Gellibrand’s martyrs
Brigade and battalion commanders had a problem that recurred with each fresh battle: where to place one’s headquarters? If they set up too close to the front, there were two risks. The commander himself could be killed and, if one assumes he acquired his rank on merit, leadership would thus pass to a lesser talent. Second, if the dust and smoke were thick, the commander might be able to see only twenty yards. If, on the other hand, the brigadiers and colonels set up too far back, they had often to rely on scanty and conflicting information from runners, returning wounded, pilots flying over the battlefield and messages delivered by carrier pigeons (the telephone lines were almost always cut by shell-bursts). They would hear rumours and not know what to think about them. Sometimes their information would be hours out of date. In short they would have no ‘feel’ for the battlefield.
For Second Bullecourt, John Gellibrand, the commander of the 6th Brigade, set up his headquarters behind the railway embankment that looked across the plain to the three villages. He was a few hundred yards behind the jump-off tapes. Shells would almost certainly burst around him but he would have a reasonable view.
Brigadier-General Bob Smith, a tall red-faced Victorian and a close friend of Pompey Elliott, commanded the 5th Brigade, which would be on Gellibrand’s right. Smith sited his post in Noreuil, more than a mile behind the jump-off point. This was a safer spot than Gellibrand’s, but Smith would not see much of the battle and messages would take longer to reach him.
At the start of Second Bullecourt, Smith’s brigade failed about as badly as any Australian formation ever failed on the western front. Afterwards it was said that Smith was too far back. He was. But this had little to do with the failure and is perhaps unfair to Smith. The blame lay with commanders further back than him and carrying more handsome badges of rank.
THE DAY BEFORE the battle began Lieutenant John Wright, who was acting as intelligence officer for the 17th Battalion, reconnoitred the ground where his battalion would be attacking. The 17th and 19th battalions were to lead Smith’s assault. Wright found much of the wire uncut. The gunners took little notice of Wright’s report. He also felt that his battalion would be a ‘skyline target’ for German machine gunners at Quéant. Wright explained what happened in a letter to Bean in 1937. ‘I was told to shut up, that artillery would keep his nest of machine guns quiet. The artillery had no effect. The field of fire was perfect, the kind of thing a Machine Gunner dreams about.’
Wright next day directed the men into their positions on the jump-off tapes and returned to battalion headquarters at the embankment. The men hopped over on time at 3.45 am. They had to cover roughly 500 yards before they reached the first German trench. The Australian barrage opened up and the Germans replied. The first pricks of light began to appear in the inky sky. Communications broke down. Battalion headquarters, even though it was as close as it could be to the front, didn’t know where the men were. Wright was sent forward to find out what was happening. He came upon men held up at the German wire, which looked ghastly because the bodies of Australians killed in First Bullecourt were still hanging on it. Wright knew at once why the attack had stalled. He saw spurts of earth thrown up by machine-gun fire from the right, from Quéant. Yesterday he had been told to shut up; today, just before dawn, he was being proved right. Then a bullet hit Wright in the abdomen and came out his left side.
Bob Smith’s brigade was being cut to pieces. The men had bunched up when they neared the wire. They were now under fire from the front, from Bullecourt on the left and Quéant on the right. Many officers were hit. The men took cover in shell holes. The fire from the front became heavier. An Australian officer yelled ‘Pull out’. Panic set in. Men began running back towards the embankment because they saw others running back. A small party had broken into the front German trench but were thrown out. Around 4.30 am some 400 men – unwounded, confused and without officers – were seen streaming back towards the jump-off line. Most said they did not know what had happened. Smith was told of this by telephone but did not report it to divisional headquarters. Gellibrand could see Smith’s brigade coming back. He telephoned the news to divisional headquarters, which then asked Smith what was happening. Smith said some of his brigade had returned but he had ordered them forward again.
If he did issue this order, it was pointless. The moment had been lost. The right-hand side of the attack had become too hot, mainly because the planners at Anzac Corps had failed to hit Quéant hard with artillery. Smith had lost control on his front. He did not know how completely his attack had failed. But even if he had been alongside Gellibrand, the rout would still have occurred. The rout began at the wire, not the embankment.
GELLIBRAND APPEARS TO have planned better than Smith. Smith’s greatest danger during the approach came from Quéant; Gellibrand’s came from Bullecourt. Gellibrand ordered his machine gunners and mortar batteries to fire on Bullecourt. He seemed to sense the danger on his flank; Smith did not. Gellibrand also had two advantages denied to Smith. The artillery bombarded Bullecourt and neglected Quéant, and the terrain favoured Gellibrand’s brigade. A road ran up the centre of the battlefield – the Australians called it Central Road – and its eastern bank protected Gellibrand’s men from grazing fire from the Quéant machine guns.
Gellibrand was an unconventional soldier, especially when it came to form and dress. Before the battle began a staff officer from Braithwaite’s British division, which was on Gellibrand’s left, arrived at the Australian’s dugout. He looked into the gloom to see a man rolled in a blanket on a table.
‘Where shall I find the brigadier?’ the Englishman asked.
The figure in the blanket turned in the direction of the voice. ‘I’m he,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’
‘I beg your pardon, sir, I want to speak to your brigade-major. Could you tell me where he is?’
‘I keep him under here,’ said Gellibrand, pointing under the table.
There lay Major Plant, like his commander snatching a rest before the battle.
All of Gellibrand’s four battalions were from Victoria. The commander of the 24th had fallen sick. Captain Jack Lloyd, a twenty-three-year-old chemist from Melbourne, was suddenly a battalion commander. Captain Stanley Savige, four years older, was his adjutant. He had been a draper in Hawthorn, a practising Baptist and a scoutmaster. After nearly three years of war he was starting to wonder about his religious beliefs. He still believed in a supreme being but by the end of 1917 he was writing ‘where He is or by what means we approach is beyond me’.
Savige wrote in 1933 that his battalion formed up in front of the embankment in the black early hours of May 3 amid ‘chaos and confusion’. German shells were bursting among the men, who ‘crowded like sheep in a pen’. But they kept their ground. ‘What great fellows they were!’
Savige said the men were each carrying rations for two days and two water bottles. Two sandbags were wrapped around their legs and another two thrust through their shoulder straps. These were for rebuilding the German trenches. At the embankment each man collected extra ammunition and six Mills bombs. Some were given picks and shovels. Others carried boxes of ammunition, bombs and flares. A few carried rolls of expanding wire netting to throw over uncut German wire. Savige estimated the average load per man at more than 100 pounds.
He said the Germans became ‘jumpy’ before the Australian barrage opened up at 3.45 am. Flares went up from the German front trench, a searchlight stabbed into no-man’s land and then shells began landing among the Australians. Nerves became strained, Savige said. When, fifteen minutes later, the Australians moved off it was almost a relief.
CAPTAIN GORDON MAXFIELD, the accountant from Longwood, was leading the fourth wave of Savige’s battalion. Maxfield was to leapfrog through the front companies and take a position well beyond the two Hindenburg Line trenches and on the left of Riencourt. A few days earlier Maxfield had sent his parents studio photographs of himself taken in London. He didn’t think them particularly good, but they would prove ‘I am still in an undamaged condition and in possession of the full number of members’. The photographs show a twenty-seven-year-old with bright eyes and an open face unmarked by age. His hair is neatly parted and he has grown a crisp military moustache. The ribbon of the Military Cross sits above his left pocket and his Sam Browne belt shines.
He told his parents he had just finished supervising the troops’ absentee voting in the federal election. Only about half the men bothered to vote. All seemed ‘fed up’ with Australian politics. Maxfield said the Anzac Day celebrations a few days earlier were more fun. He was judging the mule race and stood on a bully beef tin. The seventeen or eighteen animals and their flailing riders ran over him. ‘I couldn’t pick the winner & had the race re-run; the next effort was worse; you’d have split your sides – mine were really sore at the end of the day.’
THE 24TH BATTALION of Savige and Maxfield was soon in the first German trench, but the attack had not succeeded as well as Gellibrand assumed it had. The 22nd Battalion was on the left and exposed to Bullecourt village. It was virtually wiped out by flanking fire. The 24th, followed by the 23rd, went on for the second German trench and stormed into it about 4.20 am. The battalions held it after terrible bomb fights but the success was uncertain. These men knew their flanks were ‘in the air’. A look to the right told them Smith’s brigade was not alongside them; indeed when they looked way back, they couldn’t see it at all. If they looked to the left, they saw Germans where the 22nd should have been. They were alone. But they went on. Maxfield took part of his company 500 yards past the second Hindenburg trench to the second objective, a tramway line just west of the Six Cross Roads. According to the timetable Maxfield was to take this at 5.25 am. At 5.24 he sent up a flare saying he had done so. He also sent back a message saying that his flanks were exposed. ‘Lobbed here absolutely on my own,’ he said. This was pretty much the story of Gellibrand’s brigade on this morning.
GELLIBRAND’S MEN LED from the front, like their leader. Lloyd and Savige, the relatively youthful commanders of the 24th Battalion, had gone forward an hour-and-a-half after the battle started and cheekily set up their headquarters in the second German trench. If they were perhaps too close, they would at least know what was happening.
Gellibrand took it upon himself to send the remnants of Smith’s brigade back to the Hindenburg Line. He had to do so: how could his brigade go on to Riencourt without support on his right? Gellibrand ordered Captain Walter Gilchrist, a twenty-seven-year-old engineer, to round up Smith’s men and take them back. He also sent in a company from the 7th Brigade, which was in reserve. No formation would be in reserve for long here. Second Bullecourt would suck in troops and divisions like a vortex. This was the start of the process.
Gilchrist and several others managed to round up 200 men from the 5th Brigade – others lying in shell holes refused to move – and lead them back towards the wire. No barrage protected them. German machine guns opened up. Dust flew and men fell. Gilchrist and a handful of others broke into the first German trench. He met an officer from Gellibrand’s brigade who tried to explain how desperate things were. ‘These men are all right,’ Gilchrist said. ‘All they want is a leader.’ Gilchrist and others tried to clear the trench eastwards with bombs. They failed. They were too few.
On the 6th Brigade’s front Maxfield kept looking to his left. He longed to see the British in Bullecourt, but Braithwaite’s 62nd Division was in trouble too. Braithwaite’s headquarters were well back from the front and for some hours he didn’t know with certainty what was happening. While Gellibrand merely had to walk outside his dugout to know that the British attack had failed, Braithwaite listened to the usual nervous gossip. His men had taken Bullecourt; his men hadn’t; the tank crews had been half-hearted; the infantry had let the tanks down. The truth emerged slowly. Braithwaite’s centre brigade had fought its way through the village and its forward troops had taken a position on the left of Maxfield, but about 1000 yards from him and out of his sight. They stayed there, cut off, through the following night and were eventually killed or captured. Braithwaite’s left brigade had reached the first German trench to be twice thrown out. His right brigade, the one nearest to Gellibrand’s troops, also failed, although some men held on at the southern edge of the village.
Back on Smith’s front Gilchrist held 200 yards of the 5th Brigade’s objective in the first German trench. Most of those with Gilchrist didn’t know who this inspirational figure was. He was bareheaded and wore a grey cardigan instead of a tunic; he hurled bombs and yelled to men in shell holes. And then Gilchrist was gone: no-one ever saw him again. Around 7 am the men he had been leading were driven back.
Gellibrand’s men were on their own. Savige, now in the frontline, knew how perilous things were. ‘We were 1,600 yards out, holding a 350-yard length of trench of the German main position with the enemy in the same trenches on either flanks.’
SOMETIME IN THE morning Gordon Maxfield lost the two lieutenants who had gone forward with him. One died trying to find the 22nd Battalion on the left. The other was hit in the kidneys; he knew he was dying and refused to let stretcher-bearers carry him back. Then Maxfield was wounded. He handed over command to a sergeant and tried to walk back to the Hindenburg Line. He was killed on the way and his body lost. The circumstances of his death are unclear. Some told the Red Cross he had been hit in the face; others said a shell landed on him.
The Red Cross file also contains letters to and from Sister Jean Simpson at the Second Australian Auxiliary Hospital at Southall. A fortnight after the attack she wrote saying that Maxfield had been reported wounded and missing. Was he on the Red Cross list of prisoners of war? She wrote again late in June. She thanked the Red Cross for the unofficial report of Maxfield’s death. ‘I myself have had that same story from several 24th officers & his friends – it seems to be the truth. I still wonder if he might possibly be a prisoner – would you let me know when the 3rd May prisoner list comes through?’ The Red Cross replied promptly. While he was still officially ‘wounded and missing’, the Red Cross believed Maxfield was dead and cited some of the eyewitness reports mentioned above. In January, 1918, Sister Simpson received a two-sentence letter saying that Gordon Maxfield was now officially listed as killed. The nature of the relationship between her and Maxfield is not apparent from the letters.
MAXFIELD’S MEN DRIBBLED back to the Hindenburg Line in twos and threes. At one stage Maxfield had commanded about 100 in that lonely outpost. Savige said only eighteen returned. So the second objective was lost. The question now was whether what was left of Gellibrand’s brigade could hold on in the two German front trenches. West Australians from the 7th Brigade were drawn into the fight and bombed eastwards along the line of German trenches, taking about 450 yards, or more than half of the 5th Brigade’s objective. Then they ran out of bombs and were driven all the way back again. It was now late in the afternoon. The fighting had been furious. Savige wrote:
… men fought until they dropped. Some badly wounded propped themselves into position and continued to fight. Before long we extended our foothold, and success rested on the knowledge that the small isolated groups, many without leaders, would fight on … One only remembers, from the blur of fighting, when one’s head was dizzy, gallant men firing rifles until the barrels were hot and throwing bombs until their arms were numb … Time seemed to be lost. We appeared to have reached an eternity of day without night. On that day every man was a hero … Lloyd, as C.O., used a rifle as never before … Lieut. Reg Pickett … leader of a bomb party, still throwing bombs though shot through the right arm … And, above all, our brigadier, the beloved John Gellibrand, organising cooks, clerks, and batmen to rally to our assistance.
The carrying parties worked under shellfire, taking ammunition to the frontline and bringing back 1800 wounded in nine hours. Men from the 1st Australian Division were drawn in as carriers. The 28th Battalion, from the 7th Brigade, had already been drawn in to take the 5th Brigade’s original objective. Three times these men bombed their way 500 yards eastwards along the Hindenburg Line. Three times they were turned back, the last at 8.40 pm, when dusk was settling in. Around this time men from the 5th Brigade’s original attack were spotted emerging from shell holes and heading back towards the embankment.
The 6th Brigade was down to about 300 men holding some 500 yards of the Hindenburg Line. They had to hang on. They had been told that the British 7th Division, a more seasoned force than Braithwaite’s 62nd, would now be attacking Bullecourt. They had also been told to retake the second objective that Maxfield had held. This was asking too much. Any advance would have to be made by fresh troops. The 1st Brigade of Hooky Walker’s 1st Australian Division was now being drawn into the fight.
The Germans kept counter-attacking; they brought up a flamethrower. Sometime after dark the men of the 28th Battalion, on the right, heard a rumour that Gellibrand’s brigade was pulling out. They began to retreat, except Captain Jack Roydhouse, a young schoolteacher. He refused to believe the rumour. He went over to the 6th Brigade’s lines and, half in tears, told the men there that they were alone again. He would stay and fight with them.
The spirit of Gellibrand’s men was extraordinary. They kept fighting. They could not spare men to act as stretcher-bearers. The wounded had to try to walk out. A corporal with a shell fragment in his knee carried another out. Savige told of one man whose entrails had spilled out. He lay smoking a cigarette. ‘Give the bastards hell,’ he told Savige. He later shot himself by placing a rifle between his feet.
Around 1 am on May 4 the relieving battalions from the 1st Division began to arrive. Two hours later Gellibrand’s men were on their way back to the embankment. Then the Germans launched another counter-attack. The men of the 6th turned around and helped beat it off. Then they finally left. Along the sixteen miles of the British attack by the 3rd and 5th armies that day the only men who held the ground they won were the Canadians at Fresnoy, way over to the left, and the 6th Australian Brigade on the extreme right.
When the men of the 1st Division took over the trenches during the night they had no choice but to step on the bodies of men from the 6th Brigade. When daylight came they tried to avoid trampling on any body that carried the red-and-white diamond of the 24th Battalion.