They rob while they fight
John Monash took eleven days’ leave in London after Messines, celebrated his fifty-second birthday, went to four stage shows as well as a performance of Aida, and watched a German air raid from his hotel at Piccadilly. The raid seemed nothing much to him – he was used to the thunder and lights of the western front – but it bothered Londoners, who had been listening for Gotha bombers since the first raid in May. One raid on Folkestone had killed twenty-five children. Monash also caught up with Lizzie Bentwitch, who had been friends with him and Vic, his wife, in Melbourne in the 1890s. She had moved to London around 1900 after collecting an inheritance. Sometime in 1917 she and Monash became lovers.
Monash returned to France and eventually took his division to rest at Boulogne on the coast, to sunshine and sports days. Vic had sent him a list of questions and he tried to reply to them in a letter late in July. Yes, the washing of socks in forward areas was done in bulk: the men didn’t get their own socks back from the pool, even if they had been knitted by wives or sweethearts. No, he didn’t know what they told the relatives of men shot for desertion or cowardice. ‘Probably the truth.’ Monash said the Australian Government’s refusal to allow the death penalty was bad for discipline. He had recently acted as corps commander during Godley’s absence. He had confirmed six death sentences on 4th Division men ‘but they have had to be commuted to ten years’ penal servitude’.
By late September the division was preparing to go up for Broodseinde. Monash dined at Haig’s headquarters with the field-marshal and two of his staff. After each course the mess stewards left and the doors were locked from the inside. The concern for security was misplaced. Haig was on a romantic flight. He was rapidly wearing the Germans down, he said. It was only a question of time and weather. Monash, with no first-hand experience of the Belgian front, appears to have believed this. Then he left for the ancient town of Ypres to obtain some experience. He set up in the ramparts near the Menin Gate.
Bean’s reporting of Messines had irritated Monash. It was ‘the apotheosis of banality. Not only is the language silly tosh, but his facts are, for the most part, quite wrong.’ The second charge is unfair: Bean was always careful with facts. But he also tended to write like a solicitor, loading up sentences with caveats and parentheses that sucked the sap out of them, and sometimes the clarity as well. Monash, the writer, owned a sharp eye and a relaxed style, and now, in a letter to Vic, he turned it on Ypres.
It had once been one of the great cloth-weaving towns of Europe, with a moat on three sides, backed by massive walls and ramparts. The Cloth Hall, built in the thirteenth century, was at once intimidating in all its Gothic greyness and fussiness, and quaint, friendly almost, like something from a fairytale. Before the Great War shepherds had grazed fat sheep within sight of the spire. Then the German artillery set upon the town and its people fled west along the road to Poperinghe pushing handcarts and wheelbarrows. Only soldiers and rats lived in the ruins of Ypres now. Yet it mattered more than it ever had in its glory days. If it fell, the Germans could fall upon the Channel ports. From a British viewpoint it was the most important town in the Great War.
Monash told Vic: ‘For three years it has been dying a lingering death, and now there is nothing left of its fine streets, its great square, its cathedral, the historic Cloth Hall, its avenues, and boulevards of fine mansions, its hospitals, its town hall, or its straggling suburbs, but a charred collection of pitiable ruins – a scene of utter collapse and desolation.’ The Germans were still shelling the town ‘and every day a few more of the gaunt, spectral pillars, which once were fine historic buildings, are toppled over and crumbled into dust’. The traffic between Poperinghe and Ypres was ‘simply incredible’. Monash likened it to Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, after the last race on Melbourne Cup Day.
Here comes a body of fighting troops, tin-hatted and fully equipped … There follows a string of perhaps one hundred heavy motor lorries … a limousine motor car with some divisional staff officer; a string of regimental horse- and mule-drawn vehicles … some motor ambulance wagons; more heavy motor lorries, a long string of remount horses, marching in twos … a great 12-inch howitzer, dragged by two steam traction engines; more infantry … more motor lorries, a long stream of Chinese coolies, smart and of magnificent stature … dispatch riders on motor bikes … a battery of artillery, all fully horsed and clattering and jingling … motor wagons bringing forward broken stone and road-making materials … a Royal Flying Corps car carrying parts of aeroplanes to forward hangars; more ambulances; and so on and on and on in a never-ending stream.
Monash’s headquarters in the ramparts were safe enough. The walls were so thick that they deflected the heaviest shells, but Monash said he felt as though he was living in a mine. ‘It is cold and dank and overrun by rats and mice, and altogether smelly and disagreeable …’
It was October 1. This was not like Messines. Monash had just a few days to finalise plans for his division’s part in Broodseinde, which was due to open on October 4.
TWO BROTHERS CAME up for Broodseinde. Monash may have seen them tramping the roads as part of that endless stream of traffic. They were privates and it was the lot of privates to tramp roads and for the webbing straps to rub against their shoulders. Jarvis Fuller was in the 7th Battalion of the 1st Division; Roy Fuller was in the 2nd Division. They had both been marked down in England as reinforcements for the 7th Battalion. Then both fell sick: Jarvis with bronchitis, Roy with pneumonia. Jarvis recovered first and was sent to France. Roy took longer; by the time he left hospital he was told that he would have to go to the 2nd Division. The brothers were close. They had gone joy-riding on the trams of Durban on the voyage over and Roy had entertained their mates on the ship by playing a tin whistle. The separation hurt. Jarvis twice went searching for Roy’s battalion in France. They had not met by September 29 but both were going to Broodseinde. They might meet there.
Jarvis was the younger at twenty-two. Tall, thin, blue-eyed and with a thick mane of hair, he had the look of an ascetic, a schoolteacher perhaps. In truth he was easy-going and worked in a rope factory in Footscray after growing up in the hot and dusty sheep country of Moonambel in Victoria’s west. It was the spectacles – winkers, he called them – that gave him that studious look. He had worn them since he was at least twelve and had been initially rejected by the army because of his poor eyesight. He told his sister, Ruby, that he was in ‘bonzer nick’ in France. He wasn’t wearing his glasses – ‘I honestly believe my eyes have improved, [but] perhaps you had better not tell mother as she may think I’m foolish.’ He worried about Les Darcy, the middleweight boxer, who was being hounded in Australia because he had not joined up. Jarvis liked the fights: he felt ‘wowsers’ were pursuing Darcy. Jarvis was ‘having the best time since I left Ausy’, although French showerheads amused him. ‘They’re exactly the size of a penny with five holes. The stream nearly knocks you over.’ He wished Roy could be with him.
Five days before Broodseinde opened he wrote to another sister, Pearl. ‘I feel in bonzer health and I’m going strong like Johnnie Walker. I reckon the war will be over before the winter sets in, we have had a marvellous run of successes, but you won’t see it in the papers, but it’s true.’
MAJOR PHILIP HOWELL-PRICE also came up for Broodseinde. He didn’t have to be there. His brother Owen had been killed near Flers the previous year. Richmond, another brother, had died at Bullecourt. Philip, twenty-three and twice decorated, had been wounded at Lone Pine and Second Bullecourt. Birdwood, conscious that Philip had lost two brothers and anxious to save his life, had seconded him to the staff of the 1st Division.
Philip wrote home from Flanders late in September. The weather was beautiful, he said. ‘Some old men (I mean old men mind you) are still living round about and it really cuts one to the heart to see them doing hard manual labour … Can’t … believe that I am going to be spared by God to return to my home.’
Philip didn’t tell his parents that, upon hearing that his old battalion was going to Broodseinde, he had begged to be sent back to it. Birdwood eventually let him go.
CHARLES BEAN CAME up in the night, along with Keith Murdoch and another journalist, to watch the attack from the ridge behind the Australian lines. Bean knew this was the most important of Plumer’s step-by-step advances. The two Australian corps were the centrepiece of the assault. They would be going for Broodseinde Ridge with its string of observation posts. From here, Bean wrote years afterwards, the Germans could look down on the British salient as if it were a spread-out map. The narrow ridge led north to the village of Passchendaele and the red ruins of its church. Gough would be going for the village of Poelcappelle. This opened the way to Passchendaele from the east. Hardly anyone in Britain or Australia had heard of Passchendaele village before 1914; now it was taking on an absurd significance, as though it were Rome or Jerusalem.
Bean began to follow the duckboards up to the front. The sky was grey and drizzling. White flares floated lazily above the German lines. Bean thought they looked like fishes’ eyes. Then, about 5.20 am, forty minutes before the attack was due to begin, the Germans sent up a yellow flare, then another and another until there were sheaves of them. ‘About seven minutes later, or less,’ Bean wrote in his notebook, ‘the German barrage came down, battery by battery. By 5.30 it was really heavy – crump, crump, crump, crump, crump, like empty biscuit-tins banging down into the valley ahead …’ Bean thought the Anzac attack had been discovered. It hadn’t. What he couldn’t know was that the Germans were about to attack Zonnebeke, on the Australian front. This assault had been set down for 6 am on October 4, the very time at which Plumer would be attacking from the opposite direction. Bean was watching the preliminary bombardment for the German attack.
Most of the German barrage fell on the 1st and 2nd divisions. They, like Bean, thought their attack had been discovered. Bean estimated that about one-seventh of the attacking force of the 1st and 2nd divisions were killed or wounded here. Some twenty officers were killed, including Philip Howell-Price. The third brother had fallen.
Private Paul Johanessen wrote to his parents:
We were formed up on the tapes by about midnight, and lay in shell holes in the rain till about a quarter to five and Fritz put down a terrific barrage on us for a quarter of an hour. It was awful, I will never forget it. It was just one continual crash of bursting shells and the screams of wounded and dying men. Well just as their barrage lifted ours came down, and over we went. We both attacked … in ‘No Mans Land’, but they had a stomach full and threw down their arms. They were dazed by the suddenness of our attack. We got our objectives by about eight o’clock and were digging in when I got hit in the ribs … I was sent to the base hospital but the wound soon healed up.
Percy Lay, newly promoted to lieutenant, wrote in his diary that the losses from the German barrage were so heavy that the men were pleased when the attack began and they could move. As usual they lit cigarettes as soon as they set off. The ground was wet; the Australian shells falling in front of them threw up steam rather than dust. Lay wrote: ‘We met Fritz attacking and then we had some great fighting and beat him badly. When he saw us coming he turned and got.’
The Australians had gone 100 yards or so, slipping and sliding as they tried to catch up with their barrage, when they saw figures carrying fixed bayonets ahead. Were they Australians or Germans? Then the figures opened fire and fled. The Australians now realised that the Germans were attacking at the same time as they were.
Private Frank Handcock didn’t make the first objective, the Red Line. He came from a farming family from Myrrhee, south of Wangaratta, in north-eastern Victoria. Eight Handcock brothers had gone off to the war. Jack, the first to enlist, was killed at the Gallipoli landing. Enlistments at Wangaratta were reported almost like cattle sales in 1916. The Wangaratta Chronicle reported a busy day at the recruiting office in February, 1916. ‘The accepted included some exceptionally fine men. One stood 6ft 1in in his socks, weighed 13 [stone] 7 [lbs] and measured 40in normal round the chest. Two others stood 6ft ½in, and another 6ft …’
Frank Handcock, a farm labourer, had enlisted as a nineteen-year-old. A few months after leaving Australia he had been wounded in the right leg at Mouquet Farm. They patched him up in England and sent him back, but his leg hadn’t healed and he apparently had difficulty marching. Because of his weak leg he was sent out into no-man’s land as a sniper before the Broodseinde attack. He thus missed the carnage of the German barrage but still ended up wounded. It was the right leg again and the upper right arm.
His sergeant asked: ‘Are you all right, Frank?’ Handcock had lost much blood. He was lapsing in and out of consciousness. The sergeant thought Frank would almost certainly die. He called for stretcher-bearers and moved on for the Red Line. The bearers must have assumed Frank was dead. They didn’t collect him.
Two Germans came along. The evidence suggests they may have been dazed and muddled by the British barrage. They heard Handcock groaning, picked him up and started carrying him towards their lines as a prisoner.
DONOVAN JOYNT OF the 8th Battalion rushed towards the crest of Broodseinde Ridge, the Red Line position, with his men. Their blood was up. They were charging. Joynt’s sergeant was shouting something to him. The sound of the barrage blotted out his words.
‘What is it you want?’ Joynt shouted. ‘What is it?’
And the sergeant shouted back: ‘One minute of this is worth a lifetime of ordinary life, isn’t it, sir!’
The Australians reached the Red Line between 6.45 and 7.20 am. They were supposed to wait there until 8.10. In some places, however, they could neither wait nor rest.
Lay and his men, who were near Joynt, came under shellfire. At first they thought their own shells were dropping short. Then someone observed the flash of a field gun up ahead. The Germans were firing ‘whizz-bangs’ at them over open sights. There were in fact two seventy-seven-millimetre field guns, plus machine guns and a pillbox, up ahead. The Australians went for them as their Lewis gunners tried to keep the Germans’ heads down. Lay and others crept so close that German bombs were bursting behind them. The pillbox was an artillery headquarters. The way Bean tells the story, a white flag appeared from a trapdoor, but ‘most of its defenders were shot down’.
THERE WERE LOTS of German prisoners this day, 5000 of them along the whole front, a huge bag by the standards of the western front and another reason for Haig and others to see Broodseinde as a grander victory than it was. Percy Lay told the story of the attack on the German field guns in more detail than Bean. ‘About six of us had some fun,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘We got a bit ahead of the others. At first we got 35 prisoners out of three strong posts then we had a good chase after a Headquarters’ staff.’ The staff men escaped but Lay captured all their papers and sent them back. They were ‘important’ papers, he later heard. ‘We then started on a machine gun position and shot the crews of the two guns with the exception of one man and we made him turn his gun on his own men but our people thought we were Huns and opened fire on us.
So we had to shoot the Hun and get the guns back.’ Lay, while a sergeant, had won the Military Medal and the Distinguished Conduct Medal. Now, at Broodseinde and as a lieutenant, he was to be awarded the Military Cross.
Charles Carrington, the young English officer we last met on the Somme, attacked with the English division immediately north of the New Zealanders. Later in the day he was sharing a tin of hot food when an intelligence officer told him a story about himself, the commanding officer, and a wounded German. The German was squirming, the intelligence officer said, done for. The kindest thing to do was to shoot him. ‘You’d best shoot the poor fellow,’ the CO told his runner. The runner unslung his rifle, fingered the trigger, but couldn’t squeeze it. The CO then told the intelligence officer to shoot the German. He couldn’t do it either. The CO drew his revolver, ‘looked fierce’ and walked up to the German, who knew exactly what was happening. The CO couldn’t shoot either. They left the German there. As the intelligence officer said, he probably died in the mud that night.
Lieutenant William Palstra, from Monash’s division, had come up through Ypres, ‘a grand monument to the desolation of war … Not one stone in this once large and prosperous city is undamaged or in its place. The streets are tracks among huge mounds of brick dust.’ Now he was behind the lines at Broodseinde, watching hundreds of German prisoners come out. As they ‘got near our lads the astonished Hun found about half a dozen hands in his pockets looking for souvenirs’.
Bean came upon a captured German officer later in the day. The German, a career-soldier, had lost much blood from a wound to the arm. The Australians had cut off his shoulder straps as souvenirs. They had also repeatedly brought him cups of tea.
‘Your men are funny,’ the German said. ‘They rob while they fight.’
THE AUSTRALIANS TOOK the final objective, the Blue Line, over the crest of the ridge, and could have pushed on further. Allied troops had not trodden this ground since May, 1915. The Australians came upon the decomposing bodies, identifiable by scraps of uniform, of British troops killed here in either 1914 or 1915. And to the south-east they could see where the war wasn’t: copses and hedgerows, cows grazing and smoke drifting lazily from farmhouse chimneys.
The Australians were astonished at what the Germans had been able to see from here. ‘As we gazed back over the country,’ one battalion historian noted, ‘we could see plainly the movements of our own units … Guns, transport, and men were all exposed to the splendid observation from this position. It was a prize worth having …’
But, again, the price was high. Broodseinde looked a better victory from the relative serenity of Haig’s and Plumer’s headquarters.
THE GREAT VICTORY had cost 20,000 casualties along the British line. This for an average advance of about 1000 yards. But Passchendaele was in sight, so long as the weather held. Something close to elation seemed to pass through Haig’s headquarters. Broodseinde rather proved what everyone who hadn’t visited the frontline was saying: the spirit of the German army had been broken. Hurley and Wilkins, the Australian photographers, knew what the front was like. They were just behind it at Broodseinde. ‘Every 20 paces or less lay a body,’ Hurley said. ‘Some frightfully mutilated, without legs, arms and heads and half-covered in mud and slime. I could not help thinking that Wilkins and I, trudging along this inferno and soaked to the skin, talking and living beings, might not be the next moment one of these things – Gee – it puts the wind up one at times.’
There was elation in the Australian divisions too, even among some of the men in the frontline, and it was understandable. They had been misused at Fromelles, Pozières, Mouquet Farm and Bullecourt. Now, under Plumer, they had been winning, quickly and decisively. Plumer looked better than Gough because he set objectives that were modest but achievable. What everyone seemed to be ignoring, however, was the scale of casualties. The three quick victories on the ridges east of Ypres had so far cost Haig’s forces 56,000 men.
The three Australian divisions lost another 6432 men at Broodseinde. The casualties were heaviest in the 1st and 2nd divisions. These two had been caught lying under the German barrage.
AT FIRST PRIVATE Jarvis Fuller appeared to have disappeared on the battlefield. Roy, his brother, had been working to the north as a stretcher-bearer with the 2nd Division. He saw Jarvis’ battalion from the 1st Division coming out. Had any of them seen his brother? A sergeant told Roy that Jarvis had been wounded and taken to an aid post. But there was no record of Jarvis being admitted to a clearing station or a hospital. He was listed as missing. Two months later Roy wrote home, saying one should not give up hope. Ten days later he reported that he still had no news of ‘our Dear Brother’. Christmas came and went; Roy said he didn’t enjoy it as the others had. Thoughts of ‘Dear Brother Jarvis’ and what might have happened to him filled his mind. He said he even found it hard to write letters.
A few months later Roy heard of a 2nd Division officer who claimed to have buried Jarvis. Roy went in search of him. Eventually Lieutenant A. G. Taylor wrote to Jarvis’ mother: ‘Madam, Your son Private Fuller J. B. did not belong to our Battalion, but I discovered his body a few minutes after he was killed, and we buried him … Your boy … had died nobly, doing his duty. My men made a cross, which now marks the spot where his body lies … His personal effects were returned to his Battalion.’
The effects sent to his mother comprised a purse, four coins, two religious books, a wallet, cards and a letter. There was no mention of the spectacles he had learned to live without.
Philip Howell-Price’s body was never found. He simply disappeared in the barrage before the hop-over. The Reverend John Howell-Price and his wife Isabel had now lost three sons, who, between them, had won two Distinguished Service Orders and three Military Crosses. But they were still dead.
We left Private Frank Handcock, badly wounded in the leg and arm, being carried off as a prisoner by two Germans who had been bewildered by the British barrage. They were so muddled they took Handcock to the Australian lines, where they collapsed and became prisoners themselves. Handcock was sent to a hospital in England. Surgeons amputated his leg above the knee. He returned to the paddocks of Myrrhee but died in his thirties as a result of his wounds.
BEAN CALLED BROODSEINDE an ‘overwhelming blow’. The German official history referred to it as ‘the black day of October 4’. Plumer is said to have referred to it as the greatest victory since the Marne. Bean said that English war correspondents at the front felt it was Britain’s most complete success on the western front. General Godley, the English commander of II Anzac Corps, wanted to push on about noon on the day of the battle. Godley didn’t care too much for the finer points of tactics – such things smacked of intel-lectualism – but he had always been good at telling troops to push on. Birdwood and Plumer promptly scotched his scheme.
Charteris, Haig’s head of intelligence, was also having a rush of blood. In 1932 Harington, Plumer’s chief-of-staff, wrote to Edmonds, the British official historian, after reading the proofs of Bean’s account of Broodseinde. Harington said that Haig and Charteris arrived at Plumer’s headquarters. Charteris, Harington wrote, came into his room and said: ‘Now we have them, get up the Cavalry, now we have them on the run. Push on, push on etc.’ Harington wrote that he told Charteris ‘in no uncertain terms of what I thought of him for urging the C-in-C to rush us wildly without preparation & lose the lives of the bulk of the men who had just done so well. It would have been madness & my old Chief was not going to be bluffed. It would have been sheer murder …’
WHAT DID LLOYD George think about all this success? Between the battles of Menin Road and Polygon Wood the Prime Minister and Robertson had attended a conference with their French allies at Boulogne. Haig was not present. Lloyd George agreed to a French request that the British take over more of the line. This was his way of saying he didn’t believe in Haig’s Passchendaele campaign; it may even have been a way of trying to end it. If Lloyd George was right to doubt Haig’s chances of achieving a worthwhile success in Flanders, the Prime Minister was still wrong – hopelessly so – in his thoughts about where the war might be won. He wanted Robertson to transfer five or six divisions from the western front to Allenby in Egypt. The idea was bizarre. Robertson resisted it.
Haig became angry upon learning, just before Broodseinde opened, that he was to take over more of the line in France. What annoyed him most was that Lloyd George and Robertson had agreed to the proposal without consulting him. ‘R[obertson] comes badly out of this,’ he wrote in his diary.
Lloyd George decided a week after the victory at Broodseinde to seek second opinions about the western front strategy. He sought these from Sir John French and Sir Henry Wilson. French had failed on the western front and knew little about modern artillery. Sir Henry Wilson was the best-known intriguer in the British army; hardly anyone trusted him. The politics of Britain’s war were becoming nastier. Robertson stood in the most exposed position. Haig niggled at him from one side and the Prime Minister from the other.
ONE THING HITS you at once as you walk along Broodseinde Ridge: the Germans could see just about everything in the British salient below. The spire of the Cloth Hall, risen from the ashes, soars above the plain; it is all laid out, the salient, just as Bean said, like a spread-out map.
Tyne Cot Cemetery lies on the ridge, on ground captured by Monash’s division in 1917. German blockhouses lie among the graves. This is the largest British Commonwealth war cemetery in the world: nearly 12,000 graves, 8366 of them with no names. Look further up the hill and you can see the spire of Passchendaele, so close, just the other side of a ploughed field that in 1917 was a sea of craters, all full of slimy water.
Down the ridge from Tyne Cot, hemmed in on all sides by the dark pines of Polygon Wood, is Buttes New British Cemetery, perhaps the most dramatic graveyard on the western front. The rebuilt artillery butt-stop is at one end, topped by a memorial to the 5th Australian Division that looks out over a vast lawn where the white-grey headstones stand up like soldiers on parade. Most of the Australian graves have no name. Silver birches are scattered among them and roses sway in the soft breeze. Jarvis Fuller rests here, next to a red rose, far from the dust clouds of Moonambel, but not forgotten: someone has left a poppy on the grave.
Geese graze the bank of the moat at the Menin Gate, near where Monash had his headquarters. Ducks, undercarriages down, glide in to land on the green-brown water. A fisherman casts a line as the crowd gathers for the playing of the Last Post under the archway of the Menin Gate memorial to the missing. The names of the 54,000 British and dominion soldiers who disappeared in the salient rise on panels reaching towards the sky and bugles ring out in the gloaming. More than any other town along the line of the old western front, Ypres has a heart. It remembers the Great War like no other place, and on every night of the year.