Two brothers
The 1st and 2nd Australian divisions left the front and the 4th and 5th came up for what would be called the battle of Polygon Wood. The wood today is mostly pines with a heavy undergrowth of ferns and tangles of blackberries. Lumps of reinforced concrete from German pillboxes are still there and a few straggly trenches, now almost filled in by erosion and pine needles, wander through the trees. This is the typical European forest, gloomy and mysterious. It was not like this in 1917. The trees, most of them about twenty years old, had been stripped of their foliage by shells; from a distance they looked like the black pickets upon which both sides strung barbed wire. There was still some knee-high undergrowth and the ground was a mess of craters and old trench lines, but one could see well enough to notice a mound up ahead, perhaps thirty-feet high. This was the Butte. Belgian artillerymen had practised here in the days of cannons and solid shot; the mound had been a stop-butt. In front of the Butte, now destroyed by artillery, lay an oval track that had been a racecourse.
Some Australians came up to the wood by marching crosscountry from bivouacs south of Ypres. Others, like Corporal William Gamble, a machine gunner in the 5th Division, came down the Menin Road. Gamble had been enjoying his rest, playing poker, at which he usually won because he believed he had mastered the art of bluffing, and walking into Poperinghe for a meal: two eggs, bread, butter and coffee. Now he marched through Ypres and out along the Menin Road and its debris: horses and mules bloated in death, broken-down ambulances and abandoned wagons, discarded rifles and bicycles, and dead men lying in absurd postures on the edge of craters, like other things that had been thrown away. It was Gamble’s first time at the front. The dead were ‘not a very helpful sight’.
Sergeant Jimmy Downing had a hellish trip to the front. He went across country from a bivouac south of Ypres. The final approach was at night. Downing lit up with a waterproof sheet over his head so that German airman could not see the glow from the cigarette. The German barrage caught his battalion.
There was a crash close by, a red flame, flying sparks. Another – and two men were seen in the flash, toppling stiffly sideways, one to the right, one to the left: the one with a forearm partly raised, the other lifted a little from the ground, with legs and arms spread-eagled wide – all seen in an instant – then a second of darkness, then shells, big shells, flashing and crashing all around … A sergeant ran around his platoon. Then the top of his skull was lifted from his forehead by a bullet, as on a hinge, and his body fell on two crouching men, washing them with his blood and brains.
He had arrived at Polygon Wood. The real battle hadn’t started but already Downing’s 57th Battalion was ‘a few handfuls of black-faced men wearily digging’.
Two brothers came up to the front. We know one of them. Brigadier-General Pompey Elliott, commander of the 15th Brigade, was cranky and inspirational, hard and soft, rough with men and gentle with women and children, ambitious yet tactless, intelligent but unsubtle, cocksure and insecure. George, his younger brother, had spent most of his life having fun. He liked a drink and, better still, four or five. Pompey was a teetotaller. George was a brilliant student but at Melbourne University, where he was studying medicine, carousing and football distracted him. George played for Fitzroy and University in the Victorian Football League and was chosen for the State side. Pompey had a sense of purpose, took himself seriously and liked giving orders; George muddled along, enjoying himself. He took a decade to qualify as a doctor and this had nothing to do with lack of academic ability. And here he was now, a captain on the western front, the medical officer of the 56th Battalion, also part of the 5th Division, but in a different brigade to Pompey’s. George carried a photograph of his daughter, Jacquelyn, born in 1916. Everyone seemed to like him: he was an officer and a doctor but he wasn’t stuffy.
Ross McMullin, in his biography Pompey Elliott, tells of an incident at a divisional tournament a few months before Polygon Wood. Pompey was in serious conversation with several high-ranking officers. George had enjoyed several rounds of drinks. He spotted his brother, walked up behind him, thumped him on the back and greeted him warmly with: ‘Hello, Pompey, how are you?’
Pompey whirled around with ‘a look of thunder’ that softened as he recognised his brother. An onlooker reported: ‘He tried, however, to cool the “doc’s” ardour by a sign which drew attention to the quality of the little gathering.’
George said: ‘I don’t care a damn who you’re talking to with all those ribbons on your chest, you should be glad to see your little brother.’ Pompey was; he just wished for a little more decorum. George visited Pompey about six weeks later and relieved him of twenty pounds: he was going on leave and needed spending money.
Now they came up to the front for Polygon Wood. Pompey set up his headquarters in a mine crater at Hooge, several miles behind the front. George went on to Château Wood, behind the 14th Brigade’s jump-off point. Hooge and Château Wood were both under shellfire.
HAIG HAD SEEN the vision again: the Belgian ports. No matter that they were twenty-five miles to the north and that he had already run up more than 80,000 casualties to gain 1000 yards here and 1000 yards there. The myth about Haig is that he lacked imagination. Yet here he was dreaming of breakthrough again: up the ridge, step by step, to Passchendaele village, then a lunge towards the Belgian coast. He had glimpsed the denouement. And Charteris, his sorcerer, was priming the fantasy by feeding Haig tales about the collapse of enemy morale and exaggerating the extent of German casualties. Haig’s imagination only ran down certain roads, however. He apparently didn’t think much about the weather. October, only four days away at the time of Polygon Wood, usually brought about three inches of rain to Ypres. That would be enough to turn the battlefield into a swamp again.
The front for Menin Road was 14,500 yards; for Polygon Wood it would be 8500. The ratio of artillery to the yardage of front being attacked would be about the same as at Menin Road. To the north Gough would go for Zonnebeke village, or what was left of it. In the centre the 4th and 5th Australian divisions would take the rest of Polygon Wood. To the south of the wood the British 33rd Division would come up alongside the Australians. Or at least this was the plan.
THE DAY BEFORE the set-piece was due to begin the Germans, who had clearly not been reading Charteris’s intelligence reports, counter-attacked just after dawn on the front of the 33rd Division, firing a tremendous barrage: high explosive, shrapnel and gas. Some said afterwards the bombardment was the most intense ever fired by the Germans to support an attack by a single division. It fell not only on the British division but also on Elliott’s 58th Battalion, waiting for the next morning’s attack on Polygon Wood. German infantrymen drove 700 yards into the British lines and exposed Elliott’s right flank.
Elliott, meanwhile, was being shelled at his headquarters two miles back at Hooge crater. Talbot Hobbs, the divisional commander, tried to drive down the Menin Road to Elliott’s post. ‘Dumps were going up in all directions,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Motor lorries and cars burning along the Rd, broken down wagons, dead men and horses.’ Hobbs came to within 200 yards of Elliott’s post, then decided to go back, and perhaps saved his life. Three minutes after he turned back a lorry loaded with ammunition blew up. It was just in front of where Hobbs had been stopped. Those who had to stay on the road watched with astonishment as two Australian official photographers – Frank Hurley and Hubert Wilkins – stood up and clicked their cameras as tails of earth erupted on either side of the road.
Elliott’s plans for the following morning were being wrecked. He sent up part of the 60th Battalion to help the 58th. Later in the morning he sent up the rest of the battalion and its commander, Colonel Norman Marshall, a public schoolboy who had been amateur middleweight boxing champion of Victoria and was also an intrepid cross-country horseman, particularly after he had downed a few drinks on a moonlit night. Marshall steadied the men but the two Australian battalions were being chopped up under the barrage and the British troops on their right still had not regained their old frontline. Late in the afternoon Elliott threw in his 57th Battalion, which brought Jimmy Downing into the madness.
Private David Whinfield had gone up with the 60th. ‘We passed many killed. Tommies and Scotties in useless shelters, were devilish scared.’ The German heavy guns were firing at the rate of four shells a second, he wrote in his diary afterwards. ‘It was more than men could stand.’ Downing’s battalion was shelled all night. Many men were buried two or three times.
As darkness came Elliott knew he was in trouble. Three of his four battalions had been shot up before the attack, his right flank was still exposed, many of his supply dumps had been blown up and the British commander on his right didn’t know where his troops were. Elliott also knew he would have trouble trying to assemble what was left of his battalions for the assault. Many of the officers who were to act as guides had been killed or wounded. About 8 pm Elliott told Hobbs that he didn’t want to attack. Hobbs talked to Birdwood. Both decided the 15th Brigade’s assault had to go ahead. The 15th was only a small part of a big attack but its objectives – the wood itself, which opened the way to Broodseinde and Passchendaele Ridge – were probably the most important on the whole front.
Hobbs accepted that Elliott now had only one battalion that was in proper fighting shape, the 59th. The scheme for the assault by Hobbs’ division had two brigades attacking, Elliott’s 15th and the 14th. The 8th Brigade was in reserve. Elliott was now given two battalions from the 8th. They would go on to the final objective, the Blue Line. The 59th would take the first objective, the Red Line. Elliott’s other three battalions would be used for carrying and support.
GEORGE ELLIOTT WAS in the 14th Brigade, which had had an easier time than his brother’s brigade. He was in Château Wood, a few hundred yards ahead of his brother’s post, waiting in the dark with the headquarters staff of his battalion. Soon the barrage would begin and George and the others would move up closer to the frontline troops. Then a shell crashed down among them. A fragment smashed into the back of George’s skull. He lost consciousness.
THE BRITISH BARRAGE opened just before daybreak on September 26, a misty morning a few days into autumn. Sinclair-MacLagan’s 4th Division was north of the 5th Division, going for the northern edge of Polygon Wood and a spur beyond. The historian of one of the 4th’s battalions wrote that the British barrage ‘was the acme of perfection – a gigantic thunderstorm of bursting steel hurled out of the lips of thousands of guns … So close overhead was it that the warm air caused by the friction of the shells could be distinctly felt.’ Bean said that the barrage was the most perfect that ever protected Australian troops. It seemed to break out with a single crash and produced a wall of dust and smoke that appeared to be solid and rolled ahead of the Australians, as someone said, like a Gippsland bushfire. Officers had to use compasses to keep direction. Jimmy Downing said the sky behind him flamed like the Aurora Borealis. The barrage moved across the German lines like the shuttle on a loom, combing the country with intersecting teeth that passed and repassed. And the machine guns: they were fired as barrages now as part of the new tactics. Downing thought they sounded like the leitmotif from a piece by Wagner. North of Downing a captain in the 14th Brigade led his battalion forward, a cigarette in his mouth and a map in his hand. Germans emerged from pillboxes offering souvenirs.
Sinclair Hunt, a schoolteacher from Croydon, New South Wales, shortly to be promoted to lieutenant, had come up with the 14th Brigade. A shell fell among Hunt’s men while they were in the support trenches. One of the six men hit was a ‘platoon favourite’. Hunt wrote that the man’s wounds were terrible, though bleeding little. ‘Great lumps had been chopped out by the pieces of shell and one leg was smashed. He bore up like a true man, would insist on seeing every wound as we hastily dressed it and quietly weighed up his chances of life, which as he said didn’t look over bright.’ He moaned as four men lifted him onto a stretcher, then thanked everyone for helping him. He died two days later.
Before the barrage, Hunt wrote, a man would rise here or there to tighten his belt or stretch a cramped limb. Then the guns opened up and Hunt was on his way. When he had gone seventy-five yards he saw his first Germans, ‘chewed up by the barrage’. When he had gone 100 yards he saw scared-looking German prisoners hurrying back with their hands up. They seemed to know the way better than their guides. He passed the Butte. Australians swarmed all over it, flushing out Germans. He went on. The casualties were light and mostly caused by Australian shells dropping short. One landed a foot behind Hunt’s heels but failed to explode. The moment the barrage lifted off a pillbox the Australians would be all over it, looking for flues or ventilator shafts, then dropping bombs down them. Mostly, Hunt said, the Germans didn’t want to fight; many hadn’t bothered to fix bayonets to their rifles.
Everything had gone well here. The brigade took its objectives easily enough. The barrage had been ‘perfect’. The men were in good spirits. Few had the heart to kill the shell-shocked Germans. Hunt said there were rules. ‘If Fritz fights, he gets fight with interest, but the moment he throws up his hands then fight finishes, for to kill an unarmed and defenceless man is as abhorrent … as to kick a man when he is down.’ But there were also exceptions to the rules, ‘when men wrought to a pitch of momentary insanity by the terrific strain of a barrage endured for hours perhaps, or by the loss of mates killed at their sides, act as they would never do in saner moments.’
Hunt watched the souvenir-hunters. As soon as the Germans emerged from a pillbox they would be roughly searched. Watches, pouches, cigarette cases, revolvers and field glasses were the most common trophies.
Corporal Gamble, back with the machine-gun barrage, saw his first German prisoners. Back in Australia he had seen drawings of cruel-looking Prussians in spiked helmets threatening women and children. These prisoners wore the ‘coal scuttle’ helmets that had come into use the previous year. They didn’t impress him, ‘dressed as they were in sloppy fitting tunics and helmets that looked for all the world like upturned chambers on their heads’.
The 4th Division brigades took their second objective after a short fight but German snipers became busy. Captain Harold Wanliss fell dead here, shot in the heart, throat and side. He was buried where he fell. Wanliss, dark-haired and well liked, had gone out on a trench raid in French Flanders during 1916 to be shot in the mouth in no-man’s land. Bleeding freely, he went on to the German trench and directed the raid from the parapet. On the way back to the Australian line he tried to carry a wounded man but did not have the strength to free him from the wire. Wanliss was then hit by shrapnel and fainted from loss of blood. Three sergeants carried him through the mud to safety. Wanliss received the Distinguished Service Order, a high honour for a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant.
He was a farmer who, like the Elliott brothers, had been dux of Ballarat College; he had also been dux of Hawkesbury Agricultural College and had travelled in Europe with his father, a Ballarat solicitor, before the war. He was a high-minded young man, full of ideas about what Australia might become after the war. His comrades caroused in estaminets and he read and studied. That had always been his way. Around the time war broke out he had broken his leg in a riding accident and couldn’t enlist. While his leg knitted he studied the history and theory of war. After Wanliss’s death his battalion commander wrote: ‘Many brave men – many good men have I met … but he was the king of them all.’ Bert Jacka, who was in the same battalion, said: ‘A hero and a man.’
It had been generally accepted that Wanliss would go into politics after the war. Some, including Monash – and perhaps also Bean – appeared to see him as a future prime minister. The historian Bill Gammage wrote of Wanliss: ‘His death demonstrates that Australia’s World War I losses cannot be measured simply by numbers.’
ELLIOTT’S BRIGADE, BOLSTERED by the 29th and 31st battalions from the reserve brigade, also took its objectives, but it was a day of desperation and confusion because the British division on the right had not caught up and the flank was still open. Elliott’s line was often bent back to the right because of flanking fire. Battalions became intermixed. At one point a lieutenant in Elliott’s brigade found himself in charge of troops from four Australian battalions, plus a few lost Royal Welch Fusiliers. The 15th Brigade seems to have struck more resistance from pillboxes than the brigades north of it.
Early in the advance Lieutenant John Turnour, a theology student from Bendigo, positioned his men in an arc in front of a pillbox. Then he stood up and charged. He ran on, even though he was hit time and again by machine-gun bullets, and eventually fell in front of the loophole. But he had distracted the Germans and his men took the pillbox.
Private Patrick Bugden was caught up in several fights around pillboxes. After rushing one of them he noticed three Germans leading an Australian corporal away as a prisoner of war. He shot one of the Germans, bayoneted the other two and rescued his comrade. Five times during the battle he went out under fire to rescue wounded men. Then he was killed. He was never to know that he had won the Victoria Cross.
The 59th Battalion took the Red Line on time at about 6.45 am. There was, however, still no sign of the British troops who were supposed to be on their right. At this stage the two battalions that had been loaned to Elliott were supposed to go through the 59th and press on to the Blue Line. Their commanders were wary of doing so with their right flank unprotected. Elliott, back at Hooge, was becoming testy, and more so when he heard that the 14th Brigade had already reached its final objective. ‘Push on,’ he told the commanders of the two battalions. Two hours passed and Elliott had heard nothing. It was time for one of his theatrical gestures. He sent a message up: the two battalions were to get moving or he would place a 15th Brigade man in charge of them.
The commander of the British 33rd Division, which should have been on the Australians’ right, was also becoming frustrated. He threw in the 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers, the battalion of Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. The battalion was sent forward in the afternoon through ground already taken by Elliott’s brigade rather than on its own front. The Welch Fusiliers were shelled on their way forward and held up when they went for German positions just south of Elliott’s open flank. They eventually fell back through the Australian lines. British and Australian officers stopped the rout. German airmen flew low over the front, strafing with machine guns. The Australians shot down one of the aircraft, an event so dramatic and unusual that it figured in many soldiers’ diaries.
The British divisional commander again told his troops to push on to the Blue Line. Elliott, meanwhile, told Colonel Marshall to try to take some of the British objectives on the right. Around midnight Marshall took a strong point on the British front, but back at Hooge it wasn’t clear what blockhouse had been captured or precisely where it was. Marshall himself wasn’t entirely sure where he was.
Elliott decided to go to the front himself at dawn, even though Hobbs’ chief-of-staff advised him against this. Ross McMullin recounts in Pompey Elliott that on his way forward Elliott came upon an unwounded 15th Brigade officer in what he considered ‘suspicious circumstances’.
‘Your men are up their fighting for their lives – what are you doing?’ Elliott demanded, and we may presume that he spoke in a very loud voice. Typically again, Elliott decided he might have to shoot this man, then, just as typically, allowed himself to be talked out of it.
Elliott reached the frontline about 8 am. His men were pleased, though not surprised, to see him. The Welch Fusiliers were astounded. One wrote: ‘It was the only time during the whole of the war that I saw a brigadier with the first line of attacking troops.’ Another said it was ‘rare for anyone who combines authority and nous to be on the spot’. Elliott wrote to his wife a few days later: ‘I never saw such a scene of confusion, men of all regiments mixed up all over the place, dead of all regiments lay aside the enemy everywhere.’
Elliott told Marshall to consolidate the position around the strong point he had taken. He told the commander of one of the battalions he had been loaned to push on to the Blue Line. He urged the Welch Fusiliers officers to reorganise their men. And then he left.
That day the Australians took all their objectives here. Marshall ended up holding 250 yards on what should have been the British front. The Welch Fusiliers went forward, superbly, Marshall said. The battle was won. Elliott had prevailed. Force of character had a little to do with it.
AT 3 PM ON the day before Elliott had been told that his brother had been badly wounded.
They brought the news to me when I was tied to my office directing the fight and I could not go to him though they said he was dying. [George had lingered for several hours but never regained consciousness.] I hope never to have such an experience again. The effort to concentrate my thoughts on the task of defeating the enemy as the messages came through revealing each move and the changing phases of the battle to me seemed as time went on to turn me into stone and half the time I was like a man sleepwalking, yet I do not think I made a single error that I would not have made at [training] manoeuvres under similar circumstances.
While Polygon Wood was going on Elliott also discovered that his legal partner back in Melbourne had run up heavy debts. Elliott could be liable for them and the figure could run to thousands of pounds.
He went to see his brother’s body. He cut off the shoulder straps with the captain’s stars as a memento for his sister-in-law. Field ambulance men later gave him George’s watch and cigarette case.
Poor old Geordie, I saw him dead so white and rigid and still and his loved ones left behind him. And we have buried him so far from home amongst strangers to him. I am so glad I was able to bring his body back from the shell torn zone to a little cemetery where the grass was smooth and green and we fired the volley over his head and laid him in the grave with the Union Jack flying over him and our great guns still roaring in the distance. Poor Lyn [George’s wife] and poor little darling Jacquelyn. You must tell our bairnies to love them both well.
The children, Elliott told his wife, need to be told what happened, that ‘the Germans hit poor old Uncle Geordie with a shell and he died and has gone away to heaven … then Dida’s own soldiers got up and they chased those nasty old Germans back for a long way through the bush that is called woods here and they caught and killed such a lot of them and those that weren’t killed … have been sent away to jail again.’
Not long after Jack Campbell, Elliott’s brother-in-law, was killed north of Polygon Wood, dying instantly from a bullet that entered under his left eye. Jack’s mother lived with Elliott’s family. News of the death of her only son and of George is thought to have caused her to suffer a stroke from which she never truly recovered. The European war was doing terrible things to Australian families. And Billy Hughes was again thinking about conscription.
JIMMY DOWNING WON the Military Medal for Polygon Wood. On the morning of the second day, when the barrage eased, Downing and those around him still alive realised that they were hungry. They took food and water from the dead, saying: ‘Pardon, brother, you don’t need it.’ In the afternoon Downing noticed a carrying party of sixteen men coming up. The non-commissioned officer in charge placed eight men in one trench and seven in another while he went on to reconnoitre. He returned to the eight to find them all dead, ‘chopped into lumps like butcher’s meat’. He went to the other seven. They were dead too. Downing said the NCO threw his steel helmet far away and sat down. ‘His body seemed shrunken. “This is the finish, the finish,” he whispered from cracked and blackened lips.’
Downing left the front. ‘We were a pathetic band, with dirty faces and stubbly beards. All were hysterical in varying degrees.’
Sinclair Hunt came out too. He wrote that fear gripped hardest when men were coming out. Having survived, they didn’t want to be hit on the way out. ‘Men tended to hurry away, until some puffing hero declares he won’t run another step for every Fritz in creation and the pace slackens.’ Weary men limped along the roads, stopping to take a cup of coffee at a YMCA stall. Then they slept and slept. Hunt was happy enough: he had survived Polygon Wood. He was killed the following year.
LIKE MENIN ROAD, Polygon Wood was a success. The objective had been gained along the five-mile front. Another three-and-a-half square miles had been won. And, as with Menin Road, the cost had been close to outrageous. There was something perverse about this. The British had spent most of the first three years losing battles, not because of their infantrymen but because the artillery support was poor. Now they were winning battles because they had discovered how to use artillery. They had forced the Germans to revise their tactics and strengthen their frontlines because the ferocity of British barrages stopped German counter-attackers getting through. The trouble now was that the cost of winning was too high and the pace of advance too slow. Haig wouldn’t have enough men left to take the Belgian ports, although he didn’t yet seem to see this, or that he had little prospect of threatening the coast before the autumn rains came. There was another trouble that Haig failed to identify. The advances were so shallow that German artillery pieces were not being captured. This virtually ensured that the next shallow advance would be costly.
The casualties along the whole front for Polygon Wood came in at around 15,400. This was a much higher rate, in terms of the ground captured, than for Menin Road. The Australian losses amounted to around 5400: about 1700 in the 4th Division and more than 3700 in the 5th. Elliott’s brigade had suffered worst: 1204 dead, wounded or missing.
In a week, in two short and ‘successful’ battles, the Australians had lost 10,000 men to advance the allied line in Belgium a few thousand yards.
EARLY IN OCTOBER Haig held a conference with Plumer, Gough and others. He wrote in his diary that night: ‘I pointed out how favourable the situation was … Charteris emphasised the deterioration of German Divisions in numbers, morale and all-round efficiency.’ Haig thought that by October 10 he might be able to do away with bite-and-hold operations and begin a rolling advance on the railhead at Roulers. This would of course involve cavalry. One gains the impression from Haig’s diary entry that Plumer and Gough were less enthusiastic than Haig, but they went along, as they always did. Dissent – open dissent, anyway – was a stranger at Haig’s court.
A few days earlier A. G. Gardiner, editor of the Daily News, had visited Haig’s court. ‘Gardiner says [Lloyd George] never reads anything or thinks seriously. How unfortunate the country seems to be to have such an unreliable man at the head of affairs in this crisis. I thought Gardiner much above the usual newspaper man who visits France.’
THE 4TH AND 5th Australian divisions came out of Polygon Wood and the 1st and 2nd divisions, plus Monash’s 3rd and the New Zealanders, now came up for the next step in the journey towards Passchendaele village. For the first time four Anzac divisions would be attacking in a line. They would call this battle Broodseinde.