CHAPTER TEN

‘I Really Cannot Imagine How They Live Through It’:

Winter at the Somme

AUGUST 1916–MARCH 1917

ELLIOTT’S BRIGADE WAS unfit for any major offensive assignment for months. The 59th and 60th Battalions were so depleted that for a while they were combined for administrative purposes as if they were a single unit. For almost three months the 15th Brigade remained in the Fromelles sector, which reverted to its customary state of relative inactivity after the futility of attacking there had been confirmed by Haking’s disastrous venture. Elliott applied himself to the task of rebuilding his brigade all over again.

Officers were needed desperately. Always on the lookout for officer material, Pompey was more assiduous than ever in his efforts to attract suitable candidates. Some he obtained from the 4th Light Horse (a squadron of this Victorian unit had accompanied the AIF infantry to France as divisional cavalry). Other officer vacancies were filled by 15th Brigade NCOs who had been brave rescuers at Fromelles, including Dan Toohey, Bill Knuckey, Hugh Knyvett and Simon Fraser. Awareness of Knuckey’s willingness to accompany Norman Marshall on dangerous rescuing enterprises was crucial, Knuckey himself was convinced, in the willingness of his platoon to follow him as an officer. Rank-and-file respect for newly appointed officers was far from automatic; Knuckey’s experience vindicated Pompey’s promotion choices.

The AIF’s aggressive harassment — intermittent artillery bombardments, sporadic mortar assaults, occasional infantry raids — disturbed the relative quietness of the Fromelles sector following the battle. These raids, rapid incursions to unsettle the German formation opposite, maintained pressure on the enemy, but the price in casualties was sometimes excessive. The 15th Brigade’s first raid, exactly a month after the Fromelles battle, was undertaken by the 57th Battalion and directed by Norman Marshall. At least sixteen Germans were killed, an enemy machine-gun was captured and another destroyed, documents and other materials were seized, and the defending unit identified. But the 56 raiders sustained 19 casualties, including two fine officers who were both killed. The ‘good ones are always getting it’, Elliott reflected sadly. It was ‘harder and harder to replace them’. Consecutive letters to Kate featured this melancholy theme. ‘If only some of them, the Hendersons, McCrae and one or two more could have come through it all right’, he wrote, ‘it is terrible to have the good ones go one after another’.

In mid-September there was another raid, this time by the 58th. Its organisation by Captain Harold Ferres was impressive, and the raiders secured identifications and inflicted considerable damage, but their casualties (five killed, five wounded) again saddened the brigadier:

I begrudge them very much. The results seem so inadequate for the loss of these fine boys, but on the other hand a shell landed in a patch of 10 boys who had come to get their breakfast at the cook’s fire and eight of them … were wounded all at once, one seriously.

Distressing losses seemed unavoidable whatever his men were doing.

Another incident that particularly upset Elliott concerned his keen young protégé Bill Scurry, who had devised the ingenious drip-rifle used at the Gallipoli evacuation. Scurry had been awarded the DCM for his ingenuity on Elliott’s recommendation. Afterwards, having been promoted to brigadier, Pompey thought of Scurry when he had to find someone to create from scratch the light mortar unit that had become part of an infantry brigade’s structure. Scurry had no idea what a trench mortar looked like, but the brigadier’s offer was compelling. ‘Pick three officers and 60 other ranks, any you like in the brigade’, urged Pompey. Scurry accepted. Now a captain (he was a humble lance-corporal when he and ‘Bunty’ Lawrence created the drip-rifle), Scurry applied himself with such zeal and proficiency that only a few weeks later the 15th Light Trench Mortar Battery performed creditably at the battle of Fromelles.

Light mortars operated in the 15th Brigade more effectively, Pompey was convinced, than they did elsewhere. Mortar batteries in some other brigades had an uneasy relationship with the infantry, who did not like the retaliatory enemy shellfire the mortars tended to provoke. In contrast, he and Scurry instilled a spirit of mutual co-operation; infantrymen in the 15th Brigade eagerly nominated troublesome enemy posts for Scurry’s mortars to deal with. Elliott was delighted with Scurry’s ‘splendid work … he has a real genius for soldiering’.

On 3 September, however, an unusual German shell, brought to Scurry for examination, exploded while he was scrutinising it. His multiple wounds included the (eventual) loss of a finger, a severe chest injury, and almost total blindness in one eye. Pompey was dismayed. Informed of the hospital’s verdict that Scurry was unfit for further service, Pompey urged the doctors to reconsider. Scurry was ‘the best and most enthusiastic officer in my brigade without exception’, he declared. ‘I would sooner have him with one eye than a dozen others with both eyes’. But medical authorities confirmed that Scurry should return to Australia.

Elliott was experiencing near misses himself. One night he and Dave Doyle tried to locate a suspected spy allegedly signalling to the Germans from behind the Australian lines. Weary after searching unsuccessfully, the brigadier wrote, they had paused for a breather ‘when a bullet zipped just over my head and struck him in the side, and he fell forward on me’. Doyle’s wound was ‘pretty serious’. He was evacuated to England. The frequency of such incidents ‘makes one become a fatalist’:

This morning … a poor boy was struck in the face and blinded by a piece of shell just as I passed him … it is just heartbreaking to see these fine boys maimed and broken like that every day.

Elliott fantasised about having ‘a holiday in the country where everything is quiet and Katie and I are walking along holding each other’s hands and telling each other all the news’.

I am very sad these days sometimes, thinking of poor old Geoff McCrae and all the other boys. I wish we could get away from this spot. It will be always associated in my mind with their loss, like Lone Pine will be with the losses there … I am tired of all this — every day I must plan … how to kill men.

After yearning to get away from Egypt only a few months earlier, it now seemed ‘years and years since I was there’.

Compensations were few. Not even an overdue decoration could cheer him up. In mid-September he learned that he had been awarded the Russian Order of St Anne:

I don’t know much about it … I suppose it is a scheme to palm off some old thing upon me, and keep the best for someone else … But I suppose it is better than being passed over completely as in Gallipoli.

After making enquiries, however, he conceded that it seemed ‘not a bad Order to have at all’.

At least he was feeling better about his battalion commanders. Colonel Harris, disabled by shellshock in no-man’s-land on 19 July, had confessed to Elliott that after such an unnerving experience he doubted whether he could face another battle. Pompey tactfully thanked him for his contribution and wished him well in the future, but privately reacted to his departure from the brigade with heartfelt relief. At last all three of the ‘old fossil’ colonels had gone. Cam Stewart at the helm of the 57th retained the exacting brigadier’s confidence. Charles Denehy had performed very capably at Fromelles in challenging circumstances, having been plucked from the 57th to command the 58th just hours before the battle. Elliott was delighted that the transfer of his friend Harry Duigan from Tivey’s brigade had been approved. With Duigan in charge of the 60th and Bert Layh leading the 59th, Pompey was certain his brigade would have its best quartet of battalion commanders since its inception.

On 29 September he left France for a badly needed holiday. While it was a beneficial spell from the trenches, he was too busy to have the complete rest he needed. Beginning in London at Berners Hotel, he accepted an invitation to spend a couple of pleasant days at Digswell Place with the Buckleys. He then visited AIF training camps at Salisbury Plain, paying particular attention to the ‘depot battalion’ that was the designated reinforcement source for his brigade. From there he travelled by train to Christchurch on the south coast to see one of his new-found British relatives, Alicia Carter, a cousin on his mother’s side (widow of an admiral and sister of Emily Edwards). Mrs Carter was still coming to terms with the recent loss of her eldest son at the battle of Jutland. Returning to London, Elliott visited

various hospitals where I knew my boys were, and saw a number of them. I am sorry that few of them were making any satisfactory progress towards recovery. It will be a long time before most of them are fit, if they are ever fit at all.

Aware he had been ‘looking a bit dilapidated’ of late, Elliott acquired a new uniform in London. Even Pompey admirers felt this was overdue; ‘we were all a bit ashamed’ of his shabby attire, Captain Kerr of the 60th admitted in August. Stylish dress was never a Pompey priority. Utterly unpretentious, he tended to be contemptuous of soldiers who were conspicuously spick-and-span, staff officers from higher formations in particular. Moreover, he begrudged expenditure on clothes when he was trying hard to save: the cost of his new outfit ‘was just something awful’. Anyway, even if he had felt motivated to take more care about his appearance, his bulk and temperament were daunting obstacles. Whatever he was wearing soon became crumpled, looking as if he had slept in it.

Nevertheless, ever the disciplinarian, he insisted that men under his command had to be properly dressed. Diverting incidents ensued. Because Pompey preferred a belt rather than braces to keep his trousers up, he would often leave his braces hanging down; sometimes he forgot to hoist them back over his shoulders when this became appropriate. At formal parades he would be haranguing some unfortunate private about a button infringement, unaware how incongruous this reprimand was when his own braces were dangling sloppily from his midriff. Pompey’s arrest in London for impersonating an officer also generated widespread amusement. Military policemen refused to believe that such a scruffily dressed man could really be a brigadier. There were red faces all round when this misunderstanding was eventually resolved.

Before returning to his brigade Elliott was reunited, for the first time in two years, with his sister Violet and brother George. Violet had been in London for months, waiting impatiently to see her husband, now an AIF medical officer, but Jack Avery had only recently been granted leave. It had been a frustrating situation. As Harold acknowledged when periodically canvassing whether Kate might come to London, Violet Avery’s experience was not an encouraging precedent. Pompey was on his way back to the front when he caught up with George at Wimereux (near Boulogne). In 1915 George had married Lyn Walker after at last qualifying as a doctor (having started his course a decade earlier). He subsequently enlisted, like Jack Avery, in the medical corps. Harold was particularly fond of his youngest brother, and they had much to discuss, not least the recent marriage of their brother Rod.

Elliott and his brigade were transferred to the Somme shortly after his return. Haig had persisted with the Somme offensive despite mostly unsatisfactory results and an immense casualty toll, Australians very much included. Fierce fighting around Pozières and Mouquet Farm had resulted in no fewer than 22,826 AIF casualties in less than seven weeks. The ends hardly justified the means or the losses, but Haig was determined to persevere, even during winter.

The impact of summer showers on the Fromelles trenches had convinced Elliott that winter at the Western Front would be grim, but the reality was worse than even he had expected. The brigadier and his men were about to endure an unimaginable ordeal in the worst conditions experienced by the AIF during the entire war. British forces, relentlessly attacking since July, had pushed the Germans up to eight miles back, but the territory gained had been churned by innumerable shells into a surreal wasteland of death and destruction. As the Fifth AIF Division made its way towards the Somme battlefield, the onset of winter rains was turning the bleak shell-cratered landscape into a gluey morass. With all transport now confined to a few major roads, the increased pressure left them impenetrably congested.

While the 8th and 14th Brigades were sent straight into front-line trenches north of Flers, the 15th Brigade began with a stint in reserve three miles behind at Montauban, one of the pulverised villages that had become a boggy pigsty. ‘The ground was very wet and muddy and there was practically no shelter’, Wieck noted. Elliott was furious that the previous British occupants had left the area ‘in a perfectly filthy condition’. Learning that 150 tents were obtainable from a supply depot some nine miles away, Elliott and Wieck immediately arranged for them to be collected, but clogged roads made this impossible. In these new surroundings, unlike the Fromelles sector, ‘the roar of the guns is continuous by night and by day’, Elliott reported. On 24 October he decided to have a look up ahead:

Everything is desolation. The shell holes overlap and no semblance of buildings remain, just heaps of rubbish. I was quite knocked up by the walk and heavy going. Communication trenches are practically impassable with mud.

With his men scheduled to relieve the 14th Brigade in the front line, Elliott went forward again three days later to discuss changeover arrangements. It proved an even more trying excursion. Battling a severe cold, Pompey decided to take Darkie this time:

I rode up yesterday and it took over 6 hours to go 3 miles up and three back. My poor old horse was quite knocked up floundering through shell holes up to the knees in mud and water. Once he fell with me and I thought I’d never get him up again for the mud was like glue and he simply couldn’t lift himself at all.

On the 29th, amid persistent rain, Elliott inspected the front-line trenches his brigade had taken over:

They were wretched in the extreme. Full of sloppy water and mud, in places over your boots. No sanitary arrangements … Large numbers of dead, even in the trenches, with only a layer of dirt thrown over them … Enemy shelled our headquarters considerably.

Next day there was more torrential rain. Conditions deteriorated even further.

As Corporal Downing recorded, the men were exhausted after slipping, sliding, and wrenching themselves forward through ‘mire to the thighs at best, to the middle at worst’. When they tried to extricate themselves from the most tenacious mud the noise ‘was like the tearing of sheets of cloth’. Some men and mules could not be extricated at all. A front-line stint in these putrid, dugout-less ditches, Downing wrote, was sheer torment:

Hands and faces protruded from the slimy, toppling walls of trenches. Knees, shoulders and buttocks poked from the foul morass … Our clothes, our very underclothing, were ponderous with … mud … There was no hot food, and no prospect of it … We were soaked from head to feet (the feet that were never dry all that winter) with sweat and icy mud. We did not sleep, but waited in a torpor as the minutes crawled past … We were mud to the eyes; our chilled fingers bled. Everything we touched was slimy.

Downing exemplified the plummet in AIF morale during this unusually severe 1916–17 winter:

We just go into the line again and again until we get knocked. We’ll never get out of this. Just in and out, in and out, and somebody stonkered every time. Australia has forgotten us, and so has God. I wouldn’t wish my worst enemy to have to put up with this.

Elliott was full of compassion for his ‘poor boys’ having ‘a terrible time’ in these ‘dreadful’ trenches, with ‘practically no sleep or rest’ for three days at a time. Despite his heavy cold, he did what he could to hearten them, leaving his headquarters (an old German underground dug-out) to plough through the muck in regular front-line visits before breakfast:

When I went round the trenches of course I got sopping wet just like the boys, but we had a fire in the end of the dug-out and I promptly went to bed until my clothes were dry again and did not put them on again until quite dry.

For miles around there was utter desolation — ‘mud, mud, mud everywhere’, wrote Elliott. It was ‘one vast bog’, affirmed Wieck.

Attacking in these conditions was inconceivable, grotesque. Not only would attackers scarcely be able to drag themselves across the quagmire; it was impossible to get provisions, ammunition, and other prerequisites forward to them. But Haig decided to keep pressuring the Germans, and the Fifth Division was ordered to undertake an attack north of Flers that had been initially scheduled for 25 October before being repeatedly postponed because of the weather. The task had been allotted to the 14th Brigade with the 57th Battalion assisting; Elliott was warned that his whole brigade might become involved. To Pompey, any notion of attacking in such conditions was ‘madness’, and could only be contemplated by individuals unaware of the real situation.

He decided to rectify this himself. Having reconnoitred the position with Lieutenant-Colonel Wagstaff, McCay’s senior staff officer, Elliott protested forcefully to McCay that the operation was impossible. Wagstaff concurred. McCay thereupon telephoned Brudenell White at First Anzac Corps and passed on what Elliott and Wagstaff had said; he added that because of their assessment he was not going to authorise the attack unless specifically ordered to do so by Birdwood, who would accordingly be responsible for the consequences.

The upshot was further postponement and reconsideration. On 3 November the Fifth Division was relieved, and Elliott briefed the 7th AIF Brigade commander, Brigadier-General J. Paton, who was new to the sector. A few days later Elliott learned that Paton’s brigade had suffered a severe repulse in attempting a similar advance. There were 819 casualties in the 7th Brigade, including Paton himself. Attacking in such conditions — the worst the AIF ever endured — was preposterous, Bean concluded. Some 7th Brigade men were so exhausted by the effort of getting forward to the front line that they were weeping from sheer fatigue with the attack about to start. Elliott felt understandably vindicated. ‘I am glad I saved our poor boys from the attempt’, he wrote; ‘fancy attempting a charge’ with ‘mud up to your knees’.

By then he was preoccupied with an altogether different concern. The increased need for AIF reinforcements after devastating recent casualties had prompted Australia’s Prime Minister, W.M. Hughes, to raise the issue of conscription. Following a bitter campaign, a referendum on the question had been held on 28 October. Elliott was appalled to learn that a majority of Australians had voted against conscription. ‘Isn’t that a scandal’, he raged. ‘I feel that our country has disgraced us’. He had been emphasising the need for reinforcements ever since mid-1915. To Elliott, if Australians would not volunteer in sufficient numbers to do their duty in this almighty struggle, compulsion was obviously necessary. Astounded by the people’s verdict, he responded by unleashing instinctive prejudices:

I cannot understand it. I suppose it was the Catholics that were against England as usual, together with all the cold footers and wasters … I hope we will never hear anything again about the loyalty of the Irish. They are a lovely lot.

Hughes had presumed that the AIF would vote overwhelmingly for conscription. He had arranged for the soldiers’ voting to be conducted early enough for him to be able to trumpet this anticipated large majority before polling day in Australia. The AIF did record an overall majority in favour of conscription, but the narrow margin was far short of the emphatic endorsement Hughes was expecting. Instead of advertising the soldiers’ vote far and wide before 28 October, he refused to release the figures for five months.

Voting in the 15th Brigade took place on 19 October. ‘I am afraid lots and lots of the boys here have voted against’, lamented Elliott. Although profoundly disappointed, it was symptomatic of his compassionate identification with his men — such a significant factor in his success as a commander — that he reacted sympathetically to their motives for opposing conscription. He could understand why ‘men who have to stand in the front line and bear it all — frost and snow, rain and hail, bullets, bayonets, shells and bombs night and day’ were reluctant to compel relatives and friends to endure such ‘dreadful suffering’ against their will. Not even in private letters did he castigate those in his brigade who had voted ‘No’, though he was repeatedly scathing about anti-conscriptionist campaigners.

That Germany had to be defeated, for Australia’s sake as much as any nation’s, had been Elliott’s firm conviction ‘from the very instant war was declared’. It was ‘very, very certain’ that if Germany won the war, Australia itself would be in peril: ‘The Germans themselves make no secret of the fact that if they can get it they will take it’. If so, everyone in Australia would then experience ‘all the horrors we see about us’. According to Elliott, peace terms should not even be considered as long as the German army remained outside Germany. He endorsed the conscriptionist claim that even a conflict involving millions could be so finely balanced that the provision of more Australians could make a difference, although his own recent experiences at Fromelles and Flers suggested that if Australia did provide more men they would probably be massacred in futile enterprises. Concern that unwilling conscripts might diminish the quality of the AIF’s performance influenced some Australian soldiers to vote ‘No’, but Elliott was confident he could extract a satisfactory standard of efficiency from unpromising raw material.

His frustration that Australians remote from the conflict were prepared to vote against the views of on-the-spot military experts like himself was understandable, but perhaps this very detachment enabled them to make a longer-term judgment in a way that he, in the centre of the action, could not. Australia’s future had already been gravely compromised by the loss of so many of its brightest and best, such as Geoff McCrae. If it really was necessary to send more soldiers to the Western Front slaughter-house, it was arguably not in Australia’s genuine long-term interests to be the nation providing them.

For a while at the Somme the 15th Brigade happened to be in pleasing proximity to the 7th Battalion. Reunited former comrades exchanged hearty greetings and swapped tales of Pozières and Fromelles. Pompey himself was inundated with well-wishers. Many reiterated a sentiment he had often heard from 7th veterans since his departure: they would like to transfer to the 15th Brigade. Charles Mason, Jack Scanlan, and Shannon Grills, former 7th officers incapacitated at Gallipoli, had all joined the 15th Brigade after recovering in Australia. Elliott heard fervent similar aspirations expressed when he visited the 7th on 26 October. It was a jovial interlude with spirited handshakes and reminiscing. But at one point, with his successor Lieutenant-Colonel Carl Jess present, Pompey said ‘Well, boys, if any of you are not satisfied you know where to come — we’re just camped across the road’.

That pointed remark reflected Elliott’s differences with Jess concerning George Ball. Pompey had recommended Jess as his successor. Jess had not served in the 7th before commanding it; he began the war as Monash’s staff captain before becoming brigade major of the 2nd Brigade. Ball, a tall, Russian-born immigrant who had been in Australia only three years when the war began, was one of the 7th Battalion’s finest front-line soldiers. He was ‘absolutely fearless’, Pompey enthused, ‘always doing some reckless job’. Wounded at the landing, Ball was awarded the DCM on Elliott’s recommendation for remarkable gallantry at Lone Pine. Ball’s undoubted leadership potential was undermined, Pompey felt, by his imperfect grasp of English. Reluctantly, Pompey decided not to make him an officer because his inability to understand or write precise messages might let him (and those fighting alongside him) down in a tight corner. Ball’s fondness for liquor was another concern. Whereas Pompey had been tolerant — ‘he was such a splendid chap that I always shut my eyes hard’ — Jess punished him repeatedly for drunkenness.

In the trenches, however, Ball was outstanding. At Pozières he was ‘magnificent’, and in a subsequent raid he single-handedly dealt with half a dozen Germans. Although recommended for a VC, he was only given a bar to his DCM. Disappointed, he hit the grog again and was arrested. Elliott intervened — ‘I went over and asked Jess couldn’t he let him off in view of his services’ — to no avail. Jess had been stung, Elliott surmised, when Ball blurted out that Pompey used to visit the front line regularly, but Jess was rarely seen there; this was a widely held view, as Pompey knew. Elliott then asked Ball if he would like to transfer to the 15th Brigade. Ball applied immediately, but Jess refused to acquiesce. Returning to the front line soon after, Ball was struck by a shell fragment and killed.

Elliott and his brigade returned to front-line duty in the Gueudecourt sector (not far from Flers) on 20 November, taking over from the most elite British formation, the Guards. During the changeover Elliott and the guardsmen discussed their experiences. He had a reminiscent chat with the able chief staff officer of the Guards Division, Lieutenant-Colonel C.P. Heywood, who had, as a Coldstream Guards subaltern, served in close proximity to Elliott in the Boer War while the Victorian Bushmen were attached to Henniker’s column. Elliott was interested to learn that the Guards had spent months near Fromelles; then part of XI Corps, they had resisted Haking’s desire to launch a series of attacks with a view to capturing the Aubers Ridge.

Prompted by Elliott’s account of the AIF’s grim Fromelles experience, Major-General G.P.T. Feilding, the Guards Division commander, remarked that the Guards were supposed to attack there, but decided not to because the operation would have been a disastrous failure. ‘What happened?’ asked Elliott. ‘Nothing’, replied Feilding, explaining that the Guards’ reputation was ‘beyond reproach’. The Australians had now established an equivalent reputation, Feilding added, endorsing the way McCay had challenged the proposed attack at Flers. Feilding advised Elliott that whenever he was given a task that he was convinced after careful reconnaissance was impossible, he should do what a Guards commander would do: refuse to carry out the order without instructions from a superior specifically overriding his recorded protest. Only a few days earlier, in fact, an order by Heywood directing one of the Guards brigades to capture two enemy trenches contained an escape clause specifying that if conditions were unfavourable the brigadier concerned was ‘at liberty to postpone the operation’. The attack did not take place. Elliott’s discussions with the guardsmen reinforced his determination to protest if directed to undertake any more operations like Fromelles or Flers.

The Guards were inadvertently implicated when Elliott incurred Birdwood’s wrath shortly afterwards. Birdwood happened to ask a 58th casualty if he had seen any Germans, and was told he had seen dozens but was not allowed to shoot at them. Birdwood angrily demanded an explanation from Elliott. The brigadier denied all knowledge of any such order (and sensed Birdwood disbelieved him). On making enquiries, Elliott discovered that front-line guardsmen had told his men during the changeover that they were not to fire at the enemy unless the Germans fired at them.

Elliott followed this up with Brigadier-General C.E. Corkran, commander of the Guards brigade his men had relieved. Corkran confirmed that the Guards had established a tacit understanding with the Germans opposite, and provided a compelling justification for it. The British front trenches were situated on the forward slope of a hill under direct enemy observation, and communication trenches to the front line were impassable or non-existent; yet the terrible ordeal endured by front-line soldiers could be partially alleviated only if food, dry clothing, and equipment could be conveyed to them. With firm dry ground much closer behind the German front than it was behind the British, it seemed obvious to Corkran that the British would benefit much more than their adversaries from a non-provocative arrangement. Elliott agreed.

I reported this conversation to General Birdwood and asked him to see General Corkran, and pointed out that a policy that was considered good enough for the Guardsmen who had always been held up to us as the mirror and pattern of efficiency and discipline was hardly to be condemned in us … He did not seem pleased at the way I put it.

Birdwood ended the understanding. Front-line suffering increased, and by more on the British side, Elliott was convinced, than on the enemy’s.

On 22 November, having decided to see for himself the state of the trenches his men had just taken over, Elliott left his headquarters early in the afternoon intending to spend the night in the front line. Accompanying him was Lieutenant Hugh Knyvett, who had impressed him with the quality of his scouting work after being commissioned from the ranks following Fromelles. On their way they encountered a sharp enemy bombardment, which necessitated a deviation from their intended route. The forward position comprised an erratic broken ‘line’ of thinly occupied shell holes, not easy to find in the dark. ‘We got almost inextricably tangled amidst the slush and shell holes’, Elliott wrote, ‘and after wandering for hours found ourselves at last in the 8th Brigade lines to the right about 800 yards off the position we intended to reach’.

How they were to proceed from there was not straightforward. Knyvett was confident he knew the best way, but Elliott was not so sure. Getting around in the shell-scarred slime, Pompey explained later, could be

terribly puzzling in the dark owing to the dozens of trenches which get in your way. Often you cannot cross them when you reach them, and you go along to find a crossing, and before you know where you are they have bent round, and when you do cross them it is so dark and you cannot see anything that will enable you to pick up your original line of march.

It was not uncommon, in this sector particularly, for soldiers of both sides to turn up mistakenly in enemy-held territory.

Elliott opted to stay put while Knyvett checked that his preferred direction was correct. Knyvett set off. An hour later he had not returned. The brigadier had an uncomfortable wait. It was a bitterly cold night, and he was wet through. Eventually Elliott decided he could wait no longer. He made his way slowly back, arriving ‘very wet and muddy at 2am next morning’. His misgivings about Knyvett’s route proved correct. Knyvett had almost walked into a German sentry, who fired at him as he scurried away into a shell hole. One of the bombs the Germans threw after him rolled against his leg and exploded, inflicting multiple wounds. The bombers then searched for him unsuccessfully. With his legs useless, Knyvett crawled painfully back across part of no-man’s-land before being rescued. It was just as well that Elliott had been prudent.

Meanwhile Elliott was grappling with another affliction tormenting his long-suffering trench-dwellers:

It is dreadfully cold and frosty … The frost dries the ground wonderfully, but the men in the front trenches suffer shockingly from trench feet when their feet get frozen and gangrene sets in. It is so far back to the ambulance and it takes so long to get them from the front line that they are too far gone when they reach the ambulance to have their feet saved.

Various preventative measures were adopted. Rubber gum boots were issued, and officers and NCOs were directed to ensure that feet were regularly massaged with whale oil. Efforts were redoubled to get duckboards forward and to provide the men regularly with dry clothing and warm sustenance.

Elliott, desperate to alleviate the hardships, was at his wits’ end.

I have tried to work out ways of sending hot food up to the line … I have so much on my mind … It is dreadful that these poor boys have to suffer like this. Fancy a six foot trench half full of muddy slush in which you have to live for three days at a time.

‘I lie awake all night at times trying to find a way to help them’, he admitted. He passed on to McCay his own ideas, together with suggestions by his men that he had adopted. Some were instituted beyond the 15th Brigade. One of his officers came up with a thermos-like conveyance to keep provisions hot on their way forward. This contrivance, Elliott reported proudly, ‘has been taken on throughout the whole British Army’.

But it was distressing to feel so powerless despite his strenuous efforts:

The weather continues to be the absolute limit. Today pouring rain and snow. Many of the poor boys are very sick. I really cannot imagine how they live through it all. The ground is so sodden with rain and so shaken with shell fire that it is hardly possible to dig a trench at all. When it is dug the sides crumble in almost at once from the rain … The men stay there three days at a time. During this time it is practically impossible to get any sleep as there is nowhere to lie. The men get a little sleep propped against the side of the trench, but then the frost comes and freezes the sludge and their poor feet get frozen and unless you get them back quickly their feet get gangrene and their toes drop off. We have to leave them there three days as otherwise the awful toil of marching up every day through the mud would simply knock up every man we have, and the men themselves prefer to do the three days at one go than face the awful walk. It is a horrible walk, too. Fritz notices almost at once where a track is worn in the mud and shells it all night, and most of the tracks have an avenue of mangled corpses all along the border of them.

The Fifth AIF Division ‘has the worst sector along the whole British front’, Bean concluded.

On 14 December Elliott was on his way to the front line with Major Greenway of the brigade engineers when ‘suddenly without any warning a huge shell … exploded with a deafening roar’ just behind him. Elliott was flung violently forward as Greenway, just ahead, spun round anxiously. Greenway grasped the brigadier in his arms as they were showered by spattering mud and enveloped by a pall of smoke. ‘Are you hurt sir, are you hurt?’ Greenway shouted. Fortunately for them both, the gluey mud had prevented the shell from dispersing properly, and Elliott was unscathed. But that night when he went to bed he realised he had not escaped altogether.

Although I felt as sleepy as usual I could not go off at all. If I dozed the least little bit I would suddenly give a nervous jump and wake right up again … This made sleep impossible.

After three nights of this he consulted Keith Doig, the recently arrived 60th Battalion doctor. Doig had been a colleague of George’s during his medicine course, at Ormond College, and on the football field. The Ormond farewell dinner in September 1914 that both Elliott and Doig (as senior resident) had addressed seemed half a lifetime ago. Doig prescribed a sleeping draught for the brigadier. That evening, having taken it, Pompey was ‘into a lovely sleep’ by 7.00pm, but at 12.45am a German shell arrived

about 20 yards from my door and nearly shook the place down. I tried to get off again and had rotten luck. I dozed off about a dozen times and had frightful nightmares each time. I fell off bridges and got blown up by shells, and went into a big house or hotel to find Katie and found dozens of bedrooms all round the place and did not know which was hers, and got into a terrible state because I had to go away as I thought without having seen her. This dream was brought on by Katie’s letter I had just read saying how disappointed she would have been had she come to England and waited for months like Violet, and then had had to go away home without seeing me. I was nearly scared to death to go to sleep again after that, and was glad morning came at last.

After a good sleep the following night, however, he was soon feeling much better.

With 1916 drawing to a close, he was about to spend Christmas apart from Kate and the children for the third year in a row. He was convinced it would not be the last. Having heard rumours that Russia was contemplating surrender, and feeling concerned about the implications of Germany’s triumph in Roumania, he was pessimistic about the strategic outlook:

I have always thought that it would be all over by Xmas 1917, but I begin to fear I will never see home again … It seems to me that never before have we been in such awful danger of being defeated, and you know what that would mean — the end of the British Empire. Certainly Australia would go to the Germans.

He was particularly concerned about the Germans acquiring their own tanks. This British innovation had been unveiled on 15 September. Next day, before he had seen a tank himself, Elliott was enthusing that this ‘new thing’ was ‘the most promising implement of war we have yet invented’. It was, he explained, like ‘an enormous slug moving so slowly over anything at all — trees, wire, trenches, even steep embankments’. The prospect of the Germans developing their own filled him with dread:

I confess that the thought of these lumbering monsters coming down upon us is awful to contemplate. There is such a feeling of helplessness in regard to them. Infantry have no chance with them at all. If you get in their way they simply come and tread on you or shoot you to bits.

At the end of another harrowing year, with victory seemingly further away than ever despite all the losses and all the hardships, Elliott was in a sombre mood. ‘I do miss poor Geoff McCrae very much’, he wrote on the last day of 1916. ‘He had a particularly bright happy disposition’. Cedric Permezel, Jimmy Johnston and the Henderson brothers all had special qualities too:

They were one and all animated with a wonderful personal loyalty to myself. And now all are gone. I shall not look upon their like again — that is certain … If I myself should fall in France I should like to be buried near poor Geoff.

He described the appearance and position of Geoff’s grave in detail for the distraught McCrae family, who reacted to their bereavement by seeking all sorts of information about Geoff — the location of the cemetery, and how to get there; the farmhouse he stayed in on his last night alive, and how to find it; the identity of his batman, and how to contact him; the personal effects Geoff left behind, and how to retrieve them. Elliott replied to these and other requests patiently and at length, and did what he could to soothe their aching anguish:

I can assure you that Geoff fulfilled the highest expectations you ever formed of him, and he will do honor to those soldier ancestors of his where he has joined them.

Elliott was also missing his family. He wrote to Kate every few days, as she did to him. Throughout these stressful years apart they gave each other unstinting harmonious support. Friction was minimal. He was annoyed when he found his first letter home after the Gallipoli landing reproduced in the Argus — ‘Beach Like Sandringham’ ran the headline — but his disapproval evaporated when he learned that a journalist who had overlapped with him at Ormond had persuaded Kate to release it for publication. Late in 1916 Kate heard from Ina Prictor that a certain officer had been critical of McCay in a letter to a solicitor friend. Presuming the unnamed correspondent was her husband, she proceeded to take him to task. However, Elliott denied writing any such letter, pointing out that he had altogether different views about McCay. Kate apologised profusely.

Such misunderstandings, however, were rare. Elliott was always sympathetic to concerns expressed in her letters — vexatious house-hunting, ill-health in the family, the redback spider in the cubby-house. He kept her regularly informed about soldiers she knew, her brother Jack in particular. Sensing her tendency to scrimp selflessly in his absence, he repeatedly urged her to put some weight on her slender frame. And he treasured her letters:

I had started on foot at 9pm and got here after 12. The mud and slush most of the way was quite up to the knees and I had fallen over into many shell holes, so you can imagine the state I was in, but I found a heap of letters awaiting me including two from you … Muddy and tired out as I was I read them all before I went to sleep, and was quite cheered and comforted by all your kindness and love.

Kate was intensely proud and supportive of her husband. His frankness to her about his experiences and feelings consolidated her loving empathy. She needed little encouragement to wax eloquent to friends about ‘Daddy’ and his doings, identifying totally with his aspirations and associations. Kate willingly invited to her house those wounded officers who accepted Pompey’s encouragement to contact her, attended the Governor-General’s presentation of the VC to Bill Dunstan, and (though not at all an attention-seeker and hardly a natural administrator) accepted a prominent role in the 15th Brigade ‘depot’ — an association formed to organise the dispatch of supplementary rations and to streamline requests for information about particular soldiers from anxious relatives and friends. Not wanting to add to her husband’s burdens, she did her best to keep her worries from him — the biggest, of course, being concern for his own safety. Whatever she really thought, she assured him she was confident that her prayers for his safe return would be heeded.

Although proud of her husband’s reputation, Kate regretted that some of the Pompey stories his men liked telling attributed (mildly) coarse language to him. After the Gallipoli evacuation she told him so. ‘There is no use denying it’, he replied,

I did swear sometimes and it did good Katie … it made them pay attention to what I said. I don’t like it Katie a bit more than you do, but I do everything calculated to make my boys do what I want.

Now he was a brigadier, he assured her, he would no longer have to swear. Before long he had to modify this assurance. His battalion commanders were to blame, he told Kate, and he had lectured them accordingly:

I made them all laugh by telling them my wife said she had heard all sorts of stories about me including one that I had developed a habit of swearing at the men, that you had said you didn’t believe it and hoped if it were true I would stop it at once. That I had thereupon written to assure you that having been promoted to command a Brigade I now had four Battalion Commanders to do all swearing necessary and I would be able to be good. That after the march from Tel-el-Kebir unfortunately I had to write again, and confess that instead as in the 7th swearing for 1 only I found I had to swear for 4, ie for the whole Brigade. This very much amused them, but I assured them I was not a bit amused at the prospect and they would have to do their job and relieve me from the necessity for swearing at their men.

Kate was not placated, and he had to revisit this issue after Fromelles:

You need not worry dear about the swearing. I don’t have to do it now at all. I leave it to Bert Layh and the others. Some of them are quite good at it too.

In fact, ‘I would pass for a Sunday School teacher anywhere at present’.

As before, whenever Kate aired misgivings about the content of her letters, he was reassuring. ‘You would not think your letter was uninteresting if you saw me reading it over and over about six times so as to be sure I haven’t missed anything’. But if ever she (or Belle) felt like that, he reiterated, just a description of whatever the children were up to would enthral him. His thirst for news about them was insatiable. Belle frequently sent photos of them; he kept asking for more. Receiving a letter from his five-year-old daughter in her own handwriting for the first time (‘Dear Dida, I love you, Violet’) was a special milestone that he noted in his diary amid all the military developments.

Elliott did what he could from afar to remain an involved parent. He deeply regretted being unable to see his children grow up, but was aware that his remoteness did not preclude him from shaping their development. In one sense, he felt, it might even help. Because the children had placed him on a higher pedestal than they would have done at home — ‘while I am so far away they cannot see all the holes and faults in me’ — they were perhaps more receptive to his influence, he conjectured, than they might otherwise have been.

However, the remarkable letters he wrote to his children underlined how unfortunate it was for them that he was not around during these formative years. He had a marvellous talent for communicating with children. Surely no commander in any combatant nation in this war regularly described military developments like this:

Since I wrote to you before we got a lot of big waggons like traction engines and put guns in them and ran them ‘bumpety bump’ up against the old Kaiser’s wall and knocked a great big hole in it and caught thousands and thousands of the Kaiser’s naughty soldier men and we killed a lot of them and more we put in jail so they couldn’t be naughty any more, but then it started to rain and rain and snow and hail and the ground got all boggy and the waggons got stuck in the mud and the old Kaiser has such heaps and heaps of soldiers that he sent up a lot more and thinned them out where the wall wasn’t broken and started to build another big wall to stop us going any further … it is very very cold here and the Jack Frost here is not a nice Jack Frost who just pinches your fingers so you can run to a fire to warm them but a great big bitey Jack Frost and he pinches the toes and fingers of some of Dida’s poor soldiers so terribly that he pinches them right off. Isn’t that terrible … And the naughty old Kaiser burnt down every little house all round here and Dida’s soldiers have to sleep out in the mud or dig holes in the ground like rabbits to sleep in. And all the trees are blown to pieces by the big guns and there is no wood to make fires and Dida’s soldiers have to make fires of coal and the waggons are all stuck in the mud so Dida’s soldiers have to carry it through all the mud and everything they eat and wear has to be carried too. And Dida’s soldiers get so dreadfully tired they can hardly work or walk at all. Isn’t that old Kaiser a naughty old man to cause all this trouble. Now goodbye dear little laddie. Give dear old mum a kiss and tell her Dida’s coming home soon and that you will grow up soon and you won’t let any old Kaiser come near her …

As those parting words suggest, Elliott gave his young son clear signals that it was a man’s duty to protect the womenfolk in the family. He was a devoted father with a rare talent for relating to children at their level, but he was a man of his time concerning the different expectations he had of his son and daughter. It was not that he gave less encouragement to Violet than Neil — he was encouraging her to strive to be top of the class before she even started school! — but it tended to be in different spheres. Prompted by his admiration of Tom Elliott and other ‘splendid boys from Duntroon’ who had served under him, Pompey was already contemplating sending his four-year-old son there so Neil could ‘learn to be a soldier properly’, as distinct from picking it up on a spare-time basis as he had. He was clearly hoping that Neil would develop sturdy soldierly attributes, both physical (a strong chin was desirable) and temperamental. On one occasion, with Belle occupied on the phone, part of the fire escaped onto the linoleum; Pompey was gratified to learn that Neil displayed initiative, sweeping it up promptly all by himself. And in a pep talk about dealing with bullies, he wrote that if ‘any naughty boy’ was ever rough or said ‘cheeky things’ to either Violet or Neil, it would be appropriate for Neil to ‘punch him real hard’ to stop him behaving ‘like an old Kaiser Bill’. ‘Don’t you be frightened if he is a big boy’, he added, ‘if you punch him good and hard he will start to squeal for mercy’. On the other hand, the specific activities that Elliott encouraged Violet to continue with were her piano-playing and knitting, saying grace before meals, and helping Kate roll the butter.

It was hardly surprising that Violet and Neil, in their own way, became absorbed in the war. Instead of the customary bedtime story from a book, they often clamoured for a ‘story about Dida’, which usually had a military flavour. Neil’s imaginary play often featured shells and ‘Kaiser Bill’ characters; he liked singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and, as the man of the house, sometimes pretended to be practising his shooting prowess in order to be ready to protect his mother, sister, aunt, and grandmother. But in his prayers he asked God to stop the war. Violet wanted to become a nurse so she could help look after Dida’s wounded soldiers, and talked about having some special flowers with her when at last she met her father again. ‘It is very nice of you to promise to bring me flowers when you come to meet me’, he replied fervently, ‘but you will be the only flower I want … best little fairy lady in all the world.’

Just before Christmas McCay was replaced. With his Gallipoli wound still troublesome, he was finding it increasingly difficult to carry on as Fifth Division commander in the appalling conditions, and his reputation among the men was permanently tarnished by his connection with the Krithia charge, the desert march, and the Fromelles disaster. Elliott believed that the sweeping criticism of McCay was excessive, and felt impelled to stick up for him. To Pompey, McCay’s biggest weakness had been his willingness to attack unquestioningly whenever he was told, but the way he associated himself with Pompey’s Flers protest indicated that he was reconsidering his former approach (a change Elliott believed he himself had engendered). McCay was ‘undoubtedly one of our ablest generals’, and there was ‘no one I personally would sooner serve under’, wrote Pompey. ‘Whatever his faults he does know his job and he is a wonderfully brave man, as brave as anyone I’ve ever seen’.

Sensing that McCay would be despondent about relinquishing the last field command he was likely to hold (he was transferred to head the AIF depots in England), Elliott wrote him a considerate letter: ‘I told him if he ever goes to war again and wants a soldier he can ask for me and I’ll go with him’. The gesture hit the spot, as McCay’s reply confirmed:

It is not often in a man’s life that he receives so generous a letter, and one that makes him very proud, but yours I will keep and value always for the splendid friendship and undeserved appreciation it expresses … It is a rather bitter pill to see the shelf so near, but I must just take things as they come.

McCay’s successor as Elliott’s immediate superior at Fifth Division was 52-year-old Major-General J.J. Talbot Hobbs. A London-born architect who had migrated to Western Australia in 1887, Hobbs had commanded the First Division’s artillery since the outbreak of war. Short and wiry in physique, and sometimes nervously hesitant in speech, Hobbs was capable, determined, and meticulous; he was a disciplinarian without evincing McCay’s austere manner. Elliott’s initial impressions were not favourable:

He has put a red flag on the front of his motor car so the men can’t say that they didn’t know he was in the car, and whenever they see the red flag car pass they’ve got to salute it. He is splashing round making a terrible fuss.

Having heard that C.R. Davies, the former ‘old fossil’ commander of the 58th Battalion, had returned from Australia and was looking for an appointment, Elliott became concerned that the reputed friendship of Hobbs and Davies, both West Australians, might result in Davies being posted back to the 15th Brigade: ‘If they try to force him on to me again there will be a deuce of a fuss’, he threatened.

The advent of Charles Mason, who had served with Elliott in South Africa as well as at Gallipoli, enabled him to kill two birds with one stone. His recommendation led to the appointment of Mason as head of the Fifth Division training school with the temporary rank of lieutenant-colonel. Not only was Mason well-suited to that post; once he was in it, transferring him to fill any vacancy that might arise at the level of battalion commander in the 15th Brigade would be, as Pompey realised, relatively straightforward. Mason’s availability would help Elliott thwart any plans to saddle him with officers he did not want, such as Davies. And there might well be vacancies to be filled — Duigan was away sick, and an injury to Layh was threatening to sideline him for weeks. To fill in for Layh at the 59th, the brigadier chose Grills; Pompey had considerable regard for Scanlan, who had also recently joined the 15th Brigade, but he was away on staff-work training. Pompey’s satisfaction with Cam Stewart’s sound leadership of the 57th had continued; he was acting brigadier whenever Pompey was on leave. Denehy of the 58th was also, Elliott felt, ‘doing most excellent work’.

But the 60th was a worry. In Duigan’s absence the acting commander during the most trying phase of the winter was Major F.V. Trickey, an officer Pompey had tried to get rid of back in Egypt. Overwhelmed by the appalling conditions, Trickey submitted that he and his staff had done ‘everything humanly possible’, but Pompey was scathing about his leadership: ‘a more utterly useless officer in the face of the least difficulty I have never yet met’. Trickey was banished and, pending Duigan’s return, Pompey resorted to installing his staff captain, Legge. Well aware of Norman Marshall’s potential, Elliott arranged for him to attend a special training course for prospective battalion commanders.

In mid-January, fortified by a fortnight away from the trenches and a CMG in the New Year’s decorations, Elliott returned with his brigade to Gueudecourt. The sector they had left a few weeks earlier was looking very different, the brigadier told Kate:

It has snowed here for two days and last night there was a hard frost, and all the world around is like a huge wedding cake with icing sugar on it. The frost has made a hard crust on the snow and it crackles under your feet as you walk. It is very pretty but very cold.

In this environment digging work was more onerous and, at times, impossible (though trench walls thankfully no longer kept subsiding). Night patrols were more visible against the white background, and traffic routes showed up more clearly in aerial photographs, presenting artillery on both sides with obvious targets.

However, despite these drawbacks — and the intense cold — the new conditions were a tremendous relief. The exhausting mud had gone. Mobility returned. Supplies could reach the front-line soldiers more easily and more often. And the recipients found themselves able to move about more freely, a development that boosted their morale as well as reducing the incidence of trench feet. Elliott’s resolve to do his utmost for his men was unremitting; he believed that they were looked after as well as possible. Bean, whose dedicated roving around the AIF had given him a good idea of what was feasible, was amazed to find that Pompey had installed kitchens close enough to provide his front-line soldiers with three hot meals each day.

But illness, exacerbated by the extreme cold, remained a major problem despite Elliott’s endeavours. In the 60th Keith Doig evacuated Duigan and Kerr on the same day; Duigan, seriously ill, was delirious and had a very high temperature. Twice, seven weeks apart, Wieck described the situation at brigade headquarters as an ‘epidemic’. At one stage half the headquarters personnel were sick in bed. Legge, for example, had a fortnight’s sick leave in January, but four days after his return had to go away again.

Pompey himself had to cope with persistent ill-health. Early in December he was diagnosed with bronchitis, and was ordered to bed. He took over a week to recover, only to relapse a few days later. ‘I get nearly better, then (as today) I get very wet and cold visiting the trenches and get right back to where I was again’, he explained. ‘I go to bed just after dinner at night because I cannot keep warm anywhere else’. He struggled on with inflamed throat and choky cough until 26 January, when he was laid low with influenza on top of the chronic bronchitis. Doig, increasingly concerned, kept him bedridden, but he was determined to remain on duty. By now it was so glacial that when Doig went looking for firewood his hands were too cold to hold the axe:

Shell holes of water are frozen right to the bottom. Ink is frozen. The mud is frozen and of course we are frozen.

‘Even in bed one’s feet feel like ice’, Elliott affirmed; the doctors ‘say I will get pneumonia or pleurisy if I stop here much longer, so I’ve given in to them at last’. He agreed to have a prolonged break at the end of his brigade’s period in the line. Until then he was supposed to stay in bed.

Bob Salmon, Doyle’s successor as brigade intelligence officer, did not succumb to the headquarters epidemic. He had become Pompey’s usual companion on his regular rounds of the forward positions, usually around dawn, whenever the brigade was on front-line duty (and the brigadier was not confined to bed). Pompey liked to amuse himself by testing whether the icy veneer above the shell holes would support his considerable weight. On 23 January he went forward early with Salmon:

On way back tested the shell holes for thickness of ice — found one that would bear us both. The ice was nearly 3 inches thick, the upper two-thirds crystallised, the lower one-third as clear as glass. Also saw some very beautiful frost effects on a wire netting screen in front of a battery.

His companion was not as enthusiastic about these diversions. According to Salmon, Pompey used to bounce about on the ice, full of boisterous exuberance and joie de vivre, and say

‘Here we are full of life, and we might be blown to bits any moment and we don’t care a damn’. He would only laugh when I suggested he should not speak like that in the plural.

Salmon had a keen eye for potential amusement himself. Pompey, Salmon knew, was so fed up with what seemed to him a stream of impractical directives emanating from Corps headquarters far to the rear that he had threatened to send any Corps staff officer he came across to the front line for 24 hours. Accordingly, when Salmon learned that a major from Corps headquarters (unidentified by Salmon, but probably Major S.S. Butler) wanted to visit the 15th Brigade, he was eager to help. With Pompey sick ‘in bed in his miserable surface dug-out doing his best to keep warm and dry’, Salmon was looking forward to some entertaining ‘fireworks’. He was not disappointed:

On reaching the dug-out I pulled the waterproof sheet aside and said ‘Major —— from Corps headquarters to see you, sir’. Pompey nearly leaped from his sleeping bag and, before any courtesies could be exchanged, roared ‘Do you know what I am going to do with you?’ ‘No’, was the answer. ‘I am going to take you to the line and keep you there for 24 hours’. The major protested, but Pompey insisted as he was trying to climb into his issue pants. In the end the major convinced Pompey that it was a matter of extreme urgency that he be back at Corps headquarters as soon as possible. On being then asked the purpose of his visit, the major replied that he had brought some cakes from the Chief of Staff. A gruff goodbye was exchanged, and the visitors departed. The only remark that I could catch as they passed along the duckboards was ‘Extraordinary!’

An official party of civilians visited the 15th Brigade on 11 February. Pompey, still unwell, asked Salmon to look after them. Salmon guided them forward until they were 400 yards from the front line. According to Elliott, Salmon then

told them they would have to stoop down very low and crawl because … the Bosche … would shell them if he saw them. So down they got on hands and knees and painfully crawled the last quarter of a mile over the frozen mud and ice in the bottom of the trench, while he walked along comfortably in rear of them nearly busting his sides at the look of them.

Chuckling about this episode afterwards, Pompey and his talented intelligence officer (who had started at Ballarat College as a seven-year-old shortly after Elliott left) reckoned they might have fewer unwelcome visitors in future.

On 1 February the 15th Brigade assisted an adjacent assault by a 4th Brigade battalion, which was initially successful before being repulsed by a German counter-attack. Elliott had advised Brudenell White beforehand that this operation should be tackled differently. Having frequently urged during the winter that local tactical objectives could be attained with much fewer casualties if his brigade’s light mortars had a more prominent role, Pompey was particularly frustrated when these mortars were not used on this occasion. He was convinced they could have exacted a severe toll on the German counter-attackers. An amended version of the operation was carried out a few days later. Again the assault was initially successful and once more the Germans counter-attacked, but this time the 15th Brigade was asked to help. Anticipating this request, Pompey had his mortars already in position, and their contribution was a crucial factor, he and Wieck believed, in the failure of the German counter-attack.

There was in addition an important raid by the 57th Battalion to organise. Hobbs, also involved in the preparations, was proving to be a worrier: after a conference he attended had exhaustively canvassed the artillery’s role, he phoned Elliott, anxiously wanting to change an aspect ‘we had already fully discussed … and agreed’. The operation was a distinct success. In a swift and devastating vindication of Elliott’s faith in his brigade’s light mortars, the raiders inflicted severe casualties on the enemy while sustaining few themselves. Furthermore, information derived from the prisoners and materials captured was in the possession of Army headquarters only half an hour after the start of the raid, a record-breaking feat. Birdwood sent a warm congratulatory telegram, and Hobbs reacted with such ecstatic delight that Pompey’s concerns about their relationship dissolved in an instant. However, ‘the effect of being up all night and the excitement sent my temperature away to glory’; Doig insisted on his immediate departure. Hobbs ‘gave me a very nice lunch’, organised a car to Boulogne, and ‘said I must not on any account hurry back’.

In London he reported to an AIF medical board, consulted a dentist, and luxuriated in his first bath for a month. He then went to Harrow to see Duigan and his wife. It was Duigan’s seventh week in bed battling pneumonia, bronchitis, rheumatism, and kidney trouble, and he was ‘just skin and bone’. To Jessie Duigan’s relief, Elliott accepted that her husband should not return to France, and arranged a position for him in England. Invited to stay with the Buckleys again, Elliott spent a couple of days at Digswell Place before travelling to Wales for a relaxing week at Bryn Oerog, where he consolidated his friendship with Emily Edwards; they corresponded frequently after his return to France.

Towards the end of his stay his brother George joined him. George was worn out after devoted endeavours as the 56th Battalion’s doctor to alleviate the winter sufferings of that unit, efforts glowingly commended (as Harold knew) by George’s superiors. They discussed the recent birth of George’s first child, Jacquelyn, enjoyed each other’s company in the picturesque Bryn Oerog surroundings, and returned to London together. Pompey then went to Buckingham Palace, where he shook hands with the King and was presented with his CMG. On 12 March, refreshed by his break, he returned to France, where interesting developments were under way and an unusual opportunity awaited him.