A very Australian mutiny
And so the new pursuit began. The Germans fell back on the Hindenburg Line: there was nowhere else for them to go. They were tired and ragged and the dream of conquest, which had flickered in March, was dead; the war was all about hanging on now. The Germans wrecked everything they could as they fell back. In daylight the sky to the east of the Australians was smudged with smoke. At night the burning villages gave off a pink glow.
The Australians’ numbers were falling every day. They too were hanging on, but with a difference: if they and the rest of Haig’s forces could hang on, they could win. The prospect had never been so close. Monash was wearing himself out. He had left the splendour of Bertangles, shifting his headquarters from one village to another along the Somme as the battle moved east. Photographs taken at this time show him looking thin and strained, folds of skin hanging on his face. His diary suggests he was suffering from nervous tremors. He impressed the English journalists who came to see him, partly, one suspects, because he was nothing like the British generals they were used to. Arthur Conan Doyle saw ‘a rare compelling personality’. Arthur O’Connor of the Weekly Despatch summed him up as a strong man: intellectual, original, democratic and ruthless.
Monash knew he was pushing his men unreasonably. He also knew the Germans must not be given time to reorganise. He cared about the welfare of his men; and he cared, perhaps more, about winning. On September 4, when Rawlinson ordered him to chase the Germans beyond Péronne, Monash told Bean his troops weren’t tired, just ‘a little footsore’. Monash was too intelligent to believe this; but he could hardly tell Bean, who had never understood him, that the end justified the means. Bean wrote in his diary that there would be no more AIF before long.
Monash couldn’t use the 2nd Division to chase the Germans: it had suffered too much on Mont St Quentin. He couldn’t use the 1st and 4th divisions: he had earmarked these for the final approach to the Hindenburg Line itself. So he had to bring Gellibrand’s wornout 3rd Division back for the pursuit. He set off for the Hindenburg Line with three divisions: the 3rd, 5th and the British 32nd.
The men went out into rolling country. There were more than a dozen villages between them and the Hindenburg Line, and the Germans were busy razing them and setting up machine-gun posts to cover their withdrawal. The Hindenburg Line here ran north–south on either side of the St Quentin Canal, which ran through the village of Bellicourt and close to Bellenglise further south. The canal was obstacle enough: it ran in a cutting with almost vertical sides that plunged fifty feet or more; it wasn’t particularly deep but it was thirty-five feet wide, with a muddy bottom and barbed wire on both banks. North of Bellicourt the canal ran into a tunnel, built in Napoleonic times, three-and-a-half miles long. Here, at least, tanks might be used and the foot soldiers would not have to swim. In one form or another the Hindenburg Line ran from Flanders to beyond Verdun. The fortifications in front of the Australians, the Siegfried Stellung, were the oldest and most intricate part of the line. Old British trenches infested with thistles lay just before the line. These had been the frontline before the March offensive.
Rawlinson and Monash were unsure where the Germans would stand: at the Hindenburg Line itself or at the old British trenches? Rawlinson laid down four objectives for the Australians as they tramped east. The third was the old British reserve line and the fourth the former British frontline. The troops took the first three objectives easily enough and without a formal plan beyond driving the Germans before them. Monash felt the old British frontline could only be taken by a set-piece. Rawlinson decided to attack it on September 18. His army had been reinforced by the arrival of IX Corps of three relatively fresh divisions commanded by General Braithwaite. Braithwaite would attack in the south, the Australians in the centre and III Corps, now again under the command of the muddling Butler, to the north. The 1st and 4th Australian divisions came up for the attack and the 3rd and 5th left for a rest.
Private Whinfield found himself ‘resting’ near Péronne. The men dug shelters into banks and used iron sheets discarded by the Germans to keep out the rain. Whinfield’s battalion played Australian rules football against brigade headquarters ‘and gave them a big trouncing’.
AS RAWLINSON AND Monash were plotting their final approach to the Siegfried Stellung, a position of critical importance, General Pershing at last took his American Expeditionary Force to war at the St Mihiel salient, a position that hardly mattered. The salient jutted into the French line south of Verdun. Foch wanted to save the Americans for a big offensive he was planning through the Argonne Forest towards the German railhead at Mezières. Pershing insisted on attacking at St Mihiel first; he was looking for a morale booster, something that was distinctly American.
So, on September 12, seventeen months after the United States had declared war, Pershing sent in a dozen divisions at St Mihiel, supported by close to 1500 aircraft. Colonel William ‘Billy’ Mitchell commanded the aircraft. He suggested that aircraft would one day win wars. This outraged brother-officers who still wore spurs. What Pershing didn’t know was that Ludendorff had already ordered the salient be given up to shorten his front and save men. The Germans fought like men who were leaving anyway. By the evening of the 13th St Mihiel was a huge success, at least in statistical terms. The Americans and the French divisions attached to them had wiped out the salient and taken 15,000 prisoners.
Two operatic figures fought here. Brigadier-General Douglas MacArthur was first in his brigade to clear the parapet. Major George S. Patton commanded a wedge of tanks. The two found themselves together during a bombardment. Patton recalled that neither was much interested in what the other said ‘as we could not get our minds off the shells’. MacArthur said afterwards that Patton flinched, then looked annoyed with himself. ‘Don’t worry, major,’ MacArthur claims to have said, ‘you never hear the one that gets you.’
MONASH WAS GIVEN only eight tanks for the attack of September 18, which would be known as the battle of Epéhy, so he decided to build dummy ones from wooden frames covered with hessian. The engineers and pioneers competed to construct the most ‘lifelike’ model. The dummies were dragged out before dawn into positions where the Germans would have to see them. Monash’s other innovation was to bring in the machine-gun battalions of the 3rd and 5th divisions, so that he had 256 Vickers guns firing a barrage 300 yards ahead of the advancing infantry. By now it had become clear that the Germans would stand on the old British frontline rather than retreat to the Hindenburg Line.
Monash’s two attacking divisions each had a frontage of 3500 yards. They had to go about 5000 yards in three bounds. The first would take them to the old British frontline, the second to the old British outpost line and the third to the Hindenburg outpost line. The four attacking brigades averaged only 1500 men each, less than half their nominal strength. They set off in rain and fog under a creeping barrage. The machine-gun barrage was so ferocious that a captured German battalion commander said: ‘The small-arms fire was absolutely too terrible for words. There was nothing we could do but to crouch down in our trenches and wait for you to come and take us.’
And take them they did. In the first phase the 16th Battalion of the 4th Division took 450 prisoners (which would have been more than its own number), sixty machine guns, several field guns and two anti-aircraft guns. On the 1st Division front an officer reported Germans running past him and asking ‘Which way?’ to the Australian rear. By 10 am the Australians were on their second objective. In the north the 1st Division pushed on easily to the final objective. The men looked down on the canal and its bridges, the entrance to the tunnel and Bellicourt village. The 4th Division came up south of them about an hour later. Rawlinson’s other two corps – Butler’s to the north and Braithwaite’s to the south – failed to take their third objectives.
The Australians had taken 4300 prisoners for casualties of about 1260. This was a modest figure but, with the Australian formations so wasted, it amounted to the loss of a brigade. In his report to Haig, Rawlinson mentioned that German officers were saying their men no longer wanted to face Australians.
THREE DAYS LATER Butler’s III Corps was still trying to come up alongside the Australian 1st Division. Butler asked Monash for help. General Glasgow had arranged for his tired men to be relieved; now he had to order them to attack again. Some in the 1st Battalion refused to move. They said they weren’t getting a ‘fair deal’, that they ‘were being put in to do other people’s work’, and that they were tired of British divisions failing on their flanks. One hundred and nineteen men disobeyed their officers and walked to the rear. All but one of them was later found guilty of desertion rather than mutiny, and sentenced to up to ten years’ imprisonment. Monash failed to confirm the sentences and the men were eventually pardoned. This annoyed Glasgow, who had none of Monash’s wiles.
But mutiny was coming. As Monash was planning his attack on the Hindenburg Line he had to order the disbandment of seven battalions: the 19th, 21st, 25th, 37th, 42nd, 54th and 60th. This was a rough blow. Men first of all identified with their battalion rather than their brigade or division. The battalion was like a large and vaguely feudal family, the source of traditions and inspirations.
Haig’s headquarters and the Army Council in London had for months been urging the Australians to adopt three-battalion brigades. Monash had resisted. He knew what the breaking up of battalions would do to the morale of his force. He didn’t think numbers mattered too much so long as each battalion had thirty Lewis guns. And, one suspects, he thought chasing the Germans to the Hindenburg Line more important than housekeeping.
Billy Hughes unwittingly forced him to adopt disbandment. Hughes had decided in August that the 1914 men in the AIF – there were about 6000 ‘originals’ left – should be given two months’ leave in Australia. But he couldn’t find ships to take them home. Then in September, after much nagging and prodding, he found one. Birdwood, still the administrative head of the AIF, was told 800 men could go home at once. Monash was told on September 12, just as he was planning his attack on the Hindenburg outpost line. Most of the originals were in the 1st and 4th divisions, the two that were carrying out the coming attack. Monash resisted and Birdwood insisted. The men left. Monash had been prevaricating about disbanding battalions. Now, faced with the loss of another 5000-odd men, he accepted that the battalions that were badly depleted had to be broken up.
The moral case for sending the men home was just about incontestable. English, Irish, Scots, Welsh, French and German soldiers received home leave. The original Australians had been fighting since Gallipoli without seeing home, which was deemed to be too far away. Many had been wounded several times. Some looked ten years older than when they had left home: boyish curves had become hard angles. But the case for keeping them, more pragmatic than moral, was strong too. Battalions were down to 400 men or less; the originals were the most experienced men and, in many cases, the best. Monash needed every man he could find for the Hindenburg Line. This was the climactic point of the war. If the line was broken here, at its strongest point, the war could end in months.
Men, and officers too, in the formations marked for extinction held angry meetings. Feeling was particularly strong in the 37th Battalion of the 3rd Division commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Story, a good soldier. He protested to his brigadier, then went over his head to Gellibrand, Monash and Birdwood. For this he lost his command. His men decided that at their final parade they would obey every instruction except the last order, which would tell them to march off and join other battalions. They did just this a few days after the battle for the Hindenburg outposts. Walter McNicoll, their brigadier, spoke to them. The men still refused the final order. The officers were told to fall out. They did so – reluctantly, it was said. The sergeants then fell out, along with a corporal and a private. The others were told that they would be posted as absent without leave if they failed to join their new battalions by that afternoon.
Left to themselves, the men decided that the battalion would continue to be run along military lines. Men were chosen to carry out the officers’ tasks; a corporal became the battalion commander. Food was obtained from sympathisers in other battalions. Rations tended to fall off wagons as they passed the 37th’s camp. It was all very Australian, rather like shearers making a stand on principle at a hot shed in western Queensland.
The other battalions marked for disbandment did much the same things. Monash and Gellibrand talked with delegates from the 37th. Monash told them: ‘I have done a thing unprecedented in military annals in holding an informal conference such as this, but I realise that the AIF is different from any other army in the world.’ Men of the 25th told their brigadier that they wanted to be given the roughest task in the next battle. That way, the battalion would be wiped out, or it would leave such a mark that no-one would dare try to disband it.
Pompey Elliott intended to roll his 60th Battalion into the 59th. Most of the men of the 60th went on strike when Lieutenant-Colonel Scanlan tried to give orders to them. Private Whinfield was there. Elliott rode up, Whinfield wrote in his diary.
[Colonel Scanlan] ordered slope arms – none budged. He then demanded it again – none stirred. Then old Pompey on his big black neddy fell on us like an avalanche. Man he was mad. If he’d had his revolver a few would have been shot very likely. He picked out the Major, a captain, odd men, then he stormed – detailed the law dealing with mutiny. Then he dealt with the necessity of being broken up. Then he pleaded.
According to Ross McMullin, Elliott’s biographer, the brigadier at first thundered: ‘This nonsense must cease at once.’ If a large body of men mutinied, Elliott said, the ringleaders would be executed. He fell into hyperbole. If the identities of the ringleaders could not be determined, then probably one in every ten men would be shot. ‘We’ve got bullets too,’ one of the men said.
Elliott became conciliatory. It was no use blaming the AIF authorities, he said. Better to blame the politicians in Australia who had failed to provide reinforcements. Elliott would leave them for half-an-hour so that they could think about what to do.
When he returned the men still seemed likely to oppose the dis-bandment. ‘It seems like deserting our dead,’ some said. Elliott talked some more, quietly and sensibly. The 60th men could retain their colour patches, he said. The men agreed to disband. Thus was the power of Elliott when he spoke softly.
The other six battalions refused to disband. Elliott was furious upon learning, the day after he had talked the 60th around, that Monash had deferred the break-up of the other six. But Monash had shown much commonsense. He said privately that he wasn’t going to let the men dictate to him; he would work out a way to disband the battalions in his own way and on his own terms. Mutiny was dramatic enough: he wasn’t going to inflame it by responding the way generals were supposed to respond. And, anyway, planning the attack on the Hindenburg Line was more important.
There had been a mutiny, but there was a nobility to it. The men weren’t refusing to fight; they simply wanted to do so in their old formations. None of the mutineers was punished.
MUTINY WAS SWIRLING around Kaiser Wilhelm too, except that he couldn’t see it for what it was.
Since late 1915 France and Britain had kept a large force at the Macedonian port of Salonika. This pleased the easterners, who saw Salonika as the gateway to Bulgaria, the Danube and the underbelly of Germany; but for years the 600,000 troops there had done little except come down with malaria. Now, reinforced by a large Greek force, the so-called ‘Army of the East’ was driving north into Bulgaria, which had come into war in 1915 for no grander reason than that it thought Germany might win. Prince Ferdinand, who styled himself as Tsar of Bulgaria, told his troops to die rather than retreat but they preferred to live. It was all over by late September when Bulgaria sought a separate armistice.
The Turks were just about beaten too. General Allenby in September attacked along the coastal plain of Palestine, heading for Syria. Allenby advanced so fast that Liman von Sanders, the victorious German commander on Gallipoli, had to flee his headquarters at Nazareth in his pyjamas. On October 1 Australian horsemen would enter Damascus.
On September 26 a huge force of Americans and French attacked in the Argonne Forest. This was always going to be a difficult front because of the rough terrain, but now Ludendorff was being tied down at the lower end of the western front. Captain Harry Truman commanded an artillery battery of ‘wild Irish and German Catholics’ in this battle. Bespectacled and with short-cropped hair, Truman knew how to curse. A runner who arrived breathless at Truman’s battery said: ‘I never heard a man cuss so well or intelligently, and I’d shoed a million mules.’ Truman’s father was a mule trader.
On September 27, towards the other end of the front, Haig sent his 1st and 3rd armies at Cambrai. By the following day they had penetrated six miles. Plumer’s 2nd Army and the Belgians were preparing to push out from Ypres. That day Ludendorff is said to have ‘lost his nerve’. He fell into a rage and blamed the Kaiser, the German people and politicians for Germany’s setbacks. In the evening he calmed down and told Hindenburg there must be an immediate armistice. Hindenburg agreed. Ludendorff was presumably thinking that Germany could find a way to keep her Russian conquests in any peace deal. He still had fifty divisions protecting these spoils. This was one of the reasons he was short of men on the western front.
Next day the pair went to see the Kaiser and Paul von Hintze, the Foreign Minister. Ludendorff told the Kaiser the army was near to collapse. He said Bulgaria was lost and that Austria and Turkey would soon follow. Germany should seek a ceasefire and then begin negotiations on the basis of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, even though these called on her to give up all conquests in Russia, France and Belgium. Hintze thought Germany would do better if she presented a more democratic face. Someone thought more liberal, such as Prince Max of Baden, the Kaiser’s cousin, should replace Count Georg von Hertling, the conservative Chancellor who never argued with the military. A parliamentary government should be cobbled up as quickly as possible. Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who had enjoyed the powers of dictators, should be answerable to the new chancellor. Kaiser Wilhelm accepted what he saw as a ‘revolution from above’; it was preferable to anarchy from below.
Hindenburg and Ludendorff liked the idea. As one historian wrote: ‘Having rigorously excluded Germany’s civilian leaders from the waging of the war, Ludendorff and Hindenburg wanted to make them responsible for its loss.’ Prince Max became chancellor.
Before this happened the Australians had attacked the Hindenburg Line.