Backs to the wall
The 1st Division was the last of the Australian formations to leave Flanders for the Somme. Lieutenant Donovan Joynt of the 8th Battalion stepped on to a train on the night of April 5 and next morning was washing his hands and face in the Somme before moving into billets in a village. ‘Terrible stories were told by the French people of the disgraceful behaviour of the English troops during the retreat – for such it appears to be,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘The newspapers make out that it was a withdrawal, but panic and a disgusting stampede appears to be nearer the mark. “English no bon ” was heard everywhere we went.’ Lieutenant Cyril Lawrence also came down with the 1st Division. ‘The people of Amiens nearly wept with joy when they saw us,’ he wrote home.
A week later Joynt and Lawrence were on trains going north again. There was a new crisis. The Germans had launched an offensive in Flanders. Hazebrouck, near the Belgian border, was being threatened much as Amiens was in the south. Hazebrouck, like Amiens, was a critical rail centre. Half the food and munitions for the Ypres front came through its yards. Behind the town, stretching to the coast, were depots, dumps, training camps and railway systems. And behind them were the ports of Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne. If Hazebrouk fell, the ports were at risk.
Lawrence had been three days and two nights without sleep by the time he reached the line west of Hazebrouck. The French had fled their thatched farmhouses, leaving behind wine, flour, potatoes and coal, as well as cows, fowls, pigs and rabbits. Clothes were strewn about. Lawrence observed that French girls owned fine underwear. Joynt watched crowds of refugees heading west as villages burned in the distance. Photographs taken at the time show plough horses pulling farm carts piled high with household goods; alongside the carts are women in broad-brimmed hats and stout boots carrying round bundles that appear to be tied up with tablecloths or towels. The locals were familiar with the Australians, who had been in the sector before. Among the refugees was a village watchmaker who was carrying away his stock. He handed out watches to the Australians as they passed.
Joynt was told that his battalion was to take up a position in front of the Nieppe Forest, east of Hazebrouck.
THE FRONT AT Fromelles had changed little since more than 2000 Australians had been killed there in a single night in 1916. The bones of the dead lay out in no-man’s land, clinging to scraps of uniform that shivered in the wind. General Haking was still the corps commander here. Two Portuguese divisions held the front and they were close to mutiny.
Fromelles was where Ludendorff attacked on the morning of April 9. Crown Prince Rupprecht knew the Portuguese front was soft. The two Portuguese divisions were 6000 men under strength. The soldiers were unhappy. They didn’t know why they were in the war; they said they had nothing against the Germans, and they wanted more leave. One battalion had mutinied. Haking said the Portuguese were ‘bait’ for the Germans. He wanted them out of the line. Before this could happen the Germans attacked. This was ‘Operation George’, a plan that Ludendorff had rejected for Operation Michael on the Somme, but it was not to be carried out in the expansive style of the original scheme. George became ‘Georgette’, as if to announce that Ludendorff was now making it up as he went, which he was. Georgette was still a big offensive: it had a front of about twenty miles and twelve attack divisions; the objectives were Hazebrouck and the Channel ports.
The Portuguese broke quickly under the barrage that came shrieking out of the fog. One German history said prisoners began to arrive before the German infantry went over. Most Portuguese fled, not just from the frontline but through the back areas as well. Some stole the bicycles of a British cyclists’ battalion. The Germans had soon penetrated three miles on a ten-mile front. Armentières fell. Further north Messines, the site of Plumer’s triumph in the previous year, was also overrun on the second day. Georgette worried Haig more than Michael. It threatened his lines of communication; worse, he was just about out of reserves. Whatever reinforcements he could scrape up for the battle, including the Australian division, would still leave him outnumbered almost two-to-one. Haig appealed to Foch to take over part of the British line. Foch declined. Haig said the Frenchman was ‘most selfish and obstinate’.
On the third day of the battle, with the Germans pressing in on Hazebrouck and the British command still trying to find out where its forward divisions were and what they were doing, Haig wrote an appeal to all British forces in France. The last paragraph read:
There is no other course open to us but to fight it out! Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our Homes and the Freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.
These were emotional words from a man of such reserve. One historian called it ‘un-English’; another wondered where the wall actually was. Joynt received a copy of Haig’s message as he took his troops forward to near the village of Vieux Berguin. He didn’t read it to the men. He didn’t think they needed to be inspired.
The 29th Division was one of four British divisions at the front he was now approaching. The 29th had been a crack regular division and the Australians had looked on it with awe on Gallipoli. The Lancashire Fusiliers, part of the 29th, had won six Victoria Crosses during the landings near Cape Helles. The Fusiliers had been around, in one guise or another, since 1688. Their battle honours included Culloden, Saratoga, the war of 1812, the Peninsular War, the Crimea, the Indian Mutiny, Omdurman and the Boer War. The 29th Division had suffered frightful casualties on Gallipoli, on the first day of the Somme and at Passchendaele. So many of its stalwarts were dead. Its composition had changed so many times that it was no longer what it used to be.
JOYNT HAD MARCHED through the night to positions near Vieux Berguin where the Australians had been ordered to dig in. They were supposed to be the support line for the British divisions in front of them but everyone knew the Australian posts would become the new frontline as the British troops fell back.
Joynt chose a thatched farmhouse for his company headquarters. It had more than a dozen rooms and most of the furnishings had been left behind, including a gramophone. Joynt went off to inspect his forward positions. The front was rolling towards him; he could hear machine guns in the distance. About twenty men from the Guards Brigade were retreating through the village. Joynt said ‘Good day’ to the officer. He didn’t reply. His men looked ‘done’.
As Joynt returned to the farmhouse he heard a gramophone playing. Men in frock coats and top hats and ‘women’ in Parisian gowns were dancing on the lawn. His men had raided madame and monsieur’s wardrobes. Joynt laughed at the absurdity of it all. The Germans were just down the road. He shouted ‘Stand to’. His Lewis gunners went to their posts in dresses. Soon they were firing at grey figures in Vieux Berguin as stragglers from four British divisions arrived at the Australian line. Some began digging in forward of the Australians; some kept going, and others simply stood around. A battery of British artillery galloped past shouting the now familiar cry that the Germans were coming. An Australian shouted back: ‘Mind you don’t get drowned in the Channel.’
A colonel from the 29th Division stumbled into one of Joynt’s posts. ‘Boy,’ he said to an Australian lieutenant, ‘is this your post?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the lieutenant.
‘Well, give me a rifle – I’m one of your men.’
The colonel told the Australian he was disgusted with his men, who turned out to be the 1st Lancashire Fusiliers. They had retreated without orders. This was the first time in the history of the regiment that such a thing had happened. The colonel kept muttering. Suddenly he jumped up. ‘My boy,’ he announced, ‘you can report that the 1st Lancashire Fusiliers held the village to the last man.’ And he went back to the village to round up what men he could and fight. The Australians cheered him as he set off. All night fighting could be heard in the village.
Joynt could now see the Germans forming up in their hundreds in the village square, preparing to attack. Their artillery spotters were in the church steeple. The Germans were ‘cheeky’, showing themselves openly, as if they believed all resistance had broken down. Joynt’s men shot down a company of them marching in column of fours along the road leading from the village.
Next day the Germans began shelling Joynt’s farmhouse, where he had about twenty-five of his own men and another eighty, including one officer, from the 29th Division. Joynt eventually sent the 29th Division men to the rear. ‘Their officer was very apologetic over the conduct of his Division and alluded to Gallipoli and how well it had done there fighting with the Australians.’
The Germans wiped out Joynt’s advanced post on the right, enfilading it from a two-storey brick factory. The battle had begun.
IT WENT ON for days. The British and Australian troops held on in front of Hazebrouck. Georgette never developed the momentum of Michael down on the Somme. On the fifth day Crown Prince Rupprecht received a signed order from the Kaiser telling him to advance. ‘But what help are all orders to attack,’ Rupprecht wrote in his diary, ‘when the troops are no longer able to attack?’ After four or five days the Germans were struggling to keep going. Still, they took Bailleul, north of the Australian positions, and Wytschaete, on the old Messines battlefield. Plumer decided to pull back his frontline at Ypres. Passchendaele Ridge and other ground won so expensively the previous year reverted to the Germans. When the Germans took Mount Kemmel, west of Messines, from a French division Haig wrote in his diary: ‘What Allies to fight with!’ The Canadians were also annoying Haig. General Horne, the 1st Army commander, told Haig that Currie had ‘a swollen head’. He didn’t want his troops used piecemeal but only as a corps. This caused Haig to make favourable comment on the Australians, who had been ‘used by Divisions and are now spread out from Albert to Amiens and one is in front of Hazebrouck’.
THE GERMANS COULD not break the Australian line at Hazebrouck. Lieutenant Lawrence and his men were caught up in the battle and also, as he put it, ‘living like lords’ on what had been left behind at the farmhouses. ‘Bacon and eggs, lunch cold roast fowl, roast pork, mashed potatoes and whatever other delicacies that the farm offers, generally good home made jam. Dinner. Roast fowl, suckling pig, rabbit …’ Lawrence was also drinking Moët and Chandon.
He had heard of the retreat from Passchendaele. ‘If this is true it will be a great shock to our boys. First of all Bapaume and the Somme then Fleurbaix [opposite Fromelles] and Estaires (our first home in France), Messines and now Passchendaele and the Ypres salient. When we think what our boys with other colonials did at all those places, and then to think that they have retired from them.’
In his next letter, to his mother, he said the Germans had recently made thirteen attacks on his front. The Australian machine gunners ‘piled them up and piled them up’. A boy from the farm where he was living had returned to retrieve a pair of boots for his mother, who had none. ‘Gee, it makes a fellow thankful that this war is not in Australia, and yet our homes out there do not mean one hundredth of what these homes mean to people here. They live in the one home for centuries and even the grown-ups often have never been into the nearest big town generally not more than six or seven miles away anywhere.’
Lieutenant Joynt held his little front too. Several days before his company was relieved he needed to send a runner to one of his posts. A stretcher-bearer called Parfrey volunteered and set off. Joynt then decided to go up himself.
On the way I saw Parfrey returning and could see he had something to tell me as he signalled me. I made towards him, he stopped running and opened his mouth to speak and then suddenly collapsed with the words on his lips unspoken. I dropped alongside him to find the blood gushing from a bullet hole in his neck. I tried to stop the flow of blood but found the bullet had made a hole the size of an apple in his throat and that it was hopeless trying to block the flow of blood without choking him, the gash was too big, so leaving him I crawled out the remainder of the distance …
It was a life of absurd contrasts. Joynt returned to the farmhouse and eventually fell asleep in a feathered bed with snow-white sheets. He played the gramophone whenever the Germans shelled. There were only five records and the Australians played them over and over, ‘pretty French dance tunes, mostly Quadrilles’.
Joynt carried the gramophone out in his pack when he was relieved; his bugler carried the funnel. Joynt called the British captain who replaced him a ‘great dud’. Joynt didn’t think the officer had ever been in the frontline before but ‘he knew everything’. As the two stood talking a cook passed carrying a dixie of potatoes and walked to a hedge where he drained off the water. The Englishman was appalled. Why hadn’t Joynt constructed proper grease traps as laid down in the Manual of Field Training – Cooking Arrangements for Bivouac Camps?
Joynt took his gramophone and left. Hazebrouck held.
The second great German offensive was failing. As with Michael, the Germans had gained much ground but little of strategic importance. And, because two bulging salients had been created, their front was now much longer. But Ludendorff was going to try again for Amiens, which meant he had to try again for Villers-Bretonneux.