The bend in the river
The new set-piece battle Haig and Rawlinson were planning for August 15 never happened; it never could have. Rawlinson couldn’t get his artillery ready by that date. Nor could he replace the tanks he had lost. And, besides, Arthur Currie, whose Canadians had the biggest part in the new attack, was against it. He didn’t like what he had seen in the aerial photographs: the Germans were now in stronger positions protected by wire.
Rawlinson had to take Currie’s dissent seriously (although in this case he probably agreed with it). Here was another change in the war. In 1916 the politicians saw men like Haig and Rawlinson as ‘experts’. As with physicians, it was discourteous to question their wisdom. The slaughters on the Somme and at Passchendaele had changed all that. In 1918 a Haig or a Rawlinson could not afford to offend Lloyd George, or the dominion prime ministers Borden and Hughes, both of whom were now asking why so many of their countrymen were dead. Canada and Australia (and even New Zealand with its one division) mattered in a way they didn’t in 1916. They owned the most experienced troops in Haig’s armies. Haig looked at Currie’s photographs and called off the attack.
Haig was reading the war better than he ever had. As Trevor Wilson wrote in The Myriad Faces of War, Haig ‘had at last divined the manner of proceeding on the western front’. He was no longer trying to win by knockout. He was going to win with a flurry of blows, limited and carefully crafted, so that, in sum, they would be mortal.
MONASH WAS MORE concerned with where his frontline would lie when winter came and the fighting had to stop. The river bothered him. He wanted to keep ‘hustling’ the Germans so that they could not use the north–south line of the Somme as a winter line of defence.
The Somme on Monash’s front had two faces. One was the series of loops he had been following from west to east towards the old fortress town of Péronne. His corps was on both sides of the river here, slowly pushing east. At Péronne the river turned abruptly south and headed in a relatively straight line towards St Quentin. This was the face of the river that worried Monash. He was about eight miles short of it. If the Germans were given time, they could blow the bridges here, fortify their positions on the other side and perhaps hold off the pursuing armies until the spring, which would mean 1919. Monash had to find a way of driving the Germans beyond the natural fortress of the river before the snows came.
His force continued to nudge eastwards, overrunning strong points and woods. Monash used this interlude to give his divisions a few days away from the frontline. All had been fighting just about continuously for five months. The Australian casualties from the Amiens battle (to August 14) were about 5900. This was relatively light by the standards of previous years, but where were the replacements to come from? The corps was winning virtually every day – and killing off a little of itself each time.
Monash acquired the British 32nd Division to bolster his numbers and began planning a new advance for August 23. The Germans were now being pounded on an ever-widening front. South of the Amiens battlefield, the French attacked near Soissons, taking some 8000 prisoners on the first day. Byng on August 21 began what would be called the battle of Albert. His front extended north-east from Albert to beyond Bullecourt, just short of the Arras battlefield of 1917. The New Zealanders were in the centre, going for Bapaume. The attack began modestly on a hot summer’s day but from the start it had momentum. Byng and Mangin’s French forces to the south were closing the pincers. In the centre Rawlinson and Monash now went for Bray on the north bank of the Somme and Chuignes and other villages on the plain to the south. Haig’s front stretched for thirty-five miles. He had never had a chance like this.
Churchill lunched with Haig on the day Byng’s attack opened. Churchill promised immense quantities of shells, tanks and gas. Haig was astounded that Churchill’s schemes were timed for completion by June, 1919. Haig told him Britain should be trying to win the war this autumn. Churchill replied that the general staff in London believed the decisive point of the war would come in July, 1919.
The following night Haig issued an order saying, in effect, that he thought the decisive point had already been reached. ‘Risks which a month ago would have been criminal to incur ought now to be incurred as a duty. It is no longer necessary to advance step by step in regular lines.’ Divisions were to go for their objectives and not worry too much about their flanks.
MONASH’S TROOPS WENT for Bray, Chuignes, Herleville and several other villages in stifling heat. The 1st Division had only a dozen-orso tanks but their sweating crews wiped out line after line of machine-gun posts. When the infantrymen reached St Martin’s Wood they had to wait for the tanks to catch up. They found a piano in a hut and a man from the 7th Battalion began playing. When, after about fifteen minutes, the men left the piano could be heard tinkling behind them.
Lieutenant Lawrence McCarthy, a farmer from Western Australia, was not in the main attack. He was in the 4th Division, which was holding the front south of the British 32nd Division, which was trying to take Herleville. The British were held up by German fire from an old 1916 trench system. McCarthy, who had landed at Gallipoli as a private, came up to help. He and Sergeant Frederick Robbins, a locomotive cleaner from South Australia, attacked the nearest machine-gun post, then fought their way down the old trench network. McCarthy may have killed as many as twenty Germans himself. He was at times out of touch with Robbins as he stormed along the trench line with revolver and bombs. He captured five machine guns and fifty-odd prisoners. His last lot of captives patted him on the back. But the more extraordinary thing was this: McCarthy, often alone, had captured about 500 yards of German front. Bean said that, next to Albert Jacka’s ‘charge’ at Pozières in 1916, this was perhaps the most effective feat of individual fighting in the history of the AIF. McCarthy received the Victoria Cross and lived to return to Gallipoli for the fiftieth anniversary of the landing.
Lieutenant Donovan Joynt won the Victoria Cross on the same day. He was about two miles north of McCarthy. He was behind the front but could tell from the sound of firing that the advance had stalled. He said to his batman, Private Thomas Newman: ‘Let’s go and have a look.’ The two found a 6th Battalion company sheltering in a sunken road. Machine-gun fire was coming from a wood to the left. Joynt told the men to advance in rushes of twenty-five yards at a time. This worked for a few hundred yards, then the attack stalled again. Joynt and Newman went forward to ‘ginger them up’. They came upon a dead German officer and Joynt told Newman to search his body for papers. A German shell burst almost on top of Newman. Blood gushed from a wound in his throat. Joynt tried to bind the wound with a bandage. He couldn’t tie it tight enough to staunch the blood without suffocating Newman. He propped him up against a bank and went on to the fighting. Newman lived.
Joynt found the men pinned down by fire from Plateau Wood. He took thirty men and began to make his way to the far side of the wood. His scheme was to rush it from there. As he worked around he came upon Lieutenant Les McGinn from his own battalion with twenty men, which meant Joynt now had a force of fifty.
The wood looked to be swarming with Germans. ‘Let’s rush the bloody place,’ a redheaded Australian shouted. ‘No,’ Joynt yelled. He knew a charge would be suicidal. He decided to scout ahead with McGinn and three men. He was hoping to find an old sap that would lead him into the wood.
The five worked along an old communications trench. Suddenly a party of Germans came around a corner in the trench. Joynt raised his revolver and pointed it at the head of the first German to round the corner. The German dropped his rifle and raised his hands. Each German did the same thing as he came around the corner: it was as though they were surrendering in sequence. Soon there were twenty of them, covered by three Australians with bayonets. With an acute sense of what was important in this war, the three rankers began ‘ratting’ the Germans for watches. Joynt objected. The three said that if they didn’t take the watches, others would. Joynt conceded the point. ‘What about one for me?’ he said. ‘Take your pick, sir,’ a man said, offering clasped hands full of watches.
Joynt abruptly realised how absurd the scene was. ‘Twenty or more Huns all standing with their hands held high, with our diggers “ratting” them and McGinn and myself looking on with one Hun still on his knees.’ Joynt started to laugh. So did McGinn. ‘I suppose it was a sort of hysteria after the strain we had been through. We leaned against the wall of the trench and laughed and laughed – it was some time before we could stop.’ Joynt sent the Germans back with an escort of two. He had found the spot from which to attack the wood.
The Germans there were surprised when the attack came from the east rather than the west. The Australians chased them, shouting. Joynt rounded up 100 prisoners. The wood had been cleared without a single Australian casualty.
Several days later Joynt was hit in the thigh by a shell fragment. His men used a piece of signal wire as a tourniquet. At the hospital a nurse told him he was going to England. Joynt begged the nurse not to move him; he was in too much pain. She told him the Channel crossing would take only two or three hours.
Joynt was laid out on the open deck of a hospital ship. The crossing took fifty hours as the ship dodged German submarines. Joynt lay in agony and unattended. An English medical orderly eventually came past. Joynt asked him to release the tourniquet because it was hurting so acutely. The orderly looked at Joynt’s wound and turned away. ‘It’s too awful for me to look at,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear to see it.’
Joynt lived to be ninety-seven.
HAIG’S WAR HAD never been so good. Each day his front shifted eastwards, and he didn’t have to do too much to make this happen. The corps commanders were now largely running the tactical side of the war and Foch was writing the strategy. Each day the cages filled with prisoners. Each day brought a fresh nightmare for Ludendorff, not only in France but also on the lesser fronts in the Middle East, Macedonia and Italy; shortly he would seek psychiatric help. Each day life became harder for German civilians: the meat ration was down to four-and-a-half ounces a week; people were dying of hunger and those who weren’t talked of revolution, be it Bolshevism or a constitutional monarchy. Each day Foch’s spirits rose: this was his sort of war – attack, attack, attack, so that eventually your opponent seeks psychiatric help. Each day Pershing came closer to taking his independent American army of close to twenty divisions to war: a young colonel named George Marshall was helping to plan a big attack against the St Mihiel salient near Verdun.
Péronne, at the bend in the river, was now in sight on Rawlinson’s front. Bapaume beckoned on Byng’s front. Monash had done better than he had expected with his new attack. South of the river he had pushed three German divisions back another oneand-a-half miles. The British 32nd Division had taken Herleville. The 1st Division had taken Chuignes and was moving on Cappy. North of the river the 3rd Division took Bray.
Byng had retaken Albert; the New Zealanders were heading for Bapaume. The Times correspondent reported: ‘These are great days … The sweep of our advance is so rapid that no man can say where our advanced line as a whole may stand at any given moment, for every half-hour brings news that this or that village is in our hands, or that an airman has seen the khaki figures somewhere where we never dreamed that they had reached …’ The newspaper readers of Britain and Australia were not yet convinced these were great days. They had been misled before.
Lloyd George still thought Haig too optimistic. This time, however, Haig had spotted a genuine weakness. This time the evidence was there, staring sullenly from the prisoners’ cages. Haig and Foch were as one: if you see a weakness, exploit it so ruthlessly that your opponent doesn’t have time to think. Haig told General Henry Horne, commander of the 1st Army (which now included the Canadians as a spearhead), to prepare to attack north of Byng’s army. This would extend Haig’s offensive front to Arras and threaten the northern end of the Hindenburg system near Bullecourt. Haig also told Rawlinson to push on to Péronne.
Rawlinson wondered whether he had the means. He had been denied fresh divisions. Haig wanted these to go to Byng and Horne: their fronts were now considered more important. Rawlinson decided to ‘ease down’ his offensive and passed the news to Monash on August 25. Monash was bemused. He didn’t want to lose momentum; he thought his Australian divisions, tired and under strength as they were, could drive the Germans back to Péronne. He disobeyed Rawlinson’s instruction – but subtly. He passed on Rawlinson’s order, and added a few of his own. Close touch would be kept with the Germans ‘and advantage will be taken of any opportunity to seize the enemy’s positions and to advance our line’. Rawlinson was even subtler. He knew what Monash was doing and didn’t try to stop him.
MONASH PULLED THE 1st and 4th divisions out of the line for a rest. Gellibrand’s 3rd Division continued to push eastwards on the north bank of the river and took Suzanne. Rosenthal’s 2nd Division and Hobbs’ 5th took over on the southern bank, where Cappy had fallen. Engineers and pioneers began to repair the bridges on the east–west line of the Somme. This way the Australians would still be able to cross the river if the Germans blew the bridges below Péronne.
On August 27 Australian patrols found many German strong points abandoned. Without reference to Rawlinson, Monash ordered a general advance. The pursuit had begun. Day after day the villages fell on the southern front: Vermandovillers, Foucaucourt, Fontaine. And they fell on Gellibrand’s northern front: Vaux, Curlu, Hem. Soon Gellibrand was threatening Cléry. Here the Somme began its sharp turn to the south and its topography began to change.
Along the stretch the Australians had been following the Somme had relatively sharp banks, but as the river started its curl southwards near Péronne its valley widened out; the slopes on both sides were gentle and exposed. The river was more than 1000-yards wide here. First came the Somme Canal, its banks lined with masonry. Then came a broad marsh, a series of channels meandering around little islands heavy with rushes. The channels were too deep to be waded. There were three main bridges on Monash’s front between Péronne and St Christ, five miles to the south. The ‘bridge’ at Brie, in the centre, was in truth a causeway with eight separate bridges at intervals. The crossing at St Christ was similar and that at Péronne involved two bridges and reclaimed marshland.
Péronne itself was formidable. Vauban, the famous French military engineer of the seventeenth century, had designed the ramparts, which rose sixty feet above the river. The Cologne River joined the Somme here, which meant that the town had a moat around much of its perimeter.
By August 29 the Australians had driven the Germans out of the bend in the river. On the same day the New Zealand Division entered Bapaume. Further north Horne’s 1st Army had begun what would be called the battle of the Scarpe in Arras. Another big breach had opened in the German line and Haig, who couldn’t help himself, talked of putting cavalry through.
AS THEY NEARED the bend in the river the Australians could see Mont St Quentin, about a mile north of Péronne and about 140 feet above it. It didn’t look much, just a bump with a few trees on the summit, but it commanded Péronne and the land to the east that stretched away to the Hindenburg Line. North of Mont St Quentin the Germans had set up machine guns on the Bouchavesnes Spur, which looked down on Cléry and the bend in the river. Monash’s divisions could not take Péronne, nor safely cross the river near the town, until they had taken Mont St Quentin and Bouchavesnes. The 2nd Prussian Guards, one of the best divisions in the German army, held both positions.
We don’t know whether Lieutenant Cecil Healy stared across the river, as others did, to the ravaged hill. As he neared the river on August 29 he was wounded, then, while pointing to the position of the machine gun, hit again and killed. He was thirty-five and had given his occupation as commercial traveller and journalist of Darling Point and Darlinghurst, Sydney. At the Stockholm Olympics of 1912 he had won a gold medal with the Australian 4 × 200-metres freestyle relay team. He could have won another in the 100-metres freestyle but for an act of grace. The American team missed the semifinals because of an error by its managers. Healy insisted they be swum again; it would be unsportsmanlike to do otherwise, he said. Healy finished second to an American in the final.
Monash didn’t want to give the Germans time to reorganise or to wreck too many bridges. He wrote afterwards in Australian Victories that a plan had been ‘vaguely forming’ in his mind over the past fortnight. He would use the bridges he had ordered repaired on the east–west stretch of the river to cross troops and attack Mont St Quentin and Péronne in a looping movement from the north.
First, however, Monash tried the obvious. He would try to take Péronne and Mont St Quentin on the run by driving due east, as he had been doing for weeks. He would send the 2nd, 5th and 32nd divisions straight at the north–south line of the river. The 5th Division would try to cross at Brie, the 2nd at Halle. The 2nd would then go for Mont St Quentin.
The obvious didn’t work. German machine gunners held up the advance; German engineers wrecked the bridges and causeways; and German gunners burst shells over the Australians. There was nowhere that the Australians could cross. Nor could the British 32nd Division cross at St Christ. Monash now turned to the plan that had been ‘vaguely forming’. He would take Mont St Quentin from the north.
Monash explained his plan on the afternoon of the 29th. First, his three frontline divisions would sidestep to the left. The 32nd would take over the 5th’s front. The 5th would take over the 2nd’s line. And the 2nd Division would move north to the bend in the river at Ommiécourt, opposite Cléry. Second, Gellibrand’s 3rd Division, on the other side of the river, would take Cléry, then push on to the German strong point on the Bouchavesnes Spur, north of Mont St Quentin. Gellibrand’s clearing of the northern bank was the crucial element in this scheme. The 2nd Division was still going for Mont St Quentin, but there were now three routes open to it – in theory anyway. It could try to cross on its new front near Ommiécourt and Halle. If this was impossible, it could go south and cross with the 5th Division, which was now opposite Péronne. And, finally, if no crossing was possible here, the 2nd Division could march west, find a crossing near one of the villages Gellibrand had already secured, then march east again towards Mont St Quentin. If the 5th could not cross at Péronne, it was to follow the 2nd Division, then head for the heights on the eastern side of Péronne. As battle plans went in the Great War, this one was not only complex but also unusually flexible: power would devolve to brigade commanders, who would make their decisions on the run. Engineers worked through the night repairing bridges, including one at Feuillères, about two miles west of Ommiécourt and Cléry.
Rawlinson visited Monash on August 30, the day the operation began. Monash explained his scheme. Monash said Rawlinson was pleasantly satirical. ‘And so you think you’re going to take Mont St Quentin with three battalions!’ Monash quotes him as saying (three battalions of the 5th Brigade had been earmarked for the final assault). ‘What presumption! However, I don’t think I ought to stop you! So go ahead and try! – and I wish you luck!’
WE NEED TO pause here to consider what was being asked of the men who were going to storm Mont St Quentin. Monash was all about boldness. This was right enough: he was winning and it was important to keep the rhythm going. But what of the men? Most had been in the fighting line for close to five months, except for a few rest days here and there. Many were exhausted from the approach to the bend in the river. Some on the northern bank of the river had not slept for eighty hours. The 2nd Division, on the opposite bank, was in slightly better shape; but, if it could not cross at Ommiécourt or Péronne, it would have to march west along the river to Feuillères, cross there, then march east for a few miles, then turn south and attack Mont St Quentin.
And there was the matter of numbers. When the Australians came to the western front, battalions comprised around 1000 men, with a fighting strength of about 900. Each of the battalions’ four companies contained around 200 men. Most of the battalions were now down to a fighting strength of 300; companies were down to fifty and sometimes less. Which meant the arithmetic had changed: every casualty now had the same impact as three in mid-1916.
The 5th Brigade of Rosenthal’s 2nd Division was ordered to take Mont St Quentin. One of its attacking battalions had been reduced to about 300 men; the other two each had fewer than 400. Nine hundred-odd men, tired and worn and without the protection of tanks, were supposed to take one of the toughest fortresses on the western front. Rawlinson was right to talk about presumption.
Private Robert Mactier of the 2nd Division, a farmer with a strong handsome face, one of ten children, wrote home to Tatura in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley: ‘Most of us are a dilapidated-looking lot, haven’t had our clothes off for 60 days until last night.’ That was in early May and Mactier had been in the line most of the time since. He had not been away from home as long as many of his comrades. He had come to ‘Froggy land’, as he called it, in November, 1917 after enlisting as a twenty-six year old. In London he had gone to Rotten Row in Hyde Park – ‘the place where the “heads” go for their morning ride. The nags they ride and the way most of them are ridden made us “smile”,’ he wrote in his diary. Around Christmas he was making for a ‘comfort fund joint’ in France for a cup of cocoa when he and his friend saw ‘General Birdwood and his crowd’ walking towards them. ‘Of course we saluted him and he said: “How are you, boys? A happy New Year to you.” “Thank you, the same to you,” says we. So he’s not a bad sort of a coon after all …’
Friends of Mactier called him ‘Nuggety’ or ‘Little Mac’ and said he was an uncomplaining soldier. Nothing seemed to bother him: the voice was always laconic. On being gassed he wrote: ‘I got a bit of it … lost my voice for 3 weeks …’ A week before Mont St Quentin he was pleased at being made a company runner – ‘anything does me rather than “stand to” all night.’
Mactier was in the 6th Brigade, which would follow the 5th Brigade to Mont St Quentin.
IT SOON BECAME clear that Monash’s plans for August 30 were too ambitious. Zero hour had been set for 5 am. Gellibrand’s 3rd Division had the crucial task, the capture of Cléry. The 2nd Division had to get itself across the river. All this was to happen without tanks and with limited artillery support.
The 2nd Division soon found that it could not cross large numbers of men at Ommiécourt or other bridges to the south. The men of the 5th Brigade therefore headed for the bridge at Feuillères, crossed there and moved into trenches on the western outskirts of Cléry. The exhausted 3rd Division pushed on north of Cléry towards Bouchavesnes Spur but were held up by machine guns. The attack on Mont St Quentin was put off until the following day.
TWO BATTALIONS OF the 5th Brigade, the 17th and 20th, prepared to attack Mont St Quentin at 5 am on August 31. This sounds more impressive than it was. The two battalions were down to 550 fighting men between them. The 19th Battalion, perhaps 250-strong, was on their right flank. The 18th Battalion, also weak in numbers, was in reserve. All the men were worn out. Few of them in the hours before the jump-off thought they had much hope of taking Mont St Quentin. There was no hot evening meal for the two attacking battalions, although dry rations were brought up. Better still, at 3 am the rum arrived. Some managed to get themselves two issues.
The first blushes of dawn had appeared when the barrage opened up. The field pieces shelled the lower slopes and the heavies pulverised the summit. The infantrymen moved off towards the dawn sky and soon realised that the Germans had been taken by surprise. Right across the base of the hill they could be seen scurrying to higher ground. The Australians in places broke into a jog. When a group of Germans broke from the trenches ahead the Lewis gunners would throw themselves down and fire off a drum. Trenches were rushed with loud cheering, so that the few hundred Australians sounded like a few thousand. They came on Germans who had run until they were breathless and now simply wanted to surrender. On reaching Gottlieb Trench on the lower slopes the Australians sat down and lit cigarettes as the heavies continued to bombard the summit.
The 20th Battalion was on the left of the attack. Its men simply walked from Gottlieb Trench to their objective, the Bapaume road north of Mont St Quentin that led to the little village of Feuillaucourt. Three companies from the 17th Battalion now rushed at Mont St Quentin village. One observer described it as ‘a regular old-fashioned charge’. A few Germans fired off token shots then ran away. The Australians took more prisoners, including a clutch of draughtsmen and their maps, as they worked their way through the ruins. A captain in the 17th sent a message back: ‘Casualties slight, troops awfully bucked.’
By 8 am, before the sun had pierced the grey clouds, the Australians had taken one of the most feared German positions on the western front, as well as Feuillaucourt to the north and Halle to the south. They had sent back 700 prisoners, or more than their own number.
Lieutenant Joe Maxwell came up with the reserve battalion, the 18th, and met droves of prisoners being driven to the rear, among them a Prussian colonel. ‘He wore his monocle and strode over the torn earth and shell holes with the poise and air of a stroller along the Strand. There was not a speck of dust on his bluish uniform and he swished in one hand a pair of fawn gloves. Across his shoulder was a pair of field glasses and he gazed on his captors with a supercilious and disdainful air.’ The Australians began robbing the colonel’s servant of a toilet and manicure set.
The colonel strode to Maxwell and bellowed in English: ‘Remember you are an officer, and I demand to be treated as a gentleman.’
‘Well, this is where you get off, old man,’ Maxwell said, relieving him of his field glasses. Shortly after the colonel lost his riding breeches.
At 8 am Rosenthal, the commander of the 2nd Division, passed the news to Monash: ‘5 Bde report having captured Mt St Quentin from which the Australian flag now flies.’ That night Rawlinson wrote in his diary: ‘As … I was dressing this morning Archie [Montgomery-Massingberd, his chief-of-staff] rang up to say that the Australians had captured Mt St Quentin! … I was overjoyed. It is indeed a magnificent performance and no praise is too high for them.’ Haig was impressed too but he was more interested in the 1st Army’s attack at Arras, where the Canadians were on the verge of breaking through the Drocourt–Quéant switch line. This was more important than Mont St Quentin because it would force the Germans into a massive retreat. Edmonds, in the British official history, called Mont St Quentin ‘a magnificent feat of arms’.
It was. But it wasn’t over.
THE 9TH AND 10th brigades of Gellibrand’s 3rd Division had headed north-east towards the Bouchavesnes Spur forty-five minutes after the attack on Mont St Quentin began. Their artillery support was thin and German machine gunners held up the 33rd Battalion in front of Road Wood. Private George Cartwright stood up and fired at the machine gunner. He kept walking forward, firing from the shoulder. He shot the machine gunner and then the two men who replaced him. He threw a bomb at the trench, rushed it and captured nine prisoners and the gun. The men of the 33rd stood up and cheered him. Cartwright was twenty-three, a labourer from northern New South Wales. A month after this day he was wounded and sent to a hospital where he was told he had won the Victoria Cross. Gellibrand’s men had captured much of the spur by the time the 5th Brigade had taken Mont St Quentin.
THE AUSTRALIANS HAD never been in a battle that moved so fast as this one. It did not go by mathematical precision like August 8 at Amiens. It was like a bushfire: first the crisis was here and then it was there, and all the time there were logistical problems. It confirmed two things about Monash: he was as good at making quick decisions, at improvising, as he was at designing set-pieces; and he had the ruthlessness that generals need to have. By shortly after 8 am on August 31 he knew he had an improbable success, the capture of Mont St Quentin, and also a string of problems that could stop him from exploiting his gain. His men were so exhausted that they would flop down and fall asleep if given a chance. Gunners dropped off while riding their horses to new positions. Monash had to push the other two brigades of the 2nd Division as well as the 5th Division across the river. The two brigades from the 2nd were needed to reinforce the battered 5th Brigade on Mont St Quentin and take that front forward another half-mile. The 5th, now down to the numerical size of a battalion, was two miles in advance of the Australian front and exposed on both flanks. The 5th Division was needed to take Péronne. And it was also important that Gellibrand’s worn-out 3rd Division took the rest of its objectives around Bouchavesnes Spur to protect the flank.
Monash telephoned Gellibrand at 8.35 am and told him he had to take the rest of Bouchavesnes Spur. ‘Casualties no longer matter,’ Monash told him.
The 6th Brigade of the 2nd Division crossed by pontoon bridge near Cléry at 11.30 am. One brigade of the 5th Division, the 14th, followed it across. Then the 7th Brigade of the 2nd Division crossed at two spots and Cléry became crowded with troops as German shells threw up geysers in the Somme marshes. Germans at Florina Trench near Halle held up the 6th Brigade’s advance on Mont St Quentin. Another problem became apparent: the 5th Brigade was not quite where Rosenthal thought it was. The Germans had begun to counter-attack on Mont St Quentin and the two battalions on the summit didn’t have the numbers to fight them off. A few hours after taking the village the Australians had to give it up and retreat down the hill.
Private Roy Brewer was on the hill. He had recently returned from leave in London. He wrote to his parents: ‘There was a big day in London yesterday, the opening of Australia House, it is some place and I believe altogether it cost nearly a million pound. That would do me to have fourteen days leave on. My word Billy Hughes has been making some great speeches over here. He’ll nearly work his way into a job over here I reckon.’ Brewer fought bravely during the German counter-attacks. Mortar shells killed or wounded the men around him but Brewer, although slightly wounded and now alone, kept firing his Lewis gun. Then a shell hit him. He died five days later, unaware he had won the Military Medal.
Major Coutts of the 6th Brigade had set up his regimental aid post in a tunnel. ‘We were kept going continuously all night … I had to amputate one man’s arm at the shoulder, and another man’s leg through the right thigh – I had to use a razor for this.’
THE GENERALS MADE their plans for the next day, September 1. The 6th Brigade would recapture Mont St Quentin. The 14th Brigade, the only 5th Division formation that had managed to cross the Somme, would attack towards Péronne. Gellibrand’s 3rd Division would again try for its objective around Bouchavesnes Spur.
The 6th Brigade set off in drizzling rain. The 23rd Battalion couldn’t advance because of machine-gun fire coming from Florina Trench, about a mile south-west of Mont St Quentin. Private Robert Mactier, the company runner, was told to scout ahead. He set off alone with a revolver and several bombs. He rushed the first machine-gun post, killed the garrison of eight and threw the machine gun out of a trench. Mactier went on, through twenty Germans who held up their hands, to a second post and took that. Then he charged a third. What happened here is unclear; he may have taken this too. What we do know is that he was hit by fire from a fourth post. Forty Germans surrendered as a result of Mactier’s one-man war. The 23rd Battalion could now begin its advance on Mont St Quentin.
An officer later told the Red Cross that Mactier was hit in the body and chest and lived only a few minutes. ‘He tried to speak to me before he died but he was not intelligible … I have just got him recommended for the VC.’ A clergyman told the Mactiers at Tatura that their son was dead. The family appears to have received no official news after this, even though Mactier’s Victoria Cross was gazetted on December 14. Mactier’s father in mid-January wrote to the Defence Department. He began: ‘I write to try and find some information re our dear boy Robert Mactier No 6939.’
Six Victoria Crosses were awarded to Australians for September 1 at Mont St Quentin and Péronne. At Lone Pine in 1915 Australians won seven Victoria Crosses but these covered several days of fighting.
The 23rd and 24th battalions of the 6th Brigade made the fresh attack on Mont St Quentin, attacking over much the same ground as the 5th Brigade had the day before. The 24th was on the left and didn’t receive its orders until 3 am on September 1. According to the battalion historian, Mont St Quentin dominated the ground in front of them and looked ‘impregnable’. One of the battalion’s companies was down to seventy men, yet it had a front of 400 yards. The front wave was to advance with a gap of sixteen yards between each man, which meant every casualty would open up a gap of thirty-two yards. The men smoked, told jokes and stared vacantly at the parapet, waiting for the officer to yell ‘Over!’
The machine-gun fire from the hill was so intense that the men went forward in short rushes, going from one shell hole to another in the rain. Fire from a crater near the summit held up the attack for several hours. When the men were ordered to resume their advance they thought (the battalion historian wrote) it would be like throwing peas at a whale. They were outnumbered about tento-one. Yet they took the crater with hand-to-hand fighting. Some Germans bolted eastwards, discarding their equipment as they did so. Others, addled by the fire that had descended upon them, ran around in circles. By early afternoon the 6th Brigade had recaptured Mont St Quentin and pushed the line well east of the village. The casualties had been heavy, but the Germans were not going to get it back this time.
North of the hill Gellibrand once more attacked on the Bouchavesnes Spur. The 11th Brigade took 400 prisoners here but again failed to take its objectives.
South of Mont St Quentin the 14th Brigade of Hobbs’ 5th Division attacked towards Péronne. Anvil Wood lay between their start line in the west and the town. Here a German field gun was firing point-blank at the Australians. Private William Currey, a wireworker from Leichhardt, Sydney, won the Victoria Cross by rushing forward with a Lewis gun, killing the crew and capturing the gun. Elsewhere in the wood the Australians captured 200 Germans in one group. The German battalion commander was astonished when he and his men were handed over to two privates for escort to the rear. The Australians crossed the moat and moved into Péronne, where the Germans chose to fight from cellars and houses rather than man the ramparts.
MONASH WANTED TO pause the next day, September 2. The battle for the bend in the river was close to being won. He had Mont St Quentin; Péronne and its suburbs would fall in the next few days. His men were worn out and some battalions were down to a few hundred men. He needed to replace the 6th Brigade with the 7th on Mont St Quentin and to move more of his artillery across the Somme. Commonsense said ease up for a day.
Alexander Godley had been a stranger to commonsense for most of his career as a Great War general. Godley’s corps, part of Byng’s army, now held the ground to the north of Monash. Godley had acquired a new division, the 74th, from Palestine and, as was his way, wanted to rush it into battle and drive eastwards. He asked Monash to protect his flank. Monash eventually agreed. There would be no pause.
So on September 2 the 7th Brigade passed through the 6th on Mont St Quentin and pushed eastwards, capturing several villages, 200 prisoners and ninety-three machine guns. Godley’s new division, unused to heavy artillery fire, could not keep up. Monash kept the battle going in the south, where the rest of the 5th Division and most of his artillery crossed the river. Péronne fell.
This day the Germans were ordered to retreat all along the line from Arras to the Somme. The trigger for this was not the fall of Péronne but the breaking by the Canadians of the Drocourt–Quéant line, which ran into the Hindenburg Line in Arras. Ludendorff ordered his troops back to the Hindenburg Line. This amounted to a retreat of about twelve miles on Monash’s front; all the gains of Operation Michael were to be given up.
‘PÉRONNE TAKEN,’ PRIVATE Lyall Howard of the 3rd Division pioneers wrote in his diary for September 3. It was a typical entry: no waste, no embroidery. A dozen words was a long diary entry. Howard had covered the period from March 30 to May 10, when the Ludendorff offensive was running, with just three words: ‘Very warm corner.’ His entry for August 30, when the battle for Mont St Quentin was starting was typically brief and dead-pan, yet affecting to anyone coming upon the diary almost ninety years later. ‘Met Dad at Cléry,’ it said. Lyall had enlisted as a nineteen-year-old early in 1916; Walter, his father, had joined up later as a forty-two-yearold father of nine. Lyall was working on the roads and bridges leading to Cléry. Walter, a private in the 5th Division, was moving up for the attack on Péronne. He was hit in the leg and abdomen a few days after meeting Lyall at Cléry. The pair met up again when Walter was recovering in hospital. Family folklore has it that Walter was treated and saved by an American doctor.
Major Coutts had treated the wounded from Mont St Quentin. Now he walked up there, as if to discover why the place had become famous. ‘There were machine guns everywhere and dead Huns lying round them … The battalion [he was attached to the 24th, which had helped recapture the hill] was a very small one now, and all the men were terribly knocked up, but in good spirits.’ A few days later Coutts went fishing in the Somme, using the traditional Australian method: grenades exploded in a few feet of water. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his days at Mont St Quentin.
MUCH OF THE credit for Mont St Quentin belongs to Monash. He improvised and delegated and demanded, modifying his scheme day by day without ever forgetting what he was trying to do and why. He had realised weeks earlier that he had to have troops on the northern side of the river. Gellibrand’s push eastward along the northern bank had set up the victory. Monash had been ruthless. He knew this and why it had to be. If he showed pity for the tired men he was driving, he might lose. He had only three divisions in the fight and each had a distinct part: Rosenthal’s 2nd at Mont St Quentin, Gellibrand’s 3rd on the northern flank, Hobbs’ 5th at Péronne. If one failed, the others probably would too. Monash had displayed what he would later call ‘intellectual arrogance’, which was his way of saying that a general had to believe in himself and, if necessary, be callous. He had long ago proved Bean and Murdoch wrong: he had talents unknown to the duo of Birdwood and White.
But Monash wasn’t the hero of Mont St Quentin, and he was gracious enough to admit it. This battle belonged to soldiers rather than generals, corporals and privates who did astonishing things that are not easily explained. Monash’s army was getting better as it wasted away. Mont St Quentin brought another 3000 casualties: battalions of 300 became battalions of 200. Yet the spirit of these men was extraordinary, and it comes through in their letters and diaries. Why it was so is not altogether clear. Logic would say that a few hundred men should not have taken a fortress like Mont St Quentin from a crack Prussian division. But they did. Mont St Quentin was probably the finest thing Australians did in the Great War.
ABOUT SIXTY MEN in Pompey Elliott’s brigade went on strike just after the battle for Péronne. They had been told to chase Germans fleeing east. They refused, saying they were too tired and that they were being used too much because of deficiencies in the British divisions. Their colonel was so embarrassed he offered to resign. Elliott asked the men to write out their grievances, then spoke to them without bluster. There was some truth in their grievances, he said, but mutiny was the wrong response. He would leave for half-anhour. If, on his return, the strikers refused to obey the order, he would send them to the rear. If they chose to obey it, he would speak on their behalf when the affair was investigated. The men decided to call off the strike and chase the Germans. Elliott was a man of many dimensions: this was an essay in tact and subtlety. Haig would not have understood what Elliott did.
Haig met a party of Australian editors and newspaper proprietors shortly after Mont St Quentin. They might have expected him to talk warmly about what the Australians had done there. Instead, to their surprise, he spoke sternly of the need to extend the death penalty to the Australian force. Many Australians had done things at the front that Haig had never managed in his brief and modest career as a fighting soldier. But the field-marshal didn’t want to congratulate them so much as shoot the odd one in the interests of discipline.
FOCH WAS IN heartier form. Charles Repington of London’s Morning Post interviewed him on September 3. Foch explained his strategy, which was not at all complicated, with vigorous hand gestures.
I attack them. Good! I say: ‘Into battle!’ Everyone goes into battle. Good! I don’t let go of them, the Boches. So – they’re not let off. Good! They don’t know what to do. I do know. I don’t have a plan. I watch what happens. Good! Something does happen. I exploit it. They’re chased with a sword in their backs. Good! … In the end they’ll be worn out. Good! We’ll take prisoners and guns. Good! We’ll chase them with the bayonet. Tic! [Foch lunges at an imaginary German.] We kill them. Toc! [He shoots at an imaginary German.] They’re off balance. Germany is disillusioned …
LUDENDORFF WAS MUCH disillusioned. Sometimes he slept for only an hour. He had eyestrain from poring over maps with a magnifying glass. He abused his generals and broke down and wept. He ate hastily. In early September he was sufficiently concerned about himself to ask an old friend, Dr Hochheimer, a retired army doctor specialising in psychiatry, for help.
Hochheimer said he told Ludendorff that he had been neglecting his soul. ‘He had only worked, worried, body and mind tensed, no relaxation, no fun, hastily eaten meals, he had not breathed correctly, had not laughed, had seen nothing of nature and art, heard nothing of the rustle of the forest and the ripple of brooks …’ Hochheimer expected a tirade from Ludendorff. Instead the general asked him what he should do. Hochheimer told him to start breathing exercises, to take walks, sleep longer, rest his eyes and ‘to sing German folksongs upon awakening’.
Within a few days Ludendorff became more amiable. Then he heard that Bulgaria, one of Germany’s alleged ‘props’, was seeking a separate peace. He suffered a fit and foamed at the mouth before collapsing.
ANZAC COVE ON Gallipoli has atmospherics: tawny ridges rise out of a sea that displays all the colours of a peacock’s tail. Gallipoli is part of Australian folklore; it is a place for pilgrimages. Mont St Quentin isn’t like that. It doesn’t have the atmospherics: a low hill rises out of the plain; the village, church and memorial to the 2nd Division lie near the summit, from where you look down on Péronne and the tree-lined river. Nor does Mont St Quentin have a place in the folklore; it is hardly spoken of. There is no sense to these things.