A night of horror and doubt
Jimmy Downing’s battalion, the 57th, part of Pompey Elliott’s 15th Brigade, spent the night before the attack sleeping in a mill on the outskirts of the village of Sailly-sur-la-Lys. Downing, a law student at Melbourne University, had tried to enlist shortly after war broke out but was rejected eight times because he was too short. For his ninth attempt Downing had friends hoist him up by the shoulders while weights were tied to his feet. He then went off to be measured before he reverted to his normal height.
Downing woke up at the mill and didn’t think too much about what might happen that day. ‘One accepts the immediate present in the army. We woke with the birds, reminded of friendly magpies in the morning back in Australia. Here were only twitterings under the eaves, but at least it was a cheerful sound, pleasant on a lazy summer morning when the ripening corn was splashed with poppies, and the clover was pink, and the cornflowers blue under the hedges.’
At the mill old women and small girls were selling gingerbread and sweets laced with cognac. At 1.45 pm the battalion moved off for the front.
Shelling commenced. These were the days of long and casual bombardments. Labourers were hoeing in the mangold fields. Stooping men and women watched us pass, without ceasing their work. It may have been courage, or stolidity, or the numbness of the peasant bound to the soil, or else necessity, that held the sad tenacious people here in such an hour of portent. Their old faces were inscrutable. They tilled the fields on the edge of the flames, under the arching trajectory of shells. Bees hummed in the clear and drowsy sunshine. There was little smoke about the cottages, where the creepers were green … We battalions came to the four crossroads where there were trenches in the corn, by a crucifix of wood in a damaged brick shrine … Late in the afternoon we were ordered forward. From his crucifix the Man of Sorrows watched our going. One wondered if His mild look was bent especially on those marked for death that day.
Downing headed down a communications trench leading to the front. He saw a bald man with a red moustache lying dead on a duckboard. The sap had been blown up in parts; splintered wood and iron poked from burnt earth. Downing dashed through a shrapnel barrage to the Australian front trench. A sad-faced man was sitting beside a body. He said: ‘Sniper – my brother – keep under the parapet.’
The 59th and 60th battalions were already in the line. They were the two assaulting battalions for the 15th Brigade. Downing’s 57th was the reserve. The order for the assaulting battalions to attack was passed along the line: ‘Over the bags in five minutes … over the bags in five minutes.’ Then: ‘Over you go.’ The 60th went over first, carrying bags of bombs, scaling ladders, picks and shovels.
THE AUSTRALIAN FRONTLINE was a sandbagged breastwork, built eight to nine feet above the plain, which itself was only about fifty feet above sea level. Traverses were notched into the breastwork every ten to fifteen yards, giving the line a zigzag look. The ground here was too wet for trenches and the heavy clay, about a foot or so down, turned blue and sticky when damp. The support trench, also a breastwork, stood 300 yards back. The road to the front was a series of conventional communication trenches, narrow and muddy-bottomed, running at right angles to the frontline. Ammunition and reinforcements went one way along these trenches, wounded the other. The Germans could see most of this system from the heights of Aubers Ridge.
The German frontline, 120 to 450 yards away, was also a breastwork but more elaborate, eight-feet high and up to twelve-feet thick. The 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, Hitler’s regiment, held the breastwork in front of Elliott’s 15th Brigade and the two British brigades to his right. In this section of the front alone – it was only about 1500 yards – the Bavarians had built seventy-five shelters into the parapet, each protected by nine to twelve inches of concrete. The Germans were good at what came to be called defence in depth. Immediately behind the frontline were roomy dugouts with about five feet of earth for a roof. Ten yards back again were deep chambers, twenty feet down in the clay, lit by electricity and kept reasonably dry by pumps. Troops sheltering in these were pretty much safe from heavy artillery. The Germans had dug support trenches 100 yards behind the front but these had been abandoned after becoming waterlogged. The support troops were now 250 to 400 yards behind the frontline, in wrecked farmhouses and strong points reinforced with concrete.
The ground at Fromelles was a typical German defensive position. Aubers Ridge was only 120-feet high but that was high enough for the Germans to see everything on the plain. The German front ran back to the ridge in tier after tier. It was formidable.
THE ARTILLERY BOMBARDMENT began at 11 am on a fine and clear day and Elliott was up at the frontline with his men. ‘Boys,’ he said, ‘you won’t find a German in those trenches when you get there.’ He may have been trying to make his men feel better. Or he may have truly believed that the artillery was doing what Haking said it could do. This was the first time Elliott had watched a bombardment in France. He had seen nothing like this on Gallipoli: hundreds of guns firing, great tails of earth and sandbags and the doll-like bodies of men soaring high above the German front, holes opening up in the parapet, smoke and dust and shrieking shells. And Elliott didn’t know about those deep German dugouts just behind the front. Hell didn’t reach down there. Men would come out of them coated with dust and shaken, but still able to fire machine guns.
The barrage was working in some places and failing in others. The gaps in the German breastwork looked impressive. What the gunners didn’t know was that of those seventy-five concrete shelters in the front of the 16th Bavarian Regiment, sixty remained intact. The wire was cut in some places and intact at others. Artillery observers were worried about the Sugarloaf redoubt: after hours of shelling it didn’t seem badly damaged. Neither side did much counter-battery work – that is, firing on the enemy’s gun positions. Both aimed nearly all their shells at infantry.
The German gunners waited several hours until the British and Australian lines were thick with troops. Then, around 2.15 pm, they began to bombard the Australian and British front and support lines, smothering them in smoke, catching the troops packed into trenches, blowing up piles of ammunition, cutting telephone wires and starting small fires. The pattern in allied attacks on the western front was for a shambles to begin once the attackers reached the German frontline and communications broke down. This time the shambles began at the jump-off points.
Shrapnel burst over the 15th Brigade on the right of the Australian line. The 14th Brigade, in the centre, and the 8th, on the left, suffered worse. The 8th was also hit by allied shells, which were dropping short.
The allied bombardment sounded better than it was. Private Leslie Martin, a machine gunner in the 8th Brigade, wrote home to his brother, Jack: ‘The row was deafening. I put wadding in my ears while we were down in the supports waiting to go forward and take our place in the fighting.’ Martin saw dead and wounded everywhere when he reached the parapet. ‘I had to sit on top of a dead man as there was no picking or choosing where to sit, for if you dallied at all you were likely to catch one.’ Shortly afterwards Martin caught one – two actually. Fragments of shell hit him in the leg and the tongue, ‘which stung a good deal at the time’. He saw a shellburst lift two men six feet in the air ‘and they simply rolled back dead, killed instantly’. He saw a man die in a few minutes after having both legs blown off.
Martin was twenty-six, a warehouseman from Dulwich Hill, Sydney. And now he saw something that in those days was little written about: shell-shock. The military and its medical arm understood men carried back soaked in blood: these were wounded. The army didn’t yet understand psychological trauma, panic attacks and catatonia. Martin saw these things at Fromelles and understood.
One or two of the chaps got shell shock and others got really frightened. It was piteous to see them. One great big chap got away as soon as he reached the firing line and could not be found when he was wanted. I saw him in the morning in a dug-out, he was white with fear and shaking like a leaf. One of our lieutenants got shell shock, and he literally cried like a child. Some that I saw carried down out of the firing line were struggling and calling for their mother, while others were blabbering sentences one could not make out. For one to get shell shock it is worse than a wound, a wound will heal, but a chap when he has lost control of his nerves takes a lot before he has got mastery of them again, and it is doubtful if he would ever be able to be relied on again. It is a thing everyone has to fight against, and if he gives in at all he is practically done for as a fighter.
The German artillery also hit the British 61st Division hard and this mattered greatly because its battalions were under strength at about 550 men each, compared with around 900 in the Australian force. The two assaulting battalions in the 184th Brigade had the hardest task in the whole attack. They had to take the Sugarloaf. They lost 140 men to artillery fire before they set out.
Many Australians who fought at Fromelles afterwards talked of spies who had somehow passed Haking’s plans to the Germans. There was talk of farm horses of a certain colour being put in certain pastures as a signal to German pilots. There had to be spies, the Australians contended, because the Germans seemed to foresee everything the Allies did. The Germans didn’t need spies. From Aubers Ridge they could see everything that happened in the allied lines. They knew an attack was coming when on July 18 they saw men bringing up boxes of hand-grenades and rolled mats that were used to cross barbed wire.
The Germans simply read the script that had been thrust under their eyes. They set out to destroy the attack before it began. Had they owned more guns – they had less than half as many as the British and Australians – they might have done so.
THE AUSTRALIAN LINE, spread out over about a mile, ran from right to left like this:
| Brigade: | 15th | 14th | 8th |
| Commander: | Elliott | Pope | Tivey |
| Assaulting battalions: | 59th, 60th | 53rd, 54th | 31st, 32nd |
| Support and carrying battalion: | 58th | 55th | 30th |
| Reserve battalion: | 57th | 56th | 29th |
The 15th had to cover up to 400 yards to reach the German line; if the allied artillery failed, its men would be exposed to flanking fire from the Sugarloaf. The 14th had to cover about 250 yards and the 8th about 120. The 8th were exposed to a German salient to the north, outside the battle zone, called the Tadpole.
At 5.45 pm, when the bombardment of the German frontline still had fifteen minutes to run, the men of the 59th and 60th battalions climbed over the parapet into no-man’s land and headed off through the long grass towards oblivion. Thirty yards out the 59th came under rifle fire from the Sugarloaf. Then a machine gun opened up. The battalion moved through the orchard of an old farm, heading towards a line of willow stumps and the Laies ditch. The German fire grew heavier as the allied artillery lifted its bombardment off the German frontline. The Australians peered through the smoke haze and saw Germans manning the parapet. Nothing was as it should be. Australians fell all along the line. Lieutenant-Colonel E. A. Harris, the battalion commander, sent his second-in-command, Major Bert Layh, back to tell Elliott that the battalion was pinned down halfway to the German line. Then Harris came down with shell-shock. Meanwhile wounded from the 60th had returned to the Australian lines to say that their battalion had broken into the German breastwork. Elliott concluded that the attack was succeeding and ordered the 59th to make another attempt.
The attack was failing, quickly and horribly. The waves of the 60th crossed the Laies and came under heavy fire, much of it from the Sugarloaf. A few from the 59th may have reached the German parapet. Mostly the survivors of the 59th and 60th were out beyond the German wire, in shell holes or hastily dug scrapes. Most of the officers had been killed or wounded.
Lieutenant Tom Kerr of the 60th got close enough to the enemy line to see Germans ‘standing out shoulder high … looking as if they were wondering what was coming next’. He lay in a shell hole and decided to send a message back. The only paper that could be found was the fly-leaf from a New Testament carried by a private. Kerr wrote: ‘Here with 4 men, a few yards from parapet. Must have reinforcements. Useless going on without.’ No reinforcements came. Kerr and his three men crawled back after midnight. Kerr had been wounded in the shoulder and the ribs. He refused to leave the battlefield.
Major Tom Elliott, second-in-command of the 60th, was a twenty-two-year-old Duntroon graduate whom Pompey Elliott (no kin) regarded as a brilliant soldier. Pompey wanted Tom to stay at brigade headquarters and help him. Tom wanted to go with his battalion and went. He died from a wound to the chest. Geoff McCrae, the poet and architecture student who led the 60th, died from a bullet to the neck only eighty yards from the Australian trench. That morning he had written:
Dearest Mother Father and Helen,
Today I lead my Battalion in our assault on the German lines and I pray God I may come through alright and bring honour to our name. If not I will at least have laid down my life for you and my country which is the greatest privilege one can ask for.
Farewell dear people the hour approacheth.
Love from
Geoff.
Pompey Elliott had written to his wife, Kate, the same day.
… we hope to so pound the enemy’s trenches that we won’t have much loss at all … I am going to watch the assault from our front line. I cannot stay back here. If mischance comes I can only say God bless and keep you my own dear little true wife and helpmate and [may] our dear little pets comfort you always … My will is in the safe at the office.
Tom Elliott wrote to his sister. ‘Some operations are pending … Don’t worry about me, I’ll be alright.’
Pompey Elliott wrote to McCrae’s parents two days after the battle. Elliott told them he believed ‘from the commencement that an attack as such was doomed to failure for we had no sufficient reserves & the artillery Bombardment was far from being sufficient’. He likened the assault to the charge at the Nek on Gallipoli, but ‘on a tenfold scale’. In his sloping handwriting with its dramatic downstrokes Elliott explained that Australians searching for wounded in no-man’s land had found McCrae’s body. ‘He was quite dead kneeling on one knee with his pistol pointing towards the enemy.’
Two days later Elliott wrote again. The body had been brought in and buried. ‘An examination … disclosed conclusively that he was shot through the head … & evidently died instantly as he knelt behind the lines directing operations.’ Geoff was ‘a true soldier & gentleman. The only fault I have ever had to find with him was that he was too gentle & kindly & hated to tell off those who thoroughly deserved it but this fault (if fault it was) was rapidly being remedied as he grew older & more experienced.’
McCrae’s father could not reconcile himself to the death of a son he had loved so dearly and who had promised so much. For years afterwards he wrote to Elliott, seeking such small details as the location of the farmhouse in which Geoff had spent his last night and the name of his batman. The McCraes left their son’s bedroom as it was and placed his military cap on the pillow.
IN THE CENTRE the two assaulting battalions of the 14th Brigade had to cover only about half as much ground as the 15th to reach the German line. Two hundred and fifty yards was still a long way across open ground in daylight, and part of the 53rd Battalion, which was on the right of the line, was hit by the same fire from the Sugarloaf that had stopped, and was now wiping out, the two assaulting battalions of the 15th. Both battalions of the 14th took rifle and machine-gun fire from the front. The allied artillery had blown gaps in the German breastwork but it had neither demolished it nor ‘frightened’ the Germans still alive, as Haking predicted it would.
The two battalions of the 14th nevertheless stormed the frontline. The first wave stayed there briefly to flush Germans out of their dugouts. The three waves following went on to look for their objective, the German support lines. Here was a success, of sorts, but the battle had been going only thirty minutes and the toll of officers had been frightful. The men in the German lines were looking for someone to tell them what to do.
A German machine gunner killed Lieutenant-Colonel Ignatius Norris, a thirty-five-year-old Sydney barrister who was well liked by his men, as he went forward looking for the support trenches. His last words were: ‘Here, I’m done, will somebody take my papers?’ He had received Holy Communion from a Catholic priest that morning. His wife, along with his infant son, had several weeks earlier sailed to London to be near him. Captain Charles Arblaster, a twenty-one-year-old Duntroon graduate, found himself commanding the 53rd Battalion.
The 54th, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Walter Cass, a veteran of the Boer War and Gallipoli, suffered even worse. It lost all its company commanders and a string of junior officers in the first half-hour, many of them before the battalion had left its own lines. Cass had been shot twice in twenty minutes during the second battle of Krithia on Gallipoli. Nearly five hours passed before, shivering from the cold wind, he was put on a stretcher to be ‘dressed & plugged up’. Now, fourteen months later, and unlike most of his brother officers, he had made the German frontline without a wound. Cass set up his temporary headquarters in a German dugout that had a table, an armchair, a stove, electric light, an electric bell and paper-covered walls decorated with gold moulding similar to that used on picture frames. His long night was just beginning.
Cass’s men pushed on looking for the support trenches. They saw the white walls of a ruined farm ahead and passed ditches filled with water. Now they were perhaps 300 yards inside the German frontline. Where were these support trenches that they were supposed to occupy? Where were those lines that showed like veins on the aerial photographs? The truth began to soak in. There was no support line, not in the form of a trench system anyway. And these ditches half full of water? They were probably old trenches, perhaps from 1915. And the water? The Germans might have been using the old trenches as holding ponds for water pumped out of the deep dugouts on the frontline. So what were the men to do? They couldn’t consolidate a position that didn’t exist. They began building a new frontline, shovelling mud into sandbags alongside the farthest ditch. The mud was so heavy with clay that it sometimes had to be pushed off the spade by hand.
Meanwhile engineers were digging a sap across no-man’s land and the 55th, the ‘carrying’ battalion, was bringing across sandbags and ammunition. The first wave, having cleared out the German frontline and sent prisoners back, moved on to help the men building the new frontline at the ditch.
ON THE LEFT the 8th Brigade had been badly shot up by the German artillery and ‘drop shorts’ from Australian guns while waiting to attack. The facts are unclear, but one of the assaulting battalions, the 31st, appears to have suffered hundreds of casualties from this. Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Toll, commander of the 31st, was bleeding from a head wound but that didn’t stop him leading his troops to the German line. What then happened to the men of the 31st and 32nd battalions was almost identical to what happened to the two battalions in the centre. The artillery had not done what it was supposed to do. As the men began to cross no-man’s land they ran into rifle and machine-gun fire from the front and their left flank. Corporal Richard Kennedy of the 32nd wrote to his sister that the first thing he saw on emerging from an opening in the parapet ‘was the man in front of me blown to atoms, and then on the ground hundreds of my mates dead and wounded … They were in all positions, and piled in heaps …’ Kennedy was hit twice in the first forty yards, but crawled to the German lines and five hours later crawled back again. He ended up in a hospital in England where the bed linen was branded ‘Chorlton House Workhouse’.
Many officers fell in no-man’s land, but the two battalions took the German frontline, captured prisoners and watched other Germans fleeing across the grassland behind. The Australians moved on but couldn’t find the support trench, mainly because it didn’t exist. All they found were flooded ditches.
Toll left a few men in the old German frontline and went on. His men came upon a ditch filled with water to waist height and containing several dead Germans and one who was frantically alive. On a footbridge across the ditch an Australian soldier stood prodding at this German with a bayonet. The German would duck completely under the water, then at intervals bring his head out to say ‘Officer’. He was rescued by an Australian lieutenant and sent back as a prisoner.
Toll sent a message back to his brigade commander, Brigadier-General Edwin Tivey: ‘6.30 pm. Four waves well over 200 yards beyond enemy’s parapets. No enemy works found yet, so am digging in.’ Accompanied by a lieutenant and a messenger Toll went on another 200 yards, looking for the support trenches, then returned. Shells started to land among his men and German troops appeared to be massing in front. Toll sensibly concluded that the position was too vulnerable. As dusk came he led the 31st back to the old German frontline. There was a chance it was at least defensible. Out in no-man’s land wounded men from the assaulting and carrying battalions lay groaning and weeping in shell holes. Engineers began to dig a trench across no-man’s land.
Private Les Martin, the machine gunner in the 8th Brigade, crossed no-man’s land around this time. ‘You could hear the moans of the wounded and dying wherever you went,’ he said. He thought the German frontline ‘much superior to ours’. Behind the German frontline he found himself ‘floundering in muck and water in places up to our waist, other places it was just mud and took us all our time to get along’.
AT DUSK THE truth about the Australian attack at Fromelles went something like this. The artillery had failed to subdue the Germans and their machine guns. Haking had never possessed the means to demolish the German line. Elliott’s attack on the right had failed. Those still unwounded in his two attacking battalions, and they were few, were pinned down in no-man’s land. The attacks in the centre and on the left had succeeded, in the formal sense anyway. The infantrymen had reached their objectives. But could they hold them? Four battalions were digging in several hundred yards behind the old German frontline. Most of the officers in these battalions had been killed or wounded. The new line was not continuous; it amounted to four islands in a sea of Germans. Contact between the four battalions was either intermittent or non-existent. The men had followed orders and left the old German frontline unoccupied, except at the points where Cass and Toll had established themselves. This meant that the Germans could creep around the flanks of the ‘islands’, reoccupy their front breastwork and cut off the Australians. The islands were not good defensive positions anyway. They were being built up by filling sandbags with mud. There were no German support trenches to occupy. Here was a final truth: the British general staff had much to learn about the interpretation of aerial photographs.
Of course these truths were not apparent at dusk that night. The pattern in these battles was for divisional and corps commanders to begin to lose control the moment the infantry hopped the bags. Modern artillery killed at long range and this meant that headquarters had to be set up well back from the front. Modern artillery meant that the telephone lines to the front were invariably blown up. Modern artillery meant that the frontline was invariably wreathed in smoke, so that observers could only guess at what was happening. Brigadiers tried to work out what was happening from a mile or so behind the front (although Elliott at Fromelles was only 300 yards back); divisional commanders issued fresh orders from several miles further back; corps commanders were several miles back again. And Haig, the commander-in-chief? He might be twenty or thirty miles away. Misinformation flowed up this line and back down it. Everyone in the chain of command wanted to give the impression that they actually knew what was happening behind the smoke some of them couldn’t even see. None wanted to be thought timid.
So the ‘truths’ that General McCay, the 5th Division commander, thought he saw around dusk were rather different to those above. He was entitled to think there was some chance of success. Pigeons from Cass and Toll had been his main informants. The messages they carried spoke of difficulties and the need for reinforcements. But the men were ‘in’. And they were holding on. McCay and Elliott knew they had problems on the right with the 15th Brigade. They didn’t know how bad these problems were. The trouble here was the Sugarloaf and its ever-twinkling machine guns. The British infantry had failed to take the position and it was hardly their fault.
THE BRITISH 61ST Division, badly under strength, had attacked on a front of about a mile. On the extreme right the British quickly broke into the German line and took about eighty prisoners, but those going directly for the Wick Salient found the wire mostly intact and were shot to pieces by machine guns. Much the same thing happened to the brigade in the centre. Brigadier-General Charles Carter’s 184th Brigade, on the left, went for the Sugarloaf after being hit hard by German artillery before its advance began. Those attacking just to the right of the salient found the wire uncut. Those going directly for the Sugarloaf came under heavy shrapnel fire.
Major-General Colin Mackenzie, the British divisional commander, believed his brigade in the centre had made a ‘small lodgement’ in the German line and that ‘a footing had been gained in the Sugarloaf’. Mackenzie decided to resume the bombardment where the attack had failed. All three brigades would attack again. Haking issued an order around 7.30 pm saying he wanted to strengthen the hold on the Sugarloaf to help the Australians. Then the British discovered that they had no hold on the Sugarloaf. They decided to make a fresh assault at 9 pm.
SHORTLY AFTER 8 PM Elliott received a message from General Carter: ‘Am attacking at 9 pm. Can your right battalion co-operate?’ The message had passed through both divisional headquarters. About twenty minutes earlier McCay had given Elliott permission to use half of the 58th battalion (the ‘carrying’ battalion) to reinforce the 59th and 60th. Elliott now decided to throw in these two companies from the 58th at 9 pm to help the new English attack on the Sugarloaf.
They set off under Major Arthur Hutchinson, a twenty-one-yearold Duntroon graduate and son of a Tasmanian clergyman. All the Sugarloaf’s machine guns seemed to be turned on Hutchinson’s two companies, but they kept going and apparently carried on some men of the 59th who had been sheltering in no-man’s land. Ellis, the historian of the 5th Division, wrote:
At the enemy wire the fire became hellish, irresistible. Major Hutchinson, his body riddled with bullets, perished gloriously, close to the German parapet. The attack melted into nothingness – passed in a few quivering moments from the realm of man’s high endeavour to the record of his deathless failures … The ground was covered with [the brigade’s] dead and dying, among whom the wounded dragged themselves painfully, seeking the fearful security of a shell hole or a mound that might give some protection from the machine gun fire that still enveloped them … the fruitlessness of further sacrifice was now apparent to all. After a couple of hours the remnants of all three battalions commenced to drift back to their old front line, wounded assisting wounded, those still unscathed bearing some comrade too badly stricken to aid himself.
Hutchinson’s body was never found. Elliott unsuccessfully recommended him for the Victoria Cross. And the sacrifice had been for nothing. The British had not attacked at 9 pm: that’s why it seemed all the firepower of the Sugarloaf had been directed at Hutchinson’s two companies.
Around 8.20 pm Haking had discovered a little more, all of it discouraging, about the true position of the 61st Division. When, shortly afterwards, he heard about Carter’s proposed attack on the Sugarloaf he ordered it cancelled. Haking had not told the 5th Division HQ of this, possibly because he was unaware that Elliott had been asked to participate. Nevertheless around 8.35 the 5th Division HQ received this message from the 61st Division: ‘Under instructions from corps commander am withdrawing from captured enemy line after dark.’ McCay’s headquarters did not immediately pass this to Elliott. We have to consider the possibility here that McCay may have been unaware that Elliott was using Hutchinson’s two companies to help Carter. At 9.10 pm McCay received a message from Haking saying that the 61st Division was withdrawing from no-man’s land and would renew its attack next day. Now McCay’s staff apparently thought that Elliott should be told what was happening. He was sent this message: ‘9.25 pm. 61st Division not attacking tonight. General Elliott may withdraw 59th Battalion and its reinforcements if he thinks attack is not likely to succeed.’ It was, as we know, too late. Hutchinson and his men had gone off to their deaths sharply at 9 pm in support of a non-existent attack.
Soldiers and historians have argued for close to ninety years about this incident. McCay and his staff have most usually been blamed, directly or by innuendo. McCay was always going to be an attractive target because he was so easy to dislike. And yet, to be fair, it is hard to blame him alone for the sacrifice of Hutchinson and the two companies. Bean wrote that there was ‘a failure at the headquarters of the 5th Australian Division to grasp either the meaning of the message [from the 61st Division] or the importance of sending it on to General Elliott’. Ross McMullin, Elliott’s biographer, puts the blame on Carter and his staff in the 184th Division. ‘They asked for the assistance in the first place; they should have ensured that the 15th Brigade was informed that they no longer required it.’
AROUND 11 PM ELLIOT was still unaware of how completely things had failed on his front or of the carnage among the two-and-a-half battalions he had sent out. He thought the 60th was in the German breastwork and the 59th almost there; he didn’t know where Hutchinson’s men were. Then at 12.30 am he received a message from Major Charles Denehy of the 58th:
Men of all battalions are coming back from No-Man’s Land and I expect that they will gradually drift back to the line. Many men are wounded, many are not. Very many officers are casualties, including Majors McCrae, Elliott and Hutchinson, all of whom are reported dead, and seems impossible to organise … Report seems unanimous that not a single man of 15th Brigade has now arrived in enemy’s trench, as enemy’s flares are coming from the whole of the front allotted to this brigade. I am now organising the defence of our original trenches …
There it was: the truth, long delayed and awful.
AND NOW THE wounded were coming back. Some crawled. Others were dragged in. They lay on the firesteps and the duckboards in the bays and traverses and along the saps that led away from the front. Red and green signal rockets burst in the black sky. Blood was splashed and smeared everywhere and lay in dark patches on the clayey ground and the air smelled of fire and ashes and failure. Jimmy Downing wrote that the smell of blood was still in his nostrils four years later. The communications trenches became congested. Stretcher-bearers, their knuckles bleeding from repeatedly being barked against trench walls, sometimes took hours to carry a man 1000 yards. The wounded cried out from no-man’s land, as they would for days. Downing heard one man in delirium singing a marching song. A machine gun opened up, then stopped. The wounded man continued singing. The machine gun rattled again and the man sang no more. ‘The interminable hours wore on,’ Downing wrote. ‘It was a night of horror and doubt.’
In the morning it was worse. The men could see what no-man’s land was like. Charles Bean borrowed Brudenell White’s car to drive from the Somme to the battlefield, arriving early in the afternoon. He wrote in his official history: ‘Especially in front of the 15th Brigade, around the Laies, the wounded could be seen everywhere raising their limbs in pain or turning hopelessly, hour after hour, from one side to the other.’
And in the morning the sums were done. The 60th battalion had been wiped out as a fighting force. It went out 877-strong and now, on the morning after, Lieutenant Tom Kerr, wounded in the shoulder and ribs and the only officer present, abruptly found himself in charge of a ‘battalion’. Sixty-one men answered the roll; another forty or so turned up later. The 59th had suffered nearly as badly.
The brigade had gone into the line about 3750-strong. Now it was down to about 2000. The most common wounds were to the lower limbs, followed by wounds to the upper limbs, then head and neck wounds. The ratio of dead to wounded was unusually high. Arthur Butler, author of the official history of the Australian medical services in the Great War, said that this was because many men were shot while lying wounded in no-man’s land or simply died there from lack of help. One man, wounded in both legs and one arm, was brought in after spending nine or ten days out in no-man’s land. He had survived by sucking on a strip of tunic that he soaked, hour after hour, day after day, in the muddy water in the bottom of a shell hole.
In the morning Elliott went to the frontline. Lieutenant J. D. Schroder went with him.
What had been ordinary sandbagged trenches were now heaps of debris, and it was impossible to walk far without falling over dead men. Although the Hun had a barrage down and there must have been dozens of machine guns operating from the Sugarloaf, Pompey never thought of ducking, but went from battalion to company headquarters and so on right along the line. A word for a wounded man here, a pat of approbation to a blearyeyed digger there, he missed nobody. He never spoke a word all the way back … but went straight inside, put his head in his hands and sobbed his heart out.
Private William Boyce returned from no-man’s land early that morning. ‘This was when Pompey Elliott disclosed his true self,’ he said. ‘[He] was there with tears running down his face, apologising for the mix up … He was very, very upset … “don’t blame me for this,” he said, “this is wrong, it’s not my fault”, he was definitely very upset.’
Strange words for a brigade commander to offer in the presence of a private. Such men were supposed to at least pretend to infallibility. They were supposed to be stoic in the face of outrageous casualties. This was what the Great War had come to be about: stoicism at the top and casualties, millions of them, at the bottom. Tears and doubts were for wives and mothers in Manchester and Ballarat. But then few senior officers went to the front immediately after a battle. Few stepped around the gore and looked into the eyes, bug-like and white, of men who had been dragged back without arms and legs. And Elliott was truly ‘very upset’. The memory of that morning would burn in his brain for the rest of his life. On that day in front of Fromelles he didn’t know that much about the battle beyond what had happened to his own brigade. He didn’t know about the failure at Boar’s Head a few weeks earlier. He didn’t know that much about the on-again, off-again prelude to the battle and the sinuous game played by Monro and Haig. He was new to the western front and knew little about artillery. When over the next few years he learned about these things the memory of that morning would turn him to anger.
Bean saw Elliott some time that afternoon and wrote in his diary: ‘Old Elliott was dead asleep when I called – but McCay came in and woke him up. When Elliott came out I felt almost as if I were in the presence of a man who had just lost his wife. He looked down and could hardly speak – he was clearly terribly depressed and over wrought.’