Verdun’s bitter fruits
An Australian brigade commander, burly and ruddy cheeked, took a British staff officer out into no-man’s land five days before the attack at Fromelles. He wanted to show him the Sugarloaf salient and the ground the Australians would have to cross. Four hundred yards of it: rank grass, that ditch they called a river, shell holes filling with stinking water, barbed wire twitched to iron stakes, then the German bunkers, squat and inscrutable.
The Australian was Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliott; the staff officer was Major H. C. L. Howard from General Haig’s headquarters. The three brigades of the 5th Australian Division were to attack to the left of the Sugarloaf and the 61st British Division to the right and at the salient itself. Howard had come up to report on preparations for the attack.
As the pair walked back from the frontline Elliott produced a circular that had been sent out by Haig’s headquarters. This tried to distil some of the lessons of two years of trench warfare. It recommended that no assault should be made where the breadth of no-man’s land exceeded 200 yards. Elliott’s 15th Brigade was being asked to cover twice that distance. Elliott conceded to Howard that he didn’t know much about tactics on the western front. He had been here only ten days and it was nothing like the crazy escarpment at Gallipoli, where neither side had much heavy artillery and the trench lines were often only a few yards apart. Then he told Howard what he thought. Elliott liked to tell people what he thought.
The attack would fail, he said. What did Howard think? Howard knew much more about artillery than Elliott. He said he thought it would be ‘a bloody holocaust’. Elliott asked him to tell Haig this. Howard agreed to do so.
Elliott and Howard were alone. Howard never spoke publicly of the conversation. We have only Elliott’s account and this is a pity: it would have been interesting to know what Howard made of the Australian. Elliott wasn’t like other generals, English or Australian. Loud and dishevelled and cocksure, he was one of the true eccentrics of the Australian army. Pompey (the nickname came from the big-hearted Carlton footballer Fred ‘Pompey’ Elliott) was admired and feared down the line, by the enlisted men he roared at like ‘a bull thirsting for gore’, by the men he arrested or threatened to shoot (Elliott was forever on the edge of drawing a revolver, often for such heinous offences as smoking while on a route march), and by the junior officers he taunted by telling them they weren’t ‘a wart on a soldier’s arse’, and who cared if corporals and privates could hear what he was saying. He bullied and blustered, but there was said to be a fatherly quality to it. As several contemporaries observed, other commanders tried to be disciplinarians and ended up being hated. Elliott did the same thing and mostly found respect, and sometimes affection. His men had their own fun with him. They paid newsboys in Egypt to stand outside his tent in the early morning and shout: ‘Egyptian Times – very good news – death of Pompey the bastard.’
Maybe his men sensed that he cared, and he did. If there was bombast, there was also generosity. Elliott wrote to his wife Kate, a soft beauty, that a private had died from pneumonia and ‘he was such a good fellow’. These tender letters to Kate sit curiously with his ravings on the parade grounds of Australia and Egypt. He wanted to gaze into her ‘dear, bright eyes and sunshine face’ and kiss her ‘dear lips and cheek and chin’. He liked children and referred to his young son and daughter as ‘our dear little pets’.
Elliott luxuriated in that power, often tyrannical, that devolves on some men in wartime, but he had not been a career-soldier. When war broke out he was a suburban man who found contentment in his family and his garden, a solicitor who had done lots of part-time soldiering and read much about war. He admired Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general, and dreamed of glory. It is not clear whether Elliott, even by early 1916, had begun to understand modern war, where heroics alone were not enough and indeed sometimes caused thousands of men to be butchered for no gain.
Elliott had been an outstanding student at Melbourne University, where he took degrees in law and arts and shared the Supreme Court Prize for the top student in final-year law. He liked poetry, particularly Kipling. But he had also known poverty in the red dust of the family farm at Charlton, in Victoria’s north-west, where he attended a one-teacher school and lived in a two-room hut of iron and bark. He won the Distinguished Conduct Medal for bravery as a corporal in the Boer War after he ran off enemy horses. On Gallipoli, where he commanded the 7th Battalion, he was the oldfashioned leader, straight out of military romance, at the front with his men, leading by example. He was shot in the ankle on the morning of the landing at Anzac Cove and lay for hours on the shingle of the beach, his foot throbbing. He fought at Lone Pine in August. The man next to him was shot and his head exploded. Elliott led his men covered head to foot in blood and brains.
Elliott certainly fascinated his men because of the way he looked. He had just turned thirty-eight at the time of Fromelles. He stood five foot ten inches, maybe a little more, and was particularly heavy in the shoulders and upper arms. His head was huge and the chin jutted; he would lift it at the end of a sentence, sometimes as a form of intimidation. His hair had receded at the temples, leaving a tuft of grey standing up over his forehead. People said it stood up because of all the frantic energy inside his head. The cheeks were pink and unlined, like those of a boy, and they turned to puce when he was angry. His brown eyes were loaded with mischief. The face was plump and open. Elliott was heavy through the hips and his uniform hung on him like a bag.
He looked the typical fighting leader: bull-like, sure of himself, full of menace, big of heart. He seemed even more impressive when he was on Darkie, his black horse with a white star. Unafraid – that was the word most people used to describe him. Elliott was clearly unafraid of Turks and Germans, his pettifogging superiors at corps headquarters and foppish English staff officers. But demons were running around in his head, and they had been there long before Gallipoli. Elliott demanded to be taken seriously. If he felt he wasn’t, he could be high-handed and petty. He imagined slights and let them eat away at him; he wanted to ‘arrest’ too many people for things that didn’t matter. Elliott only looked sure of himself.
Lieutenant-General Sir William Birdwood, the head of the Anzac forces, and his Australian chief-of-staff, Brigadier-General Brudenell White, thought Elliott lacked judgement and tact. He knew how to come barging through the front door, red-faced and affronted; he had no idea of how to pick the lock on the back door. Birdwood had considered sending Elliott home.
Birdwood and White knew how to play political games up the line, all the way to General Haig’s headquarters. They knew the rules. They would dissent from time to time, but politely. They would push, but only so far. They were temperate and subtle. They were against the plan to attack in front of Fromelles and said so. Finally, though, they agreed to hand over the 5th Division to a British corps commander for the assault. Elliott would help carry the plan out. He was good at the frontline. He wasn’t subtle and neither was the plan.
UNLIKE ELLIOTT, THE commander of the 5th Division was disliked by just about everyone for most of his adult life. When James Whiteside McCay (he pronounced his name to rhyme with sky and sometimes spelt it M’Cay) died in 1930 the Bulletin first acknowledged that he was a ‘born soldier and a brave man’, then ran up to the point it really wanted to make: ‘Nevertheless, he became about the most detested officer in the A.I.F. [Australian Imperial Force] at an early stage of the World War, and remained so to the end.’ McCay’s career was unusual. Here he was at Fromelles, fifty-one years old, tall and with a wilting moustache, a major-general commanding a division, and having spent only five-or-so weeks of his life in action. Yet those weeks were tumultuous. They showed him to be about as brave as a soldier can be, and also as a commander with a genius for alienating his men.
He had gone ashore with the 1st Division at Gallipoli and walked into a shambles. His 2nd Brigade was supposed to go left. Lieutenant-Colonel Ewen Sinclair-MacLagan, who had landed first with his 3rd Brigade, told McCay to go to the right. McCay reluctantly agreed and walked into a bigger shambles. Battalions were mixed up, command structures had broken down and some men had gone too far forward. McCay became crankier than usual. When Major-General William Bridges, the divisional commander, came ashore with Brudenell White around 7.30 am, he found McCay unstrung. White said that McCay was ‘completely lost’. Bridges ‘wanted to know what the hell he was doing’. Bridges grew angrier and White said he saw McCay’s face change. ‘He began to get a grip on himself and before long he was in complete control.’
We should not judge McCay for this. The shambles would have tested any commander. Two bullets passed through McCay’s cap that morning and another through his sleeve. But he did not help himself. He accused rankers of cowardice and threatened them with a revolver. It was the style of the man that offended: the threats, the sarcasm, the prissiness of the schoolmaster and the pedantry of the lawyer. McCay could put the wind up men; he could not inspire.
Early in May the 2nd Brigade was sent south to the British beachhead at Cape Helles. Major-General Aylmer Hunter-Weston, the senior British officer there, wanted to try again to capture the village of Krithia. Hunter-Weston was one of the Great War’s spectacular incompetents. Haig called him an ‘amateur’. Others said he was a ‘music-hall general’. At least twice during the war he went ‘off his head’. He bubbled with cheery humour and threw troops away as lesser men tossed away socks. Hunter-Weston sent McCay’s Australians into the battle late on the third day, telling them to advance on Krithia. There was no time to organise anything, not that this would have made much difference. The attack was suicidal. Half of the Australians involved in it were killed or wounded. McCay’s brigade took more than 1000 casualties. Broken men lay in the darkness and cried out for water. It was heroic – and futile.
The Australians blamed McCay, which was unfair. Hunter-Weston wrote the orders. McCay showed much grit. He took his headquarters closer to the frontline than was usual. A bullet smashed into his leg, breaking it. His wound healed, then the leg snapped again. McCay was invalided home.
Two Australian divisions had fought at Gallipoli. The 1st Division, plus John Monash’s 4th Brigade, had been there from the start; the bulk of the 2nd Division arrived in September and missed the worst fighting. After the abandonment of Gallipoli these two divisions and Monash’s brigade returned to Egypt, where large numbers of Australian reinforcements were training. Out of this pool four new divisions were created: the 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th. The 3rd Division was meanwhile being formed from new recruits in Australia. Birdwood, in Egypt, had to find two new divisional commanders. He didn’t believe there were any obvious candidates among the Australians. This dismayed Senator George Pearce, the Australian Minister of Defence, who sent a telegram saying that McCay should command one of the two new divisions. So McCay came to command the 5th, mainly it seems because he was deemed to be an ‘Australian’, even though he had been born in Ireland. He arrived in Egypt in late March, 1916, just in time to alienate himself from his new command.
McCay, the son of a Presbyterian minister, had come to Australia as an infant. Young James was a brilliant student. He was dux of Scotch College, Melbourne, where he was a contemporary of Monash, before taking masters degrees in arts and law and winning the Supreme Court Prize (as Elliott later would), even though, the story goes, he didn’t attend a single lecture. Before he graduated he had bought Castlemaine Grammar School, where he was said to be a good teacher, although one of his aids was a birch, which he used often. He became a lieutenant-colonel in the militia, won a seat in the Victorian Parliament and then in the new Federal Parliament. He was not popular among politicians because of his scornful wit, but briefly became Minister of Defence, before losing his seat.
McCay had no sooner returned to Egypt to command the 5th Division when he received orders to march two of the three brigades nearly forty miles to the Suez Canal. McCay appears to have made ‘some objection’ to this order but agreed to carry it out. His 14th Brigade suffered frightfully in the heat, which topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and deep sand. McCay composed a rant against the 14th Brigade and had it read out to the troops. He didn’t seem to care about the men he commanded and they didn’t care for him.
So here, now, was McCay on the plain in front of Fromelles, carrying the burden of his own personality and the blame for Krithia and the desert march, and eager to get this one right, even if the battle plan seemed slanted towards heroics rather than good sense. As with Krithia, it wasn’t his plan. As with Krithia, he and his men had been loaned out to the British. This scheme belonged to Lieutenant-General Richard Haking, also a son of a clergyman and possessed of a doleful moustache. Haking commanded the British XI Corps and Aubers Ridge, where Fromelles lay, kept beckoning to him.
THE 5TH WAS the last of the Australian divisions to arrive in France. If the men didn’t know much about Haking, they were doubtless pleased to be leaving General Sir Archibald Murray, the British commander-in-chief in Egypt. Murray was politely called a ‘conventional’ soldier. Haig in private called him an ‘old woman’. Murray had a nervy disposition and collapsed from strain during the battle of Le Cateau in 1914. The following year he became Chief of the Imperial General Staff, which might have been the most important post in the army.
It couldn’t be so in 1915 because Lord Kitchener was Secretary of State for War. Kitchener, cross-eyed and cranky and unknowable, a man who lived in an ‘Arctic loneliness’, was thought to be a distinguished soldier. He had routed the Mahdists near Khartoum in 1898, but this left him several battles short of being a military genius. Kitchener didn’t understand Cabinet government. He wanted to hold a political office and run the day-to-day affairs of the army as well, to be a politician and a field-marshal at the same time. He had run the Boer War as a one-man band; he was now trying to run the Great War the same way and his Cabinet colleagues were tiring of him. But they had a problem: how did they sack a public idol? Kitchener regarded the Chief of the Imperial General Staff as his flunkey and Murray didn’t let him down. Murray then became commander-in-chief in the Middle East in March, 1916. His replacement as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Lieutenant-General Sir William Robertson, was never going to be Kitchener’s flunkey.
Murray’s dislike of the Australians had nothing to do with their fighting essay at Gallipoli. Murray alighted on something his Victorian and Edwardian past told him was more important: a certain lack of discipline and, specifically, the failure of these civilian-soldiers to take saluting seriously. As Charles Bean, Australia’s official historian, wrote, Britain’s political system at this time was democratic in form but largely feudal in tradition. Bean said saluting came more naturally to English soldiers because most had been brought up to see themselves as inferior, socially and mentally, to their officers. The Australians came from a quirky new democracy. Officers, the colonials contended, had to earn respect, like the boss in the shearing shed.
Murray hinted to the Australian commanders that he could not recommend that their troops be sent to France. Saluting and other courtesies would be matters of real consequence there, he said.
Then, on February 21, the Germans attacked at Verdun. France needed men. Whether the Australians were good at saluting suddenly didn’t seem important. Murray told London he would send the Australian divisions, even though they were the ‘most backward in training and discipline’.
So the Australians sailed for France. Saluting, however, would remain a problem. The poet John Masefield told how in early 1917 a British staff captain reprimanded an Australian for failing to salute. The Australian patted him on the shoulder. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘when you go home, you tell your mother that today you’ve seen a real bloody soldier.’
BY THE END of 1915, a disappointing year for the allies even though Italy had come in on their side, France had already run up 1.9 million casualties (including 50,000 officers). One million of these were dead. British casualties (including those from dominions and other empire lands) now topped half-a-million. It was bad enough that a generation of young men was being sacrificed; worse still was the realisation that there didn’t seem to be any end to it. The stalemate, that line of trenches running from the Belgian coast to Switzerland, couldn’t be broken. The French had carried out the big offensives, above the Somme in Artois and below it in the Champagne. These produced long casualty lists for gains of a thousand yards here and a thousand yards there that changed the nature of the war not one whit. The British had tried smaller assaults in Artois, at Neuve Chapelle, Aubers Ridge and Loos. All failed. The British generals were still learning the new ways of war. And they didn’t have enough modern weapons. The Victorian and Edwardian manuals had stressed the importance of ‘character’ and ‘the offensive spirit’ and the wonders of bayonets and cavalry. What the generals needed in France and Belgium were more howitzers and high-explosive shells. Character was fine and of course it mattered; but firepower mattered more.
The British politicians were learning even more slowly than their generals. They had split into two camps: the ‘westerners’ who believed the war could only be won on the western front against the main German army, and the ‘easterners’ (who included David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill) who wanted to knock away Germany’s ‘props’, the Austrian and Ottoman empires. Gallipoli was an easterners’ adventure; so was Salonika. There was a flaw in the easterners’ argument, although it is easier to see from a distance of ninety years. Austria and Turkey were not propping up Germany; she was propping up them. Much of the time the Austro-Hungarian army was a shambles and it only avoided setbacks in the east because the Russian army was a grander shambles. As someone said, the easterners were like a boxer who tries to win the fight by knocking out his opponent’s seconds. But the easterners would be around for the whole war, always looking for the quick fix, the sly flanking movement, in the Balkans or the Middle East or indeed anywhere but on the western front. Haig was a westerner. He predicted that Gallipoli would fail weeks before the troops landed. He had tentatively agreed late in 1915 to a joint offensive with the French on the Somme the following year, even though he would have preferred to attack around Ypres in Belgium.
The German generals had also been thinking about how to break the stalemate. They had spent most of 1915 on the defensive on the western front while they propped up the Austrians in the east. General Erich von Falkenhayn, the chief-of-staff of the German army, a ruthless and secretive man, now came up with a scheme that was wondrous in its cynicism. He understood the importance of firepower. He would build up a stockpile of high-explosive shells and launch them at one spot, a narrow front where the French would be compelled, for reasons of honour, to pour in more and more men and watch them be blown to pieces. The idea, Falkenhayn explained, was to make France ‘bleed to death’.
He would play Dracula at Verdun, the ring of forts that had long been the eastern gateway to France. The forts had been built for older forms of warfare. And they hadn’t mattered much in this war, because the Germans had come not from the east, as the French had expected, but from the north, spearing out of Belgium in great hook-like formations that were supposed to sweep around either side of Paris and crush the French army in six weeks. Even so, the French people saw the Verdun forts as symbolic. This was the sentiment Falkenhayn was working on. The French could give up Verdun and be humiliated; or they could fight for it and be slaughtered, division after division, fed into that narrow front like sheep clattering up the ramp of an abattoir.
Verdun sits astride the River Meuse, 140 miles east of Paris, inside a ring of hills, and in those days it was only a day’s march from the German frontier. The forts surrounded the town, most of them on the eastern side of the river, facing Germany, and the strongest of these was Douaumont. Falkenhayn threw in his stockpile of two million shells and 1000 heavy guns on a front of only eight miles after first establishing air superiority so as to spot the French artillery batteries. Here was the new warfare: killing at a distance, killing from places where the enemy couldn’t see you, so that the old infantry tactics, the close-order drills that had been taught in the previous century, no longer had much meaning. The muzzles of the heavier guns looked like sewer outlets. The shells for the seventeen-inch howitzers each weighed a ton. The first shell fired in the battle, from a fifteen-inch howitzer twenty miles away, hit the bishop’s palace in Verdun. It was meant to hit a bridge but the French and British propagandists seized upon it as proof that the Hun was godless. On that first day about 80,000 shells fell on a 100-acre rectangle just behind the French frontline before the first German infantryman was seen.
That day was February 21 and in the next few days the German 5th Army, commanded by Kaiser Wilhelm II’s son, the Crown Prince of Prussia, advanced five miles and took Fort Douaumont and the chalk and clay in front of Verdun became a hell. The Germans used flamethrowers for the first time. Both sides used gas. Shell craters were so thick that aerial photographs of the battlefield looked like a wasps’ nest, a rash of cysts. Men simply disappeared, blown into thousands of pieces. The luckier ones lived in a pall of black smoke. Kaiser Wilhelm arrived behind the battlefield; this, he thought, had the feel of a victory.
Church bells rang out across Germany and France slipped into despondency. General Henri-Philippe Pétain took command at Verdun. He had been a colonel when war broke out and thought a heretic because he didn’t believe, as most did, that attack was virtually the only tactic worth studying. Pétain was cautious and taciturn – some said he was without charm – but he understood that this war was about firepower. Haig and Joseph Joffre, the French commander-in-chief, were like lions locked in a cage: they longed to break out, to escape to the open plains and get back to the war of movement they had been taught as young men and which was about the only form of war they understood. They seemed to think some collective act of ‘character’, some display of Napoleonic heroics, could get them out there, wheeling and turning, pennants fluttering and saddles creaking. As much as one can tell, the people of France and England thought much the same. They knew about Napoleon and Wellington; they didn’t yet perceive that this war was as much about the science of artillery as it was about the human spirit.
Pétain, a bachelor, was fifty-nine at the time of Verdun, straightbacked and aloof, a man of some presence, mainly because of his glacial stare. His eyes were said to be the same colour as his uniform, horizon blue. Women found him charming. On the night before he took command at Verdun he was finally found at a Paris hotel. His boots stood outside the bedroom door next to a pair of ladies’ shoes. Pétain explained to his aide that he had other duties to attend to at this moment; he would deal with Verdun tomorrow.
A week into the battle, which was to last ten months, Falkenhayn’s scheme was in trouble. Because he had insisted on a narrow front, his troops were soon exposed to flanking fire. Pétain had seen that weakness and exploited it. Falkenhayn began to widen his front and the scheme started to lose its point. If it was ‘bleeding’ France, it was bleeding Germany too. The French rotated divisions through Verdun, which meant the horror of the place was felt through most of the French army. The Germans pushed their artillery closer to the front over wet ground and on one day 7000 horses, French and German, were killed, ninety-seven by a single shell.
The Germans captured a French captain who had a bayonet wound in the thigh. Charles de Gaulle spent the rest of the war as a prisoner. The German expressionist painter Franz Marc, famous for his ‘Blue Horses’, wrote from Verdun: ‘For days I have seen nothing but the most terrible things that can be painted from a human mind.’ The agonies of the horses particularly upset him. A shell killed him the next day.
Pétain saved French honour at Verdun and became a national hero, but by April his superiors privately thought him too cautious and promoted him so as to install General Robert Nivelle at Verdun. Nivelle, a fifty-nine-year-old artilleryman, had one of the best gifts a general can own: he could charm politicians. He was confident and outgoing and spoke excellent English. At Verdun he thought that he had discovered the formula for winning the war, a combination of artillery and infantry known only to him, and this made him popular with politicians. They all wanted to know a man who thought he had found the formula.
The Germans ground on towards the town. By now more than twenty million shells had been fired into the battlefield and each side had run up about 200,000 casualties. A German lieutenant had joined in the battle. He could not have conceived that one day he would command in a battle just as cruel. Lieutenant Friedrich Paulus would twenty-seven years later surrender a Germany army at Stalingrad.
The Germans now had other things to worry about. General Alexei Brusilov had run the first successful Russian offensive of the war, routing the Austro-Hungarian forces in Galicia, taking 400,000 prisoners, and forcing the Germans to send reinforcements to prop up the empire that was supposed to be propping them up. And the French and British were clearly preparing to do something on the Somme.
In October, when the Somme battle had been going three months, the French recaptured Fort Douaumont and began to push the Germans back along the main line of their advance. Falkenhayn had fallen. He had got things wrong too many times and the Germans had the good sense to see Verdun as a failure. Falkenhayn in August was sent to command an army in Rumania. He had not found the formula, just a way to run up 300,000 casualties on both sides, maybe more. No-one knows precisely. An ossuary at Verdun contains the bones of more than 130,000 unknown soldiers, French and German. Some of the villages in front of the town were never rebuilt and fields thick with bones and shells have been left unploughed to this day.
Many claim Verdun was the worst battle of the Great War and this perhaps underestimates what happened in the Ypres salient of Belgium over four years. But the world changed at Verdun. It brought to prominence Pétain and Nivelle. It satisfied French pride but it seared the souls of French soldiers. They had been asked to do too much. Verdun saw off Falkenhayn and brought forth two Prussians, Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, who would command the German armies for the rest of the war. And it put pressure on Haig and the British to achieve something worthwhile on the Somme, to shift the German gaze off Verdun. Which was why the Australian 5th Division was at Fromelles. The battle planned for there, under the control of General Haking, was supposed to stop the Germans sending reinforcements south to the Somme.
THE MEN OF the Australian 1st and 2nd divisions began arriving in Marseilles from Egypt in late March. As the trains took them through the south of France they thought they had wandered into the Elysian Fields. No more Egyptian sandstorms, no more Gallipoli flies. These men had grown up on the thin soils of Australia. They were used to paddocks bleached pale yellow and dotted with skinny merinos grazing with their noses into the wind. Here was something from a picture-book: fat cattle and green meadows and old farmhouses with stone barns. The land seemed to smile at them.
Arthur Thomas, a thirty-seven-year-old tailor from Melbourne, arrived with the 1st Division.
From Marseilles we trained across France, & a more lovely sight I have never seen, the South of France is beautiful, forest, meadows, glorious roads, delightful homesteads, little wonder the Frenchman is proud of his country, every available bit of land is tilled & gardened & no waste ground is left, no fearful hoardings like Melbourne, very little advertising is allowed over the country … all along the line the people gave us a very warm welcome & one noted the number of people in black & beautiful women in their widow’s weeds, hundreds of them.
Lieutenant Gordon Maxfield from the 2nd Division had just turned twenty-seven. He had bright eyes, an unlined face and a crisp moustache. An accountant from the gritty soils of Longwood, in Victoria’s north-east, he had fought at Gallipoli. He told his father that France seemed like paradise. ‘We wanted to climb out of the train and bury our faces in the green, green grass, and roll about in the fields like toil-weary old horses just unharnessed after a hard day’s work.’
John Raws, slightly built but a good cricketer at school in Adelaide, was the head of the parliamentary reporting team for the Melbourne Argus when he joined up in 1915. His father, a clergyman, apparently demurred. Raws, gentle and sensitive, replied that he wasn’t one for heroics and claimed no great patriotism. He simply believed that ‘the only hope for the salvation of the world is a speedy victory for the Allies’.
Raws was thirty-two and unmarried. He had been born in Manchester and had come to Australia as a twelve-year-old. His younger brother Robert (known as ‘Goldy’) had already joined up and had fought at Gallipoli. Now both were in France, lieutenants in the 2nd Division. John (known as ‘Alec’) wrote to his niece that French girls threw kisses to the Australians passing on the trains. ‘It seemed such a pity that we couldn’t get out of the train, so that they needn’t have had to throw them. Because kisses get spoiled being thrown, don’t you think?’
English officers puzzled him. They put on ‘a frightful amount of dog … they appear to be absurdly mincing and effeminate, and to have an extraordinary desire to look foppish. I think they really try to put it on, because whenever one scratches one of them he does seem to be all right inside.’
Ivor Margetts, a captain in the 1st Division, had splashed ashore from one of the first boats to land at Gallipoli. He was a schoolteacher from Hobart, twenty-four years old, six foot four inches tall, a big handsome man with a whimsical turn of phrase and a pipe clenched in his teeth. He loved Australian rules football and even played at Gallipoli. ‘Beautiful match. Led at three-quarter time, lost by seven points.’ France, he wrote to his parents, was much better than Gallipoli.
John Monash arrived in northern France with his 4th Brigade in June. He explained how billets were arranged. ‘You pull up at a large farm house, demand inspection of the accommodation available (rooms, barns, stables and kitchens), make friends with the children, or the dog, or in one case the pet pig; curry favour with the old dame who cannot understand my Parisian French, as she speaks only a Flemish-French patois; and finally after much gesticulation and remonstrance you chalk up on the various doors: “3 officers and six batmen”, “Mess for 4 officers”, “1½ platoons” (in the barns) …’ Monash was astonished to see a pretty French girl selling the London papers just behind the front as shells burst nearby.
One of the first things Sergeant Cyril Lawrence, an engineer in the 1st Division, noticed in Marseilles were the public urinals. A man was relieving himself against a wall even though a tram ‘with any amount of ladies aboard’ had pulled up a few yards away. When Lawrence reached the front there was a scare about a gas attack. One of his men, in thrall to the folklore of Ned Kelly, came rushing up, eyes standing out like doorknobs. ‘God! sergeant,’ he said, ‘I’m done, I’m done, it’s got me, tell them at home I died game.’ The horror was in his mind: there had been no gas attack.
The 5th Division arrived last, at the end of the spring flush. William Barry, a private, liked the cafés, or estaminets. He could buy wine and beer for a penny a glass, ‘and one good thing about the beer was you could drink a ship load and it would not take any effect’. Barry’s battalion had to march nineteen miles over cobbled roads to the front. The men’s feet were blistered ‘like raw meat’, Barry wrote in his diary. ‘I noticed that all through the march Mr McKie [Major-General James McCay], the Commander of the Division, was riding up and down the line in his motor car … [The next day] Mr McKie said that he was disgusted at the way the men marched and if in the future any man fell out while he was on the march, he was liable to be immediately shot …’ Few of McCay’s men had any time for him, Barry said.
Major Geoffrey McCrae, also of the 5th, strong-jawed and conventionally handsome, had been badly wounded at Gallipoli. He liked to write poetry, which was right enough considering his lineage. His father, George, had been close to Henry Kendall, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Marcus Clarke. Kendall regarded George as the finest poet in Australia. ‘This is a most gorgeous country where it has not been devastated by the Hun,’ Geoffrey McCrae wrote. ‘I always thought Australia was the only place on God’s earth until I came here.’ McCrae’s only complaint was that he had hay fever.
