Goodbye to all that
The men of the 24th Battalion of the 2nd Division had been only lightly caught up in the struggle for the Beaurevoir Line. Next day, along with the rest of the division, they were savouring a long rest, preferably near the coast. Apart from the matter of their weariness, there weren’t many of them left. In the afternoon they were surprised to learn that they were to be used as part of a scratched-up force to take the village of Montbrehain, on the plateau to the east, the following day. They would be joined by the 21st Battalion, which had not fought at the Beaurevoir Line, the division’s pioneers, who were to be used as infantry for the first time, as well as a few men from the brigade’s machine-gun company.
After hearing this news, nine officers of the 24th Battalion huddled in a German dugout that smelled of earth and mildew and engaged in a singsong, ‘as if war were a huge comedy’. They invented new lyrics for popular songs. Their version of ‘Parlez-vous’ told how infantrymen (‘who “rat” the poor old Huns’) were superior to cavalrymen, engineers and gunners. Captains Harry Fletcher and Austin Mahony sang ‘I’m Courting Bonnie Lizzy Lindsay Noo’ and Fletcher gave a solo rendition of ‘The Bells of St Mary’s’.
Fletcher and Mahony had been close friends before the war, when they lived in the same boarding house near Melbourne University. On Sundays they would leave for church, parting on the way. Fletcher was a Protestant and Mahony a Catholic. They would meet up again on the way home. They enlisted together as privates in March, 1915, and received consecutive numbers. They went to Gallipoli together, foregoing chances of promotion to stay together in the same battalion.
Mahony was tall and strongly built, with a broad heavy jaw and brown eyes that looked kindly on the world. In most of his photographs there is the hint of a smile, as though smiling is the most natural thing to do. He grew up at Hansonville, in Victoria’s northeast, and was dux of Wangaratta High School and topped the State in French before coming to Melbourne to work as a clerk in the public service. His passion was playing Australian rules football. By the time of the Gallipoli landings he and Fletcher were both sergeants, promoted on the same day.
The following year Mahony, now a lieutenant, won the Military Cross at Pozières. He always carried a walking stick at the front and inspired those around him with his coolness. He was also regarded as lucky. Several times when he should have been killed he walked away swinging his stick.
Football, rather than shellfire, put him in hospital. A sprained ankle took him away from the front for eight months in 1917 and early 1918. Four months after the injury he still had difficulty walking up stairs. He was made a captain in May, 1918, and in September he and Harry Fletcher arranged to spend a weekend together in London, where they stayed with an English family. They followed their old routine on the Sunday: Fletcher and the family went to ‘kirk’; Mahony went to Mass. An evening of song followed.
Mahony had set up his headquarters on the new front after the battle for the Beaurevoir Line. Two German runners blundered in after dark and the Australians grabbed for their rifles. The Germans hadn’t realised the front had shifted. They had brought dispatches and a tripe stew for the regimental commander who had occupied Mahony’s dugout. They became prisoners; the fate of the tripe is unknown.
Harry Fletcher had rejoined the battalion only four days earlier. Photographs of him show a handsome young man with a serious air, intelligent eyes, a neat part in his hair and a dimple on his chin. He grew up at Eaglehawk, a suburb of Bendigo, and had become a teacher at Princes Hill, near Melbourne University, where he was studying for an arts degree. His sister, Annie, who died in 2004 aged 109, said he had a ‘good sense of humour’ and was ‘quite sporty’. He was on the committee of a debating society that argued such topics as ‘Is militarism desirable for a nation?’ and ‘Does the press of Australia exert too much of an influence over the politics of the nation?’
Mahony and Fletcher were in the trenches at Lone Pine when the Turks, late in the campaign, finally brought up howitzers. More than forty men were killed in one barrage that fell on the 24th Battalion. Fletcher was wounded and buried. According to family sources, one side of his face was damaged and he did not afterwards have to shave in that area. Gallipoli seared him but he kept his sense of humour. On the Greek island of Lemnos he took a hot bath. ‘After washing about half an hour I found a singlet which I had lost a couple of months ago. On peeling it off I had to start and wash again.’
We know that Lieutenant John Gear from Ballarat was at the singsong before Montbrehain. He was twenty-four and had interrupted his studies for a diploma of education to join up as a private. He was a fine athlete and had earlier been accepted for the Duntroon military academy, only to be rejected because he was an inch too short. He had been wounded at Pozières and had won the Military Cross in 1918. We do not know whether Lieutenant George Ingram was present. He was a building contractor from the Melbourne suburb of Caulfield who had also risen through the ranks and been decorated for bravery.
MONTBREHAIN HAD BEEN a large village of 900 people. The Germans had evacuated some of them but elderly couples, as well as women and children, were sheltering in cellars and battered houses. A quarry and a cemetery stood on the north-west outskirts of the village.
The plan was for the 21st Battalion to go through the village and dig in on its eastern side. The 24th would go through and dig in on the northern side. The pioneers would veer south before the village and set up a defensive flank. In conception it was a nasty little operation. With only two battalions attacking, the front would be narrow, more so because each battalion could only offer about 240 men. If the assault succeeded, it would create a salient that could be hit from three sides. The war was now moving at a terrific pace. Monash probably didn’t think too long about what he was ordering.
THE MORNING WAS cold and frosty and a bright moon shone on Australian bayonets and men rubbing their hands against the chill. Some sneezed from the gas they encountered on the way to the start line. The sun was just lighting the horizon as they followed the creeping barrage up the gentle slope to the village. The tanks that were to help them were late.
The 21st Battalion, on the right, broke into the village and a shell killed Captain James Sullivan, a young law clerk from Geelong. He had won the Military Medal on Gallipoli and two Military Crosses on the western front. He had been wounded earlier in 1918 but had returned to fight at Mont St Quentin. The men pushed on up the main street. In a cellar they came on twenty French women and children who later in the day gave them coffee and milk.
South of the village the pioneers fought well in their first essay as infantrymen. Lieutenant Norman Wilkinson, from the brigade’s machine-gun company, had joined them with two gun teams. Wilkinson came upon about 100 German machine gunners manning a line on an embankment and firing into the Australians attacking the village. The Germans hadn’t seen him. Wilkinson’s teams poured fire into the embankment from close range. Each gun fired two belts. That was enough to put fourteen German guns out of action and kill thirty of the gunners and wound another fifty. In the afternoon Wilkinson was carried out with a bullet wound to the leg.
On the north-western side of the village Lieutenant Ingram led his platoon in rushing a machine-gun post, killing more than forty gunners and capturing six guns. (One account has them capturing nine guns: the Germans were short of men and food, but not machine guns.) With help from a tank Ingram next led an attack on the quarry on the north-western edge of the village. He landed among the Germans and shot several. The quarry gave up a large bag of prisoners and forty machine guns. Ingram went on into the village, where he saw a machine gun firing from a cellar ventilator. Ingram shot the gunner and rushed the cellar stairs. His men found him holding thirty prisoners. Ingram lived to be awarded the Victoria Cross.
Lieutenant Gear died, hit in the heart by a machine-gun bullet. He was in Fletcher’s company on the extreme left of the attack. Then Harry Fletcher was killed. The Germans fired on a tank with a field gun. One of the shells hit Fletcher.
Mahony’s company was going for the village before wheeling to the north-east. It paused at a hedge outside the village. A lieutenant was pushing his head through the hedge to see what was ahead when his helmet clanked against the muzzle of a machine gun. His batman, Private John Blankenberg, known throughout the battalion as ‘Russia’, shot its crew of four, saying they were ‘cowards’. Blankenberg was himself killed later in the day.
French civilians, mostly old people and a few young girls, came out to meet Mahony’s company as it moved through the village. An old man walked up the street saying ‘Anglais bon! bon!’ Mahony came up to supervise the siting of his posts. He stood in the open and a machine-gun bullet, probably fired from some hundreds of yards away, slapped into his temple. A private who was with him said Mahony quickly lapsed into unconsciousness and did not speak. He died four days later.
Mahony had been hit about 8 am, Fletcher about an hour later. There had always been a symmetry to their military careers. And now, after nearly four years, in this village that really didn’t matter that much, the symmetry had continued, except that it had turned black. There would be no more singsongs. The journey that had begun in Melbourne was over.
By early evening the Australians held Montbrehain and its outskirts. Joe Maxwell went up to the village. Old people were abusing German prisoners. One woman – ‘gaunt and as old as one of the witches in Macbeth’ – shrieked at the prisoners then hoisted her petticoats ‘and exposed to them that part of her gaunt old anatomy on which nature had intended her to sit’.
The men here didn’t know it, Monash didn’t know it, but the Australian infantrymen had fought their last battle of the Great War.
LIEUTENANT NORMAN WILKINSON’S leg wound took him to Wandsworth Hospital in London. He remembered that he had taken a Mauser pistol from a German at Montbrehain. It was in his haversack, which was hanging from the bed head. He rummaged for the pistol. He was going to ask one of the men in the ward to unload it for him. His finger touched the trigger. Crack. The bullet went through the floor. Orderlies and patients came running. The two ward sisters ‘did handsprings’ and a New Zealand officer whose right leg had been amputated fell into shell-shock.
IT WAS SOME time before Fletcher’s parents at Bendigo were told of their son’s death. They then wondered why his friend Austin had not written to them. The pair’s effects were eventually shipped home. Fletcher’s included a gold cigarette case, two pocket testaments and a Commonwealth Bank chequebook containing twelve unused cheques. Mahony’s included a rosary, a crucifix, a pair of football shorts, a red guernsey and two pipes. Both men had left their estates to their mothers. Mahony’s father asked the defence authorities if he could wear his son’s medals. He was told this was against regulations. Both families eventually held a joint memorial service at Bendigo for their sons.
Nearly eighty years later two photographs of Austin Mahony in uniform were found among the keepsakes of Mrs Celia Ash, who had died in 1996, aged 100. Mrs Ash grew up in the Hansonville– Greta area. She went to Melbourne in her teens to continue her education. When and where she met Austin and the nature of their friendship is unknown; but he meant enough for her to keep his photograph for the rest of her life.
In Royal Parade, Parkville, close to the university and to where Fletcher and Mahony boarded, a memorial was dedicated to the fallen from the district. A slouch-hatted soldier rendered in marble stands above a grey granite pediment. The names of Fletcher and Mahony are there. The monumental mason, Peter Jageurs of Parkville, had to inscribe the name of his son, John, among the dead.
THE LAST OF the Australian infantrymen left the frontline the day after Montbrehain. A few days earlier, Captain Ellis, the historian of the 5th Division, watched Australians leaving.
Troops more fatigued had rarely been seen and yet, by sheer determination, they overcame the weakness of the body and marched back in excellent order … But their strained, pallid faces revealed what they had passed through, and numerous transport units along the road respectfully and in silence pulled their vehicles to one side that the war-worn men might not have an extra step to march. It was the mute and eloquent testimony of brave men to heroes.
CAPTAIN JAMES SULLIVAN, the young law clerk from Geelong, lies in Bellicourt British Cemetery. The main Hindenburg Line once ran through here. A bay thoroughbred horse stands in the paddock next to the graveyard, staring out over the headstones. Harry Fletcher is in the yellowy soil of Calvaire Cemetery at Montbrehain, a short walk from where he died. Austin Mahony is a few miles back in Tincourt New British Cemetery. It seems wrong that the two are not lying side by side.