‘Don’t believe a single word of it’
General Nivelle journeyed to London in mid-January to explain his formula for winning the war. He was like a man peddling the patent medicine that is guaranteed to cure arthritis. Lloyd George, still feeling the sharp stabs of the Somme, lunged at the bottle. At the same time the British and Australian troops in the valley between Gueudecourt and Bapaume stood in their trenches and shivered. They were supposed to carry out small wearing-down operations but the mud made these impossible. For both sides the important thing was to stay warm.
Lieutenant Cyril Lawrence, behind the front at Mametz, acquired the sort of batman every officer needed in such conditions. ‘Gets quite cross if I do anything at all,’ Lawrence wrote to his mother. ‘Thieves anything he can lay his hands on or carry if he thinks I may want it. Yesterday on three different occasions he walked in with 3 stoves which he had taken out of other huts. Of course, he was immediately followed by their irate owners. Majors, Captns. and God knows what.’ Lawrence’s man shrugged off abuse. When a major demanded the return of his stove the batman calmly asked if he could keep the chimney. The snows came on the night of January 17. One day was the coldest in France for twenty-three years. Lawrence said the cooks took to the meat with an axe. Pickles, cheese and whisky all froze. The temperature dropped to twenty degrees below freezing. Lawrence had to use a candle to thaw the ink in his fountain pen before he could start writing.
Corporal Thomas told his mother he had tied bags around his boots to prevent him from slipping. ‘Gad it is awful, too awful, frostbite is very common & cases of frozen to death innumerable … why we should be put in the trenches in mid-winter beats most of us.’ There was a brazier nearby but, even with two blankets and a greatcoat, he couldn’t sleep because of the cold. ‘I want nothing but to get away from this awful carnage & waste of splendid lives … the whole business is a bad bargain from General down to the private.’
A sergeant in the 4th Division said that no water was carted to the frontline; it was hard enough sending up rations on the backs of mules. The men simply melted ice that had been broken up with an axe. One shell hole, the sergeant said, contained ‘lovely clear water’ beneath eight inches of ice. The men used it to make tea. After several days one of them noticed a pair of boots in the hole and, on investigation, that these were attached to a body.
Captain Gordon Maxfield, the accountant from Longwood, told his father he had had a ‘rotten time’ in the trenches in early January. They were more like drains, he said. Then he was given a temporary staff job. ‘I now swank round with the General, live in beautiful châteaux and have two horses instead of one – in case one gets tired I suppose.’ Next month he was sent back to the trenches. ‘Crikey, it is cold – such cold as I never dreamt of.’ The mud, instead of being thigh-deep, was now hard. He pitied the horses. They had no shelter at night when there was often twenty-two degrees of frost. As an aside, Maxfield told his father that Bean was the most ‘coldly accurate’ of the war correspondents. ‘Moreover he sees what he writes about. He crawled over me in a narrow trench in Pozières orchard, trying to find the 5th Brigade.’
Captain Allan Leane of the ‘Joan of Arc’ battalion told his mother that he was sitting almost on the top of a brazier in a hut four miles behind the front. It had been snowing for the best part of four days ‘and the whole country looks sweet, the ugly scars are for a little while covered & beyond the Boom of our own Heavies & the Crump of Fritz’s exploding it would not appear as though a war were raging at all.’
Private David Whinfield of the 5th Division had just arrived at the front after training on Salisbury Plain. While there he had met a boy of fourteen-and-a-half among a new batch of reinforcements. Whinfield’s trip across the Channel took less than two hours. ‘They say we did 24 miles an hour, went like buggery.’ Now, in late January, he was heading for the frontline. The duckboards were a terror, he wrote in his diary. They were all frozen up; one could not obtain a grip. One man had three heavy falls. The temperature dropped to seventeen degrees below freezing during the night. Rations at the front were issued at 8 am. ‘Each man gets a quarter small loaf of bread, two tins of butter, one and a half tins of jam and three tins of cheese. And tea supplied for each meal with a 3” × 2” slice of ham for breakfast and a pint of stew for tea. Not forgetting the issue of rum at 9.’ The rum mattered: more than anything it warmed the men up.
The generals wanted to keep niggling at the Germans through the winter. Birdwood suggested a series of minor operations along the Australian front. One was an attack on Stormy Trench, in front of Gueudecourt.
WHEN HAIG AND Joffre met at Chantilly in November, 1916, they had agreed to resume their attacks in mid-February and to broaden the Somme battlefield to the north and south. Then Joffre was sacked and Nivelle rejected the Chantilly plan. He would make ‘one tremendous effort’ in the French sector on the River Aisne. This, he thought, would win the war. The British contribution would be a subsidiary attack in Arras. Nivelle also wanted to put the offensive back from February to April. Haig went along with all of this on the condition that, should the Nivelle offensive fail, the French would support his own scheme to attack in Flanders and clear the Belgian ports. Nivelle readily agreed to this. The Flanders scheme was an irrelevancy: the Germans would no longer be able to hang on in Belgium after he had crushed them on the Aisne.
Lloyd George in mid-January invited Nivelle to London to address the War Cabinet. Robertson and Haig were also invited. Lloyd George first offered some blunt thoughts to Robertson and Haig in private and thereby reminded them that the polite age of Asquith was over. According to Haig, the Prime Minister said the French army was better than Haig’s and able to gain ground at less cost of life. Lloyd George said that ‘much of our losses on the Somme was wasted, and that the country would not stand any more of that sort of thing.’ He said that, to win, ‘we must attack on a soft front, and we could not find that on the western front’. Haig told Lloyd George that the general opinion in the British army was that French infantrymen lacked ‘discipline and thoroughness’. Here was Haig at his most pompous, obsessed with form rather than substance. The truth was that French infantry tactics were often more sophisticated than those of the British; this had been clear on the first day of the Somme. Here was the formal start of the running scrap between the three men that John Grigg, Lloyd George’s biographer, called a grave weakness at the heart of government.
The scrap was, most obviously, about strategy. Robertson and Haig believed the war could only be won on the western front. Lloyd George had since 1915 been searching for soft fronts elsewhere: Gallipoli, Salonika, the Middle East and, most recently, Italy.
Less obviously, the feud was about personalities. Robertson and Haig couldn’t quite accept that they were the servants of a civilian who had the cheek – and Lloyd George had lots of that – to meddle in military affairs. Robertson and Lloyd George came from the lower reaches of the social stratum, yet Robertson, who could be gruff and prissy, disapproved of Lloyd George. The Prime Minister had never forgotten where he came from; Robertson had become the defender of a class to which he had never belonged. Robertson was the government’s principal military adviser yet his first loyalty was not to his Prime Minister but to the patrician Haig. Haig had never approved of Lloyd George: he wasn’t a gentleman. Haig’s loyalty was to God and George V, with whom he conducted an improper correspondence. Lloyd George, it should be said, didn’t help himself. He was not comfortable with soldiers, or at least with generals. He had never allowed them to know him. He had not visited the army in France as often as he should have when he was War Minister. And he was wrong about strategy: the war was not going to be won from Palestine or the Balkans.
One can only wonder at how things might have gone if Robertson and Haig had been articulate. Both could write sharp and clear reports. Both were hopeless at conversation: they could not present a case, let alone coax and persuade. They should have been able to explain to Lloyd George why his ideas on strategy were wrong.
ROBERT NIVELLE WAS better than articulate. He was a salesman who could invest a word such as rupture with magical properties, as though no general had thought about the tactics of breakthrough before him. The solution was so simple and others had walked straight past it. And of course he was selling something Lloyd George was likely to buy: a big offensive on the western front – but with the French doing most of the fighting. This was even more attractive than a big offensive on the Italian front with the Italians doing most of the fighting. Nivelle charmed the War Cabinet with his fluent English, his sureness and energy. He failed to charm Robertson and Haig, who knew there was more to breakthrough than a string of catchwords. They did not demur, however. This may have been due to courtesy, and perhaps also to their inability to find the right words.
These two went along with the War Cabinet’s endorsement of Nivelle’s scheme. Lloyd George went to unusual lengths to bind them into what would be called the Nivelle offensive. He instructed Robertson to tell Haig by letter that Cabinet expected the agreement with Nivelle to be carried out ‘both in the letter and in the spirit’. Haig wrote in his diary that he thought the War Cabinet’s conclusions ‘hastily considered’.
Haig, now back in France, had George Bernard Shaw to lunch – ‘an interesting man of original views’. Shortly after Major-General Frederick Maurice, the director of military operations at the War Office, arrived. Maurice told Haig he had been an admirer of Lloyd George; now he distrusted him. The Prime Minister was ‘sketchy’; he didn’t go into things thoroughly. ‘It is, indeed, a calamity for the country to have such a man at the head of affairs in this time of great crisis. We can only try and make the best of him.’
CAPTAIN MAXFIELD WAS right to call Bean the most ‘coldly accurate’ of the war journalists. Bean later became an equally accurate historian. If he said seven men were running north along a trench and that one of them was a prospector from Norseman with a cleft palate, the reader could be sure that Bean had verified this from two or three sources and perhaps even gone to the spot and taken a compass reading. When it came to high-ranking officers, however, Bean would occasionally omit things and play favourites. So it was with his brief account in the official history of how generals McCay and Legge lost their field commands during the winter of 1917. Bean teased a little. He wrote that ‘certain officers after prolonged trial were held to lack, or to have lost, some quality essential for command at the front. This was believed to be the case with Generals Legge of the 2nd Division and McCay of the 5th.’ Then he danced away.
The reality was that McCay didn’t know as much as he thought he did; that he was cranky and officious, more like a schoolmaster than a leader of soldiers; that for most of his military life he had quarrelled with superiors and subordinates; that he inspired little affection, either from his troops or his staff officers; that his performance at Fromelles had been poor, before, during and after the battle. McCay was also thought to be physically ill. And indeed he had been unlucky in his three major enterprises, the victim of a miscarried plan at the Gallipoli landing, of Hunter-Weston at Krithia and Haking at Fromelles.
Legge went into Pozières with much experience in administration and little in the field, which meant he was bound to be unlucky too. He was a victim of the Australian Government’s insistence that, if possible, its divisions should be commanded by Australians. Perhaps Birdwood and White should have done more to protect Legge from Gough at Pozières. Some said Legge was in poor health by the time of the Somme winter; Legge himself said he had not been ill for one day in France.
McCay went to England to take charge of the depots around Salisbury, his ambition undimmed. Legge returned to Australia to become Inspector-General. His eldest son died in France as a private.
At around the same time as McCay and Legge departed, Vaughan Cox, the Anglo-Indian general, lost command of the 4th Division. This had nothing to do with his performance and everything to do with the Australian Government’s wish to replace Englishmen with Australians.
So, suddenly, while the war had been reduced to ritual shelling, three divisions needed commanders. One trouble with the Australian Government’s policy was that, at this point in the war, there were not enough Australians with sufficient experience to fill the vacancies. Thus Legge’s 2nd Division went to Nevill Smyth, the Englishman and Victoria Cross winner who had led the 1st Australian Brigade to victory at Lone Pine. The 4th Division went to the Sydney-born William Holmes, who had been a citizen-soldier as a ten-year-old. Talbot Hobbs, who arrived in Australia from London as a three-year-old, took command of McCay’s 5th Division. Hobbs, an artilleryman, had been a prominent architect in Perth. He had commanded the 1st Division artillery at Gallipoli, which gave him little chance to show his talents because he never had enough guns. Hobbs was an outstanding and thoughtful soldier with lots of good sense. He was short and slightly built, with what seemed like a nervous manner. He was often seen in the front trenches and the men warmed to him as they had never done to McCay.
HOLMES’ FIRST TASK as commander of the 4th Division was to assault Stormy Trench, about 100 yards in front of the Australian line. The objective had no particular significance; the attack was simply to keep pressure on the Germans. Holmes sent in the 15th Battalion on February 1. The Queenslanders and Tasmanians took the trench easily enough but were thrown out by German counterattacks and ran up 144 casualties. Holmes then sent in the 13th Battalion, which included Harry Murray’s company.
Lieutenant-Colonel James Durrant, a permanent army officer from Glenelg, South Australia, commanded the 13th. The preparations he now made were an example of how attacks, even minor ones, should have been conducted on the western front, and usually weren’t. He took an interest in the artillery plan: he didn’t want his men exposed to German machine-gun fire in the snow and ice of no-man’s land. He sent his company commanders out to scout no-man’s land. Murray had a fine eye for the lie of country. When he returned he knew exactly where the wire was and had worked out the quickest route back. Durrant knew that his troops would be counter-attacked in Stormy Trench, just as the 15th had been. He loaded his men with bombs. The specialist bombers each carried twenty and infantrymen stuffed their greatcoat pockets with them, so that they clunked against their thighs. Harry Murray’s company alone, some 140 men, carried more than 2000 grenades, including some that could be fired by a blank cartridge in rifles. The men were told to wrap sandbags around their boots so that the Germans would not hear them assembling. Lewis guns were rubbed with kerosene to keep them from freezing. The men were given a rum ration before the assault to warm them up.
Eight men of the 13th who were due to take leave in London volunteered to stay behind for the attack. A lieutenant in Murray’s company who was in bed with dysentery announced that he was taking part. Murray had come down with influenza. A doctor, Major Roy Winn, attended him, found he had a temperature of 103 degrees and decided to send him out of the line. According to Winn, the conversation went like this:
Murray: You can cut that out. I’m not going away.
Winn: Not going? You’ll get pneumonia if you don’t. In fact I’m not too certain you haven’t got it already.
Murray: Pneumonia or not, I’m not going to hospital. I’m going to take Stormy Trench tomorrow.
Winn: Don’t be silly. You’re not fit.
Murray: I tell you I’m going to take Stormy Trench; and what’s more let me tell you, I’m going to keep it.
MURRAY, SHIVERING WITH fever, went for Stormy Trench on the night of February 4. His company was on the right of the attack. Here, paraphrased, is his account of what happened.
The night was one of austere beauty. A mantle of frozen snow flooded by rich moonlight hid the scars of previous battles. The men, many of them reinforcements who had never been under fire before, lay on the snow, waiting. A whisper came back to Murray: could they smoke? Many would not see the sunrise; a cigarette would be a comfort. Yes, they could smoke, but one cigarette had to be lit from another, lest the flare of a match be spotted. Three minutes before the Australian barrage opened up the order ‘Smokes out’ was whispered along the line. Men looked at their rifles and fingered pockets that were bulging with grenades.
The artillery opened up. The horizon leapt into quick stabbing flashes. The rush of the shells overhead made the men jump. Now they edged forward. No fire from the German trench. The barrage had been accurate. It was better to crawl. If one stood upright the shells shrieking overhead seemed too close. The barrage lifted exactly on time. The Australians rushed Stormy Trench.
The Germans sheltering in the bottom surrendered. The bombers swung down the trench to the right, rushing traverse after traverse. Lance-Corporal Roy Withers peered into a dugout and called on the occupants to surrender. A shot rang out. Withers had a bullet hole in his ear and was now very angry. He pulled the pins on two Mills bombs, shouted ‘Split that, and that, you ------- s’, and threw athem into the dugout. There was a yell below as the grenades went off, then silence. There had been eight Germans down there. Seven died outright. The eighth, an officer, staggered up. His body was shattered; all that animated him was his spirit. He growled from the spouting wound that had been his mouth. Murray thought he had never heard anything more terrible than that growl, which he took to be a surrender. The Australians tried to help the German. Murray felt it would have been a kindness to have shot him. The German died shortly afterwards.
The Australians built a bomb-stop across the trench and prepared for a counter-attack. They were no longer cold and there had been few casualties. Then the counter-attack came: artillery and mortar fire, then German bombers. Some Australians went beyond Stormy Trench, looking for the German bombers. Corporal Malcolm Robertson had been twice buried. Shell splinters had cut his face. But he kept firing rifle grenades, sitting with his rifle between his knees, the stock on the ground, checking his angle of sight of each shot.
The Australians’ casualties were now heavy. The German bombers retreated, which allowed their artillery to start up again. The trench sides were torn away in frozen boulders of black earth. It was hard to find temporary havens for the wounded. The men became terribly thirsty. The water in their canteens had frozen. Some used pocket knives to chip lumps of ice out of their bottles.
The artillery fire suddenly stopped and the German bombers returned. The Australians sent up an SOS flare and their artillery replied. But the German bombers kept coming back. When they left the German artillery started up again. Those Australians not killed were knocked off their feet and buried. Then the German bombers came back again. Corporal Robertson, despite the wounds to his face, kept firing his rifle grenades and cheered on the bomb-throwers. Roy Withers, now wounded in the knee, hobbled along the trench, throwing grenades as fast as he could pull the pins. When that counter-attack ended the company was down to forty men, enough perhaps to repel one more bombing attack. But none came.
In daylight the Australians looked around and saw that the neat trench they had captured, six-foot deep and four-feet wide, was now just a depression strewn with boulders of frozen earth. Murray counted sixty-one dead Germans and twenty dead Australians in a short stretch of the trench. The Australians were still trying to prise ice out of their water bottles. A fresh company relieved Murray’s men, who now discovered they had no cigarettes. A tarpaulin muster was organised, each man throwing whatever coins he could spare onto a tarpaulin. Two men were then sent to the canteen, which was just behind the front, for cigarettes.
THAT IS PRETTY much how Murray told the story in Reveille. All the descriptions are his. Murray left out certain things.
He didn’t mention that he was close to pneumonia as he crawled out across no-man’s land. He didn’t mention that during one of the bomb fights he jumped out of Stormy Trench to charge six Germans, shooting three and capturing the others. Or that he carried at least three wounded Australians to safety, that bullets had torn holes in his uniform, that his hand was lacerated. And of course he didn’t say, would never say, that he inspired his men by example.
Colonel Durrant recommended Murray, Withers and Robertson for the Victoria Cross. Five weeks later came the news that the award had been approved for Murray. Withers and Robertson received the Distinguished Conduct Medal. The following month Murray wrote to an old comrade, Cyril Longmore, to tell him of the death of a mutual friend, then added: ‘My getting the VC was all rot and I’m seriously annoyed about it. I hate people booming a chap that is in no way entitled to it, and for god’s sake, if you see anymore about me in the press don’t believe a single word of it.’
After the war Colonel Durrant said: ‘Harry Murray was not recommended for his VC because of one action. He was recommended because he gave more than brawn; he gave brains over a sustained period of twenty-four hours.’
RAIN RETURNED TO the Australian front in mid-February. The snow melted, mists and fogs rolled in and the battlefield became a bog again. It also become unusually quiet. The German artillery was hardly firing. Nor were its machine-gun posts. The Australians didn’t think much about this. The Germans were always there, a few hundred yards ahead of you. That was one of the truths of the war.
On February 24 a British corps reported that the Germans had abandoned their front trenches. The Australian divisions were told to probe forward. They found the same thing. The Germans had gone. The idea seemed beyond imagination. Next day Haig wrote in his diary: ‘Important developments have been taking place … The enemy had fallen back on a front of 18,000 yards …’
THREE DAYS EARLIER Haig had made another entry that didn’t seem particularly important. Lloyd George wanted to hold a meeting, perhaps in Calais, about the problems with the French railways. Robertson was coming over for it. Aristide Briand, the French Prime Minister, and Nivelle would also attend. Haig and Nivelle had already agreed on what needed to be done about the railways. If Haig thought it strange that two prime ministers needed to go to Calais to talk about rolling stock, he didn’t say so.
YOU DRIVE INTO Gueudecourt along a sunken road and on to what was once the Australian winter line. It is high summer but you know at once that this would be a cruel place in winter. It is open and exposed: no woods, no hedgerows; depressions here and there offer the only shelter. Friesian cows crop the short grass, withered by the sun but still light green. A Frenchman points towards the old front. Corporal Adolf Hitler, he tells us, was stationed over there in October, 1916. You look to where Stormy Trench once was. Nothing to see, just a fallowed field and a lone tree. There is an old trench practically at our feet. Its floor has been steadily filling up with redtinged earth and pine needles; it is now only three-feet deep. But we should spare it more than a glance. It was an Australian trench. And it is the last scar from the Somme winter of 1917.