In the First World War, killing was very efficient, very accurate and very destructive. Although there were failings in the Allies' operations, overall tactics had improved since the battles of the nineteenth century, as had weaponry, uniforms and equipment, systems for resupplying the front, medical services and communications.
Many people imagine that soldiers during the First World War faced danger only when they were close to the frontline, but the reality was entirely different. First World War artillery had a range that extended well into reserve areas behind the front and into what might have been considered safe billets in the rear. Even a small artillery piece could fire 20 shells a minute at a range of 5 or 6 kilometres. The range of German and Allied artillery was such that generally anyone within 20 kilometres of the front was in danger, but the German 'Amiens gun', captured by the Australians in August 1918, was able to shell the city of Amiens from 25 kilometres away. Any place that personnel were likely to be found was targeted: crossroads and junctions, supply lines, towns, observation posts and high ground, known artillery positions, troop concentration areas including forming-up points and start lines, headquarters and cookhouses. With accurate range-finding and communication, artillery could follow and attack single vehicles and trenches in the support lines, or even hunt individual men.
A notable, tragic case of this came later in the war, on 31 May 1918, when the Germans shelled the rest area in the small village of Allonville, just north of Amiens. The Germans had learnt from Australian prisoners that the village contained a Divisional Headquarters, a training area and a rest area. At 1 a.m., they fired on the village from 10 kilometres and, with the aid of an aircraft to pinpoint the exact range, succeeded in landing shells on two barns where members of the 14th Battalion were sleeping, killing a total of 18 men and wounding a further 68.
As men left the frontline, they knew they were in danger, with the ever-present risk they might draw fire from German artillery and snipers, or from German aircraft. Exhaustion and cold, shell shock, minor wounds and fear went with the men, their faces hollow and bearded, their clothes often shredded, muddy and bloodstained. Staggering back to rest areas and billets, they at last had the chance to bath, repair and clean their weapons and sleep in warm beds. This was the cycle of war.
Getting back out of the line was as dangerous as coming in. It was always carried out at night, in the pitch black. When the 45th is finally relieved on the frontline near Gueudecourt and head back to the support line, Nulla and his mates Yacob and Dark are separated from the rest of their battalion – Nulla and Dark because they have been given jobs to do, but Yacob because he has been detained for nearly leading the relief into the enemy's line.
They try to save time by making their way back to their battalion across open ground. Suddenly, however, the night is shattered by a series of shells, randomly fired onto likely targets, so they seek shelter in a sunken road. They make for a deep underground shelter, probably constructed by the Germans when this part of the line was in enemy hands. Fifty feet below ground, men could warm up, wounds could be treated and they could grab a little sleep.
But for Nulla and company, there is no room at the inn. After seven nights standing up in a frontline trench, catching only a little sleep, they are exhausted and soon fall asleep on the top step at the entrance of the dugout, with no shelter from the freezing conditions. When they wake the following morning, 'cramped and shivering', they are covered in 15 centimetres of snow which fills every crease in their uniforms and completely covers their rifles and other equipment.
Around them, the landscape has taken on a new and unfamiliar look as many Australians would not have seen snow before, except perhaps the Gallipoli veterans, who had suffered on the peninsula with the snowfalls in November 1915. Snow now covered the pitted, shell-smashed ground, the bodies of the dead, the duckboards and tracks – making the trip to the rear even more difficult. And it also made men and movement in the white landscape far more visible. Far out across no-man's-land, German eyes on higher ground would be scouring not only the frontline trenches, but also the rear area for any movement whatsoever and any tell-tale sign of men, equipment or stores.
Normally, men only tried to make it back from the frontline under cover of night, but as the sun is only now beginning to rise and snow is falling again, reducing visibility, Nulla and his mates set out across the open ground, safe in the belief they cannot be seen by the ever-watchful Germans.
First, they come upon some officers' gear that has been left unattended and collect a bundle of clean, dry blankets that have been rolled and tied with pack straps, 'the work of some neat batmen', or officers' servants. Nulla even swaps his muddy rifle for a clean one.
Weighed down with their bounty of fresh blankets hidden under a greatcoat, they set off, but the sun suddenly breaks through and they are caught in the open. They are now even more visible: clear black, moving specks in the vastness of the dazzling white landscape. At that very moment, probably half a kilometre away, a German minenwerfer crew receives their coordinates and races to fire their weapons. Seconds later, three whiz-bangs (shells) crash 20 metres behind the three men, frighteningly accurate for a first salvo.
'Swing to the right,' calls Dark, a smart move, for the Germans would have quickly corrected their range, added the 20 metres plus a further 20, hoping to land their next shell on the running men. Sure enough, three more shells land exactly where they would have been had they not made their right turn. Running on, the men would have been very obvious to German forward observers, who would have signalled to their own men the Australians' position, allowing the quick re-registering of the German mortars and the change in the type of ammunition they were firing.
Cr-up! and a big shrapnel bursts high up just to our right and we see the mud and snow kick up in fifty places where the deadly pellets drive into the ground. [p. 48]
Shrapnel was greatly feared by men in the open. It had been invented in 1784 by a British Royal Artillery officer, Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel, who took the existing technologies of canister shot or grapeshot to a new level. Grapeshot comprised multiple iron balls that were fired by a cannon; in canister shot, smaller lead balls were encased in metal, which burst open when fired. Shrapnel's innovation was to place lead shot in a shell casing along with a crude timing device that allowed the shell to explode much further away, increasing the range from about 300 to 1,100 metres.
Shrapnel was used extensively by the Duke of Wellington against Napoleon's troops in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The German armament manufacturer Krupp further developed it by incorporating TNT, but the use of shrapnel in the First World War was limited, because it was ineffective against men in trenches and with overhead cover. It was also ineffective against barbed wire, as seen in the Somme offensive in July 1916, when even after intensive use of shrapnel, the German wire was left intact. But for men in the open and unprotected, it was deadly.
In response to the air-bursting shrapnel, Nulla and his mates change tactics. They run an erratic, zigzag course and spread out to make the gunners' task more difficult and head towards some old trenches. By doing this, only one life is risked with each shell, rather than three. The Germans target first one man, then another. At the sound of an incoming shell, the targeted man flings himself to the ground, hoping the explosion will not kill him outright and that he can get low enough to the ground to avoid the flying shrapnel balls and shards of metal from the exploding shell. The other two slacken their pace until they know the man is not wounded and can get up and run on. These small acts of bravery in very dangerous conditions were common among the men in the line. A fellow Australian rarely left a wounded man behind, even if his own life was endangered.
Stories like this abound, such as that of Corporal Fred Nicholson, a Gallipoli veteran and an orchardist from Hobart. He was one of a party of 14 men of the 12th Battalion bringing forward rations when his group crossed their own frontline and found themselves on the enemy parapet. Dropping the rations, they ran back, but two men were killed and two fell wounded. Corporal Nicholson went back for one of the wounded, but was killed himself in his selfless attempt to save a mate. His grave is at Bulls Road Military Cemetery, Flers.
Nulla and his mates, though, are lucky. They find their way to the shelter of the old trenches and, from there, back to their battalion on the support line. The purpose of the support line was to provide reinforcements if a German attack on the Australian frontline trenches broke through. The frontline was connected to the support trenches with communications trenches, which zigzagged to make it harder for enemy infantry to fire on them or for enemy aircraft to strafe a line of troops in them. Troops used angles and bends in trenches to build 'blocks', barricades where men could defend the trench while still being afforded some protection.
Reaching the support line, Nulla and his mates' minds are on food and at the end of the trench the cooks have prepared plenty of hot Maconochie rations – a soup-like stew made from canned meat, gravy and small pieces of vegetables such as carrots.
Hot food was very important during the terrible winter of 1916–17, both for the strength of the men and for their morale. Battalion cookhouses were set up as close to the frontline as possible, so hot food could be taken forward in insulated containers to men occupying even the most forward positions, but in many cases the food was cold by the time it got to the men.
It was very difficult to carry containers of food over terrain churned up by shelling or covered in mud, snow or ice and then along narrow, clogged and broken-down muddy trenches. Sometimes it was impossible, in which case the men had to make do with their cold rations. These consisted of canned meat known as 'bully beef ', hard biscuits and possibly cheese or jam. When they could get bacon, it was popular on bread or a biscuit. The Maconochie rations were famous for their tendency to induce severe flatulence and for their disgusting taste, especially when cold.
To wash down these indigestible meals, the men drank tea from a mess tin or dixie. Hot tea was sent to the front in drums, but often it was cold by the time it got there and tasted like the petrol the drum had once held. The tainted brew forced a difficult choice on men: refuse the tea and freeze, or drink the tea and vomit. Bean mentions tea that so reeked of petrol the men dared not light a cigarette for fear of it exploding, so bad was the taste. To compound this, cooks collected ice from shell-holes and boiled it for making tea and for cooking, probably believing that boiling the water would kill any germs, but these shell-holes often contained dead horses and men and other detritus of war, so it was an unhealthy practice that led to disease and infection.
After their breakfast, Nulla and his mates seek a dugout or 'funk hole', an alcove cut in the side of the trench as somewhere to sleep. After a week on the line with virtually no sleep, their respite is a cold, wet, muddy hole only 1.5 metres square. They do their best to make it comfortable – 'arranging the interior decorations' – and even see themselves as fortunate compared to the others because they at least have clean, new blankets. Crude shelters such as this gave men not far from the frontline some protection from the wind and snow and a chance to dry their wet, muddy clothes and sleep.
Before settling down, Dark and Nulla turn their underpants inside out in a futile effort to 'trick the chats', or lice. In his char- acteristic style, Nulla makes light of the lice problem: 'They've had a pretty fair run now, a whole week of undisturbed freedom in which to play and eat us.' [p. 51] But Lynch, like all the men on the Western Front, must have found them nearly intolerable. Lice caused severe itching, which created welts and lacerations, which in turn became infected and sore. Worse, lice caused trench fever, a debilitating flu-like illness contracted when louse faeces entered the bloodstream through a cut in the skin or a louse bite.
With lice a major concern for officers and medical authorities, soon after their arrival in France, the AIF had established divisional baths where men returning from the line could have a hot bath or shower and hand in their clothes and underwear to be disinfected. They were then issued with clean, vermin-free clothing. But visits to the divisional baths were few and far between. The efforts of the men to search for and kill lice in their clothing were a waste of time, but provided amusement during long spells of boredom and inactivity.
Another problem was rats. They grew fat on the bodies of the dead and then ran around through the trenches, over sleeping men, in their endless search for food. Rats spread disease, but there was little the men could do to curb their numbers, for they multiplied quickly and had an endless supply of rubbish and corpses to feed on. A favourite pastime for many men, and something that Nulla does mention, was to skewer a piece of food on the end of a bayonet and wait for a rat. Then, once they were blissfully enjoying their meal, to pull the trigger and send the splattered rat off into no-man's-land.
So the war was not only fought against the Germans. There were many other enemies to consider: the weather, disease, fatigue, poor living conditions, vermin and parasites, poor sanitation and, of course, the terrible Somme mud.