn’.¹ In the ‘crucial summer’² that followed, the AIF adapted to the vastly different battlefield conditions it encountered. Its soldiers developed innovative small-unit tactical skills that set the Australians apart from the other divisions in the Second and Fourth Armies. A core of experienced junior officers and men still survived, and as battalion numbers fell with no hope of being brought to strength, a few daring men stood out as independent thinkers. They exploited the local geography and the low morale of the enemy to become highly proficient at killing, capturing and advancing their posts while losing few men themselves. By the end of July, commanding officers and the British units that served near these daring men had learned the character of the Australian soldier.

The higher commanders chose the Australian Corps front to launch the Allied counteroffensive. Major General Archibald Montgomery, GSO2, Fourth Army, asserted that the victory on 8 August

could not have been won without the steady and continuous offensive of the Australian Corps throughout the months of April, May, June and July. To its remarkable achievements … may be attributed to a very large extent the increase in moral[e] … necessary to make … August 8th … even a possibility.³

The Australian soldier became feared and admired as a confident, competent and aggressive soldier adept at surprise. German documents captured at Mont St Quentin stated:

Forces confronting us consist of Australians who are very warlike, clever and daring. They understand the art of crawling through high crops in order to capture our advanced posts. The enemy is also adept in conceiving and putting into execution important patrolling operations. The enemy infantry has daily proved himself to be audacious.⁴

The Englishman Lieutenant Colonel A. M. Ross wrote shortly after the war that the Australians showed distinctive abilities as stealth raiders:

Without in the least decrying the British soldier, it is fairly generally admitted that the Australian had peculiar gifts for this work. His very mode of life, independence of character, initiative, and upbringing fitted him for this special duty.⁵

General Beauvoir De Lisle wrote that 1st Australian Division stealth raids ‘by day as well as night … excited the admiration and emulation of all’.⁶ The history of the British 29th Division, written in 1925, recorded that the ‘individual enterprise’ of the Australians set ‘a splendid example’.⁷ The 9th Scottish Division, which included the highly regarded South African Brigade, acknowledged the Australians’ ‘big reputation … in stalking Germans’.⁸ The 18th Division dubbed the Australian a ‘master’ of ‘raiding fights’ and complained that the trenches it took over from Australians near Morlancourt were ‘difficult to hold’ as they were ‘only knee-deep’; the AIF had ‘not allowed the Boche to do more digging than that’.⁹ The policy of ‘peaceful penetration’, developed by higher commanders, was merely a modification of Australian stealth raiding. The history of the 11th Service Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment, claimed, ‘We were said to have been the first Allied troops – barring colonials – to have attempted … peaceful penetration.’¹⁰

It is worth noting that among the ‘colonial’ forces, the patrolling and raiding activity of the New Zealand Division near Hébuterne ‘closely paralleled’ what occurred on Australian fronts.¹¹ The history of the New Zealand Division states:

Many of these exploits were performed by our patrols, not at night, but in broad daylight, in full view of their delighted comrades and with a wholesome effect on the morale of recently joined reinforcements. Not infrequently a German sentry or two were kidnapped without a struggle, asleep or writing letters, delousing themselves, or at a peaceful meal, and there was nothing to show their commander the reason of their disappearance. More often some had to be killed, or the raiders had to fight.¹²

Most of the men involved in these ‘freebooting forays’¹³ have not been acknowledged.¹⁴

In the Canadian Corps, four of its five divisions spent between 7 May and 8 August 1918 out of the line, resting and training. Only the 2nd Canadian Division, attached to British VI Corps, fought near Arras. It conducted 27 formal raids in three months, losing 120 officers and 2647 other ranks, and a ‘pervasive rumour circulated through the ranks of the division that they were being punished by the corps commander for supposed crimes they had committed’.¹⁵ On 26 May, Armament Corporal David Kelley, 18th Western Ontario Battalion, crawled through grass and under barbed wire to rush a German post where he killed two Germans and grabbed a third, dragging him back to the Canadian lines.¹⁶ This is the only stealth raid recorded in Canadian war diaries. Bean suggested that ‘formal raiding was doubtless more suited to their [the Canadians’] front’.¹⁷

Why did Australians conduct more stealth raids than the rest of the British Army? One factor was the coincidence of timing and ground. The Australian divisions were not in the line at the beginning of the Michael or Georgette offensives so were spared the heavy casualties inflicted on the British Third and Fourth Armies on the Somme and the Second Army in Flanders. After the offensives, the German Army did not have enough men to defend its newly won front in strength. This depleted force, and the vast supremacy of Allied artillery, led the German high command to decide to defend the Somme and Hazebrouck fronts with an outpost system. The outpost system consisted of strongpoints in depth rather than continuous trenches shielded by belts of barbed wire. The series of outposts, in a rural setting with its undulating terrains and crops, made it possible for Australian patrols and stealth raiders to outflank posts and attack them in flank and rear, often without alerting other enemy forces or command posts nearby.

By 9 August 1918 Australian stealth raiders had vanquished the worst and the best of the German Army, while British divisions also facing the same German outpost system were enfeebled. The Australian soldier stood out in stealth raids not because he faced inferior ‘trench divisions’, as Peter Pedersen claimed,¹⁸ but because the Australian demonstrated an unrivalled capacity to adapt to changing conditions and a changing enemy. In April, the 41st Battalion captured men of the German 18th Division, considered a first-class attack division by Allied intelligence.¹⁹ But the Germans had been in the line over a month, since the opening of the Michael offensive, and were suffering from exhaustion and hunger. When ‘Asked when the war would finish, most were of the opinion that it would not last till Christmas, lack of … man-power being the main cause, while other factors were shortages of food, necessities, and equipment’ due to the Allied naval blockade.²⁰ As Peter Hart points out:

The German troops at the front were … gradually fading away from a simple shortage of food … The rations they were given simply did not have the calories to keep body and soul together.²¹

The first German troops Australian stealth raiders captured at Hazebrouck were from the 12th Division, which Allied intelligence considered a second-class division. It lost 48 officers and 1550 other ranks in massed wave attacks during the Georgette offensive. Teenage conscripts of the 1920 class replaced the casualties.²² An Australian described them as being a ‘poor type’, and many were in the front line for the first time.²³ The stealth raiders totally outclassed them.

In mid-May the German high command replaced the tired attack divisions with low-quality trench garrison divisions, some recently arrived from the Eastern Front. Yet interviews with prisoners captured by stealth raiders throughout this period indicate that the problem of morale and fighting quality in the German Army was not isolated to its inferior divisions or those exhausted by failed offensives. Stealth raiding was also responsible for decimating German morale. A letter taken from a German killed near Morlancourt read:

We have Australians in front of us … they are very quick and cunning. They creep … like cats to our trenches so that we don’t notice them. Last night they were in our trenches and killed two men and dragged one away with them.²⁴

On 11 July Australian stealth raiders captured over half of the front line of the 12th Reserve Division. The Australians at first considered the 12th Reserve to be good troops, and Australian accounts testify that many hardened German NCOs, officers and machine gunners showed fight. But this was their second tour against the Australians, and many prisoners admitted to being terrified and mutinous. They had been promised a rest but instead found they were confronting aggressive Australian patrols by day and night. Captured German officers revealed that their high command replaced the 12th Reserve with the elite 4th Division, ‘with the hope of … putting an end’ to Australian ‘minor enterprises’.²⁵ During the fighting for Merris the 10th Battalion reported resistance was ‘tougher than usual’.²⁶ But an Australian report based on interviews with prisoners speaks to the domination of stealth-raiding tactics:

Considering the 4th Division had only just come into the line after a 10 weeks rest, one would have expected to find some ‘moral’ amongst the men, but the sample of over 150 taken this morning proved a very pessimistic lot … thoroughly ‘fed up’ with the war. They were overcome with the dash and initiative of our troops in this mornings [sic] attack, and the majority of them were very glad to be taken prisoners.²⁷

In this case it was the ‘dash and initiative’ of Australian stealth raiders that won the day, more than the poor attitude or quality of the German infantry. The prisoners may also have been relieved to be alive because the ethos of stealth raiders, according to ‘Squatter’ Preston, was to ‘kill what we could, the rest would surrender’.²⁸ Prisoners captured by the six-man patrol at Chipilly Spur included the 27th Württemberg Division, ‘always … considered one of the very best of the German divisions’.²⁹ They proved powerless to stop determined and intelligent men who knew how to use ground. As Bean put it, ‘When once surprise is effected by bold and skilful men with a good sense of ground, even tough adversaries may be almost impotent.’³⁰ The reason why Australian soldiers conducted more stealth raids than any other army lies in the character and composition of the Australian battalions in 1918, and the innovation of their frontline men.

In 1918 the typical Australian battalion retained a core of men who had been with their battalion a long time. Platoon officers were ‘the sergeants of last year’, and among the NCOs and privates were ‘men ready to lead’.³¹ Of the officers mentioned in stealth raids in this book, 86 per cent had served as privates or NCOs in the one battalion, often in the same platoon. A further eight stealth raiders were later commissioned. Jack Southey ‘treasured the rum-inspired remark of an old cobber’: ‘“Jack, you were a good digger, but you’re a –– rotten officer”’.³² The familiarity between men like Southey and the soldiers they led ‘was a chief cause for the effectiveness of Australians in battle’.³³ The bushman Private Bill Harney considered that the officer–man hierarchy existed behind the lines and caused resentment, but dissolved in the frontline, where ‘it’s everybody’s level’ and officers and men talked ‘freely’.³⁴ In the line, the ‘rough equality’ between junior officers and men undermined the rigidity of British Army discipline, which might have restricted stealth raids.³⁵ Sergeant ‘Eddie’ Edwards reckoned:

We may have had our reprobates, but we had our heroes by the score, and when one learnt their weaknesses he appreciated their deeds the more and condoned their little failings.³⁶

Lieutenant Donovan Joynt VC wrote that the stretcher-bearer and stealth raider David Morgan was ‘no good on the parade ground or behind the Line … but when in the Line, was truly wonderful and worth half a dozen ordinary men for … initiative and bravery’.³⁷ Corporal ‘Bluey’ Farrell was described by an officer who served with him in the ranks ‘as rough as bags’ on the parade ground, but in the front line, one of the ‘men who helped to mould the [6th] battalion’.³⁸ These are just two of the many stealth raiders in this book who were ‘confident, casual, undisciplined in the parade ground sense, but deadly effective’ in the line.³⁹

The men of the AIF respected the type of officer who recognised that pushing parade-ground discipline on Australians was futile and more importantly irrelevant to their performance in battle. In 1918 this discipline was largely dropped and training became almost entirely based around competitive sports, weapons drills and new technology. According to the stealth raider Russell Colman:

The gist of their teaching was this: ‘You are Australians, from the land of the free. You are bred under wider, freer surroundings than the rest of the world, and consequently have more initiative. You are different clay to the rest of them and are as rough as bags out of the line, but in the line nothing can beat you.’ Now this teaching fell on very fertile ground and flourished exceedingly. It certainly did a great deal towards increasing the fighting power of the AIF but it was not the kind of creed that produced a lovable type of man when the AIF came in contact with other units of the British Army.⁴⁰

Stealth raiding was the supreme embodiment of this distinctive Australian ethos. Australian battalions frequently contrasted the self-reliance and aggression of their stealth raiders with the ‘stickiness’ of rival Australian battalions, and more often to what they saw as the abhorrent structure of the British Army, which manifested itself in a lack of initiative in battle. ‘You have no idea how different they are from Colonials’, wrote Sergeant Archie Barwick of British troops,

they never question their leaders even if they are on the wrong track but will blindly follow him, bit different to our chaps. A Tommy once he gets in the Army seems to lose all individuality & initiative, & their so called discipline exists only when the eye of authority is over them, & they have to be told to do every little thing just like a mob of kids, & they live in dread of their officers & N.C.Os of all the incompetent & useless officers as ever I saw in my life these Tommy leaders were just them. I wouldn’t follow them as far as I could throw a ton.⁴¹

In 1918 this attitude was typical throughout the fighting ranks of the AIF. In July 1918 Bean told his diary, ‘It is useless at this stage to attempt to cram into Australian troops that the English divisions beside them are as good as they … because they know they are not’.⁴² Russell Colman recalled, ‘A small undersized weed with a cigarette hanging out the corner of his mouth’, who remarked as the Guards marched past, ‘“Guards, eh! They look alright out of the line, but in the line they are not a patch on us.”’ Colman thought this comment indicated the strength of the Australians’ ethos, because if a ‘little fellow’ from Australia could think so highly of his section, his platoon, his company, his battalion and the AIF, then he was likely to ‘do his very best and hang on to a bad post till the last gasp’. Or try a daring stealth raid as Colman did, to ‘save the battalion from going over the top again’.⁴³

The Australian soldiers’ ethos was not built on military tradition or the enforcement of parade-ground discipline, but on the freedoms that resonated in Australian cultural and political life at the turn of the twentieth century. Australia was considered by many to be a workingman’s paradise, with organised labour entrenched in parliament. While Australian parliaments embraced the procedures of the British Westminster system, Australian democrats legislated changes that were a generation or more ahead of their British counterparts. The newly federated nation was the first of its kind to introduce universal suffrage for adult white males and the first to institute an eight-hour working day. As Bean wrote, the pursuit of ‘[s]ocial equality in civil life had produced men with the habit of thinking for themselves and acting on their decision. In the army they continued the habit.’⁴⁴

Australians on the home front and front line alike championed personal freedoms over entitlement, and linked a heightened sense of independence and initiative to the vastness of the Australian continent, and more specifically the bush. Colonel Arthur Butler, the official medical historian of the AIF, described in his paper ‘“The Digger”: A Study in Democracy’ the ‘deeply-rooted instinct and tradition’ that celebrated virtues of ‘the “common men”, who blazed the trails’ of the ‘vast and forbidden Continent and opened up the Never-never’.⁴⁵ The mythical values and virtues of the Australian bush resonated easily with the Australian male at war. The digger behaved much as Lawson’s shearers did in the bush, where respect was earned, not mindlessly given; both ‘call[ed] no biped lord or sir, and touch[ed] their hat to no man!’⁴⁶ In war this attitude to authority troubled many AIF senior commanders, Australian and British, but it was also a principal cause of stealth raids. As late as 31 July 1918, at Hazebrouck, General Glasgow warned his staff not to tell the men they were nearing a milestone of 1000 prisoners because ‘he didn’t want the men risking their lives in trying to drag prisoners from impossible places’.⁴⁷ Stealth raids came about because of the spur from below, not orders from above.

Of the 204 men involved in stealth raids and named in this book, 63 per cent came from rural or ‘bush’ backgrounds, in that they were living in country towns or working in country occupations at the time of their enlistment, regardless of where they were born, including men who had migrated to Australia. Regional centres with significant populations at the time, such as Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, Bathurst, Launceston and Canberra, are considered ‘country’; Hobart is considered a city. This might be contentious insofar as Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo might have enjoyed city status before the First World War, but these towns looked towards the bush – to mining and agriculture as the source of their commerce and their identity.

That proportion, 63 per cent, is well above the total percentage of men with bush backgrounds in the AIF as a whole, which Bean estimated ‘was probably not much more than a quarter’ and which Gammage found to be 30.86 per cent.⁴⁸ The biographical details of stealth raiders show that the urban component of the AIF statistics is exaggerated. For instance, some stealth raiders were countrymen but enlisted in cities, and named the city as their home on their enlistment papers. Jack Hayes was born in Hay, worked in the railways in Bathurst and enlisted in Sydney. Neil Maddox and Jack Southey worked in remote far-western Queensland and enlisted in Melbourne. Bill Harney was a stockman on the Nicholson River in the Gulf of Carpentaria when he decided to enlist; he enlisted in Townsville and named Townsville as his place of residence. Occupations on enlistment papers can also be misleading because they can be misconstrued as ‘urban’; Dalton Neville was a bank clerk in the town of Singleton, on the banks of the Hunter River, 120 miles north-west of Sydney. A friend described John Stinson, a schoolteacher from Blayney, New South Wales, as a ‘tall leather faced bushman’.⁴⁹ Allan Leighton was also a schoolteacher, at Rylstone in the central tablelands of New South Wales.

Bush skills and the distinctly Australian bush ethos help illuminate why these independent men were not intimidated by the open battlefield of crop, hedges, gullies, rivers and streams encountered in the Somme and French Flanders after three years of trench warfare at Gallipoli and on the Western Front.⁵⁰

There is significant evidence suggesting the Australian soldier valued bush skills and attributed the success of some stealth raids to them. Stealth raiders valued bush skills so highly, particularly tracking and snap shooting, that some country men were encouraged to go on stealth raids even if they had only just arrived in France. Before the war and during it, the power of the bushman legend captivated city and country men alike. Even the city boy and university student Russell Colman likened sniping to an Australian bushman getting a possum ‘“mooned”, [on the skyline] and shooting it’.⁵¹ The observation touches on Bean’s point that in the AIF ‘even city-bred Australians were bush men at heart’.⁵²

The Australian bushman’s ethos also contributed to a unique form of mateship in the AIF. Historian Carolyn Holbrook writes, ‘The legendary traits of the Australian soldier – his laconic humour, comradeship, suspicion of authority and reluctance to salute – were all inherited from the bushman.’⁵³ Bill Gammage noted that ‘the best Australians were loyal to their mates in every circumstance’,⁵⁴ as Lawson claimed of the bushman. According to Lieutenant George Mitchell MC, DCM, ‘Digger mateship may be a low ideal, or it may be a high one, but, whatever it is – it will do me!’⁵⁵ He wrote:

We diggers were a race apart. Long separation from Australia had seemed to cut us completely away from the land of our birth. The longer a man served, the fewer letters he got, the more he was forgotten. Our only home was our unit, and … Pride in ourselves … was our sustaining force.⁵⁶

Was this the ethos that inspired Jack Hayes to lead the six-man patrol against machine-gun posts on Chipilly Spur when his Anzac leave to Australia was due and rumours abounded that a battalion would be ordered to do it? ‘Most of the old hands believed we cannot escape our fate, no matter what we did’, wrote Dudley Jackson.⁵⁷ Men like Hayes possessed that elusive charismatic leadership that regular armies covet in their fighting ranks, but they were far too independent and mobile to be constrained by parade-ground discipline or orders. Men like Hayes lived in the moment and dwelt very little on a future beyond defeating the enemy.

With reinforcements practically nil, the Australian soldier knew his battalion, which was his home, could not fight effectively if it sustained heavy casualties, particularly among its best soldiers. The death of old soldiers was felt throughout a battalion, as ‘their testing had lasted so long that theirs was the heavier cross’.⁵⁸ ‘Eddie’ Edwards wrote in May 1918 that he had:

been with the battalion so long that most of the killed and wounded were personal friends, and it used to come as a shock to hear that so and so had been ‘knocked’.⁵⁹

In May 1918, Ernest Hodge and friends buried a mate, and he thought:

… ‘3 years ago tomorrow dear old Sticker and I marched into camp together, full of patriotism and enthusiasm and building wonderful castles in the air,’ and a big lump came into my throat as I realised this was the finish of it all. I recalled the many happy years we had spent together and could have wept as I thought it was all finished now. Ah! It is a cruel thing this war, but its [sic] no use … after all what better way can a soldier die than leading his men in the thick of the fray against the ‘Devastators of Civilization.’ But a man mustn’t have feelings in this game and with a sigh and a commonplace remark we strolled back to the Batt[alion] chatting away as though we had not a care in the world, while underneath this great camouflage of levity there was a great hole in our hearts and an ache that would not be stilled … ‘High-ho’ with a cheer and a smile we ‘carry on’.⁶⁰

Throughout 1918 there was ‘strain all the time’.⁶¹ Carrying on became harder as the fighting intensified, the rest periods shortened and battalion strengths diminished. The year began with brutal battles to stop the German offensive, and then followed the longest period the AIF spent in the front line on the Western Front. One man described it as ‘one of the most interesting and successful, as well as strenuous, periods of fighting in which our battalion has taken part’.⁶² Men were killed in action or were wounded or fell out of the line through exhaustion, which manifested itself in drunkenness, insubordination, desertion, self-inflicted wounds and most often sickness and war weariness. Seven hundred and one cases of self-inflicted wounds were recorded against the AIF in France, about half of these between March and August 1918.⁶³ On 21 September 1918, the 1st Battalion, outstanding for its stealth raiders in July and August, practically imploded in what historian Ashley Ekins describes as an ‘outbreak of collective indiscipline’ in the front line. One hundred and twenty-seven men refused to go into action, claiming that they were exhausted, and had done their bit. After capturing their objective, they had expected to be relieved by British troops but instead were ordered to return to action to capture an objective the British had failed to take. In a subsequent court martial the men were found not guilty of mutiny but guilty of desertion and were given sentences ranging from three to ten years’ imprisonment.⁶⁴ The majority of these men had their sentences suspended seven to eight months later, but at least one died in custody.⁶⁵ Among those court-martialled and sentenced to eight years was Corporal Roger Cooney, who had been awarded the Military Medal for his stealth raid at Strazeele on 11 July. Several other men who had done good work on patrols at Hazebrouck were also sentenced.⁶⁶

Typically, experienced frontline soldiers accepted war weariness as a fact of a soldier’s lot: ‘Before any stunt there are a few men who find it impossible to get a grip on their nerves’, wrote the stealth raider Edmund Street. ‘Not the same men by any means. It might be me one day, it might be the sergeant the next stunt.’⁶⁷ Colonel Aubrey Wiltshire, 22nd Battalion, worried about the case of a sergeant major who admitted, ‘I am not afraid of the Hoch but in spite of myself, my nerves are all of a tremble. It’s a bit of war weariness.’ Wiltshire continued:

What is one to do in a case like this? The case is genuine – a splendid brave soldier – always to the front. Nerves can’t stand it interminably. The Army makes no allowance for a thing like this.⁶⁸

Yet, at this very time, confident and self-reliant stealth raiders carried their battalions on their shoulders in times of stress and, on their own or with a few trusted friends, did jobs that their commanders set out for a formal raid by a company, a battalion or a brigade. More often than not they acted decisively before their commanders knew the situation at the front or had decided what to do. The attitude was that when one saw an opportunity, was fit enough and knew how to use the ground, one went for it. Colonel Arthur Butler, whose brother Colin was one of the initiators of stealth raids, believed:

The Australian soldier … wanted to do the job he had come for – to beat the enemy. To that end he was determined to take any amount of pains, understand his weapons and his tactics better than the enemy did, so that, when it came to killing, the odds would be against the enemy.⁶⁹

As well as satisfying ‘the job he had come for’, stealth raids were a way to avert formal raids, rescue mates, avenge mates, and collect souvenirs and war trophies, or a means to express skill and initiative, and speed up the end of the war. A few daring men considered all of these motivations to be virtues.

Stealth raiders were feted and admired during the war, and for a time after it, in battalion and divisional histories and in articles in returned soldiers’ journals and newsletters. Bean dedicated three chapters to stealth raids under the title of ‘peaceful penetration’ in volume VI of the Official History. There the trail ends. In the post-Second World War era, historians and the national memory neglected stealth raids, despite the fact that the diggers believed they were important and went a long way in defining the Australian infantryman’s unique characteristics.

Gallipoli has always held centre stage in the Australian memory. The First AIF championed this view because the Anzac legend set the precedent. But the shadow of Gallipoli has loomed disproportionately large over what occurred on the Western Front. Recently, historians have attempted to press the case for a deeper understanding of the campaign on the Western Front by focusing on the battles of Fromelles, Pozières, Third Ypres, Villers-Bretonneux and Hamel and the staff work and leadership skills of higher command in the AIF. Yet these histories tell little of what the frontline soldier felt or did in 1918. What men’s diaries tell us about these battles is not so much what men did, or the outcome, or whether or not Monash was a genius or a commander who ‘destroyed the instrument that had given him his victories’.⁷⁰ The men’s diaries and letters tell of the strain and nervous energy before battle, the mistrust of higher command, enemy artillery – their dominant fear – and the shock after battle: weariness, death and mutilation, resignation to fate, and rebuilding to maintain the traditions of those who went before them. Reading these men’s diaries explains the simple reason the Australians tended to revere stealth raids: they defeated the enemy at no great cost to themselves.

The Australian infantrymen thought their stealth raiders were ‘ideal soldiers’,⁷¹ and regarded the achievements of stealth raids as among the finest feats by Australians on the Western Front. Yet to this day the Australian War Memorial’s First World War Centenary Gallery has no section on Australian stealth raids or ‘peaceful penetration’. Postwar and revisionist histories have also neglected the subject.

In 1918 stealth-raiding tactics were entirely original and developed by Australian soldiers of the lowest ranks in the most dangerous posts closest to the enemy. These men understood the brutal nature of the war and the impersonal fact of mass mechanical slaughter. But they did not see themselves as victims. They fought for their units and their mates as part of a distinctive national force. They fought as all good soldiers do, with full confidence and skill in their weapons and their friends, but also with a distinctly Australian ethos that called back to the bush and its legend.

In July 1918, a great compliment was paid to the AIF when the bushman stealth raider Lieutenant Neil Maddox was asked to give a lecture on the tactics at a XV Corps school. ‘Eddie’ Edwards, a No Man’s Land scout famous in the 1st Battalion, witnessed Maddox’s talk:

as I watched, during Maddocks [sic] lecture, the expression on the faces of those men, officers of three famous English and Scottish divisions, I could not repress a thrill of pride in the story so nonchalantly told by him, proud to belong to the same country that produced men who in parties of threes and fours walked into enemy outposts and secured prisoners four and six times their numbers. It was a brilliant series of sorties that will live in the annals of history for all time. The deeds of the Australian soldier in these raids made all with whom they came in contact look up to him as something unique in the fighting line.⁷²

Such men should not be forgotten.