Pozières was a bloodbath that resulted in over 23,000 Australian casualties – and for what? The capture of a small, shell-shattered French village that no longer existed, having been blown apart by hundreds of thousands of German shells over a two-month period. Barely one brick stood on top of another.

This was war on the Western Front in 1916 – enormous casualties for little gain, allowing the generals to move the lines on their maps a few millimetres into the German front lines. Meanwhile, back in Australia, thousands of families were provided with scant details regarding the fate of husbands, fathers, sons and brothers. Most of the dead would have no known grave, having been buried alive or blown apart with nothing of them to be found, let alone to identify and bury.

Lieutenant John Raws, a 33-year-old journalist from Melbourne serving with the Australian 23rd Battalion, experienced all that Pozières had to offer, and more. He wrote home at the time of the fighting:

The great horror of many of us is the fear of being lost with troops at night on the battlefield. We do all our fighting and moving at night, and the confusion of passing through a barrage of enemy shells in the dark is pretty appalling . . .

Our battalion . . . had to march for three miles, under shellfire, go out into No Man’s Land in front of the German trenches, and dig a narrow trench to be used to jump off from in another assault. I was posted in the rear to bring up the rear and prevent straggling. We went in single file along narrow communication trenches. We were shelled all the way up, but got absolute hell when passing through a particularly heavy curtain of fire which the enemy was playing on a ruined village [Pozières] . . .

In the midst of this barrage our line was held up. I went up from the rear and found that we had been cut off, about half of us, from the rest of the battalion, and were lost. I would gladly have shot myself, for I had not the slightest idea where our lines or the enemy’s were, and the shells were coming at us from, it seemed, three directions. As a matter of fact that was right. Well, we lay down terror-stricken along a bank. The shelling was awful. I took a long drink of neat whisky and went up and down the bank trying to find a man who could tell me where we were. Eventually I found one. He led me along a broken track and we found a trench; he said he was sure it led to our lines, so we went back and got the men. It was hard to make them move, they were so badly broken. We eventually found our way to the right spot, out in No Man’s Land. Our leader was shot before we arrived, and the strain had sent two other officers mad. I and another new officer (Lieutenant [Lionel] Short) took charge and dug the trench. We were being shot at all the time, and I knew that if we did not finish the job before daylight a new assault planned for the next night would fail. It was awful, but we had to drive the men by every possible means and dig ourselves. The wounded and killed had to be thrown on one side – I refused to let any sound man help a wounded man: the sound men had to dig . . .

Just before daybreak an officer [of another unit] out there, who was hopelessly rattled, ordered us to go. The trench was not finished. I took it on myself to insist on the men staying, saying that any man who stopped digging would be shot. We dug on and finished amid a tornado of bursting shells. All the time, mind, the enemy flares were making the whole area almost as light as day. We got away as best we could. I was buried twice and thrown down several times – buried with dead and dying. The ground was covered with bodies in all stages of decay and mutilation, and I would, after struggling free from the earth, pick up a body [and] . . . try to lift him out . . . [only to] find him a decayed corpse. I pulled a head off – was covered with blood. The horror was indescribable. In the dim misty light of dawn I collected about 50 men and sent them off, mad with terror, on the right track for home. Then two brave fellows stayed behind and helped me with the only unburied wounded man we could find. The journey down with him was awful. He was delirious . . . On the way down I found another man and made him stay and help us. It was terribly slow.

We got down to the first dressing station. There I met another of our men, who was certain that his cobber was lying wounded in that barrage of fire. I would have given my immortal soul to get out of it, but I simply had to go back with him and a stretcher-bearer. We spent two hours in that devastated village searching for wounded – but all were dead. The sights I saw during that search, and the smell, can, I know, never be exceeded by anything else the war may show me.

I went up again the next night, and stayed up there. We were shelled to hell ceaselessly. X—— went mad and disappeared . . .

I have had much luck and kept my nerve so far. The awful difficulty is to keep it. The bravest of all often lose it – courage does not count here. It is all nerve – once that goes one becomes a gibbering maniac. The noise of our own guns, the enemy’s shells, and the getting lost in the darkness . . .

Only the men you would have trusted and believed in before proved equal to it. One or two of my friends stood splendidly, like granite rocks round which the seas stormed in vain. They were all junior officers; but many other fine men broke to pieces. Everyone called it shell-shock, but shell-shock is very rare. What 90 per cent get is justifiable funk, due to the collapse of the helm of self-control.1

John and his brother, Robert, also a lieutenant in the 23rd Battalion, would be killed within weeks of each other in the fighting to take Pozières. Neither has a known grave.

Almost two years later, Pozières, along with the other battlefields of the Somme of 1916, were well behind the British lines. However, by April 1918 the tables had turned and Pozières was back in German hands and the Australians were again fighting on the old battlefields of the Somme to stop a massive German offensive that had shattered the British Fifth Army and was driving a wedge between the British and French forces. The bloody battles of 1916 and 1917 and the world of suffering they had caused the Diggers and their families back home had seemingly all been in vain and would now need to be repeated.