ONE
Goodbye
Sydney Town,
Goodbye

On 5 April 1916, Edward Lynch presented himself to the Recruiting Officer at the Depot Camp, Bathurst, New South Wales. Because he was under 21, he needed a parent's permission to join up, so he came bearing an Application to Enlist signed by his father.

Lynch was born in 1897 at Bourke, a remote town in far northwestern New South Wales, but at the time of his enlistment he was living with his family in Perthville, which was then a village just out of Bathurst but today is a suburb of that large regional city. Family meant his father, Edward, his mother, Laura, and five siblings. Edward was the eldest of the six Lynch children and was followed by William, Kevin, Ella, Veronica and Joan. Neither of his brothers joined him in the AIF, but they served in the Second World War. His three sisters all became nuns.

We know from his army personal service records that Lynch was a small man, 5 feet 4 inches in the old scale (1.6 metres) and weighing 9 stone 9 pounds (61 kilograms). His complexion was fair, his eyes hazel and his hair brown. A Roman Catholic, he attended mass regularly. His 'trade or calling' was given as 'student', a rare listing amidst the scores of farmers, labourers, dairymen and station hands signing up at Bathurst. He was 18 years and 8 months old – some would say still a child. Like so many young Australians at the time, called to the colours in defence of the Empire, he had led a sheltered life in rural Australia, had travelled little and never ventured out of his country.

After enlisting at Bathurst, Lynch went to Sydney by train and was sent to the Liverpool training camp. There, he received basic weapons training and instruction in military procedure. At Liverpool, he was allocated to the fourth reinforcement to the 45th Battalion, made up of 150 men and two officers. All the battalions were state-based and were often competitive with each other.

Training was traditional and tough: parade-ground drill, route marches and poor-quality, basic army food. But life in Australia was tough in those years and a young recruit would usually have been strong and physically fit for the training ahead. This would especially have been the case for country boys, for whom riding, heavy manual work and shooting would have been the norm. Edward Lynch, coming from rural New South Wales, would have been a typical strong young recruit.

It was now 20 months since war had been declared and the first men had swarmed around the recruiting tables of Australia. Then, army regulations required a soldier to be at least 5 feet 6 inches (168 centimetres) tall, have a 34-inch (86-centimetre) chest, and be aged between 18 and 35. With so many men offering to enlist, the army could be very selective and rejected men even for having bad teeth. In the first year, they turned away about a third of all men who volunteered for service.

However, by mid-1916 and before Edward Lynch signed up, the minimum height requirement had dropped to 5 feet 2 inches (157 centimetres) and men up to the age of 45 could enlist. Lynch made it into the army by 2 inches in height; and a quick glance at the records of men in his reinforcement shows that he was not alone in falling short of the original 5 feet 6 inches standard. In April 1917, the army would so desperately need men to fill the ranks that they would lower the height restriction again, to 5 feet (152 centimetres).

While at Liverpool training camp, Edward Lynch was issued with his uniform, basic equipment and webbing. The woollen khaki AIF battledress was drab and baggy, designed to be functional and serviceable in war. There was no colour – except the small identifying unit colour patches worn on each shoulder – and there were no shiny buttons and braid. Four large pockets on the front of the tunic distinguished the Australian battledress from all others, as did the rising sun badges on the collar and the brass badges reading 'Australia' on the shoulders. Over their breeches and good-quality Australian-made leather boots they wore puttees – long strips of cloth wound around their legs from ankle to knee.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the AIF uniform was the slouch hat, turned up on the left side, on which it bore the rising sun. It too was designed for fighting, not parade-ground smartness and, as a result, the AIF's battledress appeared to other Allied troops as untidy, even slovenly, further adding to the Australian soldiers' reputation for being undisciplined and sloppy. Officers in the British army provided much work for the tailors of Savile Row but, in contrast, Australian officers drew their uniforms from the same Q-stores as the men, thus eliminating any obvious difference in appearance and apparent smartness between the ranks.

Another thing that differentiated the Australian troops from the British was their rate of pay. A soldier in the AIF was paid five shillings a day for active service, plus one shilling a day deferred pay he would be entitled to on discharge. This was based on the average worker's pay at the time of six shillings a day, minus something for rations and lodging, and was the highest pay for any army at the time. Even a citizen soldier in the militia in Australia was paid four shillings a day. But a British soldier on active service received one shilling a day, which increased later in the war, though only to three shillings a day. For officers, the situation was reversed. Australian officers were paid less than their equivalents in the British army, and the higher the rank, the greater the disparity.

By the time Lynch enlisted in April 1916, well into the war, the army was able to train, equip, inoculate and ship new men to the front in only three months. This required capable officers who understood the special challenges of handling men in a peculiarly Australian way, as most recruits had never been ordered around or strictly disciplined. Perhaps understandably, the British feared at the outbreak of the war that Australian troops would be so lacking in discipline and organisation that they would be ineffective and at best form reserve units or be kept to the rear of the fighting. But the landing and subsequent battles at Gallipoli in 1915, which ended in a successful evacuation but dismal withdrawal, put paid to any concerns they had. In the eight months of the Dardanelles campaign, the Australian Imperial Force, now known as the Anzacs, fought valiantly and suffered nearly 27,000 casualties, of which 8,709 died and another 18,000 were wounded or captured. Afterwards, the British General Sir Ian Hamilton, commander-in-chief at Gallipoli, wrote, 'Before the war, who had ever heard of Anzac? Hereafter, who shall ever forget it?'¹

Despite this recently forged reputation of heroism in Gallipoli, many Australians went into the army thinking it was much like any other job and viewed their officer as simply a boss who, rather than issuing orders, should respectfully and politely ask that something be done. Soldiers had even conducted major strikes and marches in early 1916, much as they would in a normal job, to secure better camp conditions.

The relatively casualty-free period for the AIF as they regrouped in Egypt came to a devastating end with their introduction to the Western Front in July 1916, the month before Lynch was shipped over. On the front, the AIF were to endure horrific conditions and sustain casualties on an unprecedented scale. The war for Australia would never be the same again.

On 22 August 1916, Lynch and the other men rose early, were inspected and marched to Liverpool station, from which they went by train to Central station. Few knew that so many of them would never see these streets and their people again.

The tragedy of this chapter is that we know how the story will unfold for these young men, but they are not fearful, not concerned with the future. What Lynch portrays is a soaring euphoria, jubilant crowds lining the streets, laughter, a jumble of happy faces, halfpennies showering down from above, bearing the addresses of adoring young girls. Even then, though, reality does its best to intrude. Pricking Nulla's consciousness are the few 'silent women in black, mute testimony to what has befallen others who have marched before' and then, at the wharf, the mothers and wives who 'couldn't stand the pretence any longer' and have to be taken away to the back of the crowd. The men are a 'happy-go-lucky, carefree lot', oblivious to these omens of how their lives are about to change.

Unlike the wives and mothers of the first men to sail in October 1914, these women knew of the weekly casualty lists, the official telegrams and ominous names such as Lone Pine, Quinn's Post, Fromelles and Pozières. In the dark days of July and August 1916, when the AIF was in a desperate fight to take Mouquet Farm, the Australians suffered 23,000 casualties in just six weeks. When the slaughter of the 5th Division at Fromelles is included, the total is 28,000.

In Somme Mud, Nulla's reinforcement is made up of 250 men and two officers, but in reality Lynch's reinforcement as taken from the Embarkation Roll comprised 150 men plus two officers. Nevertheless, Lynch's experience would have been like Nulla's, on a rowdy ship crowded not only with men from their own reinforcement, but those going to bolster other battalions at the front. Their ship, the HMAT Wiltshire, designated throughout her service during the war as ship number A18, departed from Dalgety's Wharf at the old shipping hub of Millers Point, whose jetties and warehouses have in recent years given way to a new development of shops and businesses. The Wiltshire was a steamship that had been contracted by the government for transporting soldiers, and had been part of the original Anzac convoy that assembled at Albany, Western Australia, to take the first troops to Egypt in October–November 1914. Since then, the ship had been on the Australia–UK run, transporting fresh reinforcements and bringing back the wounded, maimed, those dishonourably discharged and the venereal disease patients. The Wiltshire was to remain in service until December 1917.

To run your finger down the list of men who embarked from Sydney with Edward Lynch makes for interesting reading. Most of the men were young, 18 to 30 years old, though some who gave their age as 18 may well have been even younger, a common occurrence during the First World War. From the Embarkation Roll we know that the oldest man was 45 but there were only eight men over 40. They were mostly single – just 22 out of 150 men were married, and there was one widower. Only three men had what we would today term a profession: a sugar chemist, a schoolteacher and an engineer. Most were either unskilled or worked at a trade, though some of their trades no longer exist today, such as coach driver, horse breaker, carter and coal lumper, blacksmith, trapper and wheelwright.

Their shared ancestry was the British Empire, with their next of kin hailing, if not from Australia, then from England, Scotland, South Africa, New Zealand, Norfolk Island or Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Most were Church of England; about one-third were, like Lynch, Roman Catholic; plus there was a smattering of Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists, one Congregationalist and one Church of Scotland. Everyone listed a religion – no one declared themselves agnostic or atheist. At that time it would have been considered inappropriate for a soldier – fighting for God, King and flag – to do so. But if the irreverent attitudes that Lynch describes in Somme Mud are anything to go by, it seems that some of the men of the 45th were religious more in name than in practice. Twenty-two men had, like Lynch, been in the Citizen Forces and so had some previous military experience before they trained together at Liverpool. Eight other men in the reinforcement came from the 41st Infantry, which Lynch had served in.

The 45th Battalion that Private Lynch and his mates were going over to join had been formed only six months before, on 2 March 1916, as part of the expansion and reorganisation of the AIF taking place at their old base camps in Egypt. With tens of thousands of reinforcements on their way to bolster the war effort, there were not enough battalions to absorb all the new recruits, and so 16 battalions that had seen action at Gallipoli were each split, forming an additional 16 battalions. Recruits from Australia would bring these split battalions up to a full complement of men. Creating new battalions this way ensured there would be a mix of experienced men, in this case from the Dardanelles campaign, and new recruits.

The 13th Battalion, a New South Wales battalion that had served at Gallipoli from the first days until the evacuation, split to form a 'daughter' battalion with half of those seasoned Anzacs forming the nucleus for the new 45th Battalion. While the reorganisation of the battalions was a military necessity, it was hard for the men of the 13th, who had survived Gallipoli together and had a strong desire to remain with their battalion and their mates. In the words of the Official History, the 45th had been formed by 'simply handing over two splendid companies' and 'the sight of half the old battalion marching away from the desert camps was distressing in the extreme, not only to the half that was being divorced, but to their former comrades which watched them go.'²

After they were joined by reinforcements from Australia and underwent training and final preparations in Egypt, the 45th Battalion sailed on the Kinfauns Castle to Marseilles, France, arriving on 2 June 1916. They then travelled by train to northern France, where they went into the 'nursery area' – so called because the frontline there was relatively quiet – at Méteren on 11 June 1916.

On 1 July 1916, Britain's General Haig launched his disastrous five-month-long campaign in the Somme valley, known as the Somme offensive or the Battle of the Somme. The British aimed to wipe out Germany's reserves of manpower and divert their resources from Verdun, the French fortress the Germans had beseiged since February, severely impacting the French army. But Haig underestimated the strength of the enemy's defences and the first day of the Battle of the Somme is still the bloodiest in the British army's history, with nearly 20,000 men killed and another 40,000 wounded or captured.

The first major Australian engagement on the Western Front came at Fromelles on 19 July 1916. The attack, designed as a feint to draw German troops away from the Somme offensive, was a total disaster tactically and resulted in horrific casualties for the Australians. In one night they suffered over 5,500 casualties, including more than 1,800 dead.

While Private Lynch and the men of his reinforcement sailed out through Sydney Heads and into the cold, blustery Southern Ocean, the 45th Battalion was moving towards the front and its first major battle of the Somme offensive. The men moved through Albert, past the once grand, ornate cathedral whose Virgin Mary statue, damaged during fierce fighting, was dangling precipitously from the spire (it was known as the 'leaning virgin'). They continued through La Boisselle, towards the cauldron that was Pozières. Resting for a night, the men watched the terrific bombardment of the Pozières windmill, finally captured on 4 August by men of the Australian 2nd Division. The high ground beyond the village and the sky above was red with the flash of the guns and bursting flares, lighting the night sky.

The following night, the battalion moved forward, winding through the congestion of Sausage Valley, which had recently been the scene of savage fighting but was now the main line of communication and transport for Australian troops on this part of the front. On they filed, past shattered trenches, first aid posts, smashed guns and wagons and the bodies of the dead. On through cluttered communication trenches, until they came to what had been the frontline: the shattered remains of OG 1 – Old German trench line 1 – below the crest of the Pozières ridge and just to the southwest of the destroyed windmill and the Bapaume to Albert road. Here the battalion spread out to hold a front of about 550 metres, with Australian battalions on either side.

For the following ten days, the 45th remained in the frontline or the support trenches close to Pozières. By the time they were withdrawn, three officers and 76 men of other ranks had been killed, and seven officers and 334 men of other ranks wounded, a total of 420 casualties. As the battalion history tells us, they came under such heavy and sustained bombardment and counterattacks from the Germans it was a wonder anyone survived. They successfully repulsed the German counter-attacks, but their time in the line took a terrible toll physically and mentally on the men, many of whom were Gallipoli veterans.

Meanwhile, the HMAT Wiltshire sailed on with a number of scheduled stops – Melbourne, Adelaide and Fremantle – to collect more men, before heading west across the Indian Ocean to Durban and Cape Town. Lynch portrays the voyage as one of boredom and monotony, broken by moments of hilarity and larrikin behaviour. Many of these 'men' were mere boys, full of youthful gusto. They had never travelled far from home. This was a great adventure and they were not going to miss out on the fun with their newfound mates.

When the ship docks at Durban, the men's attentions turn to the local dock workers – or, as Nulla and his mates refer to them in the pejorative language of the time, the 'niggers and coons'. Later, when they stop at St Vincent in the Cape Verde Islands, they again have their fun throwing coins for the 'stark naked niggers' to dive for. They held no respect for these poor dock workers nor indeed the English merchant seaman or people of rank and authority.

In these scenes in which the men entertain themselves at the expense of the locals, Lynch captures an anti-authoritarian, almost anarchic spirit, for which Australian soldiers were so renowned amongst other armies. In Somme Mud, it is mates against everyone else, whether it is the enemy, the local black populations, the British soldiers or their officers. No one is able to put a stop to the chaos they cause on shore; when they hit the streets of Durban it takes two hours to round them up from the local watering holes; by the time they reach Cape Town it seems that their journey to the battlefield is akin to a pub crawl. They play poker on board while the chaplain addresses them, pelt spuds at the dapper, cordial Harbour Master in Cape Town, and always manage to make fools of the officers and English merchant seamen.

For the men, this was a time when they could test those in authority and learn the parameters of military discipline. It was also a time to forge bonds and test friendships. A soldier could quickly gauge whether a mate could be trusted to stick by him, even if his antics were dangerous and likely to offend. For the reader, however, there is something foreboding about the men's pranks, their drunken carousing in port, their careless fun, for we know what these men are steaming towards across the ocean.

South of Africa, Lynch's ship headed north into the Atlantic, across the equator to St Vincent in the Cape Verde Islands. From there, the Wiltshire made for England. After seven weeks at sea, she berthed in Plymouth on 12 October.

For Lynch, Bathurst was a long way away and there was much to endure before he would again smell the eucalyptus of his native land. He was heading into a terrible and bloody war he had no way of comprehending.