Sorrow and honour
The Australian position, brave as it was, didn’t make sense. It only made sense if the British could capture Bullecourt village on the left. If they couldn’t, what was the point of a bridgehead 600-yards wide in the Hindenburg Line, with the Germans on both flanks and looped so far around that they could hit the Australians with diagonal fire from behind? Such a position would simply suck in more and more men. The village had to be taken.
Now, on May 4, the 1st Australian Division was in the line with orders to push it forward 1000 yards or more. Australian bodies lay everywhere: in trenches, slumped over parapets, in shell holes, hung up on wire. Gellibrand’s brigade had run up 1600 casualties; it was now so small that it had been re-formed behind the railway embankment as a battalion. Its 24th Battalion had gone in 586-strong and lost around 350 – dead, wounded or missing. Its 22nd Battalion, with losses of 438, had been almost wiped out. Smith’s brigade had lost more than 1500, an extraordinary figure considering that only a handful of its men had broken into the Hindenburg Line, and proof, one suspects, that it had been mauled by the machine guns on the Quéant flank.
The British 7th Division tried just before dawn on May 4 to take Bullecourt and failed. Bean likened Bullecourt to Mouquet Farm, so ravaged by artillery that many of the trench lines were unrecognisable. The Germans were in deep dugouts so hard to find that other Germans bringing up food and ammunition had to search for entrances. The Germans no longer manned what was left of their trenches, not even at dawn. They merely posted sentries who would call the men from the dugouts if an attack seemed likely. The Germans were so hungry they were eating rations taken from British dead. They were also fighting as stubbornly as their comrades had at Mouquet Farm.
The 1st and 3rd battalions were now in the Australian line on the left. Their orders were to bomb west towards Bullecourt in the hope of joining up with the British. The 2nd Battalion was in on the right and the 4th was on its way to join them. These two were to bomb east and take the ground that Smith’s brigade had failed to take. The two battalions on the left early in the afternoon fought their way towards Bullecourt and soon widened their front to 725 yards. The two battalions on the right took 400 yards of trench. The fighting was terrible. The German bombs – stick-grenades and the tiny egg-bombs – could be thrown further than the British Mills bombs, but the Mills was much more deadly. The Australians kept close to the Germans so that most of the stick and egg grenades went over their heads. Behind the leading wave of Australian bombers came parties of bomb-carriers and behind them came new bombers, ready to take over when the men at the front were killed, wounded or worn out. Other Australians fired Stokes mortars and rifle grenades along the line of the trench, over the heads of the leading wave. Lewis guns were used where possible. But it was mostly about bombs and grit, on both sides.
By late afternoon the Australians had almost doubled their front, yet this was still to little point unless Bullecourt village could be taken. Now the Germans opened a two-hour bombardment and casualties ran up quickly. The maw demanded more troops. The 11th and 12th battalions were brought up to take over on the right. The 5th Australian Division, at Albert, had already been told it might be needed.
THE REVEREND JOHN Howell-Price, vicar of St Silas’s Anglican Church at Waterloo, Sydney, had wanted to enlist when war was declared in 1914. His sons told him they would remain behind if he attempted to do so. The reverend stayed behind and by late 1915 five of his sons were at the war. By the end of 1916 he had lost one, Owen, a lieutenant-colonel, shot through the head at Flers. Now, on May 4 at Bullecourt, he lost another. Lieutenant Richmond Howell-Price, a twenty-year-old, was wounded as his 1st Battalion pushed westwards towards Bullecourt. He died later in the day. Richmond was awarded the Military Cross three days after his death. He lies in a little cemetery near a copse behind Noreuil.
THE NEXT DAY, May 5, the British 7th Division tried to push patrols into Bullecourt. The fire was too hot. The divisional commander decided he needed a full artillery preparation before he could attack again. This, he said, would take three days to organise and carry out. His corps commander gave him two days, which meant the Australians would be alone on their 1100-yard front until May 7.
On the left the Australians repulsed three German counter-attacks from Bullecourt. On the right the 11th and 12th battalions took over and tried to bomb eastwards along the wrecked trenches. The Germans dropped a barrage on them. Men were buried all along the lines as trench walls caved in. One corporal dug out three men, then was buried himself. One of his men rescued him and the corporal dug out another six. Some said this barrage was as cruel as any at Pozières. The senior officer on the right received an order from battalion headquarters to keep bombing to the east. This might have seemed sensible back at the embankment; it made no sense at the front. There, Major A. H. Darnell, a Gallipoli veteran, knew he had only about 200 unwounded men. That was all that remained of the two battalions that had just come into the line. He called a meeting of the remaining officers. All thought the Germans were about to counter-attack; it would be foolish for the Australians, the few of them left, to try to advance at the same time. Darnell refused to obey the order. His colonel insisted the attack go ahead. Darnell stood firm.
WHILE DARNELL WAS showing the sort of resolve the leaders of the Anzac Corps sometimes lacked, the 5th Australian Division, resting near Albert, was holding a horse show in balmy spring weather. Harness was oiled and buckles polished, manes tidied and tails thinned. Driver J. C. Sutherland had the best travelling kitchen and pair of horses. Corporal T. A. Buckingham won the woodchop. Earlier the men had celebrated Anzac Day with dinners and much carousing. They were in good heart. They didn’t know that their general had already been told they would probably be needed at Bullecourt. Two days later a brigade of them was on the train to Bapaume.
MAY 6, THE fourth day of Second Bullecourt, began with a German barrage landing on the remnants of the 11th and 12th battalions. More men buried. More dead. The 10th battalion came up as reinforcements. The Germans counter-attacked from the east, along the line of the trenches. The long nozzles of their flamethrowers blazed and hissed in the gloom before dawn. Clouds of oil smoke hung in the air. The squads with the flamethrowers came along the line of the trench; their comrades tossed bombs from craters along both sides of it. The Australians fell back to the Central Road. The 400-yard gain had been lost.
Corporal George Howell, a builder from Enfield, New South Wales, was on the other side of Central Road, holding a post for the 1st Battalion. He jumped up into the open and ran alongside the trench the Germans had just taken back, throwing bombs. The Germans began to fall back and the exhausted men of the 11th and 12th battalions chased them with bombs and Lewis guns. The Australians took back the 400 yards they had lost. Corporal Howell later received the Victoria Cross.
That night Charles Bean, as he nearly always did, wrote in the tiny grey pages of his diary. Sometimes he wrote in pencil, sometimes in ink. Occasionally he would lapse into shorthand for a word or a sentence. Tonight he wrote:
The Army [Gough’s 5th] seem to be doing nothing in particular to help us out. At present there is an almost endless vista of Bdes put in to hold this impossible position. The 7th Divn is going for Bullecourt again tonight – I believe … They have crumped Bullecourt a lot today White says … White is very angry with the way in which Gough has messed up this corps. It is very hard luck that the First Divn sld be dragged in like this just when it was coming out. Birdwood was saying today he might offer the Army to take Bullec’t with our 5th Divn if they w’dnt do anything. He could guarantee the 5th Divn doing it.
NEXT DAY, THE fifth of the battle, the British again went for Bullecourt. They were trying only for the south-eastern corner. The idea was to link up with the Australians’ exposed left flank. A fresh Australian battalion, the 9th, was sent in there. It was to bomb towards Bullecourt shortly after the British attack began.
The British went in under a full moon and behind a creeping barrage. Some fourteen minutes later, just before 4 am, the Australians climbed the barricade they had erected in the German trench and began to fight their way towards the village. At 5.15 am the Australians saw, standing on the parapet ahead, amid smoke and dust, Captain M. L. Gordon, of the Gordon Highlanders. Gordon and his men had been fighting their way along the eastern edge of the village when he heard the distinctive sound of Mills bombs. He knew the Australians must be close. Not long after Gordon was killed. The fighting here went on for hours. The Germans counterattacked with a flamethrower, then dumped shells on their lost positions, but the Australians and the Scots held on. The Australians’ left flank was finally connected to something, and it was something to believe in. Australians and Scots always seemed to find things to admire in each other.
Fresh troops were needed. In the dark the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Division took over the bloody earth on the left. The British next day would try to take the rest of Bullecourt; the Australians would try to push on and meet them at the north-eastern corner of the village.
NEXT DAY, THE sixth day of the battle, the British at 11 am tried to strengthen their hold on Bullecourt. They took parts of the Red Patch (as it was designated on the maps) on the south-western corner of the village, only to be pushed out of most of it. Rain had made the battlefield muddy. The Australians captured another 150 yards of German trench along the eastern edge of Bullecourt.
Sergeant Percy Lay, a drover from Ballan, Victoria, was there. He was wounded that night while firing a rifle grenade. The cartridge failed to propel the live grenade off the rifle. Lay held the rifle high in the air and the bomb blew it to pieces. A fragment of metal landed in his hand. The Germans kept counter-attacking. Lieutenant William Donovan Joynt was near Lay. ‘During a respite at night,’ Joynt wrote, ‘when we could hear the Germans assembling for a further attack, apparently very much against their will, Lay, unarmed, suddenly hopped out of the trench, disappeared into the darkness, and in a few minutes reappeared at the double with (six) Fritzies in front of him, belting the hide off them with his tin hat as his sole weapon.’ For this, and for fighting on while wounded, Lay received the Military Medal.
Walter Hill had been in the line several days with the 1st Division. In 1980, when he was eighty-five, he wrote about his time there. He remembered being buried up to his neck when trench walls caved in and seeing shell-shocked men wandering aimlessly – and something else. Pioneers had dug a communications trench to the front along the line of Central Road.
Here I witnessed the most tragic episode of my service. A corporal was working to deepen the section of trench his men occupied, throwing the earth out to where several corpses of soldiers killed the night before [lay]. Noticing the colour patch on one corpse, he remarked, ‘That is my brother’s battalion.’ As he crawled to it, he turned the corpse to discover with terrible grief that he had been throwing the earth on his dead brother.
THE 1ST DIVISION came out and the 5th Division went in. Up came Simon Fraser, the forty-year-old farmer from Victoria’s Western District, now a lieutenant, who had told of the stricken Australian at Fromelles calling to him: ‘Don’t forget me, cobber.’
Up came Sergeant Jimmy Downing, who had also been at Fromelles. He later remembered the journey to the embankment. Scraps of bodies poked from the earth. The land was bare, except for tree stumps, curled and broken railway lines and houses reduced to a shattered chimney or a broken wall. Downing watched 1st Division men coming out ‘dull-eyed, shambling, half-crazed’.
Field guns flashed behind Downing; the sky ahead was lit with the flare and flicker of German artillery. He passed a British soldier lying on the ground. His hair was bloody and Downing could see the red skull beneath. The fingers of one hand had been smashed to a pulp. His legs were broken and his puttees were twisted and bloody. ‘Keep to the left,’ the Tommy said between moans, ‘keep to the left, they want you there, boys, keep to the left.’
Downing reached the front. ‘A man with both eyeballs hanging like poached eggs on his cheeks was sitting at the bottom of the trench groaning.’ A man babbled on the parapet. The German barrage became heavier. Downing heard the sound of German bombs. And then he saw the grey mass of Germans rise out of the ground. He and the others fired until their rifles became hot. The attack was beaten off.
And up to the front came Lieutenant Rupert ‘Mick’ Moon. He had filled one of the many vacancies for officers in the 15th Brigade after the slaughter at Fromelles. Moon was twenty-four, a bank clerk, less than five foot six inches tall and slightly built. He looked more like a boy than a man. Blue eyes gazed out of a gentle and intelligent face. Moon liked horses and served on Gallipoli as a dismounted trooper. He transferred to the infantry and was commissioned in the field in France.
He hadn’t liked the freezing winter of 1916–17. ‘A terrible time, sheer misery,’ he said when he was ninety-one. ‘The shell fire, the dominance of the German air force, the appalling conditions, rain and mud made life very, very difficult, but we were very young and it didn’t do us any harm.’
He left us with none of his thoughts as he neared the front at Bullecourt that day (indeed he never talked publicly about the day), but we know what others were thinking about him. Pompey Elliott, his brigadier, doubted if Moon would make a good officer. The extroverted Elliott thought Moon too timid. Major George Wieck, Elliott’s senior staff officer, mentioned to Bean that Moon had been marked down as an ‘unsuitable’ leader. Moon, however, told Bean long after the war that this was not so, that he had had the confidence of Elliott and Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Denehy, his battalion commander. Two days after Moon arrived at the Bullecourt front Denehy called him and other officers in to talk about an attack early the next day. ‘You’ve got the tough one, Mickey,’ he told Moon.
THE ARRAS BATTLE was petering out. Haig was more interested in planning a big offensive at Ypres. Bullecourt was kept going. It was the only breach in the Hindenburg Line and it led nowhere, but it had to be kept going because otherwise there would be little to show for the Arras offensive. It also had to be kept going to lull the Germans into thinking the battle there wasn’t over. If they thought it was, they would begin to guess at the site for Haig’s next big battle and would surely come up with Ypres.
So the British 7th Division was ordered to try to capture the rest of Bullecourt in the early hours of May 12. One battalion of Elliott’s brigade – the 58th, that of Denehy, Fraser and Moon – was to assist by attacking westward along the two German trenches. It would join up with the British at the crossroads above the northeastern corner of the village. Moon’s party would storm a concrete machine-gun post that sat between the two German trenches. Another party, under Lieutenant Norman Pelton, would climb over the bomb-stop in the second German trench and push the Germans back to the crossroads and capture a large dugout. Then a third party, under Lieutenant Jimmy Topp, would capture the German dugouts beyond the crossroad. After taking the machine-gun nest Moon was to help with the other two attacks.
Moon took the nest after a bomb fight but was hit in the face.
He and his men went on to help with the fight for the second objective. Here Moon received a second wound, this time to the shoulder, that spun him around and left him dazed. The Germans broke. Moon followed them. Moon and his men trapped the Germans in dugouts and took 184 prisoners. By now Moon had received a third wound, to the foot. Blood and sweat dripping from his face, he sat down among his men and said: ‘I’ve got three cracks and not one of them good enough for Blighty.’ (A ‘Blighty’ was slang for a wound that warranted a man being sent to England.)
Moon worked to strengthen the new Australian position. Then he received a fourth wound. A bullet smashed his jaw and twelve teeth. This one was a Blighty. Moon bound up his face and continued to work on building up the position. Only when he was satisfied that this was being done correctly did he agree to leave the front. The Australians and the British eventually met, as they were supposed to, at the crossroads.
Moon received the Victoria Cross. Pelton and Topp, the leaders of the other two parties, were killed. It was Topp’s thirty-seventh birthday. Killed too was Simon Fraser.
ELLIOTT’S BRIGADE CAME out of the line the following night, relieved by British troops. The only Australians in the frontline now were on the right of the Central Road. The British 7th Division was shortly after relieved by the 58th Division, which meant the two battles for Bullecourt had used up three British divisions and four Australian. The front was approaching a stalemate. The British and Australians couldn’t push on and the Germans couldn’t recover their lost trenches.
The Germans eventually gave up. They blew up their dugouts and pulled back. Late in May the Anzac Corps left Bullecourt.
THE BRITISH OFFICIAL historian concludes his account of Second Bullecourt with a coy sentence: ‘The Battle of Bullecourt is instructive as well as terrible to contemplate.’ It is easy to see how it was terrible. Allied casualties for the second battle ran to more than 14,000: 7482 Australians and some 6800 British. But how was the battle instructive?
Charles Bean in the Australian official history was quick to criticise Gough for twice attacking into a re-entrant, the first time impulsively. He said that Bullecourt, more than any other battle, ‘shook the confidence of Australian soldiers in the capacity of the British command; the errors, especially on April 10th and 11th, were obvious to almost everyone’. He described some of the tactics as ‘impossible’. And there Bean left it.
He returned to Second Bullecourt in his 1957 book Two Men I Knew, a memoir about the generals Bridges and White, but gave it only eleven lines. He called the battle a success, ‘though this fell far short of Gough’s objectives which, so far as Australian experience went, had up to this stage in the war been tragically inflated.’ Elsewhere Bean wrote of White: ‘He was the greatest man I have known. In no other was genius so quickly and so clearly evident.’
Gough’s 1931 book The Fifth Army is no help either. Gough merely said that on the first day the Australians succeeded and the British division didn’t, mainly because its men were inexperienced and lost direction. There is no mention of tactics.
In 1990 the Australian historian Eric Andrews questioned Bean’s account of Second Bullecourt. He conceded that Gough – and Haig – were to blame for the folly of attacking into a re-entrant, but said Bean ignored failures in Australian staff work and failed to analyse the Anzac Corps’ artillery work. ‘It is like a historian writing of the Vietnam war and ignoring the use of helicopters.’ Andrews argued that the artillery plan underestimated the threat from Quéant and that this allowed German machine gunners to knock Smith’s brigade out of the fight in the first hour. He said Bean failed to mention that Gellibrand resigned command of the 6th Brigade a month after Second Bullecourt (he took up a training post in England) because he was unhappy with the staff work of Smyth’s 2nd Division. Andrews concluded that the Australian staff work was ‘incompetent’. White, he said, ‘appears a poor operations commander and an incompetent tactician’.
Andrews said Bean was too much concerned with telling the story of infantrymen, whom he admired, and often became lost in a fog of detail that confused and deterred readers. Bean didn’t provide enough analysis of the artillery plans or the Australian staff work. And he hero-worshipped White. He took White’s criticisms of Gough at face value and didn’t realise that White and Birdwood were excusing themselves. Andrews wondered whether Bean ‘hesitated to look too closely at the battle, lest he be obliged to condemn his hero. It was all so much easier to attack Gough, and revert at the end of the long account to righteous indignation against the British High Command.’
Andrews’ criticism is persuasive.
JEAN LETAILLE, A farmer and former mayor of Bullecourt, has created a private museum, perhaps the finest on the old western front, under the whitewashed walls of what were once his wheat sheds. Here is a rusting minenwerfer, the German mortar so feared by allied soldiers. Barbed wire, in all its varieties, lies everywhere. The prongs are three times longer than those used for cattle fences and also thicker and closer together. Here are tobacco tins: Gold Flake Honey Dew (a gold tin), Craven ‘A’ (red), Capstan (light blue). Here are wire-cutters: long, short, British, German, wooden handled, cantilevered. There is a German sniper’s breastplate, not much different to the armour Ned Kelly fashioned from the mouldboards of ploughs. And here is a saw used for surgical amputations.
Doves coo, bees hover over the flowerbeds and the whiff of blood-and-bone fertiliser is heavy in the air. Bullecourt is as tranquil as it was before 1914. The war is gone. The tunnels and trenches and dugouts have been filled in and ploughed over and the corn stands seven-feet high. And war hasn’t gone. The ploughs still bring its debris. And the war hasn’t gone, because people here remember.
You can find the spot where Moon won his Victoria Cross. It’s in the yellow stubble in front of the Australian memorial on the sunken road between Bullecourt and Riencourt. Walk out there and you’ll find shrapnel balls and nose cones. The chances are that you’ll also see a hawk circling high overhead and a swarm of white butterflies. War and peace, death and life. And you think of the words of Jimmy Downing: ‘Bullecourt represents for Australians a greater sum of sorrow and of honour than any other place in the world.’