Musty, dusty, god forsaken
We first met Lieutenant ‘Alec’ Raws, the Argus journalist, as he watched pretty girls from the train taking him to French Flanders. Now he was taking a train south, on his way to Pozières. Raws is unusual among the letter-writers from the Great War. His touch is light and his humour gentle. But it is his way of thinking rather than the prose itself that sets him apart. He does not write what soldiers at the Great War are expected to write. He is in a place of his own, outside the clichés. There is subtlety and ambiguity in the way he sees the war and little of the usual Australian bluntness. He believes in the war but he volunteered out of duty, not because he fell for the slogans. He sees absurdities in military rituals but amiably goes along with them.
Raws explained his duties as orderly officer:
… the men are already noisily being fed in the great mess huts, 16 to a table. Past experience teaches me that it is unwise to enter, though there my duty lies. So I tell the Orderly Sergeant … to go in and enquire whether there are any complaints. He does so. There is a roar, like the breaking of a tidal wave upon a silent shore. The Sergeant returns in due course. ‘No complaints, Sir,’ he says, as he salutes. ‘All right, Sergeant.’ We salute and proceed to other huts. The Sergeant is an old hand.
Raws said Australian soldiers disliked saluting and that he and his fellow-officers might be partly to blame, because ‘it goes against our grain to make these fine fellows salute us when they somehow feel it demeans them to do so’. Many of the French girls were ‘singularly beautiful, with the warmest richest of complexions … They seem to be charmingly free of morals.’
Raws was to join the 23rd Battalion of the 2nd Division at Pozières. Robert, his younger brother, known as ‘Goldy’, was a lieutenant in that battalion. Before Alec arrived he wrote to his brother-in-law:
Tomorrow I shall be in the midst of it all … There is something rather humorous in the situation, when I actually come to it. John Alexander Raws, who cannot tread upon a worm; who has never struck another human being except in fun; who cannot read of the bravery of others at the Front without tears welling to his eyes; who cannot think of blood, and mangled bodies, without bodily sickness – this man, I, go forth tomorrow to kill and maim, murder and ravage. It is funny. But I am glad to go. It is what I set out for, and the mission must be fulfilled. One grows weary of this life I have been living behind the lines.
He told a friend on the Argus that he was no more in love with war and soldiering than when he left Melbourne:
How we do think of home, and laugh at the pettiness of our little daily annoyances. We could not sleep, we remember, because of the creaking of the pantry door, or the noise of the tramcars, or the kids playing around and making a row. Well we can’t sleep now because –
Six shells are bursting around here every minute, and you can’t get much sleep between them;
Guns are belching out shells, with a most thunderous clap each time;
The ground is shaking with each little explosion;
I am wet, and the ground on which I rest is wet;
My feet are cold; in fact, I’m all cold with my two skimpy blankets;
I’m covered with cold, clotted sweat, and sometimes my person is foul;
I am hungry;
I am annoyed because of the absurdity of war;
I see no chance of anything better for tomorrow, or the day after, or the year after.
GENERAL JAMES GORDON Legge, the commander of the 2nd Division, at Pozières was a little like General McCay at Fromelles. McCay was carried along by Haking, who looked longingly to Aubers Ridge. Legge was spurred along by Gough, who wanted to do everything at the gallop. Legge had Birdwood and White close by, but he could no more resist Gough than McCay could Haking. Legge wasn’t Walker. He had the same rank but not the same authority. Walker was the proven article and, as much as a soldier could be, his own man. Legge had little battle experience. He had been on the edge but never in the cauldron. Born in London and an arts and law graduate from the University of Sydney, Legge was strong on administration and organisation. Bean, ever generous, wrote in 1957 that ‘defects in judgement and experience prevented Legge, despite his high ability, from being a good leader in battle’. This is a little like describing a barrister as being much talented but not very good at arguing a case in court.
Legge and McCay differed on several scores. Legge never seemed to have the confidence of his peers or his superiors, whereas McCay always had a network of boosters. McCay had trouble with the men he commanded: they mostly detested him. Legge had a different problem: his men didn’t know him. And here he was, being hunted along by Gough, who wanted to push on out of Pozières, into the OG lines north and east of the village, then on to Mouquet Farm. John Coates, a former chief of the general staff of the Australian army, wrote in An Atlas of Australia’s Wars that Legge ‘did not have Walker’s sure touch, nor was he so well served by his operations staff. And he succumbed to Gough’s impatience in a way that Walker had not.’
WHILE LEGGE DREW up his plans to break out of Pozières – and, like McCay at Fromelles, perhaps fleetingly dreamed of doing something grand – the German gunners continued to pound the village. The summer temperatures were now around eighty degrees Fahrenheit and Pozières had turned to ash. There was nothing above ground worth knocking over, just a few low walls. Trenches were dug, wrecked by exploding shells, then dug again. In the open areas – near Gibraltar, for instance – corpses lay in the sun, telling newcomers that this was a place of perdition. Lieutenant Clarence Wallach, from the Sydney suburb of Bondi, was at the eastern end of the village, near where Margetts had died. Wallach came from a family of German origin that sent six brothers to the war. He had played Rugby Union for Australia. He called the trench he occupied ‘Blancmange Trench’ because it changed shape every time he visited it.
Bean arrived at the front several days later, walked around amid the shellfire, and wrote in his diary that the dead were lying in batches of ten and twelve along the approaches to the village. He headed down K Trench. ‘There were only blackened dead – and occasionally bits of men – torn bits of limbs, unrecognisable – along it.’ He walked on. More dead, more wrecked trenches. He was near the cemetery at the edge of the village. ‘At last I came to the end of the dead men – and into a decent trench held by the living – British, and through them to Australians – 21st Battalion at our extreme left.’ At the eastern end of the village, near Wallach’s Blancmange Trench, where men ‘are slowly pounded to death’, he left a French newspaper with the troops. ‘They were delighted to get it.’ On his way out Bean could recognise the Bapaume road only because of its ‘curious straightness’.
A guide took him across to the southern side of the road, where there was a ‘wilderness of friable grey craters, so shredded and dry that it looked most like an ancient ash-heap in which the hens have been scratching for years – musty, dusty, god-forsaken, grey potholes of grey sifted earth … Everywhere were blackened men – torn and whole – dead for days. About eight or ten big black shrapnel were thrown over as we went … I knew my way now, so the runner left me – I hope he got home safe – good chap …’
General White said after the war that Bean faced death more often than any other man in the AIF. Bean was shy and self-conscious, in manner and appearance nothing like the rough men from the farms and mines that he so admired, and his accent was more English than Australian. It would please him to leave a newspaper with a private in a trench; it would mortify him if a man assigned to guide him should be hurt doing so.
Bean was a thirty-four-year-old journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald when he won the ballot to become Australia’s official war correspondent. His father, a headmaster, had been born in India and educated in England; his mother was the daughter of a Hobart solicitor. Charles grew up at Bathurst, New South Wales. In 1889 the family moved to England. Bean was educated at Clifton College (where Haig and Birdwood had been pupils) and Oxford, where he read classics and graduated with second-class honours. He turned to law and returned to Australia, aged twenty-five, as a barrister, but journalism kept beckoning. In 1910 Bean journeyed through the red country of western New South Wales, writing a series of articles about pastoral life for the Sydney Morning Herald. These were later collected into the book On the Wool Track. Bean liked the people he met in the dust. They were tough and resourceful; they lived by the code of mateship and their conversations were laced with dry humour. They seemed part of some brave adventure.
Henry Lawson had earlier made the same journey as Bean. ‘The minstrel of the people’ saw women standing by woodheaps with worn-out breasts and sickly children on their hips; he saw men with horny hands, and skinny dogs and cattle shrivelled up by ‘the red marauder’ of drought. Lawson was a pessimist and Bean a romantic.
Bean was starting to find himself. He had grown up more English than Australian and his childhood had been privileged; he came from a family steeped in the ‘imperial’ tradition; he believed in ‘British’ values and Queen Victoria’s empire. In 1909 he explained what the English flag meant to him. It stood for ‘generosity in sport and out of it, for a pure regard for women, a chivalrous marriage tie, a fair trial, a free speech, liberty of the subject and equality before the law, for every British principle of cleanliness – in body and mind, in trade or politics, of kindness to animals, of fun and fair play …’
But his travels in the bush had started him thinking rather like a breeder of livestock: he thought he could see evidence of hybrid vigour. Maybe the British race had physically improved, become taller and stronger, away from the slums of Manchester and Liverpool and under the glare of the Australian sun. Maybe ‘the real Australian’ was the man out in the scrub. Political ideas were also running around in his head. Australia was far from classless but it had an egalitarian streak that Bean liked. It was all rather strange: Bean admired these people, but he was not really one of them. He didn’t seem to know whether he was an Australian or a Briton. And all these themes matter because they were to play through Bean’s six volumes of war history.
All through these he was searching for the Australian ‘character’. This interested him more than military analysis, weaponry or political strategies. The symbol of the Great War might be a howitzer rocking back as it belches fire and death but the hero of Bean’s tale is the infantryman. Sir Ian Hamilton wrote in the 1920s – and he meant it kindly – that ‘minor tactics’ fascinated Bean. Bean’s history of the Gallipoli campaign, Hamilton wrote, was all about ‘the Homeric struggles of twenty men as they dwindle down to half a dozen’.
By the time he arrived at Pozières, Bean was well liked by the Australian troops, even if he was nothing like them. He was tall and thin, with a soaring forehead, blue eyes, ginger hair, a sharp beak of a nose that gave him a bird-like look and on which he balanced spectacles, and a thin mouth that was nevertheless kind. He wore khaki – he had the honorary rank of captain – but, as someone said, he cut a curiously unmilitary figure. He looked like a visiting scholar, hefting his black Corona typewriter, its keys stained pale yellow, a camera and sometimes a brass telescope. In his baggage there would be a palette and tubes of paint and sketching pencils. Bean wrote his official history from thousands of pieces of confetti: an interview here, another interview with someone else to verify the facts of the first, impressions he wrote in one of the hundreds of notebooks he filled, sketches he made while watching a bombardment, intricate little maps he drew, conversations with his friend General White. His approach was forensic rather than journalistic, all about piling up little details, and occasionally these became a tangle and blotted out the story.
His wartime journalism often suffered from this same need to try to tell all. Sometimes he forgot about the reader. The Age and the Argus stopped taking his copy. The Bulletin sniped at him. ‘Such a man could do algebra while Rome was burning … Bean pants bravely along the track with a millstone about his neck and a padlock on his soul.’ The troops in the frontline liked his copy better. At least he tried to tell the truth, or as much as one could under the severe gaze of censors. He didn’t exaggerate or generalise, as many of the correspondents did, nor did he dress up butchery as romance. And, whenever possible, he went to the front.
Bean was hit in the thigh by a stray bullet during the August offensive at Anzac Cove. At first he thought the bullet may not have penetrated ‘but presently I felt my hand greasy in my pants’. He went to a dressing station, then limped back to his dugout and flopped into bed. A doctor told him he should leave Gallipoli because of the risk of tetanus. Bean stayed. He obtained all his stuff first hand; he wasn’t going to leave just because he had been shot. The bullet was still in him when he died in 1968.
And now here he was, dodging shell-bursts to see what Pozières was really like. Things might have gone differently if General Legge had made a similar reconnaissance.
LEGGE, WITH HIS headquarters in Albert, had already lost about 1500 men to the bombardment before he began his assault on the OG lines. His 2nd Division comprised the usual three brigades.
The 5th, under Brigadier-General William Holmes, a public servant, had come into the line first. Holmes had become a citizen-soldier as a ten-year-old and later fought in the Boer War, where he was decorated and wounded. Now he was fifty-three but he still liked to visit the frontline. His men were unsure what to think about this. It was good that he wanted to discover what was really happening. It was not so good that he insisted on wearing his cap with a red band rather than a helmet and thus sometimes brought on German shellfire. The 5th Brigade had come in on the right and had soon ‘bought into’ another furious bomb fight around Munster Alley, where a British division was still trying to break through.
The 6th Brigade, under the Tasmanian John Gellibrand, took over at the other end of the village. Bean wrote in the official history that since the 6th contained a high proportion of Victorian ‘town-bred men’ it might be less hardened than brigades from the ‘outer’ States, such as Queensland and Western Australia. This was a fantasy that assumed battles were won by men with calloused hands rather than those of bright intellect like Gellibrand, but it shows that the music of On the Wool Track was still playing. When war broke out Gellibrand, forty-one, tried unsuccessfully to join up in Tasmania. White knew him and suggested he come to Melbourne. He turned up in a crumpled and soiled shirt and bush trousers and didn’t impress General Bridges, who accepted him, one suspects, as a favour to White.
Gellibrand was a first-rate soldier with a sharp mind and a quick wit. Though Tasmanian born, he had served as a captain in the British army, fought in the Boer War, and passed through the staff college in England with White. When Gellibrand’s battalion was disbanded he resigned and returned to Tasmania to grow apples. Bean wrote of this incident: ‘It was standing evidence of the hopeless defects in a system under which staffs were often appointed on the principles of a hunt-club. Gellibrand did not play polo; he was not a good rider; he had no skill at games; he kept largely to himself; he read voraciously. Men of this type found it no easy matter to achieve success in the old British Army.’
Gellibrand distinguished himself at Gallipoli, where he was twice wounded, but more conventional officers didn’t know what to think of him. He baffled them with his repartee, dressed as he pleased and said pretty much what he thought. A photograph taken at Pozières shows Gellibrand breakfasting in a shell hole with several of his officers. A teapot sits on a biscuit box. All the other officers wear regulation helmets and one appears to be in a tailored jacket. Gellibrand wears a felt hat and carries no badges of rank or colour patches. Take the others out of the photograph and he looks like a stockman waiting for the horse tailer to bring in the mob. Birdwood always looked immaculate: there was an innate neatness to him, as there was to Haig. Birdwood didn’t understand Gellibrand. White did.
The 7th Brigade, men from Queensland, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia under the New South Welshman John Paton, eventually came into the centre at Pozières and were to be the main bludgeon in Legge’s coming attack. Paton had fought in New Guinea and commanded the rearguard at the Gallipoli evacuation. The three brigadiers were an impressive group. Legge was the untested quantity, and it didn’t help that Gough was still spurring him along.
Legge had the confidence of the novice. His staff took over from the 1st Division on July 27. He felt he would be ready to attack the following night. Before that the artillery would cut the wire in front of the OG lines and the infantry would establish strong points near the jumping-off positions. But the artillery observers often couldn’t see where their shells were landing because of the dust. The infantrymen couldn’t obtain a feel for their new position, mainly because they were constantly being buried. A few took a fatalistic view and tried to play cards. The artillery was firing shrapnel rather than high explosive. Shrapnel was a poor cutter of wire. And there were no jump-off trenches within a reasonable distance of the objective. The men would have to cover more than 600 yards in places. White thought the scheme too rushed but gave way to Legge’s optimism.
Legge decided to attack just after midnight on the 28th with four-and-a-half battalions. On the left, one battalion of Gellibrand’s 6th Brigade would go for the Ovillers–Courcelette road. In the centre three battalions of Paton’s 7th would attack the OG lines north of the Bapaume road; this was the main assault. On the right half a battalion of the 5th would go for the OG lines south of the Bapaume road and back towards Munster Alley, the stretch that had been denied them since the first day of Walker’s attack.
The final artillery arrangements said much about the inexperience of the divisional staff. The artillery of the 1st and 2nd Australian divisions would continue to fire normally until 12.14 am on the 29th. They would then lay an intense barrage on the first German line for one minute before lifting to the German second line at 12.15, the moment the infantry hopped the bags. One minute’s bombardment wasn’t going to do that much damage. And the ‘lift’ at 12.15 would leave Paton’s three battalions exposed as they tried to cover the 600 yards to the first German trench.
THE FLARES – THEY were the first thing the brigade staffs noticed after the attack began. German flares, dozens of them, white and red and green, falling softly through the night sky: Germans talking to Germans, infantry talking to artillerymen. The Australian brigade headquarters were in Sausage Valley and Contalmaison. The officers there didn’t know what was happening, but those flares made them fretful. The Germans should have been bundled out of their trenches by now; they seemed far too busy. Just after 2 am a messenger from one of Paton’s battalions arrived at brigade headquarters. He had been hit in the face. One of his eyes had been knocked out. He said his battalion had heard German rifle fire start before the final Australian bombardment came down.
An hour later the truth about the attack began to emerge as more runners arrived. Men were hung up on uncut wire. The Germans had seen them coming. The artillery barrage had been too soft. The men didn’t know the ground and some had become lost in the dark. Those who had made the first German trench had been thrown out. And now the men were coming back.
As so often happened in the Great War, the commanders had drawn up an attack plan, in this case a careless one, then lost control of the battle to captains and subalterns on the spot. In this instance the junior officers had made the right decision. The attack couldn’t work: all they could do was try to get their men back to safety.
Captain Walter Boys, a young draper from Maryborough, Queensland, went out in command of 250 men from Paton’s 25th Battalion ‘through a perfect hell of fire’.
I went with the first line myself & my word my men fought well. They fell around me like flies, but on we went as if in a dream, while the smell of powder & din of guns, bombs etc, nearly turned my head. I reached the German barb-wire with some of my men, but could not get through & the Hun brought his maxim guns on to us, & we were forced to retire. I gave the order to retire much against my will, & what remained of my men got back that night, but I had to see all my men from the German lines before I could leave & when day broke I found myself about 30 yards from his trench. What I did was to lie still and imagine I was dead from 4.0 am on one day [the 29th] to 12.10 am on following day = 20 hours and 10 minutes. I had no water & it was very hot & there [were] hundreds of dead and wounded lying all around me. It seemed years that 20 hours. The Germans came out and bound up our wounded & passed me for dead and eventually I managed to crawl to our own lines under cover of night. I was almost off my head … I had to be under a most terrific bombardment but somehow God watched over me … I received several small scratches but none serious. The Doctor says I can go to Hospital but I am going to hang on.
Captain John Nix, a journalist from Townsville, led another company in Boys’ battalion. The wire in front of him had been cut and he led his men into the first German line. Most of the Germans had fled. Nix pushed on for the second trench. Here the wire had not been cut and the Germans opened up a furious fire. Nix was shot through the hand. Like Boys and other company commanders, he made the sensible decision to retreat. Nix had taken about fifty men to the second line; he returned with four. A few Australians may have broken into the second line, but nowhere was it occupied.
Lieutenant Arnold Brown went out with the battalion on Boys’ right. The attack, he wrote sixteen years afterwards, was ‘so complete in its stark tragedy that it should never have been undertaken’. His battalion knew nothing of the position they were attacking; none had seen it in daylight. The men’s misgivings increased when ‘no great shelling from our own artillery followed’. When the attack began at 12.15 am the German artillery opened up. ‘The bursting shells lit up the darkness, and the advancing men fell fast under a terrific rain of shrapnel and H-E [high explosive], and a withering machine-gun fire.’ The two German lines were 500 yards away. The men found the wire uncut. ‘Men ran up and down in search of an opening; others tried to climb over, but all failed. The attack had ended, for the battalion was well nigh annihilated. The survivors, about forty, found their way as best they could back to the frontline …’
Brown predicted that the Pozières battlefield would be a sacred place for Australians. It would attract pilgrims, ‘perhaps more so than any other place’. Brown had not envisioned the allure of Gallipoli or the brightness of its myths.
The Australians had everywhere suffered from the weirdness of their own artillery plan. The lack of a long and heavy barrage before the attack meant that the Germans could still man their parapets. They could see the Australians assembling. They saw the Australians, out in the open and lit up by flares, beating at wire with rifle-butts and trying to tear out steel posts with their hands. The British official history said the 7th Brigade had been set ‘an almost impossible task’.
The attack on the right by the half-battalion of the 5th Brigade simply couldn’t be delivered. The Germans spotted the Australians under the flares. The Australians tried to advance by running from one shell hole to another. They lay out there until 3 am, then returned.
On the left the 6th Brigade’s assault with one battalion succeeded, though with casualties of 333. The men reached their objective – the Ovillers–Courcelette road – didn’t recognise it, and went on another 200 yards. Here, near a German trench called Park Lane, Lieutenant Goldy Raws disappeared.
THE CASUALTIES FROM the battle came in at 2002, most of them in the three battalions of Paton’s brigade in the centre. This was not particularly high in the long tragedy of the Somme: British divisions regularly ran up figures like this. But if one looked at the 2nd Division’s casualties more carefully, they were frightful. Legge had attacked with only four-and-a-half battalions, not the full twelve. He had lost 2002 men in the assault and another 1500 in the bombardment of the previous two days. He had lost close to one-third of his infantry strength and all he had to show was a small finger of land on the left where Goldy Raws had disappeared. And Legge and his staff had dented the trust of the men who were left; they knew they had been misused.
Haig at first thought about 1000 men had been lost. He still resolved to talk to Gough and Birdwood. From his distance he believed the attack had been poorly planned. This of course was part of the trouble: Haig, Gough, Birdwood, White and Legge were all too far away. To them Pozières was smoke on the horizon. One of them, Legge obviously, should have taken a brief look at the ground.
The temperature rose to eighty-one degrees on the 29th. Germans carried in Australians who had fallen near the first OG line and appear to have treated them with kindness. Neither side fired on stretcher-bearers. Some wounded Australians returned three days later.
THE GERMAN OFFICIAL historian discovered an unusual reason for the success of Gellibrand’s troops on the left. The Australians, he wrote, were ‘inflamed with alcohol’. There had been no rum issue before the attack. No-one knows where the German historian obtained this story.
A few days after the 2nd Division’s attack W. Ambrose Cull, a captain in Gellibrand’s brigade, watched a batch of German prisoners trudging up Sausage Valley.
As they neared our kitchens out poured a detachment of cooks, each armed with a huge carving knife, and made a dash for their victims. The handsomest and most self-attentive man in the British army looks something of a ruffian disfigured by a few days’ stubble on his face and all the stain of the trenches, but a military cook, in all his panoply of grease and rags, is the very incarnation of ruffianism. The prisoners were limp with fright. Even I for a moment thought the cooks had suddenly gone mad and contemplated murder, but it was only a dash for souvenirs, and for every button that they slashed away they considerately handed the former owner of it a cigarette.
As far as we know, the cooks had not been at the rum either.
ALEC RAWS HAD not caught up with his brother before the attack. ‘Goldy is gone,’ Alec wrote to another brother in Australia, ‘quite probably taken prisoner and all right. If killed he could not have died in agony because our stretcher-bearers were out in no-man’s land that same night and then next day, and he could not have been missed. I was out searching for him myself the next night and the German flares made it all as bright as day. Possibly, too, he may have been taken away wounded by a British brigade on our left.’
Raws said he was resting in a machine-gun post that was ‘comfy’, although shells were coming from all directions by the thousands. ‘I’ve got one puttee, one and a half socks, three-quarters of a tunic, a revolver, a bayonet – no rifle – two singlets, breeches, boots, an old helmet (steel) and a gas helmet.’ He didn’t want to give in to grief (as he put it a fortnight later), the implication being that if he did so, he might fail in his duty on the battlefield. But if Goldy was dead, where was the body? If stretcher-bearers had picked him up, what hospital was he in? Raws didn’t know what to tell his parents. Eventually he told them Goldy was wounded (‘I had to tell them something’) but that he didn’t know where he was. A week later he hinted to his father, ever so softly, that Goldy might be dead.
Goldy Raws was officially posted as missing.