A well-fertilised farm
Amotif runs through the diaries and letters of the men who went to Pozières. Having been there once, in that other age, all of a fortnight ago, none much wanted to go back. They had seen something base there, something they were unready for. For the rest of their lives the word ‘Pozières’ would curdle their blood. But there was no point talking about it to someone who hadn’t been there, because what happened above the village transcended ordinary experience and thus ordinary understanding. At the time many of the men did, however, write that they didn’t want to go back, and this was unusual. Most of them had been born in the last decade of the Victorian age and its sensibilities were still playing. Stoicism was a virtue, so one pretended to enthusiasm even if trembling inside. The ‘manly’ thing was to say one was unfazed, and this time many of the men didn’t. And a word that seldom appears in the correspondence of Gallipoli recurs through the chronicles of Pozières: ‘nerves’.
Sergeant Ted Rule of the 4th Division was now going back. ‘Our nerves were still rattled,’ Rule wrote afterwards, ‘and the thoughts of another gruelling were not very welcome.’ Rule returned on a black and wet night. He didn’t know where he was or what he and his men were supposed to be doing. He went to see the senior officer. ‘He seemed a bit rattled, and next morning he went out with shell-shock.’
Rule finally received his orders. His bombers were to attack the German post at Point 54, where the track to Mouquet Farm met the Thiepval road. Lieutenant Archie Dean told him to go up to the front and have a look at the position. Captain Stewart Hansen, an architect, took Rule to the top of the quarry and they looked up towards Point 54. When they returned an officer told Rule not to bring back prisoners. ‘They were not very popular with the heads,’ he said, ‘because they ate a hole in our rations.’
Rule headed back with a corporal and a sergeant from his platoon. The corporal said to the sergeant: ‘What do you think about taking prisoners, Jack?’
‘The heads can go to hell,’ the sergeant said. ‘I’m not going to shoot men down in cold blood.’
‘That’s what I think too,’ said the corporal.
A MADNESS HAD come to the grinding match here. It was as if those writing the orders were in a different country to those who were supposed to carry them out. Gellibrand had attacked Point 54 and Point 27 (on the farm track itself) with more than a battalion, and failed. The 4th Division had taken over the line and was going to attack the same places with one-and-a-half companies. Sergeant Rule would attack Point 54, Lieutenant Dean Point 27. General Brand, the commander of the 4th Brigade, was writing the orders. He obviously didn’t know what Mouquet Farm was like. Ted Rule didn’t know much about Mouquet Farm either, but he was leery of a plan that had him capturing Point 54 with a handful of bombers. He was sure he was going to be killed.
Rule and his men rushed the post at midnight on August 27. One section attacked the rear, the other the front. Two platoons of infantry were waiting in support. That was the whole of the attacking force. Rule’s section penetrated about thirty yards, then the Germans were on all sides. Rule looked around and found he had only about four men left. He lit his red flare, the signal for the Australians in support to come up. He looked back and saw them digging a trench. They stayed in it. A bomb exploded close to Rule. His legs felt as if they had been stabbed with hot pins. Blood ran down his hand. He realised that he and his few men had to get out. ‘My ears were ringing with the row of the bombs, but above it all I could hear the Huns yelling “Ja! Ja! ” as they heaved them.’
Rule arrived back at the quarry and went to Captain Hansen’s headquarters. Rule had seen two flares go up over Point 27. He assumed from these that Lieutenant Dean had taken it. Then he heard Dean’s voice outside Hansen’s headquarters. ‘Here we are, here we are again!’ Dean was saying. Then he blundered in, blood streaming down his face and into his eyes. A bullet had lifted the top of his skull. He had staggered around inside Point 27 blinded by blood. Dean insisted that the wounds of others be dressed before his.
These attacks were mere incidents in a big war. They rate one paragraph in the British official history, and this is about right, yet they tell us much about how the Somme battle was being conducted. A few men were being asked to do the jobs of battalions. Part of the problem was that the front was now so narrow that it was hard to fit a battalion into it. Another part was that those who wrote the orders didn’t seem to understand the difference between being able to capture a position and being able to hold it. The Australians would take a trench. German reinforcements would arrive throwing bombs. The Australians would retreat. A day or so later the same attack would be repeated. The results would be the same. Part of the blame for these follies obviously lay in the personality of Gough. Much of it, perhaps the greater part, rested with the Australian commanders who planned the attacks without looking at the ground.
Dean received the Military Cross and died of his wound three months later. Rule received the Military Medal. He didn’t get over that night at Mouquet Farm for six months. ‘During that time the thought of the frontline sent me into shivers, and often at night I’d wake up, and in a dazed way live some of it over again. I know many to whom the same thing used to happen.’
THOSE IN HIGH command got over the night quickly enough, mainly because they didn’t know what had happened. Next day, as more rain fell and the trenches began to ooze anew, Brand told Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Dare of the 14th Battalion that his men should go back after dark and take Mouquet Farm. Captain Hansen told Dare that the new attack would simply be a waste of lives. Dare believed in Hansen and in himself. He was only twenty-eight, an architect in his other life, and had fought in Monash’s attack on the heights on Gallipoli. He told Brand the new attack was folly. We don’t know whether he refused the order outright. The 13th and 16th battalions of Brand’s brigade were coming into the line. It was decided they would replace Dare’s 14th and take Mouquet Farm the following night, August 29.
PERCY BLACK, A big man with a drooping moustache, nearly didn’t make it into the army. He was thirty-six when he joined up and had broken teeth. He was accepted ‘subject to extraction of stumps’. Black was well known as a prospector in the West Australian outback, where headframes shimmered in the haze and outcrops gave off lurid colours and aroused dreams of Ophir. Everyone thought Black a ‘gentleman’ but, as with Harry Murray, he had been hardened by the rough bush life. Black and Murray set up their machine gun on Pope’s Hill just after the Gallipoli landing. Both were wounded but kept firing. Black, Murray later said, was an intuitive soldier: he just knew what to do. After a month or so on Gallipoli he was a lieutenant. He had been born near Bacchus Marsh in Victoria, the eleventh child of immigrants from Ulster. Murray said Black was ‘the bravest man I ever knew, and I knew hundreds of them’.
Black was to lead the centre of the 16th Battalion attack, going straight for the rubble of Mouquet Farm and beyond. Murray was to lead the left company of the 13th, going for the Fabeck Graben trench. The two battalions were to join up on the other side of the farm. There were now so many shell holes on this front that a pilot looking down might have thought the land had smallpox. And now it was raining and the slime was rising in the holes.
Black led his company from the front and broke into what had been the courtyard of the farm. He pushed on towards the far end. A German machine gunner was waiting there, his fingers on the buttons of the gun but his head hidden behind the earthworks. When he raised his head Black shot him, then put two more bullets into the gun to wreck it. As Black did so a bomb fragment hit him.
Black’s company and another on his right went beyond the farm, knocking out German posts, throwing grenades down dugouts, engaging in hand-to-hand fights in the mud, all the time pushing forward and becoming fewer. The Germans seemed to be everywhere and, as always, fought gamely. The Australians had no idea of how the underground system connected up. They would throw bombs down one dugout entrance only to see Germans bursting from another. The farm had been captured and it hadn’t. The Australians were too few to hold on, let alone to mop up. Rifles and Lewis guns became clogged with the plasticine-like mud. By 1.30 am the Australians had been driven out.
On the 13th Battalion’s front Murray’s company alone reached its objective. By the time he arrived there Murray had only about thirty men left and he was trying to hold roughly 150 yards of the Fabeck Graben trench. Murray and two men went looking for Black’s battalion. They met Germans throwing bombs. One of Murray’s men had his foot blown off; the other was hit in the eye. Two Germans attacked Murray with knobkerries. He shot both; the other three fled.
Murray’s company was down to sixteen men. He moved from one to another, offering encouragement, but he knew the position was hopeless. The best the Australians could do was pick up their wounded and try to retreat. Murray was wounded in the back, lung and thigh. He eventually fainted from loss of blood and became one of 459 Australian casualties for the night. Murray ended up in a London hospital with Black and Bert Jacka. He was embarrassed when he was told he had won the Distinguished Service Order.
The attacks had failed everywhere, simply because the assaulting force was too small to hold the ground it took.
THREE BATTALIONS FROM Thomas Glasgow’s 13th Brigade were now put at much the same objectives. The attack was set for just after dawn, on September 3. This would be the Australians’ seventh push towards Mouquet Farm.
Captain Charles Littler was part of it and he probably shouldn’t have been. He was a Tasmanian, forty-eight, too old for this soggy hill, and he had already used up a lot of lives on Gallipoli, where he was known as ‘the Duke of Anzac’, a flamboyant man with a beard and older than just about everybody. He had to be well known because he was in charge of the beach parties. Now, just before the seventh assault on Mouquet Farm, he came down with malaria but still lined up with his men. He decided he would not carry a revolver, just a stick. He said this would be his last fight. He was not thinking of dying, merely of being invalided out.
Three brothers from South Australia, all privates in the 52nd, came up for this final push. Edward, Hurtle and Thomas Potter would all die, the first two virtually at once, Thomas the day after. Sergeant Joseph Trotman came up too. He said his troops would be told to move back twenty yards because men were being killed in front by shells. A few minutes later they would be told to move forward because men were being killed behind. Backwards and forwards in the mud. It was cold, Trotman said, but he could feel streams of sweat running down his back. ‘But the climax that surpassed all horrors was that of walking over the top of our own wounded & dead comrades.’ Trotman remembered his group’s first casualty that night. A shell blew a man’s head off. ‘The only thing we could do was to crouch in our potholes & watch the blood run down the trench.’
Trotman’s battalion scrambled up the hill towards the Fabeck Graben trench and took it with bombs. To their left another battalion broke into the farm, throwing grenades down every hole they could find. The Germans were like mice in a barn: they bolted down one hole, then sneaked out another. It seemed, just briefly, that the farm had finally been captured. Then German machine gunners began firing into it. Captain Littler leaned on his stick. There was blood on his leg; he also appeared to have been hit in the chest. ‘I’ll reach that trench if the boys do,’ he told another officer, who took Littler’s stick and waved the men on. Littler died soon after.
Around 8 am more Germans began to appear north of the farm and pushed in between the Australian battalions. The German artillery began to land nine-inch shells. One battalion began to fall back. The two forward companies of another were left stranded around the north-east corner of the farm. Most were killed and others captured. A sergeant hit in both legs lay in a shell hole and wrote a letter to his brother before he died.
The Australian attack had failed, except on the ridge on the right where the Queenslanders of the 49th Battalion had dug in. About ninety men from the 52nd, under Lieutenant Duncan Maxwell, protected the 49th’s flank. Maxwell’s men were worn out. It was mid-afternoon and they were running out of bombs. Then they saw men in kilts coming up to reinforce them. It was a full company, 250 men, of the Royal Highlanders of Canada under Captain J. H. Lovett, an accountant from Toronto.
THE CANADIANS WOULD take over the whole front during the next few days. Major-General Arthur Currie commanded the 1st Canadian Division. Like Monash, now training the 3rd Australian Division in England, Currie was a citizen-soldier who brought a fresh and analytical mind to war. Currie was forty, a real estate speculator, rough of speech, a shambles of a man, six foot four inches tall, almost eighteen stone, heavy-hipped and big-bellied and inclined to get about in shirt and braces.
Currie carried a secret. Before the war one of his speculative schemes had gone wrong and he had stolen some $11,000 Canadian from regimental funds. He had not returned the money: he couldn’t raise it. A few, including the Canadian Prime Minister, knew of the theft. Currie worried every day that a scandal would burst around him. Yet this didn’t stop him from becoming one of the finest generals of the war.
AT DAWN NEXT day the Scottish Canadians and the Australians were still holding on above Mouquet Farm. Around 3.30 pm a German barrage crashed down on them. Lovett was wounded. Dead and dying lay everywhere. Those still alive needed to take their minds off what seemed inevitable. The men from the frontier societies began to compare wheat-growing methods as the carnage went on. Maxwell was down to about forty men, Australians and Canadians. Other Canadians eventually came up and took over the position. Part of the Fabeck Graben had finally been taken and held. And Glasgow’s brigade had lost 1346 men.
Currie was now in charge of the front. The Canadians captured Mouquet Farm later in the month, but Germans could still be heard in the grottoes beneath. The British relieved the Canadians and the Germans crept back into the farm. The British cleared it again. Fifty-five Germans held out underground, then surrendered to a party of pioneers.
THE AUSTRALIANS LEFT for Ypres and a rest. They had taken 23,000 casualties here in less than seven weeks. They had done so in an area not much larger than 600 acres, which meant around ten Australians had died for each acre. When the casualties from Fromelles were added in, the four Australian divisions had lost 28,000 men, the same as for the eight months at Gallipoli. The British divisions had suffered on a similar scale, but Australia’s was a volunteer army.
Where were the replacements to come from? Conscription? Pozières, a dowdy farming village that didn’t show on many prewar maps, had brought sadness to thousands of Australian homes. Now it was about to bring bitterness to Australian politics.