The morning after
An Australian soldier – some said he was an officer – wandered about near the German lines after the battle of Fromelles. He had been hit in the forehead and skin hung over his eyes. He was blinded and out of his mind. He would blunder around in circles, hands outstretched, then fall down. Then he would get up and stumble around again. This went on for days. Some said the Germans were using him as a decoy. The Germans eventually killed him. It is unclear whether they did this with a bomb or a bullet. It is also unclear whether they did this out of cussedness or kindness. This was the Great War and men did terrible things and did not always understand why they did them.
AROUND MIDNIGHT ON July 19 the generals running the Fromelles battle from a few miles back were being ambushed by reality – but slowly, teasingly, by one scrap of paper after another. Amid the accounts of failures and – that quaint military noun – retirements, there were also reports of local successes. It was lost and it wasn’t lost. This battalion was ‘in’ and that one wasn’t.
The confusion was profound, but a rough profit-and-loss account was starting to take form. Six brigades – three Australian, three British – had rushed the German lines six hours earlier. It was now clear that four of these assaults had failed: those of the three British brigades and Elliott’s 15th. Which meant the right-hand side of the attack and part of the centre was lost. On the left four battalions of Australians – two from the 14th Brigade and two from the 8th – were still scrapping behind the German lines, helped by reinforcements that had been sent over later. These battalions were not joined up; there was a big gap where one brigade ended and the other started.
And now the Germans were counter-attacking, working their way between the Australian strong points. There had been no order to leave men behind in the German frontline trench while the main body of Australians went forward. This meant that the Germans could creep between the Australian positions, re-occupy their own frontline and shoot the Australians down from behind.
The generals simply knew that their men were ‘in’. The Australians behind the old German frontline didn’t know that much either, except that they lived in chaos and from moment to moment. Globs of mud stuck to their boots. Some were often up to their waists in water. They took rifles from dead men and laid them down nearby so that they had spares if their own weapon became clogged. They tried to move German sandbags from one side of a position to the other and found that the bags were rotten and fell apart in their hands. They looked out through mist and artillery smoke and now and then saw the spiked helmets of Bavarians pricking the night sky, some in front, some moving towards the flanks. They heard the squelch of shovels going into sodden clay and the cries of the wounded behind them in no-man’s land. They heard German officers shouting orders up ahead. They looked for their own officers, most of whom were either dead or wounded. They looked at the ground and tried to work it out; the Germans knew it and they didn’t. They looked to the sky and saw flare after flare. What did these mean? They tried to light cigarettes with soggy matches, then ran out of cigarettes. They were also running out of bombs and ammunition. They had done the job, broken into the German front, well in, but they couldn’t hold on unless reinforcements arrived.
The string of Australian ‘islands’ ran something like this. In the centre there was Captain Arblaster and the remnants of the 53rd Battalion, about 100 yards inside the old German frontline. Next to him, but not always in touch, were the 54th and some of the 55th, who had been sent over as reinforcements. Behind them, in the old German frontline, was Colonel Cass of the 54th. This was the 14th Brigade’s front.
East of Cass, also in the old frontline, was Colonel Toll, bleeding from a head wound and trying to direct his 31st Battalion, which was 100 to 150 yards ahead. And on the extreme left, frightfully exposed, its flank hinged to thin air, was the 32nd. This was the front of the 8th Brigade.
MEN FROM THE ‘carrying’ and reserve battalions had drifted into the fight on the 8th Brigade’s front. Sapper Fred Strode went out to help dig the communication trench across no-man’s land to the new front. Just before he was due to climb the ladder and go over the parapet ‘we was told to read a verse out of our bible, because a lot of us, won’t be coming back’.
Private William Barry, from the 8th Brigade’s reserve battalion, went over after the infantry attack had been going about three hours. He handed over the bombs and ammunition he was carrying and went back for more.
I was in ‘no man’s land’, near the German parapet when a lad in my platoon came up and asked me to show him the way across the wires as he was wounded in the head and bleeding freely. After helping him on his way I returned, only to meet another poor lad with his arm shattered and he wanted to know if there were any Red Cross men about. During all that night I never saw any. I helped him as far as the barbed wire and again returned. The enemy was now shelling us unmercifully and everybody was running amok with himself, for by the way they were shouting out, there was nobody in charge of the men. The German artillery fire was growing fiercer every minute, in fact it was hellish and their shells were landing with great accuracy and killing the boys like flies. About ten o’clock I shifted my position … and was able to get into the German trench. No sooner was I there, when a shell struck the top of the parapet with a terrific explosion. Two boys standing alongside of me started to cry for their mother and I told them to cut that out, but pray to god to get them out of this hole. No sooner were the words out of my mouth, when another shell hit the parapet just above my head and I remembered nothing more.
The two assaulting battalions on Barry’s front had called for reinforcements about 8.50 pm. They were being swept by machine-gun fire from three distant German strong points and bombed from the flanks. A sap was dug across no-man’s land and eventually became blocked with Australian dead just short of the German frontline. The 32nd Battalion, at the extreme left of the Australian line, appeared to suffer worse in the German counter-attacks. At 9.40 it sent back a message: ‘Frontline cannot be held unless strong reinforcements are sent. Enemy’s machine-gunners are creeping up … The artillery is not giving support. Sandbags required in thousands. Men bringing sandbags are being wounded in the back. Water urgently required.’ Twenty minutes later the 32nd reported that it was being forced back. It fell back further around 2.30 am when the Germans attacked again. The Germans were behind the 32nd and men from the 29th – Private Barry’s battalion – who had been drawn into the fight. The Australians here were just about surrounded.
They decided their only chance to avoid death or captivity was to make a rush, through the Germans, back to their own frontline. This they did at 3.45 am. There were about 150 men in the charge. They fought the Germans with bayonets and bombs; German machine guns fired at them from all four sides, but some of these men made it into no-man’s land and eventually scrambled into the Australian frontline. By 4 am the battle here was lost.
WE LEFT PRIVATE Barry unconscious in the German breastwork, hit by a shell. Around daybreak he felt Germans pulling at his leg. Barry pretended to be dead, then passed out again. He regained consciousness several hours later. He felt no pain but couldn’t move. Several Australians, stripped of their equipment, came up and told Barry they were all prisoners. Barry wrote that the Germans were ‘bumping’ the Australians with rifle butts and prodding them with bayonets. A German sighted his rifle at Barry but was sent away by a German officer. The officer cut open Barry’s trousers and exposed a terrible wound to his right knee and another in the calf. The officer bandaged Barry’s leg and began to question him. Barry answered with ‘the most awful lies imaginable’.
The German wanted to know how many Australians were in France. Barry told him three to five million, with the conscripts yet to come.
‘Wass you a fria willie, a volunteer, eh?’
‘Yes,’ said Barry.
‘You Australians are b----- cowards. We are not at war with you, but you came over here last night and went hough [he imitated a bayonet thrust] while we always fight a long way off.’
By now, Barry wrote, the German was angry with him. No, Barry would not be sent to a doctor. As he left the officer said something to several German soldiers standing nearby ‘and I got one of the worst beltings it was possible to give a man’. Barry lapsed back into unconsciousness. He was beaten again as the Germans dragged him to the rear. A German Red Cross man gave him a piece of black bread and a German military coat. ‘It was wet with blood, but that didn’t matter.’
Barry, to his horror, found that he was at a place where the dead were being stacked. ‘I was sitting on the edge of a hole about forty feet long, twenty feet wide and fifteen feet deep and into this hole the dead were being thrown without any fuss or respect. Friend and Foe being treated alike, it was pitiful to see the different expressions on their faces, some with a peaceful smile while others showed they had passed away in agony.’
Three months later the Germans amputated Barry’s leg.
MAJOR MUIR PURSER of the 30th, the 8th Brigade’s ‘carrying’ battalion, lost the last subaltern left in his company to shellfire as the remnants of the brigade returned to the Australian front about 5 am. ‘Dawn showed our trenches to be a shambles – breastworks badly damaged; dead, wounded and blood everywhere … I met General Tivey [Brigadier-General Edwin Tivey, commander of the 8th Brigade] on his way to the front line. His lip showed a spot of blood, as though he had been biting it, and he remarked to me that it had been a “great fight”.’ Purser called the roll of his company. He was the only one of six officers left; only about thirty of the 181 other ranks who had gone into the fight answered the roll.
Bean saw Tivey that afternoon and wrote in his diary: ‘Poor old Tivey looked quite overdone – with eyes like boiled gooseberries. He had been up two nights …’ Tivey told Bean: ‘Men who were at Anzac said that the shell fire at Gallipoli was child’s-play to this.’
Ellis, the 5th Division’s historian, said Tivey had gone to the frontline as soon as he could get away from headquarters. He stood there silent with grief. Then he ‘picked his way carefully through the frontline among the bodies of the men he had loved so well’.
Toll was the last to leave the German trench. He strode back proudly. A man who was near him said: ‘Col Toll’s head was covered in blood. I don’t know how he got back to our lines.’ Private William Miles was near Toll just before the retreat. Toll said: ‘Well, men, no-one could ask you to do more – get back to our lines, but don’t bunch up.’ Miles wrote that he was halfway across no-man’s land when another Australian passed him ‘flying’. The man yelled out to him: ‘Never knew I won a Stawell Gift, did you Billy?’
Private Les Martin had been wounded before he left the Australian lines. Now he was coming back as machine-gun bullets fizzed around him. In no-man’s land he fell on a German spike that gashed his leg to the bone. Then a small piece of shell, about the size of a threepence, hit him in the leg. He told his brother that the Australian lines that morning were ghastly. He headed for the dressing station.
Several bodies I passed had been burned by fires igniting their clothing, wounded were crawling about here and there but mainly lying as near the parapet as possible waiting for stretcher bearers who never seemed to come, a lot of them hardly uttering a sound although they had been badly hit. One passed here and there hands, arms, legs, quite detached from the bodies. One chap had his head cut clean off by a shell. He was bending at the time and the shell caught him right at the back of the neck. A lot of the wounded were continuously crying out with pain, others were calling for water, water, water … Some of the chaps down at the dressing station appeared to be all bandages – some of their faces were unrecognisable, especially those who had been hit about the mouth. Their cheeks were risen to an enormous size. Others had great holes in their sides or backs you could almost put your hands into. Some were minus both feet, others with hands or arms off.
Private Martin went to a hospital in England. By early 1918 he had been made a lieutenant. A few months later a shell blew off his right arm. He returned home and eventually bought three grocery shops. He drove back and forth to them, steering his car with one hand.
Sapper Fred Strode had been digging the sap across no-man’s land for the 8th Brigade. An officer told him and two others to try to hold the line while the others carried two machine guns back. Each of the men had four hand grenades. The officer gave Strode an extra three or four in a Malvern Star tucker bag and wished the men luck. Strode and his two companions were in the German front trench. The Germans advanced in columns of twenty and the bomb fight began. Strode said the three Australians scattered the first row of Germans, then let fly at the second.
… we lost the man on the right, he toss a hand grenade over and forgot to pull out the pin, but one of the Germans pull the pin out and let fly at him, and a piece of the casen hit him in the forehead just between the eyes, and he fell back into my arms. I could see he was going very white, and he died straight away. And then they [the Germans] called for the bombers again to shift us, so my mate said he will have a look to see how far back they were, and then he got shot in the belly, he said it was burning like hell. I said to him I will carry you back, he said get back, while the going is good, but I did not leave him, and then I saw him fall over, that was the end of him. I could see they were coming into the trench again, so by that time I had only 1 bomb left so I let them have it, and then I made my run back, when I was just about ½ way back, the ground was just like a hail storm hitting the ground, all around me, how I got back I do not know …
Sometime after 5 am General McCay was told that the 8th Brigade, what was left of it, was back in the Australian lines. The 14th Brigade, the men under Cass and Arblaster, were now alone in the German trenches. After eleven hours they were all that was left of Haking’s grand vision.
IT HAD BEEN the worst night of Colonel Walter Cass’s life and now, as the golden lights of dawn began to stipple this place of death and smoke, he knew things would only become worse. Before long the Germans would be able to see everything. They would see him vulnerable and isolated. Cass was wet and cold. He had lost most of his officers. He had indeed lost a large part of his 54th battalion. From his position in the old German frontline he didn’t really know who was alive and who wasn’t, or where those who were alive were. He didn’t know with any certainty what was happening on his flanks. The 53rd, under Captain Arblaster, was on his right; the 8th Brigade was on his left. Cass knew that both these formations were in trouble and could collapse at any time.
At 3 am he had sent a message back saying the 53rd appeared to be giving way and the Germans were coming in. Twenty minutes later he wrote that his position was ‘serious’. His men had no grenades and the Germans were massing again. Twenty minutes later again he sent a message saying the position was ‘very serious’. The 53rd was retiring. The Germans were re-occupying their own frontline on either side of him. At 4.20 am he reported: ‘Position almost desperate. Have got 55th [the ‘carrying’ battalion] and a few of the 54th together and have temporarily checked enemy. But do get our guns to work at once, please. The 53rd have lost confidence temporarily and will not willingly stand their ground. Some appear to be breaking across No-Man’s Land. If they give way to my right rear, I must withdraw or be surrounded.’
All through he remained calm and resolute. We don’t know whether he had time to reflect on the great quest of his life, a Canadian woman named Helena Holmes, a chiselled beauty who was ten years his junior. He had been courting her for five years – by letter. He had met her on a liner crossing the Indian Ocean in 1911 while she was on a world tour with a chaperone. Cass went ashore when the ship docked in Western Australia and bought her an armful of yellow roses. Then the correspondence, tender and flirtatious, began. Cass sent her petals of roses and violets by post. He hinted at marriage and finally proposed and thought he had been turned down.
By now Helena had become a lieutenant in the Canadian medical corps and was heading for London. A month before the battle of Fromelles Cass wrote: ‘My recollection of you is as of a beautiful queen with a “touch-me-not” air about you that made me want to take you in my arms. Oh, if only I had dared. I shouldn’t have been soldiering now – would have been married and settled down into a fat old major of 40 …’ A week before Fromelles he wrote again: ‘If I get out of this war in one piece and alive you are to marry me or do please make up your mind to it.’ He hoped to meet her in London. It would be his first glimpse of her in five years.
Sometime around 2 am Cass must have realised that he could expect no help on the right. That was where the 15th Brigade was supposed to be, and there was no sign of it. German flares were going up from positions where the 15th should have been. The men of the 53rd under Arblaster held the right. Around 2 am they saw figures in the mist, creeping past their flank and heading for the old German frontline. They opened fire on them, then stopped, in case the shadows were the 15th Brigade. Soon after bombs came lobbing in from the direction of those shadows. Meanwhile the Germans had attacked from the front. When the Australians tried to answer this fire some were shot in the back. The Germans were also behind them. Arblaster had just about lost contact with Cass’s forward troops on his left; and he was running out of ammunition.
He decided to turn and charge the Germans behind him. His men were shot down as soon as they left their trench and had to return. Arblaster was badly wounded. He was taken prisoner and died of septicaemia a few days later. Many of his men were taken prisoner at the same time; others tried to head back across no-man’s land.
GENERAL MONRO, THE army commander, Haking, the corps commander, and McCay and Mackenzie, the two divisional generals, met at 5 am at Haking’s headquarters. While the conference was going on McCay was told by telephone that the 8th Brigade was back in the Australian lines. He was also told of Cass’s message of 4.20 am: ‘Position almost desperate.’ The 14th Brigade was all that was left of the attack. Monro and Haking decided that it should come out.
Captain Norman Gibbins, a bank manager from Ipswich, Queensland, held the left flank of the 14th Brigade after the 8th had pulled out. Gibbins was thirty-eight and had been promoted from the ranks on Gallipoli. He stood six foot four inches and Bean described him as gaunt, brave and humorous. Earlier in the night he saw a man crawling towards them. It turned out to be a German, badly wounded, covered in blood and almost unconscious. Gibbins and another Australian helped him, but when one of them let go of his hand he rose on his knees and started to pray. ‘Oh, cruel, cruel!’ said Gibbins. Gibbins was soon after wounded in the head.
Cass had by now received a message from Colonel Pope, his brigade commander, telling him to be ready to retreat. Cass decided that once the order came he would dribble men back through the sap across no-man’s land.
Sapper William Smith had started digging that sap about 9 pm. ‘The German flares were the best display I had seen, and at times one could have imagined that the battlefield was illuminated with arc lamps.’ A wounded man called to Smith: ‘Cobber, bring me a drink of water.’ Smith gave him a drink from his water bottle. Soon the man was calling out for water again. Smith went back to the Australian breastwork and returned with water in a petrol can. The man took a long pull, even though the water reeked of petrol. He said he was cold. Smith wrapped him in sandbags and placed a bundle under his head as a pillow.
Cass decided that he needed a rearguard to cover his retreat. Captain Gibbins, his head now bandaged, was given the job. Cass still hadn’t received the order to pull back. Seven runners had tried to carry the order to him; all failed to get through. The eighth runner arrived at 7.50 am and the retreat began. Inevitably it was disorderly. Some small groups were surrounded and had to surrender.
Cass was among the last to leave. Gibbins was the last. He clattered along the duckboards of the freshly dug sap until, close to the Australian line, he found it clogged with wounded. He climbed out of the trench and was killed by a bullet to the head. Some of his men claimed he died with a smile on his face. It was about 9 am. The battle was over.
Sapper Smith, in his account of Fromelles written for Reveille in 1936, reports an exchange between Cass and Colonel Pope near the Australian breastwork ‘just before daybreak’.
Both of these officers had been across to the enemy lines. Col. Cass was obviously over-wrought and distressed. He and Pope were having a heated argument about the attack, and Col. Cass unburdened his mind.
‘I tell you that it was wholesale murder, they have murdered my boys.’
‘Oh, pull yourself together man, this is war!’
‘This is not war. They have murdered my boys.’
There are problems with this. There is no evidence that Pope crossed to the German lines. What evidence there is suggests that ‘just before daybreak’ Cass was still in the German frontline trench and Pope was at his headquarters behind the Australian lines. Yet the exchange is plausible, even if it almost certainly didn’t happen when Smith said it did. Cass felt let down.
Ten days after the battle he wrote to Helena Holmes in London, telling her that he was in a ‘rest home’ suffering from rheumatism brought on, he said, by fourteen hours in the wet and cold of the German trenches. He had been lucky, he said. Nine of his officers were lying wounded in a London hospital, but he had escaped with a scratch on the hand.
Dear we got such a ‘strafing’ that I honestly thought it was certain that I should get hit as they simply rained shells on us. And then both flanks retired and left me out there to be chopped up. And I was waiting for the order to withdraw and all the time Germany was smashing in on both sides. We beat them back again and again, despite their bombs & machine guns. My men were simply splendid and only when I gave the order did they come back.
Cass never truly recovered from his long night at Fromelles. He was invalided to England, saw Helena Holmes for the first time in five years and married her in October. Cass’s daughter, Angela, recorded an interview in 2001 in which she said of Fromelles: ‘Some damned politician-cum-soldier was in command … and [Daddy] was left holding the salient with the Germans in front and on each side, and he wasn’t withdrawn for a long time. And he said to this damned politician, “My lads were murdered”, and the politician took against him.’
The politician-cum-soldier was clearly General McCay. Cass was one of the true heroes of Fromelles; he was also one of the few commanders who did what the battle plan said he was supposed to do. He was recommended for the Distinguished Service Order and had to settle for being mentioned in dispatches.
He fared better than his brigade commander. Colonel Pope, from Perth, was a good soldier, much admired, forty-two years old and with gentle eyes. His performance once the Fromelles battle began was just about faultless. He fell asleep at 3 pm on the afternoon after the battle. McCay tried to wake him at 4.30 and, deciding that he was drunk, sacked him and sent him home. Pope asked for a chance to clear himself at a court-martial but Birdwood, who, one suspects, was sympathetic to Pope, refused the request. Pope later returned to France to command the 52nd Battalion.
RATHER THAN HUMILIATING an exhausted brigade commander who may or may not have taken a drink, McCay should have been worrying about his wounded. Hundreds of them lay in no-man’s land. Arms could be seen waving from shell holes. On July 20, the night after the battle, 300 wounded were brought in, some of them missing limbs. When corpses were rolled over so that possessions could be recovered they gave off a short moan, much like dead lambs turned over with the foot.
Jimmy Downing said this work went on for five nights. ‘Parties went out under fire in broad daylight. Some of the wounded were never found. A few crawled in three weeks later, with shattered limbs and maggoty wounds.’ Downing said it took four men an hour to carry one wounded man from the Australian frontline back to safety. ‘We carried till the mind refused its task and limbs sagged, and always there were hundreds for whom each minute decreased the chances of life. Release came to many of the stricken. We left the hopeless cases undisturbed for the sake of those whom the surgeons could save.’
Two Germans, Downing said, carried a wounded Australian back to his lines, saluted, then walked back towards their line. Australians in the next bay were unaware of what had happened. They shot the Germans as they walked back.
Sergeant Simon Fraser, tall and blond, a thirty-nine-year-old farmer from Victoria’s Western District, spent three days bringing in wounded.
One foggy morning in particular, I remember, we could hear someone over towards the German entanglements calling for a stretcher-bearer; it was an appeal no man could stand against, so some of us rushed out and had a hunt. We found a fine haul of wounded and brought them in; but it was not where I heard this fellow calling, so I had another shot for it, and came across a splendid specimen of humanity trying to wriggle into a trench with a big wound in his thigh. He was about 14 stone weight, and I could not lift him on my back; but I managed to get him into an old trench, and told him to lay quiet while I got a stretcher. Then another man about 30 yards out sang out ‘Don’t forget me, cobber.’
Harry Williams, a private in the 60th, had written home two days before the battle. ‘Should I fall,’ he told his mother, ‘I will be proud to know I did so in the cause of Righteousness and Justice … Dad, I have kept your wishes, neither smoked nor taken liquor.’ Williams, who was eighteen, took three weeks to die in a hospital in Essex.
‘Rowley’ Lording, a lance-corporal, was hit in the chest, arm, spine and back. He was dragged back to the Australian line and for ten days fought tetanus. He had just turned seventeen. He didn’t leave his hospital bed until early 1917. He had fifty-two operations over fifteen years and lost an arm. Through all this he married, had three children, worked as an accountant and helped limbless soldiers. But Lording had become dependent on drugs. In 1944 he died in a mental hospital.
Alfred Langan had been captain of Fort Street High School in Sydney and an original member of the Bondi Surf Lifesaving Club. Now he was the medical officer of the 30th Battalion. Three days after the battle he wrote to his father.
For sixteen hours we worked with blood up to our elbows on the poor battered wrecks that were brought to us, in a dugout that was not wide enough to swing a cat in, nor high enough to stand in an upright position … Men with shattered arms staggered in carrying or dragging men with battered legs and begged us to attend to their more unfortunate mates first. Not one of them murmured or complained. God it made you humble and brought the tears to your eyes … I’ll never forget this stunt as long as I live. If ever there was a living Hell, that night and morning was it. Won’t worry you with the sights I saw, they were too awful for words. If there is a God in Heaven may he strike the bastard Kaiser and his crew dead. We lost exactly half the battalion.
MORE WOUNDED MIGHT have been saved if a truce had been allowed to go ahead on the day after the battle. William Miles, a thirty-six-year-old private, had been near Toll at the time of the retreat from the German lines. When he was back in the Australian lines, Miles saw General McCay walking along the duckboards with Tivey. Miles said McCay kept saying ‘They’ll get used to it.’
Miles shortly afterwards volunteered to go out and look for a captain who was thought to be lying wounded in no-man’s land. He wore a Red Cross badge on his arm. He came upon a man who had been hit in the stomach and wanted a drink. Miles told him a drink would make him worse but cut his haversack off to make him more comfortable. Miles then came upon a man shot in the testicles, which had swollen terribly. He borrowed Miles’ knife to rip his trousers open. His agony was so great he wouldn’t let Miles touch him.
Miles slid into another shell hole and heard a voice from the German lines. He saw a German officer beckoning to him. Miles walked slowly towards him, pausing to pick up a pair of field glasses. Firing had stopped all along the line.
‘What are you supposed to be doing?’ the German asked in English.
Tending wounded men, Miles told him.
‘You may be laying wires. This is not the usages of war.’
Miles told him the Red Cross was always allowed to work unmolested.
‘What did you pick up just now?’
Field glasses.
‘It might have been a bomb.’
‘I’ll show you,’ Miles said.
The German told Miles not to put his hands in his pockets but over his head. While the German officer spoke on a field telephone several other officers asked Miles to turn this way and that so that they could photograph him.
The first German officer put the phone down and asked Miles his rank.
‘Only a private, sir.’
‘Well, I want you to go back to your lines and ask an officer to come over here and we will have a “parliament” [this is what Miles wrote in 1929, but it is likely the German said ‘parliamentaire’] and see if we can arrange about collecting the wounded.’
Miles returned to the Australian parapet, which was crowded with men who had watched this parley. Major Alexander Murdoch decided to accompany Miles back to the German line. A Red Cross flag was improvised from a red cushion and waved above the Australian parapet. Murdoch and Miles set out for the German lines, carrying water bottles, which they handed to the wounded. The Germans telephoned their divisional headquarters and came up with a proposal. The Australian stretcher-bearers could work only in their half of no-man’s land. The Germans would clear their half. Murdoch would be blindfolded and held as a hostage behind the German lines. Murdoch said he would have to obtain his superior’s approval for the truce. Both sides saluted and Murdoch and Miles headed back. An informal truce had already broken out all along the front.
McCay’s headquarters (we don’t know for certain whether McCay was there) refused the German proposal and also appears to have put an end to the unofficial truce. According to Miles, wounded men were lifted off stretchers in no-man’s land as their would-be rescuers hurried back to the Australian line. In the Australian official history Bean writes himself into a tangle trying to exonerate McCay over this incident, and one must wonder what he is trying to do and why. Bean worshipped Brudenell White, Birdwood’s chief-of-staff, who often looked over drafts of the official history. White, in turn, was one of a handful of people who saw military virtues in McCay, and in 1940 he made the preposterous suggestion that McCay was ‘greater even than Monash’. Bean noted that orders from Haig’s GHQ said no negotiations were to be held with the enemy. Bean said ‘a divisional general could hardly be blamed for rigid adherence to the orders of the commander-inchief.’ Bean surely knew that such orders were not that rigid.
Robin Corfield’s Don’t forget me, cobber, published in 2000, is the definitive account of Fromelles. Corfield says of McCay:
With about half of his division dead or wounded, on a stretch of ground easily accessible to stretcher-bearers, and with the battle lost, one might think that the General in charge of the 5th Australian Division might have cared, or even fought a corner for his troops. He might, had he one iota of charity, be seen to at least to show posterity that he tried. But of course McCay cared about nobody but himself ever: and all he could say to Bean is that two British generals later approved!
And later: ‘It was McCay’s neglect of the thousands of his men who lay dead, dying, wounded in no-man’s land in those summer days that forms the most damning case against him. Hundreds of others risked their lives to bring in the wounded, and many died at this work. Nothing can pardon McCay for that neglect. Nothing.’
Bean sent a draft of his Fromelles chapters to Brigadier-General Sir James Edmonds, the British official historian, for comment. ‘The mistake made,’ Edmonds wrote, ‘was asking permission to arrange a local suspension of arms. Many such suspensions were made, e.g., even during the battle of Loos, when, near Hulluch, both sides bound up and removed wounded. There was another on 3rd May 1918 at Villers-Bretonneux for half an hour.’
In a letter to Bean in 1926 McCay said he did not ask permission up the line. The diary of the 5th Division says Tivey, the commander of the 8th Brigade, sought permission. McCay is not mentioned in the diary entry, as though to suggest he was not present when the truce was requested.
THAT NIGHT AT Fromelles was one of the worst in Australian history, probably the worst in terms of the scale of the tragedy and the speed of it, a mere fourteen hours; but no-one back home knew this at the time, or in the weeks that followed. Bean filed a story from Amiens that appeared in the Australian newspapers of July 24. Bean had to write something that would get past the censor, and we shouldn’t blame him for that, but his published story ended up a travesty. The report left readers in Australia wondering whether Fromelles had been a defeat, a fleeting victory or a draw, and whether it had been a big raid or an attack. Only the last sentence gave a clue to what had really happened: ‘The losses amongst our troops engaged were severe.’ It would be long after the war ended before Australians realised how severe these losses were.
Before Bean’s newspaper account appeared the British authorities had put out an official communiqué: ‘Yesterday evening, south of Armentières, we carried out some important raids on a front of two miles in which Australian troops took part. About 140 German prisoners were captured.’ Bean wrote in his diary: ‘What is the good of deliberate lying like that? The Germans know it was an attack …’
Some raids. The Australian casualties – dead, wounded, missing, prisoners of war – came in at 5533 and the British at 1547. The Germans estimated their casualties at between 1600 and 2000. Four hundred and seventy Australians had become prisoners of war. All this in one night, and for no gain. The Germans weren’t even fooled into thinking a major attack was taking place away from the Somme.
Haking wrote a report a few days after the battle.
The artillery preparation was adequate. There were sufficient guns and sufficient ammunition. The wire was properly cut, and the assaulting battalions had a clear run into the enemy’s trenches. The Australian infantry attacked in the most gallant manner and gained the enemy’s position, but they were not sufficiently trained to consolidate the ground gained. They were eventually compelled to withdraw and lost heavily in doing so. The 61st [British] Division were not sufficiently imbued with the offensive spirit to go in like one man at the appointed time … With two trained divisions the position would have been a gift after the artillery bombardment … I think the attack, although it failed, has done both divisions a great deal of good …
Haking had a gift for humbug that bordered on the spectacular. We need to take his assertions in order. The artillery was not adequate. If it had been, the machine guns at the Sugarloaf and elsewhere would not have been firing. It follows from this that there were not sufficient guns. The wire wasn’t properly cut. Whether the Australians were sufficiently trained had nothing to do with anything; the most experienced troops in France could not have held the non-existent German second line that Haking set as the objective. The British division did not lack the offensive spirit; it had simply been chopped to pieces by machine guns. The position was never a gift; the problem here was that the artillery bombardment didn’t do what it was supposed to do. Losing 7000 men for the gain of not one yard of ground did not do both divisions a great deal of good.
When the artillery failed at Fromelles everything else had to fail; but this is the way things went on the western front in 1915 and 1916. We cannot blame Haking for failing to see the new world in perfect clarity. We cannot blame him for failing to abandon abruptly the theories he had learned over thirty years. We can blame him for timeless faults that would have got him into trouble with Napoleon or Julius Caesar. He was careless and unreasonably optimistic before the battle and less than honest afterwards. Haig tried to promote Haking to command of an army a few weeks after Fromelles. The War Office overruled Haig.
Edmonds had been on Haig’s staff and knew as much about the war as anyone. He could be prickly but was in an unusually reflective mood when he wrote to Bean in September, 1928.
In viewing 1914–16 I feel that I must remember that from the highest to the lowest we were all amateurs. The generals and staffs of the Regular army, though professionals in name, had never been trained to fight Continental armies or deal with such masses of troops … Economy of life did not become a principle of Haig’s until, I might almost say, August 1918. I try not to judge 1915–17 by 1918 standards.
It is a fair point. The commanders of 1916 could not know what we now know, which is a pity because three Australian divisions were about to be thrown into the battle of the Somme at a village called Pozières.
POMPEY ELLIOTT WROTE a curious letter to Emily Edwards, a second cousin who lived in Wales and with whom he had stayed during the previous year.
God knows why this enterprise was ordered apparently as a feint to distract the enemy’s attention from the Somme area … the Division was hurled at the German Trenches without anything like adequate preparation … the slaughter was dreadful … I am glad to say that my poor boys behaved magnificently. We attacked in four waves & there was not the least hesitation in any one of them although they saw the preceding waves going down before the machine guns like corn before the reaper … One of the best of my Commanding Officers was killed & practically all my best officers the Anzac men who helped to build up my brigade in Egypt are dead. I presume there was some plan at the back of the attack but it is difficult to know what it was. One can only say – It was an Order. I trust those who gave the order may be made to realise their responsibility … I am as you may guess not particularly happy but I am consoled by the fact that none of my own local arrangements went wrong & that the responsibility for this failure if failure it was rests entirely on higher authorities.
He wrote that four days after the battle. What was he trying to say? That it was awful but it wasn’t his fault?
VC CORNER CEMETERY outside Fromelles is the only solely Australian war cemetery in France. The name has nothing to do with the Victoria Cross: soldiers simply referred to the intersection of two roads here as VC Corner. There are no headstones. Underfoot are the remains of 410 Australians. The bodies were picked up after the war. None could be identified.
A plastic poppy blows in the east wind, clattering against the concrete, and sparrows squabble and titter in a shrub in the corner, and all around are tranquil fields littered – still, and probably forever – with shells and shrapnel balls and cartridge cases and shards of iron. Look up to the ridge and you see the church spires of Fromelles and, to the right, Aubers. If it doesn’t look much of a ridge, that’s because it isn’t. But when you stand on it, where the Germans were, you can count the ponies in a field near VC Corner.
The museum in the school at Fromelles smells musty, perhaps because most of what is in here has come out of the earth. There is a red tin of Oxo cubes; here an orange denture, curling at the back edge; there a purple water-canteen, the felt rotted off; here a pipe, small and neat, unbroken but bleached white.
The site of Elliott’s forward headquarters, about 300 yards behind what was the Australian frontline, is now Le Trou Aid Post Cemetery, one of the most beautiful in Flanders, with willows on four sides and a moat. Wounded Australians from Fromelles were treated here as shells dropped nearby. Now it is all about serenity. A line of ducks comes marching from a nearby farmhouse to prospect in the culvert and somewhere far away on the darkling plain a horse neighs.