1917–1918
There had been uniform Allied success in the Battle of Broodseinde right across the eight-division line. It had been a very good day for the British, Savige wrote in his diary, concluding that the Anzac force had managed its biggest success ever.
In fact, it was the Anzacs’ only sizeable victory as a combined force in the war so far. There had been nothing like it on Gallipoli. Although not yet a serious breakthrough into the German defences, it was more than a modest success. In the only two outings in which he had a great say in the planning and command, Monash had had two big achievements.
Haig, short on wins and long on stalemates and losses, wrote to him, ‘Congratulations for your part in the greatest battle of the war.’1
The Commander in Chief, predictably, was more than keen to hit Passchendaele Ridge. He wanted to reach Bellevue Spur, which joined the ridge at Passchendaele village. His continuing propaganda, rather than reasoning based on hard intelligence, was that the enemy was demoralised, fatigued and weakened. It was wishful thinking: in fact the German forces were strong and committed.
Some British corps commanders, too, were barely containable in their desire to push on, knowing that this was Haig’s wish.
Monash was not in accord with the C-in-C or the British generals. He felt it was now imperative to consolidate and work on a broader plan for another advance. He thought the front battalions had suffered too many casualties. He was also worried about the time it was taking for him to get orders to the front line.
He would attack Passchendaele, but was more pragmatic than the British. The wet autumn weather, which did not affect the Broodseinde battle, had now set in and would have an impact on any coming conflict. As always, Monash thought of his troops’ welfare, and was against any further attack until conditions improved.
‘It was pouring on 6 October,’ Savige would write, ‘and Monash took his 3rd Division out of the line, replaced by a British division. But Haig and [2nd Army Commander] Plumer wanted them back in again. They were going to take on Passchendaele come hell or high water.’
The way the rain was bucketing down, the diggers were going to encounter both. General Herbert Plumer became unhappy about making an offensive in such terrible conditions. Surprisingly, he was supported by the lightweight, usually gung-ho Gough. Monash was still against an attack. Birdwood sided with him.
No one except Monash had the courage to front the C-in-C face to face in an attempt to persuade him of the folly of advancing into a building quagmire. The others avoided the chance of confrontation and put forward a joint written proposal. Yet Haig was known for his obstinacy. Even a close aide said it would take the impact of a travelling planet to shift him.
On 8 October, the rain become torrential.
‘We saw the cavalry being prepared,’ Savige later wrote, ‘but we could not believe that man or beast would be asked to go over the top in that sea of mud.’
Haig wanted the horses there as a symbol of their successes in the previous century. But in the swampy conditions they would be useless. There would be no ‘mobile’ fighting. The horses would flounder and drown in seconds. Once they toppled into the mud, it would act like quicksand, and the cavalrymen would be sucked under in their heavy gear, sharing the fate of their mounts.
‘We were dumbfounded to be told to prepare for a preliminary attack,’ Savige noted.
He was now acting as an intelligence officer. But because of his earlier gallant display, he was again asked to carry out the precarious job of laying out the jumping-off and direction tapes. This was on the night of 8 October and into the early morning of 9 October. It was pouring. Enemy searchlights bounced all around him. Artillery was firing, repeatedly forcing him to dive into shell holes and dips in the land. But Savige, as ever, was going beyond the scope of his mission, and carried on.
The first British division went out on 9 October, backed up by Savige’s 2nd Division.
‘Predictably, the Divisions did not get very far in the bog,’ Savige later wrote. ‘Thousands would again needlessly spill blood in the Flanders marsh.’2
On 9 October, Monash fought hard to have his 3rd Division spared. Haig granted him a day’s grace. It would go into battle on 12 October instead of 11 October – when the torrent was at its peak. All Monash could do was create a sophisticated ambulance system in advance.
The next day, his 3rd Division suffered 3200 casualties out of 5000 soldiers who fought. The New Zealand Division had 800 casualties and nearly 2000 wounded or missing. In the end, both divisions had to take on the objectives of the failed British divisions.
In private, Monash was fuming. ‘It amounted to this,’ he later wrote. ‘[New Zealand divisional commander Andrew Hamilton] Russell and I were asked to make a total advance of 1.75 miles [nearly 3 kilometres] – in a day.’3
So much for Haig’s advance by ‘limited objectives’. Three kilometres in the mud would have been 12 kilometres in the dry. It was an impossible mission.
Haig and his high command did not quit until very late on 12 October. After four days of fighting, several thousand British and Anzac soldiers had been killed or injured, and Haig’s forces had advanced less than a net 100 metres.
Following the spirit engendered at Broodseinde on 4 October, Passchendaele was a bitter blow. It was a microcosm of the entire British Flanders offensive. Since July the Allies had gained just 8 kilometres, at a cost of 250,000 casualties.
Passchendaele was also a turning point for the Australians and Canadians. The latter, a month later, would capture Passchendaele in dry conditions. But because Haig had pushed them into Passchendaele, with the resulting considerable losses, the Canadians would refuse to fight again under British command. Monash and the other senior Australian military personnel would now push hard to bring all five Australian divisions together, preferably under the command of an Australian general.
‘Our men are being put into the hottest fight,’ Monash wrote at the time, ‘and are being sacrificed in hare-brained schemes, like Bullecourt and Passchendaele, and there is no one in the War Cabinet to lift a voice in protest . . . Australian interests are suffering badly. Australia is not getting anything like the recognition it deserves.’4
Savige reflected the feelings of most front-line soldiers when he observed that the result of Passchendaele was sad for the force, after the Anzac divisions had lined up with so much energy and optimism at Broodseinde.
No talk of mutiny among the ordinary diggers has been recorded. They were too shocked. But some officers felt like dropping out, Monash included. The whole enterprise at Passchendaele had flown in the face of his philosophy of reaching important objectives without treating his troops like cannon fodder.
On reflection, though, he stayed put. On 1 November, the five Australian divisions were brought together for the first time in the war, to form the Australian Corps, commanded by General Birdwood. It was the single biggest Allied corps of the 20 fighting on the Western Front. Monash knew that if Birdwood moved on, he could be in line to take over. At that point, if it came, he would be able to stand up to everyone, confident that a digger army under his command would have a huge impact on the war.
Savige, meanwhile, was depressed, even in the knowledge that he had been mentioned in despatches again in November 1917 for his role at Passchendaele. The citations were accurate, and if anything understated. ‘Consistent good work and devotion to duty,’ one read. Another mentioned his ‘coolness under fire and tenacity of purpose’. He was promoted: first to assistant brigade major in October 1917, then on 22 November, after Passchendaele, to acting brigade major.
Yet again none of this gave him joy. He began drinking more and enjoying it less, in what was the lowest point of his war experience to that point.
Savige’s dream had always been to show that he could display leadership skill under battle conditions. He had now achieved accolades and recommendations beyond his imaginings, and he had done it purely on merit and performance. He had made fools of those who had overlooked him before Gallipoli.
Yet all this meant very little after what he had been through. He had prayed fervently for his life and those of his mates and fellow diggers. But his God, it seemed, had only heard his pleas concerning himself. While millions of men were being slaughtered, and millions more badly impaired physically and mentally, he had skated through with one or two minor wounds and no more bruises and cuts than a regular footballer. He continued to suffer from having inhaled phosgene gas, and experienced symptoms similar to asthma. It had affected his heart, but so far he had overcome this with prolonged rest periods.
‘I can live with it unless it kills me,’ he joked in one letter to Lilian.5 He saw himself like a sportsman carrying an injury yet still performing. He referred often to his good fortune in being alive and functioning well. This compounded his doubt, first experienced after the death of Mick Sunderland at Sniper’s Ridge on Gallipoli, and magnified by the dying, eviscerated digger on the ground at Bullecourt who urged him to ‘give the bastards hell!’
For the first time in his 28 years, Savige’s faith was slipping. He was not prepared to renounce it, but he was angry and confused, on top of a general depression. The war had turned futile, meaningless and insane. He wrestled with his belief in a benevolent higher being. Where were the compassionate teachings of Jesus Christ here on the battlefield? He felt confused and in despair.
He expressed these feelings to Lilian at the end of 1917. He said he still believed in a ‘Supreme Being. But where He is or by what means we approach is beyond me.’ God certainly did not seem to be anywhere on Gallipoli or in Flanders or France. His presence was hard to reconcile with the sight of dismembered or near-vaporised soldiers lying on literally every square metre of the battlefield.
Savige had stood on those muddy grounds when artillery shells were pouring from the sky. He had marked lines when snipers and machine gunners were swinging their weapons around to pick him off. He had run along trenches thick with the dead bodies of fellow diggers. He began to accept that it might just be that he was one of the lucky ones. If it wasn’t just luck, then what was the purpose of his being kept alive?
He could not see past this point. Yet he kept praying and believing. It was going to take more than a stumble in belief to take his God from him. Because in the end, his stronger-than-average faith continued to give him hope where nothing else did. Without it, Savige wrote to Lilian, he would go mad.6
This shocked Lilian. It was difficult for anyone in somnolent Australia to comprehend what the diggers were going through on the bloody, muddy Flanders fields. Generations of pioneering Australian families had worked hard, developed cities and villages and trusted God to see them through. If someone died young, or in a horrible farm accident, it would be put down to ‘God’s will’, and everyone would return to their daily lives. A few other phrases would be brought out, such as ‘Only the good die young.’ God was calling the deceased person to ‘a higher cause in heaven’, whatever age they were.
On the battlefield, where death stalked diggers every second they were in battle, and even out of the war zone when they were badly injured, such simple reasoning was often washed away in the trenches of blood.
No newspaper account gave a true picture of the war. And Savige never revealed to Lilian what he was experiencing. He kept the whole business as nearly postcard-perfect as he could. He didn’t wish to upset her. But in keeping the truth at bay, he was going to make it harder for her to understand him if they ever saw each other again.7
By the end of 1917, however, Lilian was reading the newspaper accounts keenly, and trying to reconcile them with Savige’s anodyne letters, which no longer had an upbeat tone after Bullecourt and Passchendaele. They both continued to profess their love for each other and pray for an end to the carnage, and the war itself. Lilian kept mentioning that she wanted her fiancé away from it all.
Then early in 1918, she believed her prayers were about to be answered.