Mad Harry
The Somme campaign lives in popular memory because of what happened on the first day. Lines of men walking to their death in a trance, as if they had no say in it, which they didn’t. Fifty-seven thousand casualties, for a gain of three square miles. Yet it might be argued that what was happening on the Somme now, six weeks later, was worse.
The casualties from the new front – from Munster Alley, Delville Wood, High Wood, Guillemont and Pozières – were heavy, but they came in small packages, a few hundred here, a few thousand there. They also came just about every day. The war here was no longer about a wide front and the hope of breakthrough. In a sense the war here was no longer about hope of any sort, just attrition, the notion that by allowing yourself to be hurt you might hurt your enemy even more, so that when it was over there might be slightly more of you left than of him. The war here was about dozens of small fronts, perhaps only wide enough for a battalion, dozens of desperate little fights in newly created salients, repeated over and over until one side gave way. It was also about counter-attacks. The Germans were as gritty as their opponents. If they gave way, it was only because they had to. They would take a breath, then come back throwing bombs. And this war was about artillery barrages more intense than anything that had gone before because the fronts were so narrow.
Pozières, and particularly the ground northwards towards Mouquet Farm, was just one of these narrow fronts, another place for men to wear each other out. Most of these fronts belonged to General Rawlinson’s 4th Army to the east and south of the Australians. High Wood and Guillemont were bigger nightmares than Pozières. In their study of Rawlinson’s military career, Command on the Western Front, Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson estimate that the 4th Army ran up 82,000 casualties between July 15 and September 14. In that time Rawlinson took two-and-three-quarter square miles from the Germans. ‘That is, while capturing a somewhat smaller area than in the massed offensive of July 1, the 4th Army during six weeks of small-scale attacks sustained casualties that were 40 per cent higher.’
The problem for the 4th Australian Division, now holding the Pozières front, was that as the advance turned north towards Mouquet Farm the Australian salient became thinner and more awkward. The idea was to come at Thiepval from the rear, through Mouquet Farm, as well as from the front. It looked good on maps, neat almost. It didn’t look so good on the ground.
The Pozières front had become thousands upon thousands of craters. Walking paths meandered through them, like the tracks of drunken sheep, but men still became lost. German shells screamed into the Australian salient from three sides. Runners were blown up trying to carry messages back; stretcher-bearers were buried trying to pick up wounded. The ground had once been some of the sweetest farmland in the world. Australians who had grown up on farms wrote home that it would never again grow anything but weeds. And the ground stank: of explosives, a chemical aroma relatively new in the world, and of putrefaction, a smell as old as humankind. Corpses lay everywhere, some mutilated, others untouched but for a trickle of blood from a nostril or an ear.
Pozières had developed new rhythms. It was best in the three hours before 7 am when summer mists lay on the downland and gunners from both sides took a break. It was tolerable at other times if one could shelter in the deep German dugouts. In the trenches the best a man could hope for was that the next shell would merely bury him.
Captain Allan Leane,the nephew of Ray, wrote to his mother after the 48th Battalion had lost two-thirds of its men during two nights in the line.
You can have no idea of what the ground is like … All I can do in the way of description is futile & the best I can do is to say that … it resembles a rough sea seen from the beach, walking is imposs[ible] & no horse could cross it except where the tracks which we have made & keep in repair exist & it is only by keeping parties at work filling up fresh holes as they are made that it is possible to cross at all, this state of things exists for hundreds of acres, & so far as the eye can reach, great craters, so close together as to make traffic hopeless, these being blown in & remade incessantly till as I say the country resembles a wild sea. I cannot describe it & it is no use trying. I can only pray God that one day Father will bring you here & show you the place.
DOUGLAS HAIG DIDN’T encounter problems with the terrain when he rode his horse, which he liked to do as often as possible. Sand was sometimes spread on the road so that the horse might obtain better traction. Things went to a proper timetable at GHQ. Haig always breakfasted at 8.30 am, a gentleman’s hour, even if it was long after dawn in summer. At Montreuil he was closer to the Channel ports than the Somme killing grounds. There was nothing wrong with this and much that made sense. GHQ and the commander-in-chief needed to be in a safe place. But Haig was also disinclined to visit the front and this meant that his knowledge of the conditions under which his men were fighting was sometimes poor. The Australians knew Birdwood: he always looked dapper and wanted to shake hands. The Canadians knew Arthur Currie, the commander of their 1st Division: he got about in shirt and braces and swore a lot. Haig’s troops seldom saw him. He said he didn’t do ‘showy things’ or try to be popular.
Haig was running the fray but also somehow above it. He was more like a king, mysterious, there but not there, a man who delegated and sent out emissaries and thought that God had chosen him. He was selfish like a king: his interests and those of his retinue came first. To him this was not selfishness but necessity, and he had a point. He was some sort of middle kingdom, between the Cabinet room and the frontline, and the kingdom needed to argue its case. Haig now had to convince the politicians at home that the Somme campaign was actually achieving something. He had to convince some that the British were fighting in the right place. The ‘easterners’ still believed the war could be won from the Balkans or Italy.
Haig’s German counterparts didn’t have to explain or mollify as he did. Germany wasn’t a democracy. There was a federal parliament, the Reichstag, but, as someone once said, it was ‘the fig-leaf of absolutism’. Kaiser Wilhelm didn’t have to answer to the Reichstag. He controlled the armed forces. He had the formal powers to run Germany much as he liked. Germany was an autocracy. And, now that the Kaiser was sulking after being denied the quick victory to which he thought he was entitled, Germany was on the way to becoming a military dictatorship.
Haig looked down on politicians but when they came to his salon he brought out the brandy, fixed them with his blue eyes, and tried to put them right. Eloquent and subtle men bothered him: they might not be ‘straight’. Yet he had to deal with just such men and they had names like Asquith, Churchill, Lloyd George, Balfour and Carson. He was more comfortable with King George, who, like himself, was long on character and shorter on intellect.
During the early weeks of the Somme, Haig entertained Lord Bryce, who had chaired the committee that had investigated German atrocities in Belgium. (‘A nice old man,’ Haig wrote, ‘and very highly educated. Yet he is unable to give an opinion definitely on any subject! It is sad to think that “education” so-called will bring men to such a state of indecision.’) Sir Derek Keppell, Master of the King’s Household, arrived to find a suitable château for the King’s visit. (‘Derek is enjoying himself so much that he has asked to stay another day,’ Haig said, which rather proved that Derek had not been to Guillemont or Pozières.) Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of The Times and the Daily Mail, once the cleverest popular journalist of his time but now a megalomaniac, came to lunch. (‘He is most enthusiastic on all he had seen, and is very anxious to do all he can to help to win.’) During his next visit, about a month later, Northcliffe told Haig that Lloyd George did everything he [Northcliffe] advised. Shortly after the King arrived. He thanked Haig for what he had done for his ‘family’.
John Masefield visited Haig’s GHQ. Masefield had a poet’s gift for finding just the right adjective. He wrote home that Haig had a ‘resolved’ face. In Haig’s mind all was resolved: it was simply a case of not losing one’s nerve and wearing the Germans out.
ONE FAMILY HAD owned Mouquet Farm, where the Australians were to do their wearing out, since before the French Revolution. The house commanded the ground around it, much as the Windmill did at Pozières, and stared across to Thiepval in the west. The buildings, laid out in a square like a rustic fortress, were of red and chalk bricks. Dormer windows peeped over a courtyard that echoed with the footfalls of heavy horses. The dairy stood at the end of the square now nearest to the Australian line; there were five cellars beneath it. The main house was at the far end; it had two cellars. Mouquet Farm had been very stately. Now it was rubble and tree stumps. All the Australians could see were one or two broken beams and a patch of white cement. But the Germans had been busy in those cellars, extending and fortifying them with concrete. Now the farm truly was a fortress, a system of stairways and passages, galleries and tunnels. But it was out of sight, underground, and the British and Australians had no notion of how strong it was.
The Australians would have to fight their way through three lines of trenches before discovering the grottoes of Mouquet Farm. These lines ran roughly east to west. The first, called Park Lane and now the new German frontline, followed the highest part of the ridge north of Pozières. The next line, Skyline trench, ran across a little valley in front of Mouquet Farm and skirted around a chalk quarry. The third, Fabeck Graben, ran through Mouquet Farm itself.
BRAND’S 4TH BRIGADE took Park Lane and by August 10, amid rain, the Australians were over the ridge north of Pozières. Harry Murray came into the line with the 13th Battalion. The Australians probed at the German lines and set up outposts as German shells fell among them. Newton Wanliss said the men of the 14th Battalion were exhausted. They couldn’t sleep because of the artillery barrages; several had been sent to the back areas with ‘nervous disorders’. Other battalions now went for Skyline trench, with British troops on their left. The line had gone forward about 600 yards in three-and-a-half days. Gough wanted the Australians to lunge at Mouquet Farm, less than 400 yards ahead, and either take it or surround it. General Cox seemed confident this could be done; Birdwood and White had doubts. None of them knew how strong Mouquet Farm was. Then the Germans counter-attacked and took back the British section of Skyline trench. Suddenly the salient was much narrower. Cox had to change his plan. The Australians on the left would pull up short of Mouquet Farm; those on the right would go further and take the Fabeck Graben trench east of the farm. But now there was another complication. Germans near Thiepval captured British documents saying that the farm was about to be attacked. The Germans panicked: they saw every movement in the British or Australian lines as the start of an assault. They dropped a furious barrage on the waiting Australians on August 14.
The Australian attack was due to go in that night after 10 pm under a full moon. As the British official history put it, the German barrage caused ‘such confusion and loss that a properly coordinated advance became out of the question’. The 50th Battalion was supposed to go forward on the left flank, the 13th in the centre, and the 51st and 49th on the right.
Around 8 pm a company commander in the 50th sent a message to battalion headquarters: ‘We cannot move. We have few tools, few bombs, no water, and the men are badly shaken. At present we are digging a number out. I have too few men to take up the frontage, and after consulting the company commanders have decided to remain fast. Am notifying 13th Battalion.’
He told the 13th. The commander of the 13th objected: his flank would be exposed. Captain Harry Murray was commanding a company here. Just before the attack he reported: ‘C Company rattled and only have 35 men.’
The commander of the 51st, on the right of the 13th, sent a message to brigade headquarters:
Both 13th C.O. thinks, and it is my genuine (not depressed) opinion that it would be a mistake to press the offensive further locally in this salient. We are heavily shelled from due E. right round to N.W., and the communications are simply awful. It really requires some days’ solid work. Water-and ration-carrying is most precarious. The boys are sticking it well, but are so congested that it will be most difficult to deploy tonight. Do not worry about us, but we want WATER and digging tools always. Our artillery are bombarding our own front trenches (heavies!!!).
No-one, it seemed, wanted to attack, not because of fear of the offensive itself but because they had been hit so hard by artillery before it had started. The company commanders in the 50th were promptly told they had to obey orders. The attack began at 10.30 pm.
Panic broke out in the 50th on the left. A German barrage fell on the troops just before the jump-off. Two officers managed to bring the troops under control. The line eventually went forward only to be shot down by machine guns. Those still alive dug in around the chalk quarry in front of Mouquet Farm. After half-an-hour they withdrew. The left flank was open.
On the other side of the salient the 51st, West Australians, met heavy machine-gun fire. Someone yelled ‘Retire!’ Confusion broke out. Some men kept going, then turned back. The right flank was open.
In the centre the 13th Battalion went forward strongly, charging the Fabeck Graben trench. The Germans there, after hesitating to weigh the odds, mostly ran. A lance-corporal threw a pick at a machine-gun post, then a bomb, and came away with eleven prisoners. A sergeant-major who was with him came away with nine bullets in his thigh. The 13th had taken its objective, but Murray soon realised he and his men were alone. The Germans were counter-attacking and his men were running out of bombs.
Murray began to think about how he would get his wounded out. He set up a line of posts along a German trench that led back to the old Australian frontline. Then he received definite news that the 51st had retreated on his right. He knew he had to leave too.
MURRAY WROTE YEARS afterwards that discipline got him through. Not the parade-ground discipline of which the English were so fond, but the discipline that said you must not give in to natural instincts like fear, that you must look after your mates, that you had a duty. You would feel fear. That was inevitable. You could let it tempt you. But you must not succumb. Murray knew he could not simply retreat. He had to hold off the Germans while his men fell back on the staging posts he had set up. His party was almost out of grenades and the Germans knew this. The Germans, Murray wrote, were ‘cool, heady’ and ‘courageous’. The Australians began to fall back on the staging posts. Murray was always the last man away, with the Germans perhaps one bay behind him, throwing bombs.
Murray headed for the fifth post. ‘I could hear excited, guttural voices, together with the rattle of enemy accoutrements, and I experienced the usual fierce struggle between natural promptings and duty … Even in those hectic moments I had experienced many a cold shiver, as I thought of the bayonets of the counter-attacking force, because it seemed to me, as I ran, that I was almost within reach of those lethal, shining blades.’
A bomb dropped one of the two men in front of him. The other man, dazed and wounded by fragments, kept running. Murray jumped over the fallen man, assuming him to be dead. As he did so he saw the man’s eyes open.
His leg was doubled and twisted, and although he did not speak his eyes were eloquent. It was then that I fought the hardest battle of my life, between an almost insane desire to continue running and save my own life, or to comply with the sacred traditions of the AIF and stop to help a wounded comrade. Surely I must be bayoneted if I stopped for an instant. The enemy were coming up at the double, having no opposition. I often dread to think of what I might have done. I was safe enough at the time, and all I had to do was keep on going; there was only a straight run of 50 yards to my mates, and despite that poor, twisted leg, those mute lips, and pathetic eyes, it was really only the mechanical habit engendered by strict discipline, that forced me to do what I did. I dropped on to my shaking knees, caught him by the arms, and pulled him on to my back. He helped me like a hero with his one sound leg, and off we staggered, with Fritz just coming into our bay.
Murray outpaced the Germans, who, having been four times held up with Lewis-gun fire and bombs, were perhaps losing some of their zest. ‘I was once more among my mates, and the wounded Digger was safe, for a little while, at all events.’
Murray’s men were down to their last dozen bombs. Soon they would have to fight with their bayonets. Then Murray heard the voice of Lieutenant Bob Henderson, an electrician from Drummoyne, Sydney. Henderson was the battalion’s bombing officer.
‘Here I am, Bob,’ Murray yelled, ‘have you any bombs?’
‘Any bloody amount!’ said Henderson.
Henderson and his men hurled bombs and forced the Germans back 100 yards. Murray and the others were safe. Bean called this ‘one of the most skilfully conducted fights in the history of the AIF’.
It said a little about the discipline that mattered, that which materialised under fire. Monash said much later in the war that ‘stupid comment’ had been made about the discipline of the Australians. Discipline, he wrote, was only a means to an end. ‘It does not mean lip service, nor obsequious homage to superiors, nor servile observance of forms and customs, nor a suppression of individuality … the Australian Army is a proof that individualism is the best and not the worst foundation upon which to build up collective discipline.’
Within a week Jacka and Murray had done unusually brave things. Jacka’s was a piece of madness, not at all scientific, as though the Germans had offered him a personal insult, which they undoubtedly had, and needed to be dealt with; but it was also inspired and inspiring, so frightening and elemental that it changed a local defeat into a victory. Murray’s was about poise and steadiness and a courage that was profound but not reckless and only one or two degrees removed from fear. Jacka’s exploit was instinctive, Murray’s considered. Jacka was a natural; Murray had to screw himself up and think of duty. They called Murray ‘Mad Harry’ but he wasn’t.
THE 4TH DIVISION was pulled out of the line the next day, to be replaced by General Walker’s 1st Division, back for a second tour. In nine days the 4th had lost 4649 men, which meant the three Australian divisions had now lost 16,780 troops in a few hundred acres at Pozières. Add to that the casualties from Fromelles and the losses came in at 22,313 in just under a month.
This was a volunteer army. Enlistments for July had amounted to 6170. Billy Hughes wanted to introduce conscription.