Shell-shock
Before Robert Graves was wounded at High Wood it is reasonable to assume that, like most soldiers at such moments, he was calculating the odds of mortal chance. It was just before the jumpoff. Then, as he put it, ‘the usual inappropriate message came through from division’. Private X was to report to Albert, under escort of a lance-corporal, for a court-martial. As Graves explained: ‘Division could always be trusted to send a warning about verdigris on vermorel-sprayers, or the keeping of pets in trenches, or being polite to our allies, or some other triviality, exactly when an attack was in progress.’
On the afternoon of the Australians’ first day in Pozières two colonels met on Dead Man’s Road, which led back to Sausage Valley. The colonels had their maps out. They were trying to organise a second attack on a concrete blockhouse known as ‘Gibraltar’ on the western edge of the village. They talked (as one of them later wrote) ‘amid dozens of corpses and moaning wounded, mainly German’, and surrounded by blackened tree stumps that rose like stalagmites.
A messenger suddenly panted up with an envelope marked ‘Urgent and secret’. Orders had changed several times that day: this could be important. The message was from Gough’s headquarters. ‘A number of cases have lately occurred of men failing to salute the army commander when passing in his car, in spite of the fact that the car carries his flag upon the bonnet. This practice must cease.’
GOUGH HAD MADE another rash decision that morning. Walker and Blamey had planned to capture the rest of the village by a conventional advance in the afternoon after first hitting the north side of the Bapaume road with a barrage. No, said Gough. Reports from artillery observers and airmen suggested that the north side of the village was empty. The Australians could capture it simply by sending out patrols. The British 48th Division would push in from the west and join up with them. Walker cancelled his plans, although he wasn’t convinced that Gough had read the signs correctly.
He hadn’t. Pozières wasn’t empty. Snipers were still firing, skirmishers were creeping into the village from trench lines to the north, and huddles of Germans lay in the deep dugouts, addled and blinking after the barrages and unsure whether to fight or surrender. Germans on the edge of the village had been told they wanted to recapture it. They lay in K Trench, which ran along the village’s western boundary and faced the British 48th Division, and in the OG lines on the other side of the village.
Around noon shells began falling on the left of the Australian line, near Dead Man’s Road. It was from near here, earlier in the morning, that the Australians had taken the Gibraltar stronghold. Gibraltar stood out because it was white and also because it was one of the few structures in the village still standing. The Australians took the blockhouse easily enough shortly after dawn, collecting twenty-three prisoners, but they could not hold it because the British barrage falling on the nearby K Trench was too close. This is why the two colonels were in the afternoon planning a second assault when the memorandum about saluting General Gough arrived to remind them of what was truly important.
Gibraltar was taken a second time, and late in the day the patrols went out on the left and right of the Australian line, heading towards the cemetery on the northern fringe of the village. Men from the 8th Battalion, part of the 2nd Brigade, had been brought into the frontline for the sweep on the left. They went into the flattened village with bayonets fixed. The odd flare lit the night sky. They came upon the church; all that was standing was a window near where the altar had been, and soon that fell over too. Private Jack Bourke, a schoolteacher from country Victoria, came upon a heap of cake boxes in a dugout.
The addresses [he wrote to his mother] were in a child’s handwriting as were also one or two letters. In another corner was a coat rolled up. I opened it out, and found it stained with blood, and there, right between the shoulders, was a burnt shrapnel hole – shrapnel is very hot … The owner of the coat was a German, and, some might say, not entitled to much sympathy. Perhaps he was not, but I couldn’t help thinking sadly of the little girl or boy who sent the cakes.
Around midnight the men of the 8th began to dig into the rubble about halfway between the Bapaume road and Pozières cemetery. They had met little opposition, although they could see Germans to the north-east, up towards the OG lines.
The Australians from the 3rd Brigade who went out on the right were in a black mood. They had been sniped at all day; they were going to get even. Margetts and Captain Alan Vowles sent out patrols. Lieutenant Elmer Laing of Western Australia led one and afterwards admitted that he and his men were looking for revenge. Some Germans ran away – one rode off on a bicycle as bullets hissed about him – and some tried to surrender and, one suspects, were shot or bayoneted. Laing wrote of a German in a dugout who tried to give himself up. One of Laing’s men yelled at the German to come out. ‘I heard him, rushed back shouting at the chap to shoot the swine or I would – so he got him. Altogether we killed 6 and captured 18 down the dugouts. The men had great sport chucking bombs down any hole they saw.’
Margetts and Vowles crossed the road to make sure the ground was safe, then returned to pick up their companies and bring them across. Vowles came back with his men; Margetts did not. A shell had burst over him. He died shortly afterwards.
Vowles, from Perth, was supervising the new forward position being dug deep in the village when he blundered into a stairway leading to a dugout. The Australians had already thrown at least one bomb down the stairs. Throw another one down, Vowles told them. There was no sound from below after the explosion. Two Australians began to descend the stairs. Then they heard voices.
‘Parlez-vous Francais?’ Vowles shouted.
‘Oui!’
Up came seventeen Germans, some of them wounded. They said there was a captain below. These are the eighteen prisoners Laing refers to above, and they were perhaps lucky that Vowles was around. The German captain emerged from the gloom. He was smartly turned out and wore a long grey coat. Laing interpreted for Vowles. The German announced that his name was Ponsonby Lyons: his grandfather, he explained had been English. He then said: ‘I am the commandant of Pozières.’
MARGETTS HAD WRITTEN so many letters of condolence. Now his family in Tasmania was receiving similar notes. And they, like the families their son had written to, wanted to know more. What had their son said before he died? Had he suffered?
Stephen Margetts wrote to Lieutenant-Colonel Charlie Elliott, his son’s battalion commander. Elliott wrote back to say that he had been unable to discover further details of Ivor’s death ‘other than those I gave’. He said the only words Margetts spoke were: ‘You boys will look after me, won’t you? Tell the sergeant-major I want him.’ Elliott said Ivor ‘died very quickly & apparently suffered little pain’. The colonel enclosed a sketch of Pozières and marked the site of Margetts’ grave with an X. He added a postscript: ‘I have been unable to find out about his watch & ring, but all personal effects were sent back to the Base Records office for transmission to you.’
Stephen Margetts’ letter to Elliott crossed with a letter sent to him by Private G. A. McKenzie, a stretcher-bearer from Hobart attached to Ivor’s company. McKenzie wrote from a hospital in England. He had been wounded two days after Margetts’ death.
It was about between 9 o’clock and ¼ past when Capt. Margetts was sitting in a shell hole giving orders to a sergent by the name of Clarke and one shell burst right in among us. I had some wounded in there as there was no room in the Trenches and could not get them down to the Aid Post. Shelling was too hot. Well it took me about half a minute to get over the shock of it, and I heard your son calling me. I crawled to him and he said I have got one at last. I got him into the Trench and ripped his shirt and singlet with my scissors and found a wound over his heart about the size of a Penny. I dressed him and gave him a drink but it was all over. He lived for about twenty minutes. I stayed with him to the end and these were the words he said before he went is that you McKenzie (yes Sir) if you get through this stink lad which I hope to the God above you do let my People know how I got hit and died thinking of them. He caught my hand and Passed Away.
I left him till the morning and got him Buried and put a Cross over his grave. His property he had very little on him as he had left it at our Battalion headquarters before going into action. The only part of his property that I buried him with, with of course his clothes, was a ring on his little finger which I could not get off without cutting his finger off so I left it on him … I was all through the Gallipoli muck with your son so I ought to know him well. I am only a Private myself but that is my fault, but there was never a better Officer living than Capt Margetts. He was the most popular man in the Batt and he never done a bad turn to anyone since we left Hobart Shore. It is the worst shock the 12th Batt has had since war started. Any one would of gave their life for to save his little toe.
McKenzie also signed a report that looks to have been made out for the Red Cross. ‘I cried like a kid when I found he was dead,’ he said. ‘I think he went because he was too good for the beastliness of war …’
THE POSITION AT Pozières on the morning of Margetts’ burial – July 24 – was something like this. Most of the village had been captured. The Germans’ counter-attacks had been uncharacteristically confused. There were still Germans in the centre of Pozières sheltering in artillery dugouts. The Germans also held most of K Trench, on the western fringe of the village, and this stopped the Australians joining their left flank to the British 48th Division. On the right the Australians had been unable to advance along the German second line (the two OG trenches). The British were trying to help by attacking Munster Alley, a trench that crossed the OG lines and ran away to the east, but they had been turned back, so the Australian right flank was also in the air. The troops in Pozières had a clear view to the OG lines to the north and east from where any counterattack by German infantry would come. They would have plenty of time to shoot down the Germans in the open. But the Germans didn’t have to send infantrymen on some mad downhill charge. They could plaster Pozières with high-explosive shells from Courcelette, to the north.
Most of the shelling on the 23rd, the first morning, had fallen in the Australian back areas. On the morning of the 24th the Germans began to land howitzer shells on the forward trenches. The terrible ordeal of Pozières had begun.
THE BOMBARDMENT STARTED at 7 am. The Germans concentrated on the line of the Bapaume road, and mainly on the 1st Brigade trenches at the western edge of the village. The shelling lasted all day. The Australian trenches had been hastily dug. There were no dugouts in which men could shelter and the earth was loose from the earlier British shelling. If a shell hit close to a trench, the walls fell in. Australians trying to dig out their comrades would hear the scream of the next shell and look up. Some said they could spot the shells at the top of their arc; others said they saw them in the last forty feet of their descent. A sergeant in the 1st Brigade said nearly everyone in his battalion was buried at least once.
Private Edward Jenkins, aged about forty-five and who gave his occupation as ‘bushman’, was always in trouble out of the line; now he became a saint. He looked after the wounded waiting to be taken away. He dragged them into a shelter he had built, gave them water from his bottle, refused to take any himself and told them the stretcher-bearers would soon be along. All these men lived. Late in the day Jenkins was blown to pieces by a shell.
Lieutenant-Colonel Owen Howell-Price, the twenty-six-year-old commander of the 3rd Battalion, one of five brothers who fought in the Great War, walked along the trenches for most of the day, trying to keep his men calm. His younger brother Philip, a captain in the 1st Battalion, later wrote home:
… the Huns simply poured high-explosive shells into our position. Trenches disappeared like paper in a storm. Where there had been trenches nobody could tell. The place was a series of huge shell holes, some 30-feet wide and 20-feet deep. Shells were so thick that they obscured the sun, smoke was so intense that one could not see, the row and noise was so terrific that men went mad, men simply stood and shook, their nervous system one entire wreck. Shell after shell planted itself in our lines, man after man was blown to pieces and yet not a man faltered.
Sergeant Champion wrote in his diary: ‘Of course, Fritz has his own late trenches marked off to a “T” on his maps, and can shoot back on them with accuracy. We were being continually bombarded, the trenches caving in, and we were digging each other out all day long. Soon our beautiful trench was nothing but a wide ditch, each caving in making it shallower and wider … our garrison became thinner and thinner.’
Men came down with shell-shock. The Victorian mind was suspicious of this condition. Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams had only appeared sixteen years earlier. Shell-shock had not figured in the Napoleonic wars or the Boer War. Was it a way for men to escape from fighting? Was it a disciplinary problem rather than a medical one? These men weren’t bleeding; they weren’t missing limbs or frothing from gas-filled lungs. They had been hit in the mind. Did this constitute a ‘wound’?
A week or so after the Australians started to come down with shell-shock at Pozières a nineteen-year-old English private ran away from a gas attack in Belgium. He was sentenced to death. His commanding officer had told the tribunal that the youngster tended to panic under shellfire. A brigadier-general reviewing the courtmartial recommended that the sentence be commuted. No, said the corps commander, cowards were a danger to the war effort. The death penalty was designed to frighten men more than the prospect of facing the enemy. The lad was shot. The corps commander was Hunter-Weston. He had had at least two ‘breakdowns’ of his own, one in France early in the war and another on Gallipoli.
In early 1917 the young poet Wilfred Owen fell asleep after an assault on German trenches and was blown in the air by a shell-burst. He ended up sheltering near the skewered remains of another officer, then began trembling and stammering. One of Owen’s biographers wrote: ‘It seems probable that his courage was called into question in some way by the CO, who may even have called him a coward.’ Owen was diagnosed as having shell-shock. The following year he was decorated for bravery.
Shell-shock became relatively common during the battle of Loos in 1915 when soldiers arrived at the hospitals with ‘hysterical manifestations’. Only in early 1916 did the British army recognise these men as ‘wounded’ rather than ‘sick’.
Bean, just behind the front, understood shell-shock because he had seen it. Pozières was a ‘mincing machine’, he wrote in his diary early in August.
They have to stay there while shell after shell descends with a shriek close beside them, each one an acute mental torture, each shrieking, tearing crash bringing a promise to each man instantaneous – I will tear you into ghastly wounds, I will rend your flesh and pulp an arm or a leg; fling you half a gaping, quivering man like these that you see smashed round you to lie there rotting and blackening like all the things you saw by the awful roadside.
Runners taking messages through the bombardment at Pozières suffered fearfully. One arrived worn out at 3rd Brigade headquarters, delivered his message, went outside to lie down, then put his rifle to his head and shot himself. Brigadier-General Nevill Smyth, the Englishman commanding the 1st Brigade (he had won the Victoria Cross in the Sudan) said one of his runners came into headquarters, quietly delivered his message, and fell dead of wounds he had received on the way. Private Angel of Alexandra, Victoria, was hit in the spine while delivering a message; his legs were paralysed. He saw an officer and dragged himself forward to hand him the note. Two hours later the stretcher-bearers arrived to cart Angel away. His first words were: ‘Has that message been delivered?’
CAPTAIN BERNHARDT WALTHER of the 3rd Brigade, a twenty-one year old from Perth, was shot in the abdomen on the 24th. He had trained in accountancy before the war, was a fine pianist and liked to play chess. Walther wrote a rollicking diary that ends a few days before he went to Pozières. ‘I don’t mind a joke but our new billet is the absolute limit. We were piloted into a dingy little shanty & received by a “fair dinkum” witch. She had one tooth, enormous boots, dirty face, clawy fingers, putrid clothes and a narrow nose.’ And he had a big heart. He was in the London slums a month before Pozières. ‘We passed a cartful of maimed kiddies who were being taken to school & I pulled up and gave them a handful of coppers – I don’t believe I’ve ever saw so much appreciation in my life before.’
Walther had been born in the Victorian Wimmera; his father, Johann Gustav, had been born in Melbourne in 1857; his grandfather had arrived in Australia from Germany in 1848. Even though his son had fought at Gallipoli and was about to go to the killing grounds of the Somme, Johann Gustav had to report regularly to authorities in Perth because of his German parentage.
Australia was suspicious, sometimes hysterically so, of anyone with German antecedents. There were whispers about Monash, now training the 3rd Division in England. His father had landed at Melbourne in 1854 from a town that was then part of Prussia (it is now part of Poland). Almost as bad, Monash was Jewish and in 1916 anti-Semitism was spoken openly. Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson, the Governor-General, privately referred to Monash as a ‘competent Jew’, which was a way of saying he had a fine mind but really wasn’t one of us. During 1915 rumours swept around Melbourne that Monash had been shot as a German spy. Soldiers returning to Australia claimed to have been present at his execution. There were whispers too about Gottlieb Heinrich ‘Frederick’ Schuler, editor of the Melbourne Age since 1899. Schuler had arrived from Germany as a six-year-old. It didn’t matter that his son, Phillip, had been at Gallipoli as a war correspondent and had since enlisted in Monash’s new division.
Captain Walther died the day after he received his abdominal wound.
GENERALS GOUGH AND Walker were not thinking about shell-shock on the 24th. Neither seemed aware of the severity of the shelling at Pozières. Gough told Walker early in the day that he should promptly take the remainder of the village. Later in the day Gough explained what he was trying to do. He wanted to take the German second-line trenches on the ridge east and north of Pozières, drive north past the rubble that had been Mouquet Farm, then back towards the Ancre valley. This would cut off the German fortress at Thiepval.
On the night of July 24 the Australians were to take all of Pozières, then set up posts north-east of the village that could be used as jumping-off points for the assault on the OG lines. They were also to capture the OG lines on the southern side of the Bapaume road that they had failed to take in the initial assault. This latter attack was to be made at 2 am on the 25th by the 3rd Brigade with help from one-and-a-half battalions from the 2nd. The 1st Brigade would sweep through Pozières and beyond an hour-and-a-half later. The British would also be attacking on each flank, trying to take K Trench on the left and Munster Alley on the right. What the Australians couldn’t know was that the Germans, who were still badly disorganised, were planning to recapture Pozières on the afternoon of the 25th.
THE AUSTRALIANS’ NIGHT attack on the OG lines below the Bapaume road began with blunders, moved on to bravery, and ended in failure. This time, instead of bombing up the line of the OG trenches, the Australians went at them from the front. Troops from the 2nd Brigade were brought in for the frontal assault. Two companies from the 7th Battalion were supposed to attack at the Bapaume road end but became lost in the night. The 5th Battalion, which attacked at the southern end, broke into the German line and its occupants fled. Half an hour later the Australians took the second-line trench and began to dig in. Meanwhile the British again assaulted Munster Alley, just below where the Australians were digging in, but were repulsed by machine-gun fire from near the windmill site on the hill above.
The Germans now started bombing their way back down the first-line trench from the north. The Australians in the second-line trench were suddenly in danger of being cut off. They returned to the first trench and a furious bomb fight began. A bare-chested sergeant – his identity is unclear – threw bombs for an hour as German cricket-ball grenades burst about him. A German grenade exploded close to his chest and he was soon covered with blood, but he kept throwing. The Germans took ground; the Australians took it back. The fight was still going well after dawn. When it ended the Australians were still 300 yards short of the Bapaume road.
To the left of this struggle the 11th Battalion thrust into the village in the dark, seeking to link up with the 1st Brigade, which was doing the same thing at the other, or western, end of the village. On this western front the 4th Battalion attacked down K Trench while the 8th, borrowed from the 2nd Brigade, pushed through the village. The Australians in K were soon in a bomb fight, but the Germans retreated down the trench, dropping their grenades, which the Australians picked up and threw after them. The 8th pushed through the village, past the cemetery with its stone vaults and out into open country. This put them behind the Germans in K, who wanted to surrender, shouting ‘Mercy, Kamerad’. The Australians kept firing at them. The 4th and the 8th met near the cemetery.
At 7.15 am the Germans began bombarding Pozières again. This time the shells fell all over the village. The Germans were preparing to recapture it. The shelling was heavier than on the previous day. Pozières blew away in clouds of dust that could be seen for ten miles. The British, though still dying sacrificially, were not putting enough pressure on the Germans at the other Somme fronts to the east and south. This meant the Germans could concentrate their artillery fire on Pozières. Two colonels had to lead the battalions through the barrage to take up positions on the new frontline beyond the village. Owen Howell-Price, commander of the 3rd, was twice blown off his feet and smothered in brick dust. Henry Gordon Bennett, commander of the 6th, was given a guide to take him forward. ‘Ginger’ Bennett later wrote:
Bodies of hundreds of Australians were strewn along the [Bapaume] road where they had fallen. We came across some old German shelters built of pine logs, all badly battered. I stopped near one of these to have a rest. Glancing at my unfortunate guide – a runner, in his late teens – I noticed that he was scared stiff.
So was I. Then one shell landed at my feet. The blast tore off the sleeve of my tunic and ripped it up the back. It did not touch me – but it was close. The runner almost panicked, but I talked to him and he quickly gained control of himself. On we went, with shells falling all around. The lad was in a bad way and wanted to leave me … In the end … I let the boy go back and he wasted no time making his way out of the inferno that was everywhere.
On his way back to bring up his battalion Bennett said he ‘prayed most earnestly to the Almighty for His guidance’. Bennett, only twenty-nine, didn’t frighten easily. He had rushed forward at the Gallipoli landing to Pine Ridge, a position the Australians never reached again after the first day. Bennett was shot in the wrist and shoulder there and sent to a hospital ship. Next day he discharged himself and returned to the frontline. Bennett was later in the mad charge at Krithia, where McCay and Cass had been wounded. But he had never been under a barrage like this.
Bennett managed to guide his battalion to the new frontline during a break in the shelling. Then he set up his headquarters in a pine-log shelter occupied by several dead Germans. Blasts from exploding shells kept snuffing out the candles that provided the only light. Bennett’s men outside were being shelled so heavily that their trench disappeared. Captain Percy Binns inspired them by walking along the line all day, amiably calling out: ‘Buried were you?’ Binns, a veteran of the Krithia charge and the winner of a Military Cross, became a victim of the new warfare. He came out of Pozières suffering from shell-shock. He was invalided back to Australia and died, aged twenty-six, on the ship taking him home.
Corporal Thomas wrote diary entries through the day.
[Early morning] For Christ’s sake write a book on the life of an infantryman & by so doing you will quietly prevent these shocking tragedies … I have seen things here that will make the bloody Military aristocrats’ name stink forever.
[11 am] … hundreds of shells from big 12 inch howitzers are being fired at us. God! It is cruel. What humans will stand is astonishing. [1.30 pm] … I turned my head sharply right & saw a decapitated man – one of ours. It is bloody gruesome – ah well, it will soon end – this awful game. Plenty of lives – just gun-fodder. Our casualties are very heavy. I picked up a German club – it will come in handy methinks. Bombs & rifles are all right but they get broken … This is truly the Valley of the Shadows – God help us.
Sergeant Archie Barwick wrote:
All day long the ground rocked & swayed backwards & forwards … men were driven stark staring mad & more than one of them rushed out of the trench over towards the Germans. Any amount of them could be seen crying & sobbing like children their nerves completely gone … we were nearly all in a state of silliness & half dazed … men were buried by the dozen, but were frantically dug out again some dead and some alive.
‘Squatter’ Preston said that after the artillery barrages the bodies of Germans and Australians were lying side by side, some quite black, others half-buried or torn, ‘and we simply had to walk over them. One well-known sergeant of our battalion lay dead on the parapet, his rosary beads across his face.’
The Germans had planned to come rolling down the hill from the Windmill at 4.30 pm. They never came. Late in the day they abandoned thoughts of retaking the village.
The Australians probably could have held off a counter-attack: their positions, particularly at the northern end of the village, were strong. But the men were spent, physically and mentally. Corporal Thomas later wrote: ‘Gallipoli was a fool to this & all the old heads avow it.’ The difference here was the fury of a bombardment on a narrow front. A village was ground down, then blown away. The fortunate ones under that storm were merely buried once or twice; the unlucky sometimes died with not a mark on them, killed by concussion and soft-tissue damage, or were blown into so many pieces that there was nothing large enough to bury. Men were being challenged to stay sane while madness came shrieking out of the summer sky. ‘The battlefield at Pozières will baffle the smartest writer living,’ Corporal Thomas wrote afterwards. ‘No-one will ever describe it properly, those who have been over it now, become dazed & numb when forced to try & write about it, it has been too terrible, too fiendish …’
The entire 2nd Brigade, originally in reserve, had now been thrown in, but it had not suffered as much as the ‘originals’, the 1st and the 3rd. No-one knew the 1st Division’s exact casualties, but they had to be high. It was probably time to pull the men out. One brigade of General Legge’s 2nd Division was already moving along Sausage Valley, weaving around shell holes and swollen bodies. On the night of July 25–26 the 2nd Brigade began to relieve the 1st on the left. The newly arrived 2nd Division men took over from the 3rd Brigade on the right.
THE GERMAN ARTILLERY stopped firing on Pozières around dusk on July 25, then opened up again the next morning. This was the Australians’ fourth day at Pozières and now a howitzer shell was landing every three seconds. Colonel Bennett, at the new frontline north of the village, reported back during mid-afternoon: ‘My men are being unmercifully shelled. They cannot hold on if attack is launched. The firing line and my headquarters are being plastered with heavy guns and the town is being swept with shrapnel. I myself am OK, but the frontline is being buried.’ Bennett was to later tell his wife that he was ‘mortally afraid’ at Pozières. If he was, it didn’t show.
Bennett and others believed that the Germans were about to attack. In truth the Germans were doing something unusual: using the guns of three divisions to lay down a barrage, not as a prelude to an infantry assault but simply to create hell. Bean wrote that the fire on the 26th was probably the heaviest yet faced by Australians. The German fire eased off around 11 pm. By daybreak on the 27th most of the 1st Australian Division was out of the line. The 2nd Division came in to find Pozières smoking like Gehenna. The 1st Division men went out with memories that were hard to explain to anyone who had not been there.
SERGEANT CHAMPION SAID the 26th was his worst day. Many officers had ‘gone west’. He was forced to walk over Australian corpses, and this gave him ‘the creeps’. His battalion finally straggled out and headed for Sausage Valley and Albert. The men looked like scarecrows. ‘What a mess of a Battalion! We felt very sad, for by the look of it, we had lost more than half of our men.’ The battalion had left its packs near Albert and the survivors of Pozières now ransacked them for clean underclothes. ‘There were fully half the packs unopened,’ Champion wrote. The dead men’s effects would be sent home. Parents and wives would months later stare at pocket knives, pipes and fountain pens and wonder whether their son or husband had suffered.
Corporal Thomas scribbled in his diary: ‘We were taken out today … Tis a wonder any of us got out. We had no communications trench, so had to cross in the open, so a battalion of men was at stake & the silly blighters moved us out in single file, it was awful, dozens were killed, blown to bits. Never shall I forget the 26th July, 1916 …’ On the 27th Thomas marched ten miles and slept. ‘How we slept! We had not slept for three nights & had had no food.’ Two days later he was issued with a new shirt and socks. Suddenly he felt comfortable.
Captain Philip Howell-Price wrote to his parents:
Last week I was fighting dirty, unshaven, sleep and tear worn and tired – today I stand a new lad with comfortable family quarters and huge mess room to myself (my other officers are casualties) a lovely bedroom with big soft single bed. How about that for war eh what? In the last engagement a shell knocked me clean head over heels and a piece of stone or iron or something entered my left cheek just below the eye. You should have seen my face a big plum pudding nothing else. There was plenty of blood and nothing very serious. The swelling has subsided but my face is very sore and the scratch is not quite healed but I am going strong. Do not worry if my name appears in the papers as I have not left my Battalion at all.
Sergeant Edgar Rule of the 4th Division watched the 1st Division men trudging back from Pozières.
… we had our eyes opened when we saw these men march by. Those who watched them will never forget it as long as they live. They looked like men who had been in hell. Almost without exception each man looked drawn and haggard, and so dazed that they appeared to be walking in a dream, and their eyes looked glassy and starey. Quite a few were silly, and these were the only noisy ones in the crowd … In all my experience [Rule served throughout the war and was twice decorated for bravery] I’ve never seen men so shaken up as these.
Bean saw the same men. The bright spirit had left them, he wrote. ‘They were like boys emerging from a long illness.’
IT IS TIME to look at the sums. The Australians had driven a salient about 1000-yards wide and 1000-yards deep into the German lines.
They had taken Pozières village, held it, and established a line from which the next attack could be launched. They had fallen several hundred yards short of their objectives in the OG lines east of the village. By the standards of the month-old Somme offensive, this was good work. Pozières was a ‘subsidiary’ operation and it had mostly succeeded; the main operation, by Rawlinson’s 4th Army at Guillemont and elsewhere to the south-east, had mostly failed. The 1st Australian Division had run up 5285 casualties, which, when added to the earlier losses by the 5th Division at Fromelles, meant that more than 10,800 Australians had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner in less than a fortnight. Fromelles was a failure and Pozières a success, and the cost was much the same.
THE GIBRALTAR BLOCKHOUSE, or the little that remains of it above ground, is still there. It lies, roped off, a curiosity from another age, on the western edge of the village, blocked in by shell holes that have had their rough edges smoothed over by rain so that they look like dimples. Below the rubble is the original cellar of red-and-white chalk bricks and, beyond that, the chambers the Germans dug in 1915. These have not yet been fully excavated.
Across the road hay bales lie curing in the sun beside the track along which Australian wounded were taken back to Sausage Valley. Pozières Trench, where the Australian attack began, has long ago been ploughed away. In the main street English tourists eat chips in a café before their bus takes them on to the Thiepval memorial.
We know where Margetts was buried. His battalion commander drew a map of the spot: at the eastern end of the village, below the Windmill, south of the Bapaume road. Here the stone fruits are blushing pink. Hens cackle and dogs bark. When Margetts went into the ground this was a wasteland. A visitor might have thought that the land had been so corrupted that it would never grow anything again. A photograph taken in 1916, a few months after the first Australian attack (it appears on the dust jacket of this book), shows a vista of shell holes and mounds, puddles and tree stumps; and amid all this is a single white cross, too white really, a nod towards sentimentality in a landscape that is otherwise without pity. The cross marks Margetts’ grave – or did. The grave was obliterated in later fighting. Margetts is still under the chalk of Pozières but no-one knows where.