Beaten Down By Blood Read online

  By 11.00 am on 5 September, patrols of the 57th Battalion of the 15th Brigade were pushing through Doingt, also abandoned by the Germans. Pompey Elliott observed that strategically placed machine-guns held up the advance and the men were almost too tired to deal with them. However, by the afternoon the high ground between Doingt and Le Mesnil and the village of Le Mesnil itself had fallen, and the 15th Brigade was in touch with the British 32nd Division which pushed steadily, but not without fierce opposition, across the Somme at Eterpigny, Brie and St Christ, the crossings which had eluded the Australians on the last days of August.

  Australian sources paid tribute to the good work of the 32nd Division. Norman Nicolson regarded it as ‘a fine Division with some good Scottish Battalions’; it was from one of these battalions that Pompey Elliott had borrowed some ‘trews’.57 Monash commended its ‘clever outflanking tactics’ in forcing the crossings and described Thomas Lambert as ‘indefatigable’, handling his division ‘with the greatest skill and energy’ and rendering ‘loyal and efficient service’.58

  By the night of 5 September the engineers and pioneers of the 32nd Division had reconstructed the bridges at St Christ and Brie and the whole division, as well as a considerable number of French troops, had crossed, extending the front to two miles beyond the Somme. Slightly to the north, by 4.00 pm the 8th Brigade of the 5th Division was through the woods at Bussu and III Corps had captured Aizecourt-le-Haut. The advance guards of the 3rd and 5th divisions came up ready to move through and exploit these successes while preventing the destruction of the roads and railways considered so important for further progress.

  The battle for Mont St Quentin and Péronne had been won by the Australians and the Bouchavesnes ridge and more distant objectives secured by Australian and British forces. The Germans had nowhere to go but the Hindenburg Line, from which Rawlinson was already planning to dislodge them.59 The Australian Corps would follow them there and, as Monash wrote in a letter to Frederic Cutlack — the assistant official war correspondent and former 3rd Division intelligence officer — on 26 September, ‘we have not come to the end of the story and, before this reaches you, you may hear of us again.’60 Indeed, the corps would play its part in the attacks on that formidable defensive position and fight its final battle at Montbrehain on 5 October.

  CHAPTER 7:

  A DUTY NOBLY DONE

  The splendid spirit of comradeship

  We do all this for our mates. The reason we get up each morning and get out there and go and find this shit is for our mates.

  Lance Corporal Tyson Murray

  Australian Army

  Afghanistan, 20101

  In a message to the Australian Corps on 14 October 1918, Sir Henry Rawlinson praised both the character of the digger and his ability to learn the scientific methods of warfare and successfully apply them.2 This was the Australians’ winning combination in their battles of the ‘Hundred Days’.

  The men who fought at Mont St Quentin-Péronne were part of what was at heart a citizen army. They still regarded themselves as painters, plumbers, electricians, labourers, carriers, bootmakers, journalists, store managers, bakers, doctors, clerks or farmers before they considered themselves ‘soldiers’. They were asked to perform extraordinary feats under incredible pressure and often in highly unfavourable conditions. Not all of them wanted to be heroes or behaved ‘heroically’. Some were ‘bad characters’ when they enlisted, others had been brutalised by their experiences of war.3 By the summer and autumn of 1918 some men, sensing that the end was in sight, just wanted to survive the war and return home.

  One such man was a lieutenant with the 56th Battalion. A Gallipoli veteran and a solid soldier in 1916 and 1917, his diary reveals that by 1918 severe war weariness and negativity had set in. After leave in Britain in February he did not want to return to France: ‘Absolutely fed up to the teeth and downhearted as hell.’ He was gassed at Villers-Bretonneux in April and spent a further 14 weeks in the United Kingdom recovering and lunching and playing tennis with his wife, a nurse at Fovant Hospital.

  As the battalion prepared for the Péronne ‘stunt’, he hoped desperately that the Germans would retreat and he would not have to fight them. On 1 September he cracked. After ‘hopping the bags’ at 6.00am he saw his sergeant wounded and killed later as he was lying on a stretcher. He advanced with his company, but fell over when a shell burst close to him. As he got up, he felt that something had snapped inside his head and although he continued on, he was badly shocked, not in control of himself and on the verge of breaking down. By evening he felt he could not control his men and when another shell burst nearby he ‘lost all nerve’ and ‘wept like a child’. He left the line permanently. Medical authorities assessed that his confidence had gone and he was likely to place his own safety ahead of that of his men. His service with the AIF was terminated. While this appears to have been a genuine case of ‘shell shock’, the man nevertheless enjoyed his trip back to Australia with his wife, sightseeing along the way.4

  Newington College 1st XV 1905, Major John McDonald, 20th Battalion and from Summer Hill in Sydney, back row left. Several of the other boys in the photograph also served in the First World War. The Newington College First World War Honour Roll records 635 names of ex-students who enlisted. Photo Newington College Archives (Stanmore, Sydney).

  Most men pushed on and did the job they had come to do, motivated by duty, loyalty and mateship. This determination and courage often saw men perform extraordinary feats of bravery. Some were recommended for honours and awards; others passed unsung. They all knew fear in the face of death. Captain Oliver Woodward, who served as a mining engineer on the Western Front, explained that a soldier never really overcame fear, but what he did have to conquer was cowardice, as life purchased under such a condition was bought ‘at a price too terrible to contemplate’. For Woodward, ‘the degree of heroism was the degree by which individuals conquered cowardice.’5 At Mont St Quentin-Péronne the fear was palpable, but the men pushed on, not wanting to be seen as cowards.

  A man’s original reasons for enlisting were many and varied and are important in any examination of the ‘character’ of the digger. After all, the AIF was a volunteer force. Some men undeniably felt a duty to king and country, and a sense of patriotism and pride in the young country of Australia was matched by a keen sense of ‘Empire’ and connectedness to Britain. Many Australians believed that the cause was just — the brutal Hun had to be stopped from taking over Europe and destroying the world as the Australians understood it. Propaganda fuelled such sentiments. There was something heroic in all of this — a sense of fortitude, of duty greater than life, a dread of dishonour, the development of patriotism which became a passion and was encouraged by the education system in the early years of the 20th century.6

  The British Empire in 1914 stood for freedom, democracy, justice and the Christian faith, all principles which formed the basis of Australian life at that time. It was important to win the war to create a better world for the future. Australia’s security depended on the British navy’s survival, ensuring that Germany did not retain its pre-war possessions in the Pacific and keeping that region free from the incursions of growing powers such as Japan.

  The epitaphs on headstones in cemeteries in France such as Péronne Communal Cemetery Extension, Herbecourt Military Cemetery and Hem Farm Military Cemetery — where many of the men who died at Mont St Quentin-Péronne are buried — reflect the sentiments of the time. Here grieving family members stressed that duty was ‘nobly done’, that the call of country was answered, that a man could show no greater love than laying down his life for his friend; he had sacrificed all for others.7 These men were brave, worthy, fearless, heroic, cherished, loved and missed.

  For many, and especially for the younger men, there was an acute sense of adventure, a ‘free trip to Europe’, a chance to see the world which very few would otherwise have experienced. Some enlisted because they did not want to be regarded as cowards by the people
in their suburbs, towns and communities; for others there were economic considerations —secure employment and pay. Very few of them, on leaving Australia, realised the nature of the conflict they had willingly joined.

  There were probably few parents signing the consent form for sons between the ages of 18 and 21, and at times younger, who realised the significance of what they were doing. Despite this, one father, who had just had a son killed, could tell a recruitment meeting at St Kilda Town Hall in 1915 that ‘if anything should happen to them, it is the sort of death to die’.8 Garry Roberts, whose son Frank died at Mont St Quentin on 1 September, asserted that he and his wife ‘were both distressed but proud of our son’.9 The mother of 18-year-old Harold Reece of the 17th Battalion had stopped her son from going to college, but allowed him to go to war.10

  Possibly the greatest incentive to enlist, however, and one of the defining features of the AIF throughout the war and in the creation of the Anzac legend, was mateship. This concept was by no means unique to the Australians, but the men themselves turned it into something of an art form and explained many of their actions and feelings within its context. Monash believed that, in order to understand the psychology of the Australian soldier, something he considered crucial, mateship itself must be understood and appreciated.11

  While not every soldier placed the interests of his mates before his own and, in fact, hundreds of men let their mates down, the men generally felt that absentees and deserters, for example, ‘betrayed the code of mateship’.12 Likewise, Major General John Talbot Hobbs deplored incidents of heavy-handedness and even bullying by some officers and NCOs in his 5th Division in July 1918, observing that this undermined comradeship which in turn led men to absent themselves or to desert, with further consequences for discipline. Hobbs ‘knew’ that among his men were ‘rascals who are incorrigibles, and who are beyond redemption’, but believed that most men, if treated the right way and encouraged to ‘belong’, would make good soldiers.13

  In battle, the concept of mateship came to the fore and was a key ingredient in the cohesion of units from the battalion down. It is not too much to say that it contributed to fighting efficiency and the implementation of tactics on the battlefield. The extraordinary lengths to which men would often go to rescue the wounded and bury the dead was also an expression of mateship. On 31 August, Second Lieutenant Albert Napper, for example, was buried in an isolated grave in a trench some 90 yards from a ruined house just west of Mont St Quentin and 1¼ miles north of Péronne, with a suitably inscribed cross erected on the spot by members of the 19th Battalion, who carefully recorded the site so the grave would not be lost.14 Eleven 21st Battalion men — including Frank Roberts and Albert Blackmore — were buried in a common grave in a chalk pit on the northern side of Mont St Quentin on 2 or 3 September. Pioneers erected a large wooden cross on the spot, and a mate took the trouble to punch their names by nail point through a sheet of petrol tin and attach it to the cross.15

  One RMO commented that ‘one got used to the horror and the insanity’, but continued to marvel at ‘the splendid spirit of comradeship which was found everywhere and under all circumstances’. This made the war meaningful for many of those who endured its horrors.16 For William Hawkins of the 59th Battalion, the importance of mateship was vividly reinforced when, on 3 September, a runner who had been on duty all day remained on duty at night rather than wake his tired young mate. Hawkins was deeply stirred by this, vowing that he would never forget those men with whom he had fought.17

  Betting at the 2nd Division Sports Carnival, Cappy, 16 September 1918. (AWM EO3288)

  Lieutenant Joe Maxwell of the 18th Battalion, in his own behaviour and when describing the men around him, offers valuable insights into the character of the digger. If we accept Peter Stanley’s assertion that the unique character of the AIF ‘owed much to the mix of “bad characters” and good soldiers’, then surely Maxwell himself epitomised the AIF.18 Born in Sydney, he enlisted in February 1915 at the age of 19, giving up his job as a boilermaker to go soldiering. He was never wounded and only missed one significant Australian operation — Bullecourt. On 3 October 1918 he was taken prisoner and escaped, shooting a couple of Germans and losing the seat of his trousers on the barbed wire.

  Between the wars Joe suffered ‘the stress of hard times and a period of wandering’, working for a time as a gardener in Canberra and then as a ‘journalist’ in Sydney. He lost all his medals except his VC when a motor launch sank on Lake Macquarie, and all his ‘papers’ when his house burnt down. He tried to change his name and lower his age in order to enlist in an active service unit in the Second World War, as he was ‘decidedly adverse to playing soldiers in a garrison unit’, but was caught out.19 In 1933 he published Hell’s Bells and Mademoiselles, his bestselling memoir of the Great War. A sequel, From the Hindenburg Line to the Bread Line, has unfortunately been lost.

  Joe Maxwell commanded B Company of the 18th Battalion at Mont St Quentin. At some stage his men were fired on by a single gun and were rushing about the trench to escape the shells. Suddenly all movement ceased and Maxwell, his curiosity aroused, decided to investigate. The line was beside an old cemetery and, ‘guided by a flickering light’, he found ‘the whole crowd congregated in a wrecked family vault playing poker in the glow of several lamps that were improvised out of fat and string.’ The gang ‘had prised a stone from the vault’ and were ‘seated on top of the old dust-smeared coffins, quite oblivious of the spooky nature of the setting’. While it is difficult to provide this episode a time or place, it reflects the fact that Australian soldiers would gamble anywhere, at any time, under any circumstances, apparently oblivious to the shells falling around them.

  Another of Joe Maxwell’s stories concerned the many German prisoners who were moved to the rear. One was a battalion commander with his staff and ‘grooms and flunkeys of every kind’. This ‘Prussian autocrat’ wore a monocle ‘and he swished in one hand a pair of fawn gloves’, gazing ‘with a supercilious and disdainful air’ at his captors. There was no dust on his uniform and one digger commented that ‘they must have had this guy in cold storage’. A servant behind him carried a pair of saddlebags which contained a complete toilet and manicure set, which the Aussies used to parody the German, even wiping the eyes of his servant with a powder-puff when he burst into tears. Joe Maxwell’s men ‘souvenired’ the officer’s clothes, exchanging his immaculate riding breeches for a lice-ridden pair of pants.

  Alongside the anecdotes, however, Maxwell described how depleted the companies were: two companies ‘could muster only forty-eight men’. Perhaps unexpectedly, he commended the work of Padre Frederic Tugwell, the 17th Battalion’s Church of England chaplain, and Father Francis Clune, a 50-year-old Catholic priest from St Brigid’s parish in Marrickville, Sydney, and now attached to the 19th. The troops respected these men for their work in the front line — Father Clune had been wounded in 1916 and won the MC at Passchendaele, while Frederic Tugwell was mentioned in despatches for his work at Mont St Quentin. Joe Maxwell believed that ‘religion in the army resembled to a great extent the rum issue — much depended upon the man who dispensed it.’20

  James Marshall, World War I Sketches, PXA 381 Vol 5 No 3, Mitchell Library.

  There are many examples of the way Australians could find humour even in dire situations. This was an aspect of the ‘psyche’ of the soldier and is often linked to the easy comradeship they displayed. The Mont St Quentin-Péronne battlefield was no exception. For an anonymous writer from the 55th Battalion, this sense of humour contributed to the ‘high morale and efficiency’ of the corps. He writes of a digger whistling ‘This is the Life’ as he marched some unwilling German prisoners to the rear, and the men laughing and joking as they pushed forward in the attack on 1 September. Even men crouching behind small bushes, darting from shell hole to shell hole or ending up ‘head down backside up’ in a hole as they tried to escape machine-gun bullets were a source of amusement. 21

  Black humour w
as also a feature of the diggers’ attitude. One story — which has a number of variations — tells of a soldier carrying a smoke incendiary bomb in a pocket. It was hit by a bullet and ignited, causing smoke to billow out and his clothes to catch fire. He stripped naked and moved to the rear where, feeling rather cold, he wrapped himself in the overcoat of a dead German. On his way to the dressing station to have his burns treated, an officer mistook him for a prisoner and ordered him to help with the wounded. There was much amusement when the man replied, ‘Say, digger, don’t be too hard on a bloke.’22 The unfortunate man proved to be more severely burnt than at first thought and died shortly afterwards.

  James Marshall, World War I Sketches, PXA 381 Vol 5 No 18, Mitchell Library.

  The troops admired the amusing eccentricities of Pompey Elliott, the very astute and strict commander of the 15th Brigade. On 4 September he and his intelligence officer took to the waters of the Somme in a little boat and the two men paddled about with shells falling all around. Hearing a noise, they rowed to a small island to rescue a stranded kitten.23

  Captain Norman Nicolson, a 33-year-old grazier from Campbell Town in Tasmania, wrote of a place near Barleux that was littered with dead horses and smashed transport. A few lines later he recorded the delicious anecdote of the capture of 100 barrels thought to contain tar. However, a digger ‘with a sensitive nose’ revealed that the ‘glorious discovery’ was, in fact, German beer. The troops were elated and the barrels, unsurprisingly, disappeared very quickly.24

  Transport units also did their fair share of scavenging. The 19th Battalion transport boys secured a piano to the top of a wagon where it rode in state for a few days, but were forced, unwillingly, to dump it on 31 August.25 The common pastime of ‘souveniring’ kept up the spirits of the troops. One sanitary man was detailed to bury some Germans killed by shellfire beyond Péronne after the town had been taken. At least two were high-ranking staff officers, and the sanitary man came away with a haul of gold watches, valuable rings, a jewelled dagger, revolvers, glasses, silver drinking mugs and glasses, wallets of money and a lot of silver, all of which made him very popular and sought after for a time.26