1916
On 19 July, 100 kilometres north of the Somme battlefield where Savige and his brigade waited, the Australians entered the Western Front war at Fromelles. It was an unmitigated disaster, with more than 5500 Australian casualties on the first day, the biggest Australian loss in one 18-hour period over the entire war. The battle was over by 8 p.m. the next day.
It was a baptism of fire for the Anzacs, who were used to the confined battles of Gallipoli, and quickly learnt that the Western Front was a bigger and even more brutal battlefield. They faced the more sophisticated and intense artillery of the Germans, who had put almost all their chips on this weaponry in an attempt to win the war.
The Australians were in shock. Those who had survived were stunned and sickened by the gruesome sight of body parts all over the battlefield. One wounded soldier yelled to a rescuing sergeant: ‘Don’t forget me, cobber!’ These plaintive words became the catchcry of this horrible, failed campaign.
The 15th Brigade commander Pompey Elliott, John Monash’s favourite fighting brigadier, called it a ‘tactical abortion. Practically all my best officers are dead.’ In more than a dig at Douglas Haig, Henry Rawlinson and others in the British High Command, he summed up the bewilderment of the Australian commanders when he wrote: ‘I presume there was some plan at the back of the attack, but it was difficult to know what it was.’1
Some of the Australians had met the Scottish Haig, whom they found impressive in size, bearing, manner and determination, but oddly inarticulate. David Lloyd George, soon to become British Prime Minister, suggested that this reflected Haig’s muddled thinking, and perhaps his dimness, especially in his impromptu speeches. Haig was close to King George V, to whom he owed his position.
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Savige and co., waiting to go into action at Pozières on the Somme, had no idea of what had befallen their comrades further north. It was a fortunate thing: such carnage of their fellow countrymen would have dampened morale to a huge extent.
The German weaponry was changing the direction of the war, exemplified by the even bigger destruction that continued in the Battle of Verdun, 200 kilometres northeast of Paris. By that point, mid-July 1916, about 350,000 soldiers on both sides of the battle were already dead, wounded or missing.2 Unless new tactics, better weaponry and more adept generals could be found by the Allies, the Germans would be on a slow, gruelling track to victory.
A win at Pozières would be important in their relentless march west to the English Channel. The plateau near Pozières, on the Albert–Bapaume road, was important as the highest point on the vast Somme battlefield. Pozières sat atop a ridge held by the Germans. Between 13 and 17 July, Rawlinson’s 4th Army had made four attacks with no success and high casualties. The four days of battle had reduced this village to rubble.
Rawlinson was proving to be out of his depth in the continuing Battle of the Somme. Haig now pushed him to attack again on a broad front on 18 July, using parts of six divisions. Then Haig changed his mind and took away responsibility for the attack on Pozières from Rawlinson and gave it to Lieutenant General Hubert Gough, the most unpopular and ruthless of the British commanders, whom Haig liked for his ‘bovver-boy’ mentality.
Now 45, Gough had made a rapid rise from cavalry officer to running a brigade, then a corps and now an army. He had been promoted without serious achievement, but more in the British tradition of advance for those of class and privilege. In spirit, experience and development, he was still a cavalry man who believed in no or little planning. His ‘cavalry charge’ mentality, which dominated Haig’s thinking too, boiled down to smashing through the Germans with infantry and artillery and then using the cavalry in much the same way as the British had in the 1880s in the Sudan and also in the Boer War. It was completely out of touch with the demands of fighting against the new technology, especially German artillery, which could destroy a horse from 9 kilometres away.
All three Australian divisions of I Anzac Corps – 1st, 2nd and 4th – had now moved down from Fleurbaix. Old Etonian Gough, in his usual bullying manner, told the Commander of the Australian 1st Division, Major General Harold Walker: ‘I want you to go and attack Pozières tomorrow night.’
Walker, an experienced English officer, had known of Gough for 20 years. He was well aware of his careless attitude towards the lives of soldiers on the front line. Walker had led the same division on Gallipoli (after the death of Major General Bridges), and knew much about preparation. He returned fire at Gough, but in a measured, respectful manner, telling him he would not send his division into battle yet; they were not ready.
Walker gave his men four days before attacking on the night of 22 to 23 July, under Haig’s doubtful strategy of advancing with attacks by small contingents.
The problem with this tactic was that the Germans could easily turn their artillery on the attackers in a small area. Such a holocaust of fire would prove fatal for the Australians. There were no deep dugouts, and the Germans jumped at the chance to annihilate their enemy by artillery alone for the first time in the war. Pozières was left as a dustheap, covered by a cloud of mingling fumes, gas and shrapnel. The two other Anzac divisions spent all day pulling bodies, alive, bleeding and dead, out from under the bricks and concrete.
‘Those who were with them [and survived] would never forget it . . .’ Ted Rule of 14th Battalion wrote; ‘they looked like men who had been in hell. Almost without exception each man looked drawn and haggard, and so dazed.’3
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Savige’s 6th Brigade was ordered into the battle at 9 p.m. on 23 July. They left the brickworks at Albert and made the tough night march to Pozières. Twelve hours on, and into the morning of 24 July, they were under heavy artillery fire. They had been ordered to relieve 1st Division, and had no choice but to take up positions under this hideous rain of artillery shells. They had to stay put until ordered to do otherwise, and it was a nerve-racking lull for every soldier.
Some of the braver, more foolhardy men took out their card decks and began playing. Some even lounged outside the trenches, saying that they were just as likely to be struck in the open as in the shallow trenches. Explosions brought rock storms about them, but the men went on playing.
The card games and the artillery continued. Soldiers holding all sorts of hands were aware that they were gambling with their lives, literally. But rather than cower or run, they kept up the banter, even when one of them was hit.
In one instance, an officer walked by during a rare lull in the bombardment. He stopped near a group of four soldiers, who were still playing, and pointed to a dead man.
‘I see you’ve lost your sergeant,’ he commented.
‘Yes,’ one of the men said emotionally, ‘he was playing just now when he got hit.’
Bravado of a strange kind had taken over. One of the men had taken the sergeant’s cards and was playing his hand. The officer saw they were unsettled and trying to maintain a steadiness when all nerves must surely be frayed.
He strode on, sheltered during another barrage, then returned the way he had come. The card players he had spoken to were all dead.
Soldiers on the move, runners, stretcher-bearers, officers and others found themselves trying to negotiate tangled messes in deep pits, where girder bricks and sharp poles stuck upwards. It was nearly impossible at night. During the day, with a mist of gas and dust, and incoming shells arriving every minute, it was not much less difficult. Those who did tumble down into the pits had to drag themselves out with cuts and bruises. The shells kept hailing and screaming down. Machine guns kept rattling. Snipers kept bullets pinging towards the stranded, entrenched Australians. Around them, Pozières was lumps of bricks and beams. The nearby woods were a wasteland, with all but a few trees uprooted.
‘The place resembles a filthy rubbish tip . . .’ 25-year-old Melbourne bank manager Captain Aubrey Wiltshire noted in his diary on 24 July. ‘Stinking corpses lay around. There a man with his face blown off and all shrivelled up. Here a good Australian lad with his leg lying beside him. A [dead] chap, bloated with gas, and just a trickle of blood on his face leans against a tree, with no apparent injury. Most of the dead lay on their faces in most natural positions. Portions of bodies lie everywhere as shells bust up the place . . .’4
Savige’s role of intelligence officer – Gellibrand’s eyes and ears – had him running the gauntlet of continuous incoming fire in the same way as the runners and stretcher-bearers. Once when he had to bring information back to Gellibrand, who had moved his headquarters close to the front trenches, he set off with a runner. They stayed close. Savige kept moving and dodging the flashes of spotlights, flares and artillery shells. The air-splitting sounds, which refused to abate, meant he was not aware that the runner was no longer a few paces behind him, as he had been during the first hundred metres.
Savige realised when he reached Gellibrand that the runner had been lost. In the ensuing days, he made enquiries. No one had seen the young man, just 19 years old. Like hundreds of others, he had simply been obliterated.
Savige kept going, doing his duty, fortified by the lines in Psalm 91, now underlined in his Bible. The prophecy that a thousand would fall at his side was coming starkly, eerily true. So true, in fact, that it was losing its meaning to him. Yet he did not have time to reflect on that during the chaotic and hideous first days of Pozières.
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The German artillery fire abated temporarily on 28 July. Gough now pushed the 2nd Division Commander, Major General James Legge, to attack Pozières and beyond. English-born, Sydney University-educated Legge did not have Walker’s military experience in the UK, or any real knowledge of Gough. Nor did he have Walker’s confidence and battle experience. These factors put him at a disadvantage in dealing with the so-called ‘thruster’.
Gough wanted 2nd Division to push forward to a shallow depression called The Cup, and on to Pozières Heights, a ridge running from a ruined windmill on the Pozières–Bapaume road that had two strong entrenchments. Beyond this, Gough had his sights on two German bastions, Mouquet Farm and Thiepval.
As ever, it was one thing for a ‘thruster’ in command to spot something through his binoculars, and another for the soldiers on the front line to take it without real preparation or adequate protection. Legge was cautious, even reluctant. He had already lost 1500 men in the bombardment. Yet he caved in unhappily to Gough’s pressure, and at midnight on 28 July launched an attack by 7th Brigade on the Courcelette and Bapaume roads. The 5th and 6th Brigades had support roles on the flanks.
From the beginning the Australians suffered from the inadequacy of their artillery plan. There was no long, solid barrage before the soldiers went over the top. The enemy could man the parapets and see the Australians assembling. Flares were sent up, allowing 7th Brigade to be sighted trying to break through the German barbed wire, which had been set up proficiently. In desperation, the attackers were trying to rip out the steel poles connecting the wire with their bare hands.
The 7th had failed almost before they got going. On its right flank, soldiers of 5th Brigade were also spotted under the rush of flares, scurrying from one shell hole to the next. The Germans swung their guns around and hammered them hard. After three hours the 5th retreated to their lines.
Savige was in Gellibrand’s 6th Brigade on the 7th’s left flank. Using just one battalion, it took 33 casualties, which was more than a third of the contingent that went out. In short, that meant that in a three-man advance, you or the man on your left or right were cut down. It was an unacceptable loss, yet the men reached their objective, the Ovillers–Courcelette road. But they failed to recognise it in the dark. The reduced battalion fought on for another 200 metres.
This minor success was explained away by the German official historian, who said the Australians were ‘inflamed with alcohol’.5 This was fanciful. There had not been a rum issue before the attack. When he heard this story decades later, Savige remarked: ‘It might have been a good idea. We would have done even better.’6