Treading on worms
After lunch on July 29, as the Australians at Pozières counted their dead, Haig travelled to Gough’s headquarters. The Australian attack had failed, he wrote in his diary that night. ‘From several reports, I think the cause was due to want of thorough preparation.’ Haig told Gough and his chief-of-staff, Neill Malcolm, that they must supervise more closely the plans of the Anzac Corps. ‘Some of their Divisional Generals,’ Haig wrote, ‘are so ignorant and (like many Colonials) so conceited, that they cannot be trusted to work out unaided the plans of attack.’
Haig journeyed on to Anzac headquarters at Contay, behind Albert, where he saw Birdwood and White. Haig wrote that White ‘seems a very sound capable fellow, and assured me that they had learnt a lesson, and would be more thorough in future. Luckily, their losses had been fairly small, considering the operation and the numbers engaged – about 1000 for the whole 24 hours.’
That was Haig’s version. Bean’s version – and his informant was obviously White – is that Haig ‘spoke strongly’ to Birdwood. This would have come easily: Haig didn’t like Birdwood. According to Bean, Haig told Birdwood that just because he had ‘achieved success’ at Gallipoli he must not assume that slapdash methods would work here. ‘You’re not fighting Bashi-Bazouks [mounted Turkish irregulars] now – this is serious, scientific war, and you’re up against the most scientific and the most military nation in Europe.’ Haig went to a wall map and pointed out errors in the attack. He said they were due to Legge’s over-confidence.
Despite a warning sign from Haig’s chief-of-staff, White took Haig back to the map. White politely disputed some of Haig’s assertions and waited to be slapped down. Haig laid a hand on White’s shoulder and said: ‘I dare say you are right, young man.’ White, we might note, was thirty-nine, Haig fifty-five.
What do we make of this? Haig had made a string of errors. He thought the casualties were only 1000. Birdwood had not enjoyed much ‘success’ at Gallipoli. He had not been fighting Turkish irregulars there. Mustafa Kemal, later to be known as Atatürk, commanded on the northern front at Anzac. Far from being a Bashi-Bazouk, he turned out one of the grander figures of the twentieth century, more significant than Haig would ever be. And if Haig felt the need to reprimand Birdwood, he should have dealt even more severely with Gough. The army commander had, after all, been pushing Legge.
But on the big issue Haig was surely right. Legge had been overconfident. His preparations had been poor: he simply didn’t understand about the primacy of artillery. Birdwood and White were also at fault, but in one sense so was everyone in the line that led from Haig to Legge.
LEGGE AND BIRDWOOD had met that morning. Legge was eager to try again, and soon. He still had 10,000 infantry left. He wanted to attack again on the following night, July 30. It was all rather brave and mindless, although this time the jumping-off trenches would be 250 yards from the German lines, communication trenches would be dug and the artillery bombardment would be stronger. Legge was trying to create a new frontline of some 1400 yards in less than thirty-six hours and it would have to be dug under shellfire. He realised later in the day that this couldn’t be done. The attack was put off until August 2. The men sent out to dig the new frontline suffered in a way that does not show in official accounts. Alec Raws was digging on the night of July 31.
We were shelled all the way up [Raws wrote to his sister], but got absolute hell when passing through a particularly heavy curtain of fire which the enemy was playing on [Pozières] … I went up from the rear, and found that we had been cut off, about half of us, from the rest of the battalion and were lost. I would gladly have shot myself … the shells were coming at us from, it seemed, three directions … Well, we lay down terror stricken along a bank. The shelling was awful. I took a long drink of neat whiskey and went up and down the bank trying to find a man who could tell where we were. Eventually I found one. He led me along a broken track and we found a trench. He said he was sure it led to our lines. So we went back and got the men. It was hard to make them move, they were so badly broken. We eventually found ourselves to the right spot, out in No Man’s Land. I was so happy that I did not care at all for the danger. Our leader was shot before we arrived, and the strain had sent two other officers mad. I and another new officer [Lieutenant L. G. Short, a journalist who had worked with Raws at the Argus] took charge and dug the trench. We were being shot at all the time, and I knew that if we did not finish the job before daylight a new assault planned for the next night would fail. It was awful, but we had to drive the men by every possible means. And dig ourselves. The wounded and killed had to be thrown on one side. I refused to let any sound man help a wounded man. The sound men had to dig. Many men went mad.
Just before daybreak, an engineer officer out there, who was hopelessly rattled, ordered us to go. The trench was not finished. I took it on myself to insist on the men staying, saying that any man who stopped digging would be shot. We dug on and finished amid a tornado of bursting shells. All the time, mind, the enemy flares were making the whole area almost as light as day. We got away as best we could. I was again in the rear going back, and again we were cut off and lost. I was buried twice, and thrown down several times – buried with dead and dying. The ground was covered with bodies in all stages of decay and mutilation, and I would, after struggling free from the earth, pick up a body by me to try to lift him out with me, and find him a decayed corpse. I pulled a head off – was covered with blood. The horror was indescribable.
Alec Raws, gentle Alec Raws, had learned to tread upon a worm.
Raws went up to the front again the following night. ‘We were shelled to hell ceaselessly. My company commander went mad and disappeared.’ Raws stayed there for days. ‘My nerve lasted all right and my constitution. I had not even a coat and we had no dugouts. I got water and biscuits from a German body. I saw many of my friends die.’
Legge had to put the attack back another day, until August 3. The jumping-off positions were incomplete. White had been studying aerial photographs: he still thought Legge was being optimistic. White telephoned Gough’s headquarters and said the attack would have to be deferred again. He was told that Legge had said the opposite. ‘Well, you can order them to attack,’ White replied, then repeated that the preparations were incomplete. Gough called the attack off until August 4, but he took affront. He wrote to Birdwood demanding that Legge explain the postponements. Gough also appeared to be asking Birdwood for his opinion of Legge’s competence. Birdwood withheld the letter from Legge until the operation was over.
Haig went riding with Gough on August 3. Gough told him the attack had been postponed again. ‘From what he said,’ Haig wrote in his diary, ‘I concluded that the cause was due to the ignorance of the 2nd Australian Division, and that the GOC Legge was not much good.’
A FEW DAYS earlier Haig had received a letter from ‘Wully’ Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who was the government’s chief military adviser but behaved as if he worked for Haig. ‘The Powers that be,’ Robertson wrote, ‘are beginning to get a little uneasy in regard to the situation … In general, what is bothering them is the probability that we may soon have to face a bill of 2 to 300,000 casualties with no very great gains additional to the present. It is thought that the primary object – the relief of pressure on Verdun – has to some extent been achieved.’
The British people were as generous and patriotic as ever, but they were now starting to wonder where this war was going and what it might cost. The casualty lists from the Somme seemed unending: there had never been anything like them. Everyone, rich or poor, seemed to know someone who had lost a son or a husband. Wounded men sat up in hospitals and told stories that argued with the communiqués the newspapers published. What was being achieved by these sacrifices? Were the Germans being pushed back? Were their losses heavier than Britain’s, as the newspapers said? Was their morale cracking?
The people merely wondered; the politicians were genuinely uneasy because they knew more, though not as much as they would have liked. Some felt they weren’t being told enough by the military. One problem here was that Robertson couldn’t tell them much because Haig didn’t tell him much. Others worried whether Haig had been given too much freedom. What was he doing? The Somme attack had begun on a wide front and with the chance of a breakthrough. Now it was on a narrow front, with Pozières at the northern end; now it seemed to be about wearing down, a dance of death that would end only with the winter rains and snows.
Lloyd George, the War Minister, wondered if Haig was the right man. The two were so unlike. Lloyd George was quickwitted, eloquent, emotional, careless with conventions, a modern man. Haig was courtly and Victorian, a believer in the proprieties, distrustful of people who were more articulate than he (which sometimes meant everyone in the room) – and also a man of implacable nerve. The tensions between the two were growing. Haig had written in his diary back in January that he thought his War Minister ‘shifty and unreliable’. The newspaper owner Lord Rothermere had told Lloyd George that the army communiqués were ‘full of lies’ and that the War Office was misleading its minister.
Churchill held no high office. Gallipoli had brought him down, but he was irrepressible, as he would be the rest of his life, and, better still, he had a way with prose that none of his colleagues could match. He wrote a paper for Cabinet members. In part it was a plea for information. No-one seemed to have accurate figures for casualties. Churchill estimated that the German losses were about half those of the British. His memorandum was mostly a polemic. Britain had not conquered in a month’s fighting as much ground as it expected to gain in the first two hours of July 1. The advance of about three miles was on a front of less than 10,000 yards. This gap was too narrow to break the German line: it could be swept by artillery from both flanks. In any case Bapaume and Péronne, the original objectives, were of no strategic value. ‘From every point of view, therefore, the British offensive per se has been a great failure.’
Before Churchill’s note found its way to Haig’s headquarters, the commander-in-chief replied to Robertson. Driving the enemy’s best troops from strong positions had shaken the faith of the Germans, their friends and doubting neutrals, Haig said. This had shown ‘the fighting power of the British race’. Haig said he had inflicted heavy losses. ‘In another 6 weeks, the enemy should be hard put to it to find men.’ Steady pressure would eventually result in Germany’s complete overthrow. Britain had to maintain the offensive. ‘Our losses in July’s fighting totalled about 120,000 more than they would have been had we not attacked. They cannot be regarded as sufficient to justify any anxiety as to our ability to continue the offensive.’ Haig said he would go on attacking, step by step, well into the autumn. Another campaign would be needed in 1917 to break the enemy completely.
Haig’s letter was printed and circulated as an answer to the Churchill paper. Then Haig went to work on the King, who was visiting France. Haig took him into his writing room and ‘explained the situation to him’. The King, according to Haig, said that generals who had been sent home from France as useless had formed a cabal that ‘abused everything that was done by the British HQ on the western front’.
LEGGE’S ATTACK FINALLY went in at 9.15 pm on August 4, close to dusk but with enough light left that the men could see their objectives and the grey lump of the Windmill up the hill. So many officers had been killed or wounded in one battalion that a few hours before the attack began eleven non-commissioned officers were commissioned in the field. Three of these new lieutenants were killed that night and six wounded, two mortally.
Captain Walter Boys had lain out in no-man’s land, pretending to be dead, for twenty hours after the 2nd Division’s first assault on the heights. ‘I expect to get a decoration out of it,’ he wrote home two days before the second assault. He received no medal but died of wounds received in the second attack. He was twenty-six. Major Murdoch Mackay also died this night. His battalion became mixed up with another on the way to its jumping-off position. Mackay, a twenty-five year old from Bendigo, took charge, sorted out the confusion, urged men forward and, by his sheer energy and the force of his personality, saved a situation that could have left a dangerous gap in the Australian advance. A few yards short of the first German trench Mackay was shot through the heart. Mackay, an exceptional student, had gone to Melbourne University as a sixteen-year-old to emerge as a barrister at twenty-one. Australia was starting to lose a lot of its future at Pozières.
It was a night of extraordinary tales. Lieutenant Percy Cherry duelled with a German officer leading a counter-attack. They shot at each other at close range from shell holes. Eventually they rose and fired together. The German’s bullet hit Cherry’s helmet and did little harm. Cherry’s bullet caused a mortal wound. Cherry bent over the German, who spoke English and pulled letters from his pockets. He asked Cherry to promise that he would post them after they had passed the censor. Cherry gave his word. The German handed over the letters and said: ‘And so it ends.’
Lance-Corporal George O’Neill led a bomb fight against German counter-attackers. O’Neill’s men couldn’t quite reach the Germans with their grenades. The cry went up for ‘Omeo’. Lance-Corporal Norman Weston came from the high country around Omeo in East Gippsland and gave his occupation as ‘bushman and stockrider’. The nineteen-year-old could throw further than the others, but he decided that he couldn’t reach the Germans from the trench. He climbed on to the parados and leaned back to throw his grenade. A sniper’s bullet hit him in the face and knocked out an eye, which now hung by a whitish rope of nerve on his cheek. Weston fell back into the trench among half-a-dozen men.
‘For God’s sake, George, take this bomb,’ he spluttered at O’Neill. ‘The pin’s out!’
O’Neill threw the grenade out of the trench. Weston fainted. And lived.
THIS TIME, AND mainly because of the careful preparation, the attack succeeded within little more than an hour. The final bombardment was so intense that few Germans had time to carry machine guns up from dugouts. With their jumping-off trench much closer to the German front, the Australians were able to creep within twenty yards of their objectives before the guns lifted.
The prelude, however, was awful. For days the German shelling had gone on and on. Men without a mark on them went mad, shivering with the fever of shell-shock as they stared at nothing. Many Australians said years later that the bombardments at Pozières were their worst memories from the war.
The brigades lined up as they had in the first assault: Holmes’ 5th on the right, Paton’s 7th in the centre and Gellibrand’s 6th on the left.
The 5th went forward, some of the men running, as the final three-minute barrage fell on the German front. They took the first trench easily. The shelling had stunned the Germans, many of whom came blinking from their deep dugouts to surrender. The third and fourth waves went on to the second line, OG 2 on the maps. The trench had been so severely shelled they couldn’t find it and kept going. Eventually someone noticed a line of stakes that had once held up a wire entanglement. This had to be OG 2, and the men were called back to it. Casualties had been light.
In the centre the 7th Brigade surprised the Germans in their dugouts. Here was evidence of one of the truths of the war. Frontal attacks could work if the artillery kept the defenders and their machine guns underground. Many Germans surrendered, often in groups of a dozen; others ran for their second line. Again the Australians had difficulty identifying OG 2 from all the surrounding craters and overran their objective. Lieutenant Arnold Brown, who was in this brigade, wondered afterwards why his battalion, even though it was now down to about 100 men, had not been ordered to advance further. The Germans were so disorganised the following day that they barely fired a shot, but ‘we had to sit and suffer the sight of enemy gun teams limbering up and drawing their field guns to safety, later to again rain shells on us; and it was not long before that happened.’
On the left the 6th Brigade was troubled by a single machine gun that had been untouched by the barrage. This gun may have killed Murdoch Mackay; it certainly killed several officers near him. But the Australians were soon throwing bombs into the German front trench. Eric Edgerton, an acting sergeant with boyish looks, wrote laconically in his diary: ‘My party capture 31 prisoners and get them safe to rear.’ Edgerton had joined up as a student from Wesley College, Melbourne. He was only nineteen and had already won the Military Medal for bravery on Gallipoli.
The Australians finally had most of the OG lines, including the Windmill. The Germans knew exactly where those trenches were and around midnight began to shell them. Australian officers were in the open at this time, supervising digging in the wrecked trenches and trying to get the wounded and prisoners away. As so often happened in the Great War, a disproportionate number now became casualties. The Australians wouldn’t see the little village of Courcelette until dawn but they already knew roughly where it was from the muzzle flashes of the German artillery.
In the misty light after dawn, the Australians glimpsed the trees of Courcelette and green fields beyond. But they would not be going for the village. Gough had already decided to turn them north towards Mouquet Farm the following night and Birdwood passed this news to Legge early on August 5. Which rather proved that this trio had no notion of the condition of the 2nd Division.
GOUGH SENT HIS congratulations to the 2nd Division. Haig telegraphed that the success ‘opens the way to further equally valuable successes’. This, though well meant, was clumsy. Several more successes like the last one and the 2nd Division would cease to exist. Gough’s order that the 2nd Division next push north towards Mouquet Farm reached the three brigades on the morning after the attack, and reality struck. The division had too many casualties and those who were left were exhausted. In the afternoon Birdwood told Gough the new attack could not go ahead. The 4th Australian Division would have to replace the 2nd.
The 2nd Division’s casualties were 6848. Many of the wounded were also suffering shell-shock. Men waiting to have flesh wounds dressed were observed to be shaking uncontrollably. Paton’s 7th Brigade in the centre had lost 2346 men (the normal infantry strength of a brigade was close to 4000). One of his battalions, the 25th, had run up 685 casualties, including twenty-five officers. Alec Raws’ battalion, the 23rd, had lost close to half its strength.
Captain Gordon Maxfield, who, like Raws, was in Gellibrand’s brigade, wrote to his father.
We have just come out of a place so terrible that my brain prior to this could not have conjured up anything so frightful – a raving lunatic could never imagine the horrors of the last 13 days, and I will not spoil your sleep by depicting the scenes through which we lived and passed and repassed during those awful days. Our casualties you will hear of some day. Two of my very good friends have been killed, and five or six others wounded more or less seriously. Major Forbes, now Colonel, is now C.O. vice Colonel – who for the fifth time got ‘shocked’ on the ‘battle eve’ … We saw the King on our way out, and General Birdwood told him in our hearing that this Brigade had done every mortal thing that had been asked of it.
Maxfield understood better than most the nature of the Somme battle. ‘Almost every inch of this country is trenched and practically fortified, and we simply have to batter the Hun from one place to another.’ Maxfield was grateful for a pair of socks that arrived in the mail. He explained that he had been wearing the same pair for close to three weeks without taking his boots off.
ALEC RAWS WROTE to a Victorian parliamentarian before the attack on August 4. ‘We are lousy, stinking, ragged, unshaven, sleepless. Even when we’re back a bit we can’t sleep for our own guns. I have one puttee, a dead man’s helmet, another dead man’s gas protector, a dead man’s bayonet. My tunic is rotten with other men’s blood and partly splattered with a comrade’s brains.’ Raws had met three officers in no-man’s land at night, ‘all rambling and mad’. Raws said that he had kept his nerve. ‘Courage does not count here. It is all nerve. Once that goes one becomes a gibbering maniac.’ Raws added a postscript dated August 8: ‘I am still all right …’
Perhaps he wasn’t. Eleven days later he wrote to his brother that he had ‘a very bad chest’. He had fainted three times, once in public. He didn’t want to report sick. It might just be nerves.
Then he wrote this:
Before going into this next affair, at the same dreadful spot, I want to tell you, so that it may be on record, that I honestly believe Goldy and many other officers were murdered on the night you know of, through the incompetence, callousness, and personal vanity of those high in authority. I realise the seriousness of what I say, but I am so bitter, and the facts are so palpable, that it must be said. Please be very discreet with this letter – unless I should go under.