Blacker than Gallipoli
The Somme offensive began as an attempt to break through; by the time of Pozières, it had become a wearing-out battle. And not one battle either but a series of local struggles at places where Haig thought the ground vaguely prospective, little fingers poking darkly into the German lines, a village half-won here, a wood almost taken there. On a trench map Haig’s advance looked like erosion, as though a leaching acid was seeping into the German lines from the west, but only south of Thiepval; north of there the German line resisted the acid. Haig hadn’t intended things to go this way: they just had, because after the first day there was no other way for them to go. He couldn’t let down the French; he couldn’t move his army to Belgium, where he would rather have been. He had not realised how deep and elaborate the German defences were until the offensive had started.
The Germans had bought the ‘wearing-out’ idea too. They were under orders not to give ground anywhere; if they were driven from a position they had to counter-attack, and they did. Hamlets and woods that hardly anyone outside Picardy had ever heard of took on a life-or-death importance in newspaper headlines, as if they were Jerusalem or St Petersburg.
Haig had neither the troops nor artillery to keep pushing on a wide front. He had to attack where he perceived the enemy to be weaker. So now the assaults were on narrow fronts, a probe here, a push there, and the artillery barrages were terrific, on the scale of Verdun, hundreds of guns firing into a front that might be less than a mile across, so that the craters soon sat lip to lip, and shell-shock became common. It turned some men into zombies and others into madmen who fell into convulsions or simply ran away, although the military authorities at this time refused to concede that shell-shock could exist. On the Somme the infantryman, as the British official history acknowledged two decades later, was being worked too hard. It was honourable for him to be wounded by a shell fragment; it was inconceivable that an invisible force could enter his brain and send him mad.
Thiepval, on the same ridge as Pozières, couldn’t be taken from the front. Thiepval was on the frontline; Pozières lay on the strong second line. The idea now was to use the British incursions below Thiepval to take Pozières and, from there, work back along the ridge in a hook-shaped offensive, past the strong point of Mouquet Farm, towards Thiepval, threatening it from the rear as well as the front. It was all rather untidy. Thiepval poked into the British lines; the British were now trying to thrust a salient of their own into the German salient. But Pozières, we should remember, was merely one battle of many going on here in late July. To the south, within sight of Pozières on a clear day, three British corps were going for Delville Wood, Longueval, High Wood and Guillemont.
More Australians lie in the ground at Pozières than in any other battlefield, but the carnage was spread very democratically here. If the ‘colonials’ suffered dreadfully, so did the Britons. If the upper classes from which British officers came sometimes mismanaged the war, they also died at a faster rate than the miners and dockworkers they led.
ROBERT GRAVES, WHO was working on his first volume of poetry, was waiting to attack High Wood a few days before the Australian assault at Pozières when a German shell burst behind him. He felt that he had been punched hard between the shoulder blades, but there was no pain. ‘I’ve been hit,’ he called out, then fell. One shell fragment had ripped into his left thigh (‘I must have been at the full stretch of my stride to escape emasculation’) and another entered below his shoulder blade, hitting the lung, before coming out through his chest. Graves was taken to a dressing station and, as was the practice, left in a corner because it was assumed that he would die. He stayed there, unconscious, for twenty-four hours. Graves’ colonel arrived at the dressing station to be told his twenty-year-old captain was dying. Next morning, when the dead were being cleared away, Graves was found to be breathing and sent to the nearest field hospital.
Meanwhile Graves’ colonel, who had lost six or seven officers at High Wood, wrote the usual notes of condolence. He told Graves’ mother her son had died of wounds. There were the usual reassurances: her son was ‘a very gallant soldier’; he had not been in ‘bad pain’ and the doctor attended to him at once. ‘Please write to me if I can tell you or do anything,’ the colonel concluded, before making out the official casualty list that announced that Graves had ‘died of wounds’. Graves amused himself watching blood, ‘like scarlet soap-bubbles’, coming out of the hole in his chest.
On July 24, his twenty-first birthday, he scribbled a note to his mother: ‘I am wounded, but all right.’ His mother had already received the letter from the colonel. She didn’t know what to think. Then she received an army telegram saying that her son was dead. The Times reported Graves as dead, then announced that he wasn’t.
Graves left hospital and was puzzled by the mood of England. ‘We could not understand the war-madness that ran wild everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language; and it was newspaper language.’ Graves lived to write Goodbye to All That and I, Claudius.
THE GERMANS KNEW Pozières was going to be attacked. The shelling had gone on too long. On July 23, the day of the Australian attack, a German in Pozières wrote home.
Dear Luise and children,
My darlings, the gods only know if I am writing for the last time. We have now been two days in the front trenches. It is not a trench, but a little ditch, shattered with shells, with not the slightest cover and no protection. We’ve made a hole, and there we sit day and night … We have already lost about 50 men in two days, 6 killed, the others wounded. We get nothing to eat or drink, and life is almost unendurable. Up to now I have only had a bottle of selzer. Here I have given up hope of life … To my last moment I will think of you. There is really no possibility that we shall see each other again. Should I fall – then farewell …
Walker and his chief-of-staff, Colonel Thomas Blamey, planned the Australian attack from a château with beautiful gardens in Albert. Their troops were already digging in on the southern outskirts of Pozières and watching the bombardment. The leaves had been stripped from the orchards and the trees stood up like outraged splinters. Beyond them the village was mostly rubble and the red bricks and mortar of the houses billowed away in gritty clouds of pink and grey.
Walker decided to assault on a front of about a mile with two brigades, the 3rd (the first ashore at Gallipoli) on the right and the 1st on the left. The 2nd Brigade would be in reserve. The 3rd Brigade had the worst of it: its right would be up against the German second-line trenches called OG (for Old German) 1 and 2. On the front facing the village the first objective would be Pozières Trench, which started at the OG lines and ran around the southern and western edges of the village. The second objective would be the orchards on the rim of the village. The third would be the southern shoulder of the Bapaume road. The artillery would ‘lift’ deeper into the village as each objective was taken. The Australians would attack in three waves, each going through the other, so that the third wave would take the farthest objective. Ivor Margetts was in the third wave; he was to dig in alongside the road.
On the day before the attack the Australians sat in their jumping-off trenches writing letters home and dozing in the warm sun, tin helmets pushed back on their heads, rifles with bayonets fixed stacked nearby. The drumfire of artillery grew louder. The 4th Army was searching the ground to the east and south in preparation for its assaults on Delville Wood, Guillemont and High Wood. And now, as night came, the shelling of Pozières became heavier. All these bombardments lit up the sky and could be seen twenty miles away. An Australian well behind the front wrote: ‘Every now and then a low lurid red flush, very angry, lit the horizon.’ Rockets burst with green stars and shrapnel twinkled ‘like the glow of a match end’.
The Australians were to attack at 12.30 am on July 23. Long before then they had crept out into no-man’s land, some to within fifty yards of the German frontline. Private Harold ‘Squatter’ Preston lay in no-man’s land watching bullets slicing the heads off red poppies. ‘In the tumult it was impossible to hear orders. My ears were ringing with the cracking of bullets. A man alongside me was crying like a baby, and although I tried to reassure him he kept on saying that we would never get out of it.’ When Preston eventually rushed forward the first German he came upon turned out to be a doctor who later helped with the Australian wounded.
The Australian gunners in the last few minutes before the jump-off fired as fast as they could load, bursting shrapnel over Pozières Trench, then lifting on to the orchards at zero hour. The Australians swept forward and – here, at least – it all seemed too easy.
Few Germans were in the trench, which had been cut up by shellfire. A German machine-gun crew got off a few shots before being wiped out. Sixty Germans quickly surrendered. Elsewhere another four tried to surrender but a fifth among them threw a bomb and all were killed. The men of the second wave passed through and headed for the next objective, the orchards.
Sergeant Champion stopped worrying about his incontinence once the final barrage came down. The ground trembled and his ears rung. The barrage in front of him was dead straight, right over the German trench. He crept towards it. The shells glowed red as they fell. Then he was rushing forward. Machine guns knocked over a row of Australians near him. ‘All tiredness was forgotten, and we chased the Fritzs and got them, and then we turned round and dug like mad. We lost all our officers and soon we had NCOs and privates taking charge and doing their good work.’ The next wave went through Champion’s position. Some of the first wave went with them ‘to be in the fun’. Afterwards ‘there were trophies galore – helmets, badges, bombs, equipment, etc, enough to stock any large museum.’
The artillery lifted off the orchards and on to the village, and the Australians took their second objective. This one had been even easier but discipline now broke down. Private Archie Barwick, a farmer, wrote: ‘A and B Coy [of the 1st Battalion] were supposed to stay in this trench but … on they went like a pack of hungry dogs now they had tasted blood …’ More than 100 Australians took off after about thirty Germans, chasing them along the Bapaume road towards the Windmill by the light of shell-bursts and flares and eventually shooting or bayoneting them. Leaders failed to turn the men, who wanted to chase every German they spotted. Some hot heads were killed as they made their way back through the Australian barrage to where they should have been all along.
The third wave was now supposed to pass through and take the road. By 2.15 am Margetts and other 3rd Brigade men were digging in on the Bapaume road. At dawn their trench was four-feet deep. There was no sign of a German counter-attack. Snipers, however, were taking shots from across the road and, since neither side’s artillery was firing, the Australians began ‘ratting’ in the rubble on the north side of the road, throwing phosphorous bombs into cellars to smoke out bewildered Germans. Bean wrote that ‘terrified and shrieking’ Germans were chased and bayoneted. Others were shot and some taken prisoner. Two or three Australians would bring in groups of twenty-or-so prisoners. The ‘ratters’ were also hunting for souvenirs, particularly pickelhaubes, the leather-covered spiked helmets that would soon be replaced by the ‘coal scuttle’ steel model. Champion said the prisoners looked ‘shaky and rattled and only too glad to be alive’.
A German was seen waving a white handkerchief at the mouth of a dugout towards the centre of the village. He eventually came forward, hands above his head, followed by eleven others, including two medical officers, one of whom said in English: ‘Well, this is a blessing!’ The Germans wanted to shake hands with their captors and offered cigarettes.
The attack had not gone so well on the extreme right. The troops here were not going for the village but attacking northwards along the OG lines, heading for the Bapaume road above the village and below the Windmill. They were advancing along the German trenches rather than making a frontal attack on them and the fighting was the fiercest on the whole front. The Australian attack here ended some hundreds of yards short of where it should have been. The Germans pelted the Australians with egg-bombs (about the size of a hen’s egg), which could be thrown further than the heavier British Mills grenade. Just before 1 am Private John Leak, a teamster from Rockhampton, ran forward, threw three bombs into a German stronghold, bayoneted the survivors, then wiped the blood off his bayonet with a felt hat. He was later awarded the Victoria Cross.
Around dawn Lieutenant Arthur Blackburn, a young Adelaide solicitor, seven times led bombing raids up the OG lines. Of the seventy men who went with him more than half were killed or wounded. Blackburn too won the Victoria Cross. He already had another distinction. As a private on Gallipoli, he and a South Australian lance-corporal, Phil Robin, had pushed further inland than any other Australians on the first morning.
German shells were still falling on the Australian back areas at Pozières around dawn, as they had been through the night. Private Frank Shoobridge, a stretcher-bearer, wrote in his diary:
Shells came in about 1 or 2 a second & everything was like day with the flares that were thrown up. Wounded started coming in faster than we could get them away & the dugouts being full we had to put them out in the open where many of them got wounded again after we had dressed them … We were within 100 yards of the Aid post on our fifth trip … when a 5.9 [inch] shrapnel burst right above us. Stredwich, who was carrying in front, was hit through the thigh & the head. Doonan was hit in the head & I got a bit in the knee & splinters in the face. Doonan went on sent out fresh bearers to bring the patient in (who died I believe before he reached the dressing station) & I carried Stred in, who was bleeding very freely & almost unconscious. He went down straight away on a stretcher and that was the last I saw of him.
Shoobridge was sent to a collecting station. ‘General Birdwood came round & talked to us – said the bearers had done good work.’
No shells were landing in the new frontline. Water, food and ammunition arrived. The Australians lay in their new trench and nearby shell holes and rested. By the standards of the Somme battles this one seemed to have gone unusually well. The bombardment had been accurate; most of the machine guns had been suppressed; and the Germans who had survived had mostly lost their will to fight. The Australians had been sent out at night, rather than as targets against the morning sunlight. They had been able to creep close to the German lines before the whistles blew, which meant most of them had a short run to the German trench. Unlike their comrades at Fromelles four days earlier, they had been given a chance to succeed. It also helped that the 1st Division men were fresh.
The British divisions attacking east of them were not. Their attacks at Delville Wood, High Wood and Guillemont failed badly. A British attack just east of the OG lines near Pozières also failed. The British 48th, Carrington’s division, had attacked Pozières from the west. Its troops advanced despite heavy machine-gun fire but couldn’t gain touch with the Australians in the village.
So here, at noon on July 24, was something uncommon in the Somme offensive: an attacking force, having gained all its objectives and undisturbed by German shells, dozing in the warmth of a summer’s day. If it was rare, it was also a daydream. Both Australian flanks were open. The right flank was bent back because the Australian attack up the OG lines had not succeeded as well as the assault on the village. And the Germans had not begun their counterattack. Pozières had been theirs: the German artillerymen didn’t have to register their guns; they knew exactly where everything was.